Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

own anything so ridiculous as a white skirt over indigo trousers, pairing it with a lavender blue bodice.
    No lady would ever be seen in a costume resembling a Liberé flag.
    Today, Annika wore crimson and yellow. Perhaps the colors had marked her in some way—and she supposed that she did resemble a Lusitanian flag. But what of it? They weren’t at war with Castile.
    There were no women to save her now. She scanned the faces of the people nearby, hoping to recognize someone whom she could call upon. Though several travelers had turned to watch the encounter, she didn’t see any of Phatéon ’s crew members.
    And what stranger would dare help? Not here, not in Castile.
    Panic fluttered wildly in her chest. She faced the guard again. “Do you speak English?” As he had, she spoke slowly, trying to make herself understood. “Please tell me, what is the matter?”
    With another sharp word and gesture, he shook his head. His hand shot out, seizing her wrist. He turned toward the guardhouse.
    “No, please! Wait!” She dragged her heels, trying to slow him without openly resisting. Her heart pounded. Only with great effort did she stop herself from smashing her umbrella over his head and sprinting to the docks and Phatéon . Desperate, she tried again. “Norse? Mælt kann norse?”
    “He demands to see your letters of entry.”
    A male voice came from behind her. She barely had a moment to feel her relief when the newcomer spoke again, but not in English—and not directed at her.
    The guard looked around and stiffened, as if in alarm. He let Annika go, his hand dropping to the short club at his belt. “¡Retírese, señor!”
    Whoever he was, the stranger apparently posed more of a threatthan Annika did. She opened the purse tucked within her skirts, stealing a glance back. Beneath a wide-brimmed hat, the man wore a faint smile—not exactly an expression of amusement, she thought, but as if he’d heard an old, worn-out joke. A gleaming monocle concealed his left eye. Focused on the guard, he lifted his hands as if to show the officer that he was unarmed.
    Oh, but he was armed. Annika’s fingers froze around her folded papers, and she took another, longer look.
    His right hand resembled every other person’s—large, perhaps, with broad palm and long fingers, but proportional to his height. His left hand and wrist were of the same size, yet they were human only in shape; the skeletal limb had been constructed of steel. The fluid movement as he spread his mechanical fingers was indistinguishable from the same movement in his right hand, and spoke to the intricacy of the design—the contraption wasn’t stiff, but responsive…and probably incredibly strong.
    No, he didn’t carry any weapons. But from the guard’s perspective, the man’s hand was a weapon—and the man himself a danger to Castile.
    Prosthetic limbs were common enough in the New World; if not used by soldiers injured at war, then laborers who’d suffered accidents in the factories and fields. Those replacement limbs were often stiff and clunky, however—a hook for a hand, a wooden leg strapped into a boot—and only if replacements were used at all.
    But there was nothing clunky about this man’s elegant hand, which meant that it hadn’t just been contoured around his arm or strapped on, but grafted on so that the steel contraption had become a working part of his body. Only the Horde’s nanoagents could graft a mechanical apparatus to human flesh, making it as maneuverable as a natural arm. This man had to be infected with those tiny machines—the same machines that the Horde had used to forcibly graft tools onto their laborers. Most of those toolshadn’t been designed to function or appear as human as this man’s did, but Annika knew that it wasn’t the hand itself that alarmed the guard. It was the nanoagent infection.
    Although an infected person was stronger and could heal faster, the nanoagents had also allowed the Horde to control the populations in the occupied territories of England and North Africa, using radio signals from tall broadcasting towers. A few of the towers had been destroyed, freeing the people in England and Morocco—but many in the New World thought the revolutions were only a temporary setback in the Horde’s inevitable advance across the ocean. Others in the New World feared that the nanoagents would reanimate their corpses after death and transform them into hungry, savage monsters, like the zombies