The Wind Merchant Read online

  In the overall geography of Atmo, Verdant was its most southwestern settlement. The mountains comprising the borders of The Bowl constituted a natural Energy-trapping structure since The Origin wasn’t too far away from the main mountain pass. Before Merron sank, The Bowl thrived with trade between the two cities.

  Imagining Verdant lying desolate and empty beneath the clouds like Merron broke Ras’ heart. With the influx of Merronian transplants living in Verdant, the city had become cramped. Ras wondered how crowded the cities outside of The Bowl were, and if they would even be capable of taking on the refugees of Verdant. With seven of the twenty-one cities downed and no real opportunity for expansion, where would everyone go? Ras had heard of some smaller settlements atop mountain ranges or townships comprised of bolted-together airships, but it was no way to live.

  The dull roar of Verdant’s engines grew as The Copper Fox approached the crowded old wooden docks. Ras’ eyes easily found the empty slip designated for the Veir family. An older man creaked back and forth in a decrepit rocking chair, waiting.

  Old Harley Hollister. He stood as Ras brought up a thick rope to moor the ship.

  “Don’t you have other slips to patrol?” Ras asked the man in the faded Port Authority uniform, tossing the rope for Harley to tie to the dock.

  “Your momma’s worried about you,” Harley said, taking the rope and effortlessly securing it. “Looks like she had good cause, too.” He paused, taking in the damage to The Copper Fox in the waning light. “I hope it was worth it,” he said with true concern in his voice.

  Ras walked down the extending gangplank, not even looking up at the old man.

  “Hey, hey.” Harley intercepted Ras, halting the young man. “What’s the matter? You get into a fight?”

  He had almost forgotten about the bevy of scrapes and cuts he displayed. “Cliff face: one, Ras: negative twenty.”

  Old Harley thought for a moment. “Cliff face…You know better than to go out to Framer’s,” Harley said. “That Tibbs boy came back bragging about pulling a Fiver from there.”

  “I didn’t get a Fiver,” Ras said, fixated on his boots. “Hey, could you do me a favor and make sure nobody messes with The Fox? I know she looks like a junker.”

  Old Harley stood at attention. “On Old Harley’s honor. At least until I get off duty tonight.” He smiled. “You want the weather report for tomorrow?”

  Ras shook his head and walked past his friend, patting him on the shoulder. “Not going out tomorrow.”

  He opted not to take one of the public transit skiffs back to his home. What should I tell mom? Hey, sorry I’m late, I was just off dooming our livelihood.

  Walking along a mostly depopulated main avenue, a street vendor tried to interest him in some sort of bird on a rotisserie. Ras wordlessly waved him off. I don’t get dinner tonight, he thought.

  His mind began playing the perverse game of wondering if each person he passed would be able to leave Verdant. The city wouldn’t fall immediately, giving those with ships a chance to escape.

  He walked past a tavern, one of the few popular businesses left, and stared through the large window into the Energy-lamplit room. Tibbs sat at the bar, surrounded by a handful of wind merchants. He made wide gestures, sloshing his drink back and forth before he spotted Ras. Tibbs motioned for Ras to come inside until the other wind merchants shot him a hard look.

  Everyone knew a Lack was bad luck.

  Just wait until you have a real reason to hate me. He continued down the avenue as night folded in around him and the streetlights slowly glowed to life as one. The artificial light guided Ras to the residential zone lined with various colored cottages on either side of the street, all identical in structure. After all, one couldn’t exactly pluck building materials from the skies.

  He came to the light blue exterior of the Veir home. His mother had inadvertently selected the color after mistakenly ordering a surplus of paint for Ras’ nursery, and couldn’t persuade the merchant to give her a refund.

  Quietly working the key into the lock, he opened the door, which sounded the piercing creak he never did remember to remedy. The house remained dark as he waited for his mother to flick on the lamp next to her chair as she did so often during Ras’ teenage years.

  The sound of slow, heavy breathing came from the couch in the middle of the living room. Emma Veir slept soundly, her small frame huddled in a ball, and her head of long, dark chestnut hair lay on a pillow. The peaceful expression on her face erased the usual lines of worry, making it difficult to guess she had celebrated her 40th birthday just a month prior.

  The slight chill in the house prompted Ras to retrieve a blanket from the hallway closet and carefully drape it over his mother. She stirred.

  “Mmm…Eli?”

  “I’m sorry mom, just me,” he whispered.

  She pulled the blanket tight and once again left the waking world.

  Ras ascended the stairs, knowing this would probably be the last night in his bed for a long while. In the morning he would hand himself over to Verdant’s city council.

  It seemed like Ras spent most of his night awake, feeling his bruises and aches settle in. The kaleidoscope of colors across his body was as impressive as it was painful.

  The smell of something baking in the kitchen told Ras his mother was up. After a dewbath and gingerly scrubdown, he dressed in a loose-fitting white work shirt and a crumpled pair of tan pants adorned with only a few patches.

  He walked down the stairs to find his mother setting a fresh batch of biscuits to cool on the stove.

  In the daylight, the house looked more sparse than he remembered. It was always a sad game trying to guess which things had last disappeared from the house, but Emma always said if he didn’t notice its absence, it was probably something they didn’t need.

  “I hope biscuits are all right again,” she said, pulling a tray from the oven. “What time did you get home last ni—” She paused, finally getting a good look at her son, who stood a good eight inches taller than she. “Night.”

  “About midnight.” Ras sat down at the kitchen table, letting his hair hang in front of his face to hide a few of the more grievous cuts near his left temple. He winced as Emma pulled the hair back.

  “Who did this to you?” she asked.

  “I hit some turbulence while I was in the engine room,” he said, pursing his lips.

  “Some.” She cocked an eyebrow. “You all right?” she asked, taking a seat on the stool across the table from him.

  Ras appreciated that she asked about him before The Copper Fox. He didn’t know if he should tell her anything yet, but a ‘no’ or even a hesitation would earn him an interrogation.

  “I banged up The Fox and didn’t collect anything I could sell,” he said.

  “How banged up are we talking?”

  “Nothing I can’t fix eventually. The tank is fine.”

  Emma’s eyes glassed over the way they usually did when she calculated what she would need to sell to pay off the bills when Ras didn’t profit from his last run.

  “Oh! I have something for you.” Emma gave her best distracted smile and went to their refrigerator to extract a cake. She set it on the table in front of her son for him to read WELCOME HOME CALISTA in big blue frosted letters.

  “Mom, Callie’s dorm room isn’t that far from her house.”

  “Well, she’s home for the summer and might like to see an old friend,” she said innocently. She never made any pretense of her preference that her son marry the girl next door.

  “She’s not going to think I made her a cake.” Ras looked at the frosted words again. “Did you try to imitate my handwriting?”

  She had.

  Within ten minutes Ras bandaged himself, dressed in his one set of patch-less clothing, and found himself holding a cake on the front porch of the Tourbillon home. The family had selected the house for its basement due to Callie’s special allergies. They had moved in when Ras was six years old, and the little
red-haired girl with brilliant blue eyes and the fairest skin he had ever seen had captivated him from day one.

  If he had to show himself before the council and be locked up for his crime, he was all right with Callie being the last person he saw.

  Ras knocked on the door to no avail. He felt stupid and overdressed, and Callie would instantly know he had been set up. He was about to knock a second time but a very faint “chick-chicka-chink” stopped him. Callie was home.

  The sound carried from the side of the house, so Ras walked over to the ankle-level basement window. He sat the cake down in front of it and rapped on the window four times. Tap-tap-tap. Pause. Tap. Their code. He stepped to the side so she couldn’t see him. The typewriter stopped.

  A latch clicked open and the window swung out. Ras watched the porcelain hand reach out and pause; then another hand swiped a finger-full of frosting from the side of the cake.

  “Now who could have left me a cake?” a familiar, playful voice wondered aloud. “I certainly hope it’s not poisonous…but I suppose there are far worse ways to leave this world.” The hand with the icing on it withdrew; a moment later, the one holding up the window did likewise. The window re-latched. The cake remained.

  Ras sighed, smiled, and rapped once again on the window. This time he stood next to the cake. Still no response.

  He went to his hands and knees to peer through the dirty window and saw a sparsely furnished basement with a pre-Atmo iron typewriter with black, circular keys on a table in the place of honor in the center of the room. But no girl.

  “Erasmus Veir, you no good peeping Tom!” Callie did the best impression of her father that a nineteen-year-old girl could muster. The effect was comical, but still startled Ras, whose posterior stuck in the air as he froze, peering through the window.

  His face flushed as he stood, and saw the little girl he had looked forward to seeing every day of his life. She had grown up since leaving for University. Now she stood with impeccable posture that he guessed her classmates mistook for snobbery, but Ras knew she feared becoming stoop shouldered for all the hours she spent reading and typing. Her long wavy red locks fell to the middle of her back but for a few strands cascading over her shoulders, and she wore a loose white sundress that both accentuated her fairness and proved she wasn’t purely white as a sheet.

  “I see you found the poisoned cake someone left for me,” she said, playing with an errant lock of hair.

  “I chased him off. Had a hook hand,” Ras said, crooking a finger and mimicking the fabled intruder.

  “Looks like he got you a few times,” she said, causing Ras to chuckle and then wince. “Grab the cake, I want to show you something.” She bounded back around the corner to the front of the house and Ras followed.

  “So how was University?”

  “Took my last final yesterday.” She held up crossed fingers. They entered the living room as Ras’ eyes darted about. “Don’t worry,” she said, “daddy’s not home.”

  It was no secret that Mr. Tourbillon had stopped liking Ras upon discovering that the boy had started sneaking over to spend time with his daughter. The relationship worsened when Callie began reciprocating and sneaking out to visit Ras. The clandestine meetings had ended when Callie passed out on her way to Ras’ house one night and had been found the next morning in her nightgown on the Veir lawn. She was only twelve at the time, but the past seven years hadn’t softened her father’s opinion of Ras.

  “How were the headaches?” Ras asked, following her down into the basement.

  “Never as bad as they were when I was little, but they’re usually there.” She arrived at her typewriter. “Right now they’re gone.”

  Ras always wondered about her chronic headaches. She’d get them and collapse when she was out and about, but whenever he was with her she seemed fine. He had once accused her of faking when they were young and she had given him a two-month silent treatment.

  He never dared to voice the thought again.

  For whatever reason, she had fewer headaches in the basement, which she preferred to refer to as her library since the walls were lined with shelves upon shelves of books.

  She slid into the well-worn desk chair and pulled the paper from her typewriter, placing it on a stack of pages. “I was just finishing the first couple chapters of a story I’d like you to read.” She took the pages and straightened them with a few thumps on her desk. “If you have time, I could really use a friend’s honest opinion.”

  A friend. That’s all Ras had ever been. And her number one fan.

  “Don’t go easy on me. If it’s bad, it’s bad, and better I hear it from you—”

  “I’ll be honest, I promise,” Ras said. “Where did you get the paper?”

  “I saved up,” she said proudly. “Well, I had to use the gifts I got for University too, but look at it. Isn’t it so clean?”

  Ras admired the fresh, white paper, and suddenly felt that no amount of hand washing would make him worthy to handle such a pure thing. There was no place on Verdant that made it, and most paper in Atmo was recycled to a mottled grayish blue hue. Mr. Tourbillon used to sneak her typo’d scraps from the capitol building until she began writing stories about the people on the front of the government documents. “Where’s it from?”

  “Derailleur,” she said. She smiled widely and offered him the stack, then withdrew it. “We should probably bind these so pages don’t go flying away when you’re waiting on the next big haul,” she said with no hint of sarcasm.

  “What’s it about?” Ras asked.

  “The white train,” she said simply.

  “You’re finally writing it?”

  Callie nodded. “How many times can I dream about it before it’s obvious I’m supposed to? Maybe writing it down will finally get it out of my head.”

  Over and over Ras heard the recounting of Callie’s dream of being on a railed vehicle she called a train. She would describe in detail things she saw along the trip that baffled Ras. Her father chalked it up to reading too many pre-Overload novels and an over-active imagination.

  “How’s the life of a wind merchant going, by the way?” she asked.

  He preferred to keep the conversation centered on her but she had the annoying habit of caring about what went on in his life. “Let’s just say I have plenty of time to read between collections.”

  “That a good or bad thing?” she asked.

  Ras hesitated. If ever there was someone Ras knew that appreciated a good story, it was Callie, and he’d rather tell her what happened than have her hear it from second-hand sources, or worse yet, her father.

  “I fell beneath Atmo,” Ras blurted.

  Callie’s eyes shot open wide as she held her hands up to her mouth in shock, then dropped them and shot him a look of disbelief. “Shut up. No you didn’t.”

  Ras pointed to his head bandage. “Does this look like a face that would lie about crashing?”

  She eyed him warily, a smirk growing. “All right, what did you see?”

  “Green wavy stuff—”

  “Grass! You saw grass?” she asked, excitedly pacing the room. “Did you get to touch it?”

  “Laid in it. Really tall stuff. Soft,” Ras said, enjoying how each minute description sent her over the moon with excitement.

  “I knew it’d be soft!” she exclaimed. “Wait. Hold on.” Her eyes narrowed. “How are you not dead?”

  “Great question. I was probably ten meters from a Convergence.”

  “Erasmus Veir,” she said, enunciating every syllable, “now I know you’re lying.”

  “Callie, if ever there was one thing I need you to trust me about, this is it.”

  “Ever? As in forever and ever, ever?”

  “Forever and ever, ever,” he said, placing his hand to his heart.

  “You realize, by law, I get to never trust you again if you’re lying.”

  Ras knew there was no such law, but nodded anyway. It was as good as law to her.

  Her
demeanor lightened. “So they’ve been lying to us about The Great Overload…” A grin spread wide. Callie loved a good conspiracy theory.

  “I don’t think so—” Ras began.

  “You know you’re taking me with you,” she said, “Today.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  The room shuddered slightly and books fell from shelves. It felt like when something went wrong with The Copper Fox’s engines, but on a massive scale.

  Suddenly the entire room fell. The drop was only a couple of inches, but it was quick enough that both Ras and Callie braced themselves instinctively.

  “What happened, Ras?” Callie asked. It wasn’t an accusatory tone, and he appreciated her for that.

  “I sort of…collected a Convergence,” Ras said. “Accidentally.”

  The corners of her lips edged into a grin, which he knew didn’t indicate amusement so much as that she didn’t know how to respond to the news. She knew what it meant for Verdant. “Can you put it back?”

  Ras shook his head.

  “Then let’s find another one!”

  “I don’t think there is another one in The Bowl,” Ras said.

  “You just flew below Atmo for the first time! Who knows what else is out there?” The prospect obviously excited her, and she had a point. A point that didn’t involve Ras turning himself in and losing his ship.

  Upstairs the front door opened. Heavy boots stomped around and Callie whispered, “That’s daddy. We’ll talk later.”

  Ras was two steps ahead of her, moving toward the basement window with a practiced motion, unlatching it, and opening it.

  “Callie?” A deep voice boomed from above and the footsteps aggressively grew closer.

  “Yes, daddy?” she called back sweetly.

  Ras struggled to squeeze through the small window. “This was a lot easier when I was eight,” he wheezed. He felt a shove on his boots as Callie did her best to push him free, allowing him to grasp further along the ground, but gained little purchase. Ras heard steps clomping down the stairs when he felt one last push that gave him enough force to free himself.