A Desperate Plan by Dex Greenbright

Author:Dex Greenbright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dex Greenbright
Published: 2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00



Daredevil in the Cities

By Victoria Bitters

“Well,” Jaff warned belatedly, and offered Wyniera a hand to climb up out of the hole. Sputtering and wiping away the drenched hair streaming into her eyes, she glared up at her manservant.

“You couldn’t have said something sooner?” Wyniera asked. The water in the well tasted like licking rain off a tin slate. She spat again and took Jaff’s proffered hand, reaching for the edge as he hauled her up. She ended up crouched on the lip of the pump well, a puddle forming around her.

“Would you have listened?” Jaff asked, reasonably. Wyniera usually paid him no mind. But then, she usually paid her surroundings a bit more mind. Jaff should have noticed that she was distracted. That was his job, as far as she saw it – providing her with distractions. Doctor von Grumpy was better at it, but he could hardly follow her about the surface of the city. Better to keep him tucked away until the silly mess with the Guild blew over. Though it would be better still if it never did. He was well-compensated, but Wyniera knew her employ wasn’t his first choice and that he might take himself off as soon as he thought he could do so safely. Wyniera appreciated the benefits of his paranoia. Perhaps she might put some effort into cultivating it further…

Now, Jaff – he was quite content to work for Wyniera. He’d been in the employ of her family most of his life, as had his father, and his father, and so forth, back to when Teraltis was an outskirts province of the Haakon Republic. Servitude was in his blood.

Unfortunately, so was his peculiar sense of humor. Or maybe that was unique to their particular pairing of master and servant.

“Besides,” Jaff added, “I could see the water level, so it couldn’t have been deep enough to be a danger.”

The pump-wells’ water levels moved slowly with the motions of the pump – water came crawling up the long tubes and then sank back down with the valves that sieved and pressurized the reserves for the great floating cities. They were also nuisances for the distracted ambler. Not that anyone was supposed to be permitted access to the perimeter, but Wyniera was not one to be scared off by things like signs emblazoned with “Danger! Do not cross!”

Dismissing Jaff’s justification as well as the now-water-logged state of her clothing, Wyniera resumed her stroll across the outer ring of the city, flicking her eyes toward the wide holes in the ground periodically. They were staggered for best effect, cooling the elaborate mechanisms that produced jets of super-heated blasts which bellowed out below, keeping the city afloat.

When she was but a slip of a girl – years ago now! – Wyniera had had Jaff lower her over the edge of the city to examine the underbelly. She had expected smooth contours, broken only by the jet streams of the vents, based upon her own experiments with eggs and sunfruit.

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