CHAPTER 61: TWO-WORLD TRADERS

  The Two Worlds Trading Company finally had an office that was not just the great cabin of their airship. They had decided it needed to be in Hightown, for staying in Lowtown—where The Sapphire Spirit remained docked for the time being—defeated the entire purpose, which was to be seen as presentable to a certain clientele, for whom those steep ramps and twisted staircases into the lower half of the city were more or less ragged chasms into a dark, unknowable cave.

  Now, The Two Worlds Trading Company was but a few easy blocks from Fairweather Provisions, located in a small second-story office on a quiet street above a friendly candlemaker who only asked that they didn’t stomp around on the creaking floorboards too loudly. It was not much of an office, as far as offices went, but it had a large paned window overlooking the pleasantly treed road below, a fireplace to keep them warm on cool evenings, and room enough for three desks, paperwork, and a cat. It was, all things considered, more than enough.

  They had moved in a month ago, but Elias was still decorating and arranging his sparse desk opposite the door. Bertrand had already gone home for the day, and Briley looked ready to leave after him. Elias had volunteered to lock up and feed Islet, who had made the open space her second home on days they were not shipping wares across the continent. She was still their hypothetical rat catcher.

  Indeed, barely a week went by without some level of travel, not that Elias ever minded. He felt more at home on The Sapphire Spirit than anywhere else in this world, and his depressing Lowtown apartment was generally the last place he wanted to be. He would move eventually, he often reminded himself, but the office had taken precedence, and he didn’t mind spending the extra time with Islet. Accordingly, he was almost always last to leave, though one would not know it from his desk.

  “A letter came addressed for you,” Briley mentioned on her way out. She lifted a small tan envelope from the skinny iron table by the door. “No return address. Could be dangerous.”

  Elias nodded. “Thanks. See you in the morning.”

  Briley nodded back. “See you in the morning.”

  Before she could leave, however, someone knocked on the door in a familiar rhythm that Elias could not quite place. Briley told them to come in. The door creaked open, a man and a woman stepped inside, and unlike that nostalgic knock, Elias recognized them instantly. His jaw nearly clunked to the floor in spite of the candlemaker.

  Melo and Ginger looked remarkably the same and yet entirely different.

  The former had lost some weight and perhaps a bit of hair, but he looked more adult than Elias had ever seen him, while the latter had grown up in opposite fashion: her hair was longer, and her once rake-thin figure had filled out.

  “Friends of yours?” Briley was reading the looks in the room.

  “This is Melo and Ginger,” Elias explained.

  “The infamous Melo and Ginger.” Briley crossed her arms, examining every inch of them. “You know, people call me ginger sometimes.” She pulled straight a red lock.

  “Hey, Elias,” Melo said, breaking their awkward silence.

  “Hey,” Elias replied, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Speaking of hair, I’ll get out of yours.” Briley excused herself and disappeared behind them, exiting abruptly as she often did, leaving Elias to catch up with old friends or, perhaps, reconcile with his past incarnate. She closed the door behind her.

  “Have a seat,” Elias said, immediately searching for seats.

  He dragged a couple to the front of his desk. They planted themselves into their respective chairs, Ginger still uncharacteristically quiet, Melo flashing quick smiles, Elias digging through a drawer for that bottle of mead he was sure was stowed somewhere—there it was.

  He presented them the beverage. “Still fond of good mead, I hope.”

  “Sure,” Melo said.

  “None for me” were Ginger’s first words.

  “Never expected you to turn down mead, Ginger,” Elias commented.

  “It’s been a little over two years, Elias,” she said. “A lot has changed.”

  He noticed it then, as she ran a hand down the slight bump of her stomach. Again, his jaw nearly crashed through the floorboards. He looked at Ginger, and then he looked at a smirking Melo. Of course.

  “You two?” His finger danced between them.

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  “Shortly after you left, we made it official,” Melo told him. “We had a small wedding this summer.” He showed him his silver ring. “We thought about inviting you, but… like I said, it was a small wedding, and you were halfway across the continent. We figured we would swing by Sailor’s Rise on our honeymoon and come say hi then. And here we are. I hope that’s all right.”

  “It’s more than all right,” Elias said. “I have missed you both dearly. I’m just glad you found me. Let us drink to it. And to your marriage. And to your… baby.” He poured two cups of mead and slid one toward Melo.

  Melo took a sip. “I suppose we might not have found you without that letter you sent, Mr. Elias Vice. I’ll admit the new name suits you.”

  Elias chuckled. “It doesn’t even feel new to me anymore. It’s funny how quickly we adapt to change.”

  “Some more than others,” Ginger chimed in. “You’ve certainly adapted.” She peered around the room, taking it in, and though the space did not look like much to Elias—desensitized as he now was by the wealth of others—it was in truth a pleasant office in a rich neighborhood. Not to mention many, many miles from Acreton. “Your own company in the Rise. You’ve done your mother proud.”

  Elias accepted the compliment with grace, but there was something underneath it, too, something not quite sinister but nonetheless unsettling. Something that had been lost between them. Perhaps it was what he didn’t hear: a hollowness once filled.

  “I’m sorry about the money,” he said, trying to fill it. “Those seven relics I borrowed from you before I left, Melo. You got them back with the letter, I hope—no unscrupulous sailor stole your coin in transit?”

  Melo nodded, but Ginger had words: “We don’t care about the coin, Elias.” She shook her head, gathering herself, her gaze bouncing between both men and their mugs of mead. “You left without uttering a single goodbye,” she went on. “We spent a week searching for you, fearing the worst had happened, until finally some fisherman mentioned he saw you sprinting for the docks the morning that merchant ship departed. Then it clicked.”

  “I didn’t think I had time,” Elias said.

  “You couldn’t have found a minute to swing by?” she asked.

  “I was single-minded in my endeavor and perhaps”—he reflected honestly—“afraid of what you might say. I’m sorry. You were my best friends, and I abandoned you like strangers.”

  “Yeah,” Ginger agreed. “You did.”

  Melo was looking increasingly uncomfortable. “It’s okay, darling. We were young. We all made stupid mistakes, and I never wrote Elias back. I meant to, by the way. Not a lot of mail goes between Acreton and Sailor’s Rise. I missed my opportunity a few times, and then… forgot, I guess.”

  “You were just living your lives,” Elias said for him.

  “And you are living yours.” Melo smiled a sad smile.

  The hollowness grew deafening.

  “Maybe we can pretend,” Elias suggested, his voice catching in his throat. He cleared it away. “Maybe we can imagine that things haven’t changed for an evening. A sip won’t kill your baby, Ginger. Come on. You two will always know better than anyone what I was like as a young lad, how much I loved playing make-believe. Indulge me one more time.” He retrieved another cup from under his desk.

  Melo needed no convincing, so easy was his very being, but they could not revisit the past without all of its players. The silence of uncertainty was loudest of all.

  It took her a long moment, but when Ginger grudgingly leaned forward, a grin breaking across her face—along with the words that followed, which were “fuck it” and “fill her to the brim”—a flood came bursting through the dam she had built up over two years, filling their hollowness as Elias filled a third mug.

  Dusk fell to night as armor fell to the ground, and in those stolen, ephemeral hours, the scrap-metal-shooting trio from Acreton was back in its element, back in their tavern corner, back sitting by the river swigging whatever Ginger had stolen from her father, but tomorrow’s problems had always been tomorrow’s problems. In timeless, placeless bliss, they told each other everything, excitedly and often out of order. Elias showed Ginger his new Leefield and asked if she was still enjoying hers—she was—while Melo could not get enough of Islet, who had taken a liking to his lap. He insisted that they, too, adopt a cat upon their return. Elias started a fire and borrowed a second bottle from Briley’s desk as they joked and laughed and talked over each other, as they burned into the annals of legend one last great memory between ancient friends.

  When Melo and Ginger departed at last, far later and drunker than intended, Elias said he would see them again if ever he stopped by Acreton. No one knew when that might be. No one knew if it would be at all. But they said their farewells and maintained the fantasy as they wandered off, zigzagging into the city fog.

  After they were gone, Elias spent half an hour petting the cat and staring out the window. He’d almost forgotten he had received an unread letter. Still too riled for sleep, he retrieved it from the iron table by the door as Islet went off to inspect nightly happenings from the windowsill.

  The envelope immediately struck him as familiar, and he was not surprised by whose penmanship he found on a single piece of paper folded inside. Jalander had not written him a letter in months, perhaps because Elias had stopped by unannounced often enough. There was a formality in the medium—and, even more so, in its message. He read it slowly.

  Dear Elias,

  I do not know what to say to you, so perhaps that is why I am writing this letter instead. I know what you have done. I realize the old headquarters may seem chaotic, but certain things—important things—are placed carefully and with intention. You may think you have only borrowed from me, but you have stolen information I am meant to safeguard, putting us both at risk. You are being monitored, Elias. I know you know that. You have told me you are being careful, but actions are what make, or unmake, a man. I cannot watch the son follow the same path as his father, for I am painfully aware of where it leads. It is only a matter of time before they find you. Burn this letter, and do not come knocking again. You are on your own.

  Jalander

  Elias reread the letter three times as if to excavate hidden meaning beneath its unambiguous message. There was none. Jalander was disappointed in him. No, it was more than that. Through his actions, Elias had abandoned their friendship just as he had abandoned Melo and Ginger. There had been a line, and as usual, he had crossed it. And to think he’d almost convinced himself tonight that maybe he had changed.

  But how could a man change without regret? Regret meant he would have done something differently, that he might give back a gift wrongly acquired, that he might undo the present to restore the past—that he might accept anything less than everything.

  What was he truly willing to trade?

  Alone in his office with the answer to that question burning brightly before him, Elias crumpled Jalander’s letter in a weak fist and tossed it into the fireplace.