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“It’s not that he doesn’t want to go. He just—doesn’t want to work, to sacrifice.” She paused, helpless. “Got any kids?”

He laughed, shaking his head, as good as a yes, and they shared a lingering look. He glanced down first, when it got uncomfortable, and Patience nodded and brushed past on the way out the door. Rain beaded on her nanoskin as it shifted to repel the precipitation, and she paused on decking. Patchy-coated rats scurried around her as she watched a lighter and train lay itself into the lake, gently as an autumn leaf. She leaned out over the Poplar Street Canal as the lights taxied into their berth. The train’s wake lapped gently at the segmented kilometers-long barge, lifting and dropping Poplar Street under Patience’s feet. Cloying rain and sweat adhered her hair to the nape of her neck. Browning roux and sharp pepper cut the reek of filthy water. She squeezed the railing with her uninjured hand and watched another train ascend, the blossom of fear in her chest finally easing. “Javier Alexander,” she muttered, crossing a swaying bridge. “You had best be home safe in bed, my boy. You’d best be home in bed.”

A city like drowned New Orleans, you don’t just walk away from. A city like drowned New Orleans, you fly away from. If you can. And if you can’t…

You make something that can.

Jayve lay back in a puddle of blood-warm rain and seawater in the “borrowed” dinghy and watched the belly lights of another big train drift overhead, hulls silhouetted against the citylit salmon-colored clouds like a string of pearls. He almost reached up a pale-skinned hand: it seemed close enough to touch. The rain parted to either side like curtains, leaving him dry for the instant when the wind from the train’s fans tossed him, and came together again behind as unmarked as the sea. “Beautiful,” he whispered. “Fucking beautiful, Mad.”

“You in there, Jayve?” A whisper in his ear, stutter and crack of static. They couldn’t afford good equipment, or anything not stolen or jerry-built. But who gave a damn? Who gave a damn, when you could get that close to a starship?

“That last one went over my fucking head, Mad. Are you in?”

“Over the buoys. Shit. Brace!”

Jayve slammed hands and feet against the hull of the rowboat as Mad spluttered and coughed. The train’s wake hit him, picked the dinghy up and shook it like a dog shaking a dishrag. Slimed old wood scraped his palms; the cross brace gouged an oozing slice across his scalp and salt water stung the blood from the wound. The contents of the net bag laced to his belt slammed him in the gut. He groaned and clung; strain burned his thighs and triceps.

He was still in the dinghy when it came back down.

He clutched his net bag, half-panicked touch racing over the surface of the insulated tins within until he was certain the wetness he felt was rain and not the gooey ooze of etchant: sure mostly because the skin on his hands stayed cool instead of sloughing to hang in shreds.

“Mad, can you hear me?”

A long, gut-tightening silence. Then Mad retched like he’d swallowed seawater. “Alive,” he said. “Shit, that boy put his boat down a bit harder than he had to, didn’t he?”

“Just a tad.” Jayve pushed his bag aside and unshipped the oars, putting his back into the motion as they bit water. “Maybe it’s his first run. Come on, Mad. Let’s go brand this bitch.”

Patience dawdled along her way, stalling in open-fronted shops while she caught up her marketing, hoping to outwait the rain and the worry gnawing her belly. Fish-scale chits dripped from her multicolored fingers, and from those of other indentured laborers — some, like her, buying off their contracts and passing exams, and others with indigo-stained paws and no ambition — and the clean hands of the tradesmen who crowded the bazaar; the coins fell into the hennaed palms of shopkeepers and merchants who walked with the rolling gait of sailors. The streets underfoot echoed the hollow sound of their footsteps between the planking and the water.