The south shore of the island had some small towns with services for sailors to unwind. There were restaurants, pubs, brothels, bars, game rooms, ale houses, dance halls, taverns, dance halls that weren’t also brothels, bath houses of both types, tea houses that only served tea and certainly had nothing going on in the back room, and theaters with shows for all tastes. There was even a theater near where I lived that was trying to use modified navs to create what it called “multimedia sensory experiences.” I think it probably worked better if you’d been to one of those tea houses first.

The officers had much nicer resorts. The sort of places they could take their spouses. They included most of the things the sailors had, just catering to a more sophisticated clientele, if by sophisticated you mean people with more money. They were nicer, cleaner, and with more expensive drinks and other services.

No matter where you went, there were more than the usual number of temples and shrines, many of them were to gods I had never even heard of, plying their trade of fortune, forgiveness, and forecast. I suppose that made sense. There were so many people from so many places to pray for and to accept offerings from and to sell charms to. There was no such thing as a poor priest or hungry monk on the Jewel of the Sea. Even those who laid claim to more frugal faiths were pudgy with the humble fruits of their service.

Once you escaped the towns, the rest of the island came in two shapes, flat agricultural land and rocky hills that people liked to call mountains. I hadn’t ever seen any real mountains before, so I took people at their word. The mountains were not good for growing things, but were good for parks, shrines and temples more interested in meditation and ritual than money, wilderness, and getting away from other people. Some people said the biggest mountain on the island, not a very big one, was a dormant volcano, but no one was really sure, and it seemed happy to keep on being dormant, so no one worried much about it.

It wasn’t really a tropical paradise, since we got there right before the rainy season hit, but the temperature stayed close to perfect year round, if a little too humid in the summer.

People say the island has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, and has survived uncounted wars and natural disasters. The inhabitants would just keep growing rice and pledging fealty to anyone who demanded it of them. Somewhere along the way the island started to be a place where ships would put in for repairs while limping back from wars to the north or south. So the people who lived there took to repairing ships without prejudice or picking sides. The island came to be known as a safe haven for anyone, except criminals that is, unless they were very polite criminals, and the islanders pledged featly to none. It wasn’t one of those rough and dangerous freeholds that stood without law or order except the rule of the fist. They had laws, they were strict, and they were mostly enforced, at least when it wasn’t more profitable to look the other way.

Visitors who committed crimes against another state were turned over to officials for that state. Since those officials were usually captains of military vessels, it didn’t really go well for the criminals unless they were worth a good ransom. Visitors who committed crimes against the natives of the island were to be found the next day as a head on a pike on the road between the repair yards and the entertainment districts where the sailors waited for their ships.

Locals committing crimes against the sailors and other guests, of course, never happened, and when it did it was usually nothing worse than cheating at dice. And really, if your host isn’t allowed to cheat at dice, then who is? Imagine all the houses that would have to close their doors if they had to play fair with their customers. Besides, gambling was illegal on The Jewel, so clearly there wasn’t any.

The entire time I was there I only ever got to see one head on a pike. And there were exactly zero dead sailors in ditches the entire time. Probably because the local guards were pretty nice and didn’t leave people in ditches, and because most navies don’t like to waste good bodies except by hurling them at an enemy. Not that there had been any big conflicts in over two generations. It was mostly small skirmishes over border disputes, crushing the occasional revolt, and keeping lawless nomads and raiders from preying at the edges of the civilized world.

After the great wars, everyone was pretty sure there was nothing civilized left outside of our ring of states and it’s tail running off to the west along the Southern Sea until it reaches the Dominion of Bh’radavar. The rest of the world was totally and completely destroyed. At least no one else ever made an attempt to contact us. Well, no one important. Only pirates ranged that far beyond the edges of civilization, and they kept their mouths shut if they found anything. The belief that outside the borders was nothing but a hostile, savage world was a belief that helped to keep the peace. No one wanted to be the next one to join the rest of the world.

It wasn’t a very fancy island, but it had some very fancy beaches on the south side that only locals were allowed to use, and I was officially an apprentice local.

The house wasn’t very fancy either, but it was a nice little cottage. It was blue with white trim, which took me a while to get used to. Who paints houses blue? But there we were on a street of little cottages painted weird colors. There were five rooms, two of which could be opened up to the outside, a huge bath, deep eaves to ease the summer heat, and a little fenced yard for Officer Puppy to go out and enjoy the sun in. Ornery had purchased it. It was ours, not rented. I didn’t even know what we were supposed to do with five rooms. There were two bedrooms and mom said the other three were the parlor, the dining room, and the kitchen. I knew that already, I just didn’t know why people needed that many rooms. I never could figure out why people wanted to eat outside the kitchen. That’s where all the good smells are.

By the time we got there, pirates were already the unpacking all our furniture and trying to figure out where to put everything. They had zipped out on a floater and left us a nice, slow ride by pedicab. There was already some furniture in the house and they were trying to work around it.

We showed up just in time for mom to start giving them directions about where things belonged. There was a lot of shuffling and rearranging as she changed her mind more than once. As they were unpacking, it was pretty easy to see none of Ornery’s stuff had come with us. He was going to be away for a long time.

That night I went to bed in a room of my very own. It was lonely, even with Officer Puppy curled up next to me.

The streets were wide, with freestanding houses in disorientingly straight rows, mostly wood, with broad porches to keep out the sun and sliding doors to let in the breezes. All the houses were bright with freshly painted walls and tiled roofs. The tiles looked like they were solar collectors, which they were. There were plants everywhere. It was weird being in a city that was so green. But the weirdest part was the people. Not a single one of them looked at us funny. No one sneered, moved to the other side of the street, or found something in a vendor stall to distract them. No one cared who we were, though some did pause to welcome as a new residents. We were just people. It was almost creepy.

The shop turned out to be very easy to find. It was a big shop. It wasn’t very far out on the Docks. There was a motorized train zipping up and down tracks in the middle of the main road that ran down the center of the Docks for people who had a long way to walk, but we didn’t need it. It was a very big shop. We could already see the shop before we got to the bridge we had to cross from the island to the Docks. It was an enormously big shop. We could even see it from the house, but I didn’t know what I was looking for on that first day. It was an impossibly huge shop. You could’ve parked half the south docks of Farport inside it, including the upper berths. And it just kept getting bigger as we approached it.

It towered over the other shops around it, though there were some further out the Docks that may have been maybe the same size. It was made mostly of solar collectors and corrugated metal. It looked more like it was piled there than built into something. The building didn’t look like it would survive a single typhoon. There was a huge sign on top of the shop, welded into a complicated piece of art from broken ships parts and scrap metal. The sign said “Ares”. It didn’t need to say any more. Everyone knew what it was and why it was there.

The sign, I learned, was a sort of a joke. There was once an ancient god of war named Ares, “air-ees”, but the name up there was pronounced “airz”, like Rimares. They were gods of war, here on the rim of the civilized world, but they were damned if they were going to change how people pronounced their name. They always overcharged people who couldn’t pronounce it right.

The entrance for me, as a new apprentice, was a tiny little door in a tiny little metal shack off to one side. Later it was really an even tinier door next to the tiny metal shack that led down some stairs to the levels under the main road. The shack was not really a shack, it was three stories tall, long and narrow, but it looked small attached to the side of a building large enough park a fleet of ships inside.

Stepping through that door was stepping into another world, from the noisy, busy world of the Docks into a quiet waiting room large enough to hold a dinner party in, with red carpets, comfy chairs, a snack bar with expensive things to nibble on, and an attractive receptionist dressed in sharp gray sitting behind a desk Officer Puppy could have lived in as a three room dog house.

“Can I help you?” she asked with a voice most people reserved for beggars and riff-raff.

Mom walked up to her quietly and handed her an envelope. The woman, took it, opened it, read the note inside, and blanched a little.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were arriving today.” This time she spoke in a voice reserved for use by people who wondered whether they were still going to be employed the next day.

“Thank you,” my mom said in her let’s drop it because I don’t have time to ground you right now tone of voice. It was one she normally reserved for using on me a lot. The receptionist gave her a warm smile, rang for someone, and offered us some tea.

Before we even had time to decide whether tea was a good idea, an old man eased through the double doors behind the reception desk. He was stooped, bald, and wrinkled, with a permanent scowl that had locked itself on to his face a long time ago and never let go. But his hands were strong and his eyes glowed with that inner fire of someone whose purpose kept them young. He was dressed in clean, black overalls with the Ares logo on the sleeve. On the left breast, above the pocket, was sewn a small name tag that said, “Rimares”.

His scowl grew a little deeper as he approached us, hand extended for a shake. “First day on the job and you’re already late,” he almost growled as he shook my hand. He harrumphed a harrumph that might have given Ornery a run for his money. Then he softened as he shook mom’s hand. “You really shouldn’t let Ornery be teaching her all his bad habits. Pretty sure that old pirate will be late for his own funeral.” He cackled at his own joke. In the end, Ornery did end up late for his own funeral, missing it by a few years, but that’s another story.

“Come on in, you’re just in time for a some ships to be moved in and out. Too busy on the floor to introduce you to my grandson today, so we got time. We can watch from my office.”

We followed him down a short carpeted hallway, the walls and doors made of exotic woods with even more exotic inlays, to a small lift that took us to up to the upper floor of the shed. The upper floor was mostly all one big room. It was decorated like the hallway, but looked more like a war room for engineers. It was mostly tables covered with diagrams and schematics, some new, some old, some scribbled all over with ideas, some stained with tea. But the best part of the room was what was behind the glass wall it shared with the repair shop. It was a vast cavern of metal filled with ships and scaffolding all lit by huge glow disks.

He led us out onto a small balcony overlooking the shop floor. The main road on the Docks was a few stories above sea level, with storage facilities and smaller shops tucked underneath it. The water was a good number of stories below us. It was like standing atop of watch tower.

Seeing the look on my face, he confided warmly, “Still takes my breath away too.”

He walked to the railing, picked up the hailer from the comm box that sat there, and waited, silently. Comm boxes use something called radio to communicate. You only ever found them on ships and their use was heavily regulated. I think mostly because they interfered with some of the abilities of wyrds and could cause charms and wards to malfunction if around them too long. If people needed to communicate at a distance, they usually used scryers to relay messages.

Below and around us people scurried around on docks, decks, floaters, and scaffolding. It was like watching ants. The activity was slowing down, and there were fewer and fewer people running around. Then a horn blared and the world turned red. It was loud and startling and I jumped high enough to I almost launched myself over the railing and off the balcony.

We were standing right under a giant air horn and two huge red glow disks.

Once the air horn was quiet again, Rimares, Sr. laughed. “I s’pose I should’ve warned you about that,” is what I think he said through the ringing in my ears.

Rimares, Sr. threw a switch on the comm box and some lights on it lit up. The lights above us shifted from red to amber.

He threw another switch and held the hailer to his mouth. “Interro: All clear?”

Over the comm box came a string of replies. “Clear one. Clear two. Clear three.” It kept going right on up to eighteen.

He threw another switch and one of the lights turned blue while the other started flashing red. “Last call for abort.” His voice came loudly through air horns throughout the huge space, echoing back to us.

“On my mark. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Mark!”

The building exploded into motion—not the people in the building, not anything in the building, the building itself was moving, breaking apart. The entire north face was breaking rapidly into pieces and moving away. The reason why the building looked it like it was too flimsy survive a good storm was that it wasn’t a building at all. The scaffolding and girders weren’t holding up the walls, the walls were holding them up. The only real building was around the shed, everything else was floaters that made up the wall panels and the portable scaffolding.

The walls almost seemed to dance as they flew out and stacked themselves neatly in the air to either side of the shop.

Rimares, Sr. switched off the comm box. “Our new girl didn’t give you any trouble, did she? We get tourists begging to come in and see it do that every time we are moving ships in or out. I told her to keep an eye out.”

When mom hesitated, he said, “Well, never mind it then. This is the boring bit. It will be a good hour for them to get the ships moved.” He turned to me. “So let me give you the tour of all the places you’re not allowed to go as an apprentice, just so you don’t get it into your head to go find out about them yourself.” My eyes answered before I did.

A small cargo floater settled in next to a gap in the railing. I wanted to think that the Black Dragon had made me better about being in the air, but I clung tightly to the railing of the floater as it moved. “Don’t trust my driving? Careful now or I may have to prove you right.” Rimares, Sr. cackled as he deliberately made it wobble steeply.

Above the lights and the horn was a control booth jutting out from the wall. It was our first stop. It was a comfortable space, if a little cramped with machines and equipment. It was dimly lit except for the display panels used to monitor the shop floor. There were twelve stations in front of the windows looking out over the floor, each with a nav. Six of them had people sitting at them. They were relaxed and chatting, and ignored us as we came in.

“Control room,” Rimares, Sr. grunted. “Twelve of the best pilots in the world. Each of them can handle moving over a dozen floaters, equipment platforms, or even entire ships at the same time, as long as they can understand the pattern between them. Only need all twelve when we are reorganizing the entire beast out there. Otherwise we make due with four shifts of three with some overlap for moving ships in and out. And don’t get your hopes up, their work day is shorter than yours because if they mess up people die, or worse, we don’t get paid. That and they need time for paperwork.”

While he was talking, one of the pilots stopped chatting to focus on her nav. Down below, some scaffolding starting unpacking itself from around one of the ships so a tug could pull it out of its berth.

After that we got a tour of the shack, which everyone just called “the shack.” It was all offices—accounting, payroll, nice meeting rooms for meeting with clients, things like that.

The shop floor was ringed machine shops used to make and repair anything from huge sheets of blackmetal plating to delicate equipment. You had to have a lot of experience to even be allowed to set foot in most of the machine shops.

There was a large dining hall with really good food on the lowest level under the Docks, locker rooms, showers, and a large infirmary because it was the sort of place where people got hurt. They even had two vitro tanks for really bad injuries. Vitro tanks were another technology nobody understood anymore. People knew how to build new ones that sort of worked, but no one really understood how or why. It seemed to channel the same energies wyrds used to heal, but it was much easier and safer to have a wyrd heal you than it was to use a mysterious technology that was as likely to kill you or disfigure you as to heal you.

There are ancient stories that say that pirates are what they are because they were bred in vitro tanks to be pirates in the first place. There are also stories about the horrible monsters that prowl the remotest regions of the wastes, and how they were once humans, but relied too much on vitro tanks to stay healthy, or tried too hard to be like pirates, or were trying to make themselves immortal, or any other reason you could think of. Using the tanks slowly turned them into horribly mutated monsters. People would say that those stories only prove that pirates are really mutated monsters and should be exterminated. People like to make up stories that give them an excuse to be afraid of things they don’t understand. The stories probably got started because pirates like vitro tanks. Pirates are notoriously hard to kill, even in a malfunctioning vitro tank.

We got to join Rimares, Sr. on the balcony again for the closing of the doors. One of the ships that had pulled in while we were exploring the rooms under the Docks was the Black Dragon. It was the largest ship on the floor, parked neatly on some scaffolding to cradle it securely.

After the doors were closed, we were handed over to the receptionist who gave mom and me all sorts of papers to read and sign, mostly about how Ares Repair Yard was not liable for me being stupid enough to get myself killed, who the small stipend I got for being an apprentice went to, who the slightly larger stipend for me getting myself killed went to, whether I was a spy for some competing repair shop, an agreement that I would take care of a small stack of company uniforms they gave me, another that I wouldn’t wear the company uniform in the commission of a crime except under the orders of a supervisor, whether I had any food allergies, and things like that. There was even more paperwork, forms, and badges for apprentices living in the dormitories.

I got finger-printed, mostly so they could identify the body if anything went horribly wrong, and was given an ID card with my name and picture on it. It was even imprinted on me so it glowed blue when I touched it and red for everyone else.

After that was done, I was shown which door the workers came in by and we were sent on our way. Tomorrow was Krotan, so the shop would be closed and there was no reason for me to work a half day before my first day off. I was to start at the beginning of the new week.

Mom and I had spent the day before getting to know our new home. We found where the markets were, which vendors were friendliest and most likely to help a new local, how soft and squishy the beach sand was between our toes, at least where the beach was sand and not smooth rock, that no one cared if you ran around naked on the beach, which was useful when it was rainy and you wanted to keep your clothes dry, what the temperature of the water was at this time of the year, and all the things people are supposed to do when moving into a tropical paradise.

Most people who talk about tropical paradises forget that they have to get all lush and green somehow. People don’t usually go on about dry, scrubby, intimidating landscapes as the perfect vacation spot. By our third day there, we had a reminder that the rainy season came a month earlier here. So the month of Flowers was wet, wet and more wet, while the month of The Rains was really pretty dry, not counting the occasional typhoon.

So much for the theory that it was kept a perfect paradise, drenched in greenery, by faeries who snuck out at night with tiny watering cans. Not that anyone ever had that theory, but it would be nicer than what really happens. Instead people talk about tropical paradises with that little bit of “oh, but you don’t want to visit there off season” snuck in at the end. And don’t try to figure out what the off-season is by the month names either.

So I waded through the business end of tropical weather on the way to my first day of work. Maybe there were giant invisible faeries with really big water cans? I hope not. That would lead to asking where the wind came from then. But Ornery had made sure I had proper rain gear. He knew everything had a business end, and if you had to be stuck on the business end of anything, make sure you were well protected from whatever it might throw at you.

As I approached the shop I saw other people all headed toward the same tiny door in the side of the shack. On the other side of the tiny door, which was marked “employees only”, there was a dimly lit set of stairs that spiraled down into the levels under the dock. At the end of the spiral stairs there was a narrow room with little desk built into an arch at the far end that everyone who came in was walking toward and through. The arch looked like it was some sort of gate, though there was no gate attached to it. At the little desk was a bored-looking security guard checking badges as a steady line of people came in. Unlike the desk, he was big, he would have taken up the entire arch walking through it. He sat there with an attitude that said that he was the only one allowed to question whether his job was important. The bored look on his face made it clear how vitally important he thought it was.

When I got up to him, he grunted, “New?”

I nodded. I stepped in close in front of the desk so people could keep moving past me.

He picked up a tiny clipboard in his massive hand and consulted it. “Peri.”

“That’s me”

“Card?”

I handed him my ID card. It glowed yellow in his hand. He popped it into a little slot on his desk. It popped back out. He caught it midair and handed it to back to me.

“Follow the sprite.”

A little glowing marble rolled out of a chute in the side of the arch and onto his desk. Before it could roll off the desk and away into a dark corner, it bounced up to float a little above eye level, just ahead of me. It started to move away and I followed, mostly because it was too nifty not to follow. I had never seen one before outside of dancing lights in kids shows. I wondered if I could get one to just keep around as a pet, though Officer Puppy might get jealous. The little sprite weaved in and out of people moving about in the hallways when it had to, but mostly people were moving in the same direction as me.

It led me down a few identical looking halls and into a locker room. I though it was the wrong one for a second before realizing it was for everyone. It was the locker room, and break room, for apprentices. There were lockers and showers and toilets and couches. At least the toilets had stalls. Really, for apprentices it was probably like a palace compared to lots of other places on the docks.

The sprite stopped in front of a locker that had “Peri” neatly printed on a little sign. Then it touched the locker. A light on the door lit up and it flew off. I was about to open the locker door when a hand shot past mine and touched the handle. “Lock out! It’s keyed to the first person who touches it.” Then the person attached to the hand laughed. His laugh was interrupted by his getting whacked upside the head by a sprite moving at a pretty good speed for a little glowing marble.

“Ow! When did they teach it to do that?” He rubbed the spot on his head. “You guys are no fun,” he shouted at no one in particular. The sprite touched the locker again and I grabbed the handle before he could again.

“Izako,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Peri,” I said, shaking it cautiously. It was calloused in a way that said he wasn’t new here, and to prove the point, it was marked with grime that it would take a wyrd to get out again. Then I turned away enough to get to know my locker and to get out of my rain gear.

Izako was a little shorter than average, trim and muscular, with a bit of a slouch that made him look shorter than he was. He had black hair and brown eyes with a triangular face that held a smile easily. He looked like he was from the Eastern Kingdoms. There was a way he pronounced things that made it clear he was.

“Welcome to Club Ares. Where you from?”

“Farport.”

“Farport? On the mainland? I didn’t even know they had a school there.”

I looked at him funny. “A school?” He went right on without answering my question.

“I’m from Ira. Just starting my third year here, so if there is anything you need, let me know.”

“Thanks.”

He hurried out of the room, trying hard to look like he was in no hurry at all and failing.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next, but there was a note taped to the inside of my locker that said, “Be down in a bit. Stay put. -R.” I guessed it was from the younger Rimares. I hadn’t met him yet and didn’t know anything about him.

The rest of the apprentices wandered in and out, dropping things off, getting changed. No one else went out of their way to say hi, but I learned a few names. No one was very chatty. I got a few funny looks because the rest of the first year apprentices weren’t supposed to come on for another month. After all, the winter session of school had just ended or was ending for most places that followed the imperial schedule. People needed time to get here and get settled and didn’t have a small army of pirates to help them move. That meant I didn’t have a group of other confused and lost apprentices my age to hang out with while waiting.

The apprentices I did meet were from all over the world and came in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. About one third of us were girls. Each year, Ares brought on twelve new apprentices, who stayed for four years. At the end of four years, if they hadn’t given up by then, they were either brought on as journeyman or given good recommendations and sent on their way to ply their trade elsewhere. If people made it up to master at Ares they could pretty much name their price anywhere if they wanted to move on, but most didn’t.

This year was an exception. There were thirteen new apprentices, not twelve. That thirteenth one was me. I didn’t know that yet. I wouldn’t understand the significance of it anyway, at least not in my first hours there.

Rimares, Jr., showed up for me about ten minutes after everyone else had trickled out to go off and do the things they did.

He was younger than I expected, looking like he had just finished his own apprenticeship. He was dark skinned, with dark hair and eyes that clearly said he was a southern Freelander from somewhere in the Archipelagos. It must have been from his mom’s side, since his grandfather didn’t look like that at all. But like his grandfather, he looked like a typical hand who worked in a repair shop—except the eyes. He had that dark energy behind his eyes that his grandfather had and that Ornery had. It could wither people with just a glance if the timing was right.

Neither of the Rimares’ was as good as Ornery at withering glances. They could looked annoyed, distant, distant and annoyed, icy and annoyed, and a few other combinations. But I am pretty sure Ornery could kill small animals just by glaring at them. Either Rimares might make people think twice with a dark glare, or even question everything you had done with your life up to that point, but only Ornery could make those people decide that maybe they should take a few steps back to that pub that was just a few steps behind them so they could drink until they could no longer remember what they had seen in those eyes. If there was no pub behind them, turning and walking or running very far away, or at least to the next nearest pub, was also an option. And really, Rimares, Jr. couldn’t even harrumph as well as me.

Rimares leaned against the doorway, looking me over for a minute. I wasn’t really sure if I should be running across the room to shake his hand or what. I got up out of the comfy couch I had found and stood there feeling a little uncomfortable at his silence.

“C’mon,” he said. Then he turned and walked away. I had to hurry to catch up. As I chased after him, he gave me a quick rundown on the things I needed to know.

“You’re the oddball here,” he said, “starting early with no one but me for a boss and no idea of what you’re getting into. You’ve got one month to get up to speed before all the others arrive. For questions, ask me, one of the floor managers, or one of the older apprentices, in that order. The bad news is you start off like everyone else, learning how to keep a clean shop. The only favor you get from me or my grand is being here. Got it?”

I nodded quietly, even though he couldn’t see me.

He stopped and turned to look at me. “I like your choice of words. Let’s try to keep it that way.” Then he continued on, walking a bit faster.

“Every single one of those new kids coming on next month is going to spend their first months whining about being handed a broom and not a wrench. Drives me nuts.”

And with that we burst through a big door and on to the shop floor.