Shadow Road: Book 1 of the Shadows Rising Trilogy

3. An Awful Adventure

6th of Uirra

After three days of feeling absolutely wretched, I finally woke without ridding my stomach of last night's dinner. Quite the opposite. I was famished, so I decided to go up to the mess deck even though Father had forgotten to leave me a key. Happily, he had left a set of meal tickets in his bag.

That missing key should have been my first clue that something was about to go wrong. Father never forgot anything. Or he never used to. At the time, though, I simply added that to the growing list of ways my father had begun to scrape away at my sanity, took a meal ticket, and left anyway, telling myself he would forgive me for ignoring his orders to stay in the cabin.

The gargantuan Starre & Sons transit ships were marvels of engineering; according to the brochure, the Galvania was one of their largest, with four decks, a thousand berths, two massive compression engines, and two full-size saloons. The brochure also made the dubious claim that sailing with Starre & Sons was "The best value for your hard-earned money! Travel farther, spend less!"

That may have been technically true, but while there was great size meant to accommodate great quantity – thus making it possible to travel cheaply – the quality was inversely related. Thin walls, inadequate heating, leaky valves, coarse linens. Everything was made to carry swarms of people across the ocean in all the ambiance and comfort of a sardine can.

The 2nd class saloon reminded me of the cafeteria at school, with its long trestle tables and benches set in rigid, impersonal lines. At school, though, the walls were white, not dingy grey green. There wasn't as much welded metal, either.

A man took my meal ticket at the door to the dining room, fed the ticket into a recording machine, and then opened the stile, allowing me to go down the line to the serving station, where a member of the kitchen staff ladled my rations onto a tin plate and shoved it across the counter without looking at me.

It would seem Starre and his sons had bought their dining service secondhand from a prison. Possibly their food, too, from the overcooked smell of things. I stared down at my plate and seriously debated whether or not it was possible to kill a chicken twice.

Imagining the cooks performing resurrections on poultry in the galley, I found an empty stretch of bench and sat. Then I examined my 'lunch' while thinking of Mrs. Winterborne's plum puffs and coriander muffins. And that chocolate cream cake she made for my twenty-third birthday, with the dusting of iridescent pink sugar on the peppermint glaze.

It didn't help. The biscuit-brick nearly broke my teeth, and the mummified drumsticks actively refused to be swallowed. Then I almost coughed it all back up when the gravy slid down my throat in a single gelatinous lump.

A florid woman with thick shoulders and a large nose was eyeing me from the other side of the table, her gaze openly amused. At my attempt not to gag, she leaned forward. "I'll take yer vittles, Missy, if ya haven't the stomach."

With a shuddering breath, I pushed what was left across to her and got to my feet. "Thank you," I whispered from behind my hand, covering a queasy burp as she began forking everything into her mouth in big, stomping bites, quivering gravy and all.

Having 'eaten,' I decided to do some exploring. Thinking Father might be taking the air, I wandered along the main deck promenade by myself, surveying an endless slate sea and an overcast winter sky, then turned around in the peak of the prow to take in the sheer size of the Galvania's four smoke stacks marching like soldiers down the centerline of the ship.

After watching the deck for another half an hour, though, I hadn't spotted Father anywhere, and the wind was picking up. With a last, worried look around, I went back inside.