Night fell, and the air grew choppy. It was my duty this evening to inspect the light bulbs throughout the ship. They burnt out constantly, but electric light was a luxury we could not do without. An open flame could kill us all. And so, each and every night, between the hours of four and five AM, the designated bulb mouse went through every passageway and common space, switching out the burnt bulbs, and turning off the lights so they would be ready for the next evening.

The ship lost altitude several times and sent my stomach lurching in my throat. I dropped my case of light bulbs and staggered up to the rail. I ate dinner too fast again. In the back of my mind, there was always an instinctive fear of starvation. Going hungry for days and weeks is a feeling the body never forgets, and I no longer believed any meal was guaranteed.

Some might say I became a pirate for the food, and they would be right. We ate well by our country's standards. Fresh fruit and vegetables filled the hold, along with sacks of grain, barley, and lentils. We had an array of meats packed with ice blocks from the Leffen Mountains. On this night, Cook had reheated frozen pigeon pies over our jerry-rigged electric stove. The first few times he tried this, he'd burnt the crusts, but tonight they had been perfectly crisped.

Now my pigeon pie took flight. I bent over the rail and hurled my guts out, lamenting the long and painful hours I would be yearning for breakfast.

I got that eerie feeling that was all too common out in the night sky. Perhaps it was our ship's dim electric lanterns glowing greenish in the fog, but it was more than just vertigo. In the abyss, I felt physically adverse to being in my own skin. The witch's curse had me nervous, and I could have sworn I heard a voice in the wind, something like the sad, sobbing sound of a child.

"They say spirits haunt the clouds up here, that there ain't no heaven. Only aimless mist," said Baker. He leaned his mop against the rail and tied back his dreadlocks as a gale rushed over the deck. He had a talent for finding me and hardly ever gave me a moment to myself.

"Shut up," I croaked. My vocal chords worked as well as my bow without rosin, and after a bout of retching, I could sound downright fiendish. "Ain't no ghosts up here."

"Are you scared, Clikk?"

"No." I closed my eyes, losing myself in my thoughts. "I'd rather like to see my dead. I'm an orphan, remember? Like every other bastard on this bird."

"Not every bastard. My mum's still alive."

"How nice for you."

An abashed grin crept across his lips, and he rolled his shoulders. "We're not on the best of terms."

"Why? You steal from her?"

"No. Nothing like that. I don't approve of the life she's made for herself."

"You mean whoring?"

He scoffed. "She ain't done that in years, not since she found herself a keeper."

"Is it the keeper you disapprove of?"

"Aye. He keeps her too often in bandages."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. At least I have a mother," he said. "Though that's not to say I didn't spend a fair share of my childhood in orphanages. Mum kept surrendering me. The orphanage was a bit like boarding school that way, with ever the possibility of going home with a new family." Baker often made light of the tragic events of his life. I always listened and chuckled along, but endured a buried, stabbing sympathy for the brute. He picked up his mop and dunked it in the bucket of water. "Anyway, I should get back to it."

"What are you doing? Since when are you a swabbie?"

"I got up to some games with Pierce and the cousins. We laid out the queens from a deck of cards and placed bets on which one Vincent would take as his wife."

"Vincent?"

"That spider we found. Sadly, though, Mr. Bentley walked right in on it. Squashed Vincent under his boot and gave each of us a list of menial duties."

"Bentley's a prig. I'm sorry about your spider."

"Thanks, mate. He's in a better place, I'm sure. Some kind of spider World After, full of them pretty lady spiders."

"Yeah. With all the crickets he could possibly eat. So, did you win anything? You still owe me two silver from our last game."

"Down to my last copper, I'm afraid."

"Course you are."

"It don't matter. We'll be swimming in coin soon enough. Have you decided yet how you will use your share?"

"Yeah. I'll buy weapons, loads of 'em, enough to form my own chapter of the resistance to see that damned usurper extinguished, a golden age of equality ushered in."

"Huh." Baker sighed. "Shame."

My heart pounded as it might have done on turbulent skies. "What do you mean by that?"

"Haven't enough people thrown their lives away for this same old lie of reform? It's a fairy story. The Blue Dusk was built on the foundations of it. What was it—a month—before Perceval declared himself emperor? The power merely shifted hands from the royalists to Perceval's cronies. Lands and titles were doled out to a new elite class. It don't matter how many times you overthrow your leaders. There just ain't enough pie for every brat on the street. And in the end, all you done is burn the world to trade one tyrant for another."

"You're a cynic!"

"Yeah, well, you're a damned monarchist!"

I scoffed. "It serves better than anarchy. And besides, a monarch is born to rule by his divine right."

"What does the opinion of the gods matter when a king murders his own people for sport?"

"No king of Elsace has ever done. A true monarch serves his people as he serves the gods."

"Except that ain't true. If Lucius had served his people, they would not have rised up against him. You forget, Clikk, it was the people what made Perceval emperor. It was the people enlisting in the Blue Dusk, the people marching on Locwyn palace and taking the heads of the royals. I was there, Clikk. They was killing each other like animals—royalists and Duskmen alike—blowing our city to pieces, filling our streets with dead."

"I understand the toll it took. Believe me."

He nodded, sighing as he let go of his tirade. "You was what? Thirteen?"

"Almost," I said.

"Whereabouts was you?"

"Shale." It was only a whisper, but the word hit hard.

Baker lowered his eyes. During the revolution, Shale had been razed, its people brutalized and disgraced. Blue Dusk entered the region and were met by a particularly zealous royalist resistance, which they crushed. After the trauma of that battle, they wreaked vengeance on the peasants.

"Is that how you got your scar?"

I touched the fibrous tissue at my throat.

"Such a mark must have quite the story," he said.

"A stupid story. A stupid story about stupid peasants. Not worth telling."

"All the best stories are about peasants," he insisted.

"Shouldn't you be working?"

Baker slumped his shoulders and snatched up his mop. "You're a grouse on rough air."

"It's a history I'd rather forget, is all."

"We all have histories we'd rather forget. I've shared all sorts of pain with you, but every time I ask about your scar, you look keen to rip my head off."

"I could do nothing but watch as the Blue Dusk killed my parents."

That silenced him. He leaned up against his mop like a walking stick.

"It was just after Locwyn fell. If you recall, the drought leading up to the revolution left our harvest meager. I was already weak with hunger when the Duskmen arrived at our door demanding we hand over our grain stores, our only goat, and the rest of our chickens. My father could not bear to see his only child starve, and thinking the Duskmen would not harm us, he begged their pity. He got down on his knees and asked they leave us just one of our hens."

A dark feeling gripped me as I recounted the tale. I could still smell the steel and the horses of those strange men. I could still see them in their blue military coats, standing over my cowed, stooping father.

"One of them, a Duskman called the Cerulean Knight, without a word, stepped forward and kicked my father down. He ran him through while his face was in the mud. Mother screamed and pulled me into the house. The Duskmen came inside, made themselves at home in our kitchen. The soldiers did nothing to stop the Cerulean Knight as he took my mother into the bedroom. He wanted her to behave, so he had his men bring me in. They made me watch as he ravished her. I begged him to stop, but every time I cried out, his men would strike me.

"The next morning, he finally slit her throat. And then he took me in his arms... and slit mine." I raised my chin so Baker could see my finger trace my scar. "I awoke on the bedroom floor, amazed the blood at my throat had clotted and I was still alive. For a long while, I lay next to my dead mother, holding her, too much in shock to weep. I knew I would not die there. The gods let me live for a single purpose, I was sure. I would find the Cerulean Knight and kill him. That idea gave me the strength to keep going. I got up, drank the last of the water in the kettle, and started walking."

Baker's eyes never left my face as I told him my story. "Blue Dusk," he said as though it were a dirty word. He spat over the rail. "If you ever see that knight again, I'll gladly help you gut him."

"I don't remember his face. The only thing I remember was his sword. It was curved steel with tear-shaped sapphires on the hilt. I'm certain I could recognize it if I ever saw it again."

"What if you found the blade but the man holding it was too young to be your parents' murderer?"

"No matter. I'll kill any man who holds that sword."

Fantasies of vengeance had carried me through my life on the streets. In times of famine and desperation, I pushed myself to survive for the sole purpose of finding and killing that evil man, even if deep down I knew it was unlikely. For now, any chance to damage the Blue Dusk gave me purpose, for it was their unchecked tyranny that orphaned children every day.

I watched the fields and forests pass below us. Elsace was an enormous country composed of forty-seven provinces. Southwest of the capital was my homeland, the valley of Shale. Farther south was the Wastes, a vast expanse of sand inhabited and controlled by anarchist gangs that had warred over the territory since before I was born. Five other countries touched our borders, and several of our crew came from those exotic lands, most commonly Leridia or Nazar.

Our air routes took us all over the different regions of Elsace. I had waded into the Poison Sea in Amaranthia, gathered sand of the Wastes into bottles, and nearly frozen to death in the harrowing mountain ranges of Leffen, but of all the experiences a human being might have in his short life, there was none so grand as seeing the world from an airship's carriage. At twilight, the clouds on the horizon could spread like ink on blue vellum. Or in the day, they could stack into pillars as tall as any canyon.

Soaring at this altitude, I saw Elsace as something so much cleaner. Lakes turned to puddles, cities into toys. The squalor of the slums went invisible, and everything smelled fresh like rain. It was one of the reasons I loved the Wastrel. I felt so far away from all that misery down below.