CHAPTER 5: TRANSLUCENT NEGOTIATIONS

  As The Sleeping Sparrow’s crew laid out their wares later that evening, Elias returned to the docks feeling the opposite of the airship he so wished to board: deflated.

  He searched for Melo and Ginger, though he knew Ginger would be eating dinner with her family, no doubt impatiently. The only thing that girl loved more than shooting scrap metal was a market full of things she did not yet have—the key word being yet.

  Elias enjoyed the market’s ambience all the same, living out the fantasy in his head if not on the ground. A row of stalls had been erected along the docks, their canvas awnings a regal mulberry, a color he associated with Sailor’s Rise. The vendors themselves, on the other hand, looked less glamorous than the goods they peddled. They were still sailors at the end of the day.

  He peered over the shoulders of potential buyers bartering with the ship’s merchants—some, he knew, with no intention to actually buy anything. While Elias was content to entertain such fantasies in his head, others needed to act theirs out. It was not until the last stall he perused that an item caught his eye—an item he just might be on the market for, after all.

  Elias approached the vendor, a dark-skinned woman with a windswept ponytail and eyes that looked like they had seen a lot over their years. There were a number of weapons on the woman’s table: an assortment of knives, a blunderbuss, two pistols. One was the same as Ginger’s, a popular wartime model, but it was the other gun that had reeled Elias over.

  He ran his fingers down its solid wood handle, capped in brass. The embossed pattern on the brass reminded him of the way clouds curled in storybooks. He stared down at the weapon’s slender chamber, longer than that of the more conventional pistol beside it.

  “Is this a Leefield?” he inquired.

  “A shooter, are we?” the woman inferred. “You’ve got a sharp eye.”

  “Do you have any more of these?”

  “Leefields?” She shook her head. “I’m surprised we still have this one. Would have sold it back in Briarsville, but a buyer changed his mind at the last minute. Not often a Leefield makes it all the way to Acreton.”

  Elias asked the question whose answer he knew could instantly shatter the ridiculous plan formulating in his head: “How much?”

  “I could get forty for it,” she said.

  Forty relics. He only had thirty.

  “Would you take thirty?” Elias peered up from the pistol to meet the trader’s knowing gaze. He tried again. “Thirty-five? Thirty-six?” She scoffed a little less with each offer. “Thirty-seven?”

  “Thirty-seven would be awfully generous on my part.” She chuckled through her nostrils, though Elias was not entirely sure what it was she found so hilarious. “Do you have thirty-seven relics, lad?”

  “If I did, would you take it?” he insisted.

  “Only if someone doesn’t offer me forty first,” she said.

  Elias slapped the edge of her display table harder than he meant to, rattling her inventory. “I’ll be back.”

  “You better hurry,” the woman reminded him as Elias skipped into a jog.

  And so he had a price. He still did not possess thirty-seven relics, but a difference of seven relics was objectively more surmountable than a difference of ten. Did any of his recent employers owe him backpay, he pondered? One, he recalled, but that debt was a single relic. He needed a lot more than that, and he needed it now. There was only one option: someone would have to lend him the money.

  “Elias.”

  Melo’s voice struck him like an obstacle—Elias did not have time for idle chit-chat—until a rather obvious revelation popped to mind just as quickly.

  “Melo.” Elias turned to his old friend.

  One way to understand Melo was to simply invert the qualities of Ginger. Melo was uniformly less adept at life, and he was infinitely less concerned with this fact. He was also by far the most likeable person they knew. Even Elias liked Melo more than he liked himself. As for Ginger, she often pulled him to bed after a few meads or some other excuse she felt the need to air whenever doing anything she actually enjoyed, all of which was none of Elias’s business or concern.

  “Can you do me a small favor?” Elias asked.

  “What do you need?” Even Melo’s soft features seemed to suggest that the answer would always, inevitably be in the affirmative, so easy was his very being.

  “Can I borrow seven relics?”

  “Seven relics isn’t that small, Elias.”

  “I’ll pay it back.”

  “That is what borrow implies.”

  “Please.”

  Melo rolled his eyes, his usual way of protesting while still giving the answer he was born to give: “Fine, sure. When do you need it?”

  “Now. I need it now.”

  Melo rummaged through his coin purse and retrieved a single untarnished relic, its foggy surface reflecting sparkles of torchlight as he dropped it into his eager friend’s outstretched palm. “You know I’m not as good at saving these as you,” he said, adding more to the pile.

  “What matters is what you’re saving for, my friend.” Elias spun on his heel with coin in hand. “I’ll catch you later.”

  “You’re welcome!” Melo yelled after him.

  “Thanks, Melo!” Elias was dodging shoulders and elbows as he added, “You’re the best!”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  More and more people were flooding the docks as twilight approached, fresh from dinner and ready for the evening’s festivities. A lute player was tuning her instrument over an empty donation bin. Soon, half of Acreton would be here. How long could it possibly be before that Leefield disappeared with one of them?

  Elias hoped the answer was in about two minutes, assuming he was the buyer in question. He budged through whatever haphazard line might have existed and plopped down his coin purse on the weapon vendor’s table. He confirmed the gun was still there—it was—and began counting his coins one at a time, piling them into translucent pyramids as she watched without commentary. “Thirty-seven relics,” he concluded.

  The woman looked at the miniature coin monuments. She looked at Elias. An annoyed customer looked at both of them—and a little confused by this boy’s rather performative purchase.

  “Enjoy your Leefield,” the vendor said.

  As he walked away triumphantly, Elias took a moment to appreciate his new pistol, flipping the weapon over to examine its small details—for small details were the hallmark of quality craftsmanship—before grudgingly stuffing the gun into his inner coat pocket. It would not be his pistol for long, and there was no point getting attached.

  He spotted the person he was looking for almost immediately. It was the same person who would have spoiled his plan had she arrived much earlier. Now she would complete it, or so he dearly hoped. Elias was literally banking on her participation.

  “Ginger!” He waved her over from a stall she was perusing near the shoreline.

  “Can you give me a minute?” she called back.

  “I’ve got what you’re looking for!” Elias patted his bulging coat pocket, which, judging by her expression, Ginger could not make heads or tails of.

  “What is it?” She marched toward him, tossing up her hands in baffled defeat.

  He waited until she was right in front of him, away from the commotion, before presenting his brand new Leefield with a showman’s flourish.

  “How the hell?” She ran the tips of her fingers through the coils of her curly hair as she asked, “Where did you get that?”

  “Where do you think?” Elias said. “From our visiting vendors. It was the only Leefield they had. Seller said it was dumb luck that even one of them had made it out here. I knew you of all people would want it.”

  “Of course I bloody want it. Wait. Did you buy this for me?”

  “I can’t afford it,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Well, I can’t afford to keep it.”

  Ginger crossed her arms. “How much?”

  “Forty-five relics,” Elias said. He had considered fifty, the number he was hoping to save, but he knew it would have been too high.

  As for forty-five: “Are you kidding me? No way you paid forty-five relics for that, not even a Leefield. Also, I know for a fact that you don’t have forty-five relics, Elias.”

  “Fine.” He could not afford for this deal to fall through. “Make it forty-two. The merchant said forty was a fair price. Forty-two to cover the financial risk I incurred on your behalf.” Elias took solace in the fact that he was not lying. The vendor had technically said as much.

  “Real kind of you,” Ginger grumbled, asking with an open hand if she could see the pistol. She inspected the gun just as he had, appreciating its many markers of quality, exhaling as she eventually conceded, “I guess that’s the tax I pay for living in a shithole. What if I find out you’re lying about this being the only Leefield for sale?”

  “Then you can shoot me with it,” he said.

  And with that, Elias had accumulated a combined forty-two relics. Thirty-five, once he paid back Melo. Either way, it still was not enough, and he didn’t suppose life would present him with a second lucky break in so few hours. He would have to make his own luck from here, or more likely, he would just need to work for the coin.

  Sleep was a lender he had borrowed from before, when times were tight, and he did so now. On his way home (home was a modest room he rented above a cobbler’s shop), Elias asked Mr. Humbledon for an extra morning shift, which he spent unloading a new delivery of fabrics at the crack of dawn. His only break in the day came around lunch. He scarcely ate—another money-saving tactic—and instead spent his free hours insisting he be paid the single relic he was owed from a less reputable employer, who at the end of their negotiation handed over the coin and added that she would never again employ such an ungrateful bastard. That was fine with the bastard in question. With his final free hour before his second shift beckoned, an exhausted Elias wandered down to the docks.

  Elias had a good eye for people, and The Sleeping Sparrow’s large captain very much embodied his job title. He was tall and barrel-chested, sporting a burgundy tailcoat and a brown leather tricorne. The sailors around him, heaving heavy crates onto the dock, were dressed for labor. The obvious captain was dressed for introductions.

  “Excuse me, sir.” Elias stood in front of him and waved.

  “I see you,” the man replied.

  “Are you the captain of The Sleeping Sparrow?”

  “What can I do for you, lad?”

  “I heard one might buy passage on your ship,” Elias said, “passage to Sailor’s Rise.”

  “Aye,” the captain confirmed, “for enough coin. It’s not a cheap trip. You’re pretty skinny, so fifty relics would cover it.”

  Elias had at least received solid intel. The price was what he’d been told, but it remained out of reach. Elias had forty-three on him, the last relic having been acquired from the bridge he just burned with a former employer. He could expect another two after the day’s second shift. That brought him to forty-five. No. Thirty-eight. He still owed Melo seven relics.

  “I could do thirty-eight.” It was worth a shot.

  The captain’s eyebrows headed for the clouds.

  “Forty,” Elias tried again.

  “Look, boy, if I offered you passage to Sailor’s Rise for forty-five relics, that would be uncharacteristically generous of me,” the captain explained. “Anything less and everyone would think they could cut a deal. And don’t say you won’t tell anyone, because I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I trusted in the secrets of men. That covers accommodation on my ship, food and water, and the fact that you’re a hundred and fifty pounds of cargo. The only reason I’m even considering forty-five is because you’re not big like me, and because my son could use the company of someone his age.” He nodded toward a teenager that did indeed look Elias’s age—and rather like a softer, slumpier version of his father. “Forty-five, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  It was a good one. Elias knew the negotiation was over and that it had gone about as well as it could have. And yet he was still short, assuming he intended to repay Melo. He would have forty-five relics in his coin purse, true—even if some of it was spoken for.

  Perhaps he could repay Melo later. Perhaps he could send the money by mail.

  “When do you need it?” Elias asked the captain.

  “We’re leaving first thing tomorrow,” the captain answered. “Be here at sunrise. Payment is upfront.”

  “I’ll be here,” Elias said.

  * * *

  When Elias awoke the next morning, his heart nearly leapt from his chest, from where it would have no doubt left a bloody trail straight to the docks. He had not meant to fall asleep, so paranoid was Elias about missing The Sleeping Sparrow’s imminent departure, but he knew the captain would not wait for him. The seasoned sailor probably doubted he would even show up.

  Elias had packed his things the night before, but between packing and his second shift, there had been no window for goodbyes. He had intentionally not told his employer, fearing Mr. Humbledon might try to talk him out of it or, worse, withhold his pay. But others were owed an explanation. Melo was owed an explanation (along with seven relics), as was Ginger and a couple of other friends. His landlord probably deserved one, for that matter.

  But every goodbye was a few more minutes by which he might miss his opportunity to break free of this place—his fleeting chance to become the modern man he was raised to be. He could not risk it.

  Elias grabbed his bag and ran for the door. He practically flew to the docks, thumping down the stairs that led from his room, kicking up clouds the color of rust as he sprinted through empty streets, sweating and swearing, before finally catching up with his wayward heart when he saw The Sleeping Sparrow and its captain, who seemed genuinely surprised and perhaps a little impressed that the boy had actually shown up with payment in hand.

  “I was just confirming that we hadn’t forgotten anything,” the captain said.

  Three days later, Elias would tell the men and women of The Sleeping Sparrow the story of how a so-called piss-poor boy from Acreton scraped together enough coin for passage halfway across the Great Continent. He would tell it just as it happened, betraying the truth only once. At the end of the story, the young traveler would claim that he had found those fading minutes to say goodbye to old friends. Melo had agreed to extend his loan, and Ginger had laughed, joking that she had funded the expedition. They were sad, but they understood. And so the story had a happy ending.