After several hours, I was still a successful fugitive. The nuns seemed to have given up. No doubt they’d given a description of me to the police and headed back to the academy. That problem was taken care of—I was officially on my own.
However, I now had the problem of finding somewhere to lay low for a few days. I pondered this as I basked in the warm, orange sunset at the edge of the airship wharf, swinging my feet over the orange-tinted ocean. I was on one of the lower wharfs, having climbed a ladder down from the main dock. To either side of me rose up massive airships, ocean- and air-going ships, of all colors and shapes. There had been a small airship port back in my hometown, but never had such huge airships been docked there. They were fascinating to look at. To think of the adventures they must have had, sailing about the world. No doubt, some of these airships had been to the far east of Asia and back.
My mother was a talented airship pilot, Grandma had told me once. She’d met my father when she’d had to make an emergency landing somewhere out in the American plains and nearly dropped anchor on his head. Her airship was gone long before I was born, though, and my parents not so long after. Grandma always preferred her motorcycle to airships, and as she’d never set foot on my mother’s ship, she couldn’t even tell me what one looked like on the inside.
A nearby splash erupted suddenly by my foot as an object fell from overhead and landed in the water. Curious, I rolled to my stomach and fished the object out. As I shook it dry, I took it to be a leather wallet, black and white cow-patterned. The airship license inside showed a young man’s face, smiley, giving two peace signs. I did a double take—the person was none other than the eye patch boy from the café, messy hair and all. Redde, Harrison-Addison, copilot of ReddeSugar, the license read.