Vincent had always been a drifter, but after that 1899 cred parking ticket, he found himself avoiding his old haunts, and really anywhere else that a vindictive inquisitor might expect to find him. That also meant looking for contracts outside of the scope of his more regular employers. Which is how he found himself in an old sailor’s bar at eight in the morning. He was supposed to ship out with a big whaling crawler any minute now. While the crew’s main ship was outfitted with everything it took to process sky whales down into meat, blubber and magical essence, it lacked the maneuverability of an S class, and they’d hired Vincent for a day while theirs was under repair to ferry harpooners to known migration routes and transport quarry back to the main ship.
When he’d showed up, a one-legged skyfaller named Borloe had introduced himself and promised to show him the ropes. Instead, he was drinking something that looked to be a glass of beer with a raw egg in it. A hangover cure, Vincent had to assume, but he’d rather fight a ravenous void spider with a spoon the morning after a bender than try one. He missed the neon glow of the hangouts frequented by the younger edger crowd, he mused, as the man rambled about the injuries that had knocked him out of hunting the big, essence-rich game that most skyfallers prefered. It was just him and the whales now, he was saying. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was an honest trade. Vincent sighed and drug the toe of his boot through a greasy-feeling patch of grime under the table. He supposed this place was almost seedy enough to feel like home, but grime always looked better lit in electric pink than dingy morning light and old oil lamps.
“So, finally getting into the family business, eh?” Borloe elbowed him while Vincent stared at him, confused. Mom had been in the silver trade, and while he had no idea what Dad had done before he married Mom, he was pretty sure he hadn’t been a whaler.
“I’m just joshing you, kid.” The man laughed. “Your average skywhale just has enough essence for a round or two at the bar. The oil is where the money is.”
“I…think you may be thinking of a different family?” said Vincent.
The man gave him a look. “Oh. Yeah. Of course. A different family for sure.” He gave Vincent a knowing wink, leaving him more baffled than before.
“Why don’t we just talk logistics,” said Vincent. “I’m new to this, after all.”
“Right, right, well…” Borloe looked at his watch. “Guess we should have been onboard five minutes ago. Come on, kid, you don’t want to be late your first day!”
“But I was waiting on you!”
Borloe guffawed, chugged the rest of his awful drink, and headed outside toward the massive crawler docked there, its engines already thrumming.
“Wait!” called Vincent. “I need my ship. Where do I dock? Who do I talk to?”
“Just drive her up portside,” Borloe called over his shoulder. “We’ll figure it out from there!”
Vincent jogged to Shelby and nearly tripped over an old pizza box as he leapt through the door. He swung by the icebox to grab an energy drink, tossed the empty can from the cup holder onto the floor, replaced it with the new one, then started driving without even bothering with his seatbelt. Shelby fastened it for him.
“Don’t do that!” snapped Vincent. “We’re in the middle of a city.”
THEN DO IT YOURSELF, scrolled across his dashboard clock in analogue text. AND THROW AWAY THE PIZZA BOX, WILL YOU?
“I didn’t bring you to life so you could nag me about everything!”
OH, DO NOT PLAY THE ‘I BROUGHT YOU TO LIFE’ CARD. YOU HAVE TRIPPED OVER THAT BOX NINE TIMES THIS WEEK.
“Are you counting?” Vincent groaned in exasperation and pressed the pedal farther to the floor. The last thing he needed was for the damn ship to leave without them.
After he finally figured out where he was supposed to go, he set Shelby’s mag locks, cracked his drink open, and leaned back in his chair. Mom had been getting onto him for how many of these he went through, but he could be drinking egg beer in the morning, so really she ought to be proud. The ship was supposed to drive out for an hour before he embarked, and the hour to himself was welcome. He wondered why he’d never picked up a gig like this before. An hour on the clock with his feet on the dashboard. Just a few jaunts back and forth with a small crew of harpooners and skyfallers. He’d have to use one clamp to carry quarry from the void to the main crawler, which would make piloting riskier–only using one claw for bridges meant no failsafes–but he’d done stupider things for less.
A little over an hour later, his ride found a stable place to dock between two large, rocky islands, and Borloe wrapped on his window.
“Time to hit the skies, Coastrunner!”
Vincent opened his cargo hatch and heard the clang of a dozen boots as the hunters he’d be escorting clambered aboard. Borloe joined him in the cockpit to act as navigator, and soon they were making their way through the void from island to island, the aging skyfaller picking out the islands they’d need to jump to before Vincent half the time. It wasn’t too long before they hit what Borloe claimed was a migration route. It just looked like empty void to Vincent, but he obediently parked on the little island Borloe directed him to. It was why they were paying him the big bucks, after all. At first it seemed like nothing would happen. Then, Vincent heard it. Whalesong. Sad and beautiful, floating through the sky. It was still some time before the pod flew into view, a dozen humpbacks and a calf silhouetted against a daylight-drenched island like they were straight out of one of Esilenia’s drawings.
“Thar she blows!” Borloe shouted with a laugh. “Stay here, kid. We’ll bring the cargo to you.”
He jumped out of the cab, a set of moth-like synthetic wings unfurling from a small backpack on his back. Vincent watched through his windshield as the other half a dozen hunters poured out of his hold. With ropes and grappling hooks, they were almost as dextrous as Borloe in flight. With surprising speed, the gap between the pod and the hunters narrowed until Borloe was flying along in the center of the group. Vincent’s heart leapt as he imagined gliding next to a creature that vast and beautiful with only the void under him. Then, Borloe’s harpoon connected with one of the whales on the outside of the pod. With a bellow of pain, it veered away from the rest. The next stab came swiftly, not hard enough for fatality, but hard enough to drive the whale toward the waiting whalers. While its fins beat desperately at the air and its great eyes rolled back in its head, the harpooners readied their shots. Five harpoons connected. The poor creature lashed its tail wildly, and Vincent yelped as a shower of blood rained over his windshield. Pale, he turned on his wipers just in time to see Borloe land atop the twitching creature’s back to pull a few chits of essence from its wounds.
His radio crackled to life. He could see one of the hunters outside speaking into a handheld radio outside. “Get ready for the catch.”
A few moments later the creature stilled. Borloe leapt off it and glided back toward Shelby as it began, first to slowly sink, then plummet. Vincent was so in shock that he would have missed the thing if it weren’t for a quick application of grav magic. Shelby’s claw clamped around the carcass just before it would have been lost to the void. It made a sickening squelch that islands and cargo crates did not.
“Close one, new guy. Cleared to board?”
“C…Cleared to board.” stammered Vincent. A few minutes later, with his passengers securely on board and a freshly slaughtered whale dangling from Shelby’s left claw, Vincent started the trek back to the ship. It wasn’t a long drive, and soon, he’d deposited the dripping carcass on a yellow-lined section of the deck. He let out a breath as a group of butchers swarmed the poor thing like hungry ants and waited for Borloe to leave his ship forever.
“Not bad for your first time, kid,” he said.
“Hmm.” said Vincent, his knuckled white around the steering wheel.
“Alright, let’s shoot a little farther coreward this time,” he said.
“This time?” said Vincent. “But…we caught one.”
Borloe laughed. “We hired you for the day. Did you really think we were going to let you go before 11?
Vincent forced himself to laugh. “Of course not. I was joking.”
And so they went off again to intercept another pod, and once again they found one quickly. It wasn’t easier the second time. He made less of a mess of the catch, but he still hated how the body gave under Shelby’s claws. He already felt like crying by the time they returned to the deck, but of course Borloe insisted they go out again.
This time they went farther up and rimward, and they waited for longer. For the third time, Vincent hoped that the wait would be fruitless, but these were old whalers, past forty, some of them, and they knew these paths like Vincent knew the paths to all the hottest nightclubs his side of the spire.
When Borloe first perked up with an ear to the sky, a toothless grin spreading across his face like a gash widening in blubber, Vincent didn’t hear anything. He strained his ears for whalesong, but all he heard was a few distant clicks. A squeak. A trumpet.
“Hear that boys?” Borloe crossed the small room and threw open the door to the hold. “We got us a flock of unicorns!” A cheer went up as, in the distance, Vincent started to be able to pick out the distinct silhouettes of four narwhals.
“Open the hatch, kid! It’s time to fly.”
Vincent didn’t move. The narwhals dived and twirled, light glinting off their horns. One bobbed up in the air, posing, for a moment, just how Esilenia had drawn his favorite picture so many years before.
“You deaf, Coastrunner?”
“The contract said whales,” he said, his voice breaking.
“The contract didn’t specify what kind. What does it matter? Open the voids damned passenger bay!”
Vincent hesitated. If he broke contract now, today would be for nothing. But maybe if he stalled long enough, the hunters would miss their window and…
Borloe shrugged and motioned for the harpooners to follow him out the cab door. And just like that, they were away, just tiny cogs in the well-oiled machine of the Perfectorate, turning beauty into profit just like everyone else. Vincent closed his eyes, but he could still hear the sounds. He opened them again when the radio crackled on. He thought about just leaving them all stranded out there, but instead he did his job. A narwhal was dying this afternoon, and that small act of rebellion wasn’t worth wasting its life.
It was the last run of the day. He rode back to the fisherman’s bar wordlessly, collected his pay, hosed off Shelby’s hull, then drove behind a grove of trees on a neighboring island, walked straight past his icebox full of rum, threw his clothes on top of a pile of dirty laundry, and sat down in his shower with the water on as hot as it would go.
He kept expecting Shelby to chide him for how hard he was taking this. To point out the section of literal pirates in his address book who he’d done jobs for without asking the questions they both knew he ought to ask. He expected her to remind him of that time he’d wrecked a passenger ferry and lecture him over how he could value an animal’s life over a ship’s. He expected her to make fun of him for feeling more guilty about an honest day of work than theft and blackmail, to be baffled over how this, out of all things, could be too far. But instead, she just turned the water off when it went cold. He turned it back on. He sat there, shivering, until the water ran out and Shelby draped a towel around his shoulders. He pulled it tight around himself and buried his face in its corners until he could make a convincingly normal expression.
Well, he supposed he had to empty his grey tanks and refill his freshwater. He took a deep breath and drove to the nearest dump station. He couldn’t take his eyes off a single sliver of bloody skin stuck to his windscreen. Hey, at least he’d made good money.
As he stood next to Shelby at the rest stop, waiting for her tanks to fill, he glanced over a bulletin-board plastered with layers of fliers about local events, attractions, sales and establishments. One caught his eye. It was a Narwhal, poorly drawn but happy looking, swimming beneath a header that said, “Fly with the Sky Narwhals Inc.” Beneath it, in smaller text, it said, “All proceeds go to sky-mammal conservation efforts.”
Vincent tore an address tab off the flier, and when he was done with maintenance, he nearly skipped back into Shelby’s cab.
“I know where we’re going next,” he said.
Fly with the Sky Narwhals Inc. wasn’t exactly as majestic as he’d pictured it. It was a weathered couple of buildings held together with extra coats of paint atop a small island. Behind them, in an enclosure of shimmering magic fields, a pair of sky narwhals basked in the evening light. Vincent didn’t care. He walked right up to the front desk, checked his pay stub, and asked to put exactly that much as a donation to save the narwhals.
The biologist sitting behind the desk looked shocked. “Wow, sir! We haven’t had a donation this large in years.”
Vincent rechecked his pay stub. “Honestly that’s disheartening.”
She smiled sadly. “I like to see the good in things.”
Vincent tried to return her smile.
“Well, would you like to meet them?”
“Them?”
“Our narwhals. Pointy and Spot?”
“I…don’t know if they’d want to meet me.” Vincent looked at the floor.
“Nonsense!” She grabbed his arm and dragged him to a little storeroom. In a few moments, he was hooked into a pair of ancient-looking steampowered wings. It took the biologist a few tries to get them started, but sure enough they hissed to life, lifting him slightly off the ground.
“Push that button to go forward. That lever to turn. And don’t worry,” she assured him. “If you fall, the force fields will catch you.”
She smiled in a very unencouraging way, but he followed her to the narwhal enclosure all the same, and when he stepped into the void, the wings held. Pointy and Spot swam lazily toward him. He shut his eyes and opened them again, but they were still there. He blinked back tears, then worked the awkward controls until he was close enough to reach out and touch one.
“Pointy loves pets!” the biologist called from the shore. “They’re quite tame!”
Vincent held out a shaking hand and one of the creatures nudged it. He patted its horn. “Hey there, baby. Aren’t you gorgeous?”
After a few minutes, the creatures let Vincent rest his face against its horn, and the hot tears finally rushed to his eyes. Sometimes he felt like he was nothing but a wad of gum between the gears of the Perfectorate’s perfect machine, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Sometimes you had to live by your own rules, even if they only made sense to you. And he had to stay true to that, even if it meant ramen for dinner for the next week. After all, Narwhals made things super official.
Crawling the Edge: The Coastrunner Chronicles 