For two days after the blackout he moved like a myth in the making, seen by few and spoken of in fragments by many; traders who called at the edge of the canyon traded whispers of a shadow with keen hands. He crossed a plateau where the trees stood like cathedral pillars and found a ruin of an old deco station, its mosaics half peeled and its bronze reliefs patinated to a sweet green. There he found papers—old manifests and a faded manifesto—speeches arguing that the Isles had been conquered and yet retained new voices, lines about Gaelic sovereignty that read like prophecy. He took a page and fold-ed it into his belt; it was a small talisman against the sense that his life was merely a sequence of escapes.
On the twenty-second day he struck a decision that would either make him free or make him an honored ghost: he returned to Gearrow at night and walked its cracked main street under the guise of a merchant. He had fashioned a simple face mask from soot and a merchant’s cloak from a tarpaulin, and he found the depot where a privateer kept maps for a price. Inside, oil lamps threw deco patterns on the walls and a piano sat silent as a ship’s compass; the privateer was a woman whose eyes bore the same tired scorn as the Overseer’s glass. He bartered for a grav-pass that would let him ride a contraband courier out of the canyon when the time came, and in exchange he promised a tale to the privateer that would augment her legend. Deals in that place were always transactional, and he left lighter of coin but heavier of purpose.
The night he planned his exit the canyon staged its own ceremony: winds that had been cowed by the Overseer’s arrays came roaring back in a single evening, carrying with them the smoke of distant brush fires and the grit of old ashes. The posse, sensing movement, converged upon Gearrow with renewed vigor, and the sheriff sent his best riders to sweep the marketplace. He stayed in the shadow of the depot until the convoy passed, then slipped into the privateer’s crate—a hollowed freight module that smelled of oil and old paper. Inside, he found other riders: smugglers and exiles, eyes bright with the business of leaving, and he understood in those small faces the human economy of escape.
Stolen novel; please report.
Dawn on the twenty-seventh day found the crate riding a lift cradle on a contraband terrace runner, the courier humming like a contented beast as it shouldered along the lower ledges, not out of them. From within, he watched the canyon narrow and widen like a lung, the panopticon spire dwindling to a pin-prick but never letting the land fall away. His hands were sore from gripping the crate’s ribs, yet his spirit—once a ledger entry—felt like an instrument rewired by defiance. He thought of the seanchai and the sloth, the Ogham tally now worn into his knife’s hilt, and felt kinship with the canyon’s patient arithmetic.
Somewhere in the blue, the Draiochta unmade its counsel and left a single clear instruction: go along, then go east, outpost is will provide refuge, tell the tale; a message from the old woman no doubt; to think she’d care for stranger, “a Growing sense of unease began to settle over me as I take stock of those around me in this hip high crate I’ve found myself in; these folks are not ones you’d expect a smuggler to help get out of a town such as this, I’ll have to cut my venture short and make a go of it on foot if this feeling gets worse”.
