The Border Without Shores

The metallic echo of Arteche’s voice took three seconds to fade past the brass trumpet, swallowed by the dull roar of the outside air. Mara didn't answer. Instead of searching for the right words, she kicked the steam-valve lever to secure the hatch.

Her right boot was loose at the ankle; the untied hemp lace dragged through the black grease on the floor, slimy and threatening to catch in any gear.

"Hold onto something that isn't glowing red!" Onofre bellowed from the catwalk.

There was nothing to hold onto.

The galleon hit a pressure pocket that emptied their stomachs all at once. The bilge groaned from end to end, with a sharp snap of rivets pushed to the limit as the bronze ribs of the hull protested as if they would bend inward. The milky light of the upper hatches instantly turned a thick, yellowish-ochre; the middle stratum enveloped them like chickpea puree, leaving that harsh aftertaste on the tongue, of old copper filings, that always warned when the breathable boundary was tearing.

"The gauges, girl!" shouted the old man, rubbing his bad knee against a railing while the galleon gave a savage lurch. "Tell me the port needle hasn't pinned itself to the stop!"

Mara wiped the salt spray from her flight goggles with her shirt's greasy sleeve. Fine grains had stuck to her forehead, like salty sand.

"It hasn't pinned!" she replied, shouting over the whistle of steam leaking through the lead joints of the boiler. "It’s trembling at three hundred forty! If it goes up ten more marks, the main rod is going to blow the cylinder before we cross the current."

"Then purge the nozzle!"

"If I purge we lose lift and we swallow the Foam!"

Onofre let out a short, chewed-up curse, the kind he saved for when reverse-pitch nuts resisted him in the workshop.

Mara's mental inventory at that exact second was a disaster:

Object one: a forged iron pry bar, sixty centimeters long, with a chipped claw and a layer of rust that stained her palms orange.

Object two: the flat wrench hanging from Onofre’s belt, swinging like a mad pendulum.

Object three: half a package of crushed butter cookies in her vest pocket, reduced to inedible dust.

And the imperial corvette above, hunting them blind.

A dry blast reverberated over their heads. Arteche had fired the compression mortars to calculate the acoustic bounce; the shockwave struck the keel like an underwater hammer, making the plates vibrate under Mara's feet with such fury that her teeth chattered.

"He has our range," said Onofre, gasping as he leaned against the firewall bulkhead. "That bastard doesn't need to see our faces. He just needs us to brake."

"We are not going to brake," said Mara.

"The connecting rod is going to bend, kid. Look at it."

The secondary piston rod went up and down with a hysterical rattle, losing its rhythm with every stroke. Each time it reached top dead center, the rod pitched to the left, grazing the cast-bronze guide with a teeth-gritting screech that made her skin crawl. If the shaft slipped off its axis, the piston would pierce the chamber and the secondary boiler would explode like a breaching grenade.

Mara crouched, picked up the dirty boot lace and wrapped it twice quickly around her ankle, tying a blind knot without letting go of the iron bar with her other hand.

"What are you going to do with that?" Onofre asked, his eyes widening.

"Jam the stroke."

"It's going to rip your arms off!"

"It's only four inches," she said, her breath catching from the sour smell of burnt rapeseed and oakum. "If I force the rod to complete the straight stroke, the overpressure will go straight to the stern nozzles."

"And if you snap the bar?"

"Then you give me back Chata, seeing as she's mine."

Onofre let out a snuff that sounded almost like a laugh, but tension pulled the wrinkles on his neck like wires.

"Do it already if you don't want us to smash into the blind chimneys."

Mara didn't think twice.

She waited for the piston to go down. One. Two. On the third stroke, when the hot metal rose in its uneven run, she wedged the claw of the pry bar between the frame stop and the guide's throat. The impact echoed in her elbows, a dry jolt that bit her wrists and left her arms trembling from the effort.

Iron against bronze.

The rod shrieked, forced to enter the track straight by sheer will, expelling a cloud of milky steam that scalded her gloved knuckles. The entire galleon lurched forward, as if a giant had kicked it in the sternpost. The air in the bilge became a deafening hum; the ribs groaned, but they held.

"It's in!" Mara howled, holding the lever with all her body weight, her boots slipping on the greasy plates. "Onofre, open the nozzle valves, now!"

The old man didn't make her repeat it. He lunged at the step wheels and spun them with wild grabs, with the skill of someone who had spent forty years burning his hands on live steam.

The galleon accelerated in an oblique dive, cutting through the dense bank like a wedge of rotten wood.

Through the acoustic tube, open to the upper weather, came the dull howl of a thermal squall. An ascending gale of superheated air that struck the stern of the imperial corvette. Mara heard the distant crack of Arteche's blades splintering against the hot air, the hollow sound of a rudder losing its grip and the broken order to tack before the current capsized them.

The corvette was falling behind. Arteche couldn't risk the armored hull in a current that wasn't in his navigation ordinances.

The silence that followed was gradual, broken only by the heavy snort of the boiler venting through the safety exhausts.

Mara eased the pressure in her arms little by little. The pry bar had been left curved, with the claw bent at an absurd angle that would no longer serve to open any bolt box. She let it drop to the floor; the clink of the iron against the plate sounded clean and solitary.

"What a mess of a lever," grumbled Onofre, though his eyes were wet from the smoke and he was wiping his cheeks with a dirty rag.

"It was good for this," said Mara.

She pulled the black oilcloth-covered notebook from her inner pocket. The corners were softened by sweat and saline moisture, but the thick paper remained intact. On the last annotated page, next to the signature with the two dots, her father had traced a course that no imperial pilot would dare put in an official report.

Mara traced the line with the tip of her thumb, reading the marginal notes written in faded iron gall ink:

We weren't running from the scrap heap; we were just looking for a sky wide enough that we wouldn't have to kneel when we landed.

"Look," said Onofre, pointing toward the ventilation slits of the bow bulkhead.

The dense, dull fog began to part, tearing like an old gauze.

The galleon emerged from the sulfurous layer into an open space, a well of clear air where the wind didn't blow sideways. In front of them, suspended over lattice towers that floated thanks to huge inverted bells, stood dozens of brick and tin chimneys, spitting columns of bluish smoke toward the void. There were hanging walkways, patched barges tied to scrap metal buoys, and laundry drying between the cables.

It was the free refuge.

Mara put the notebook back in her vest, adjusted her flight goggles over her forehead and leaned against the railing with her legs still trembling from the overpressure.

"Well," she murmured, looking at the suspended labyrinth of iron. "At least here they won't ask us for the rudder papers."