Ms. Gable’s words hung in the chilly morning air, sharper than the bite of the wind off the river. Five days. The steering column was a gnarled mess of twisted metal and severed hydraulic lines, its guts spilled across the wet deck. Brisca, despite drafting calculations behind her eyelids, kept her expression blank and puzzled as she peered over the edge of the fractured control housing.
“Oh dearie me,” she chirped, a slight wobble in her voice. “That looks… rather stuck, doesn’t it? Like a stubborn cork in a bottle. Maybe we could… wiggle it?” She demonstrated with an exaggerated, ineffectual hand gesture that ended with her nearly losing her balance. Ms. Gable, supervising the barge's burly head mechanic, Jorgen, merely grunted. The mechanic prodded the broken column with a heavy wrench, scowling. “It ain’t wiggling, missy. Not without a proper weld and a new drive shaft. And we’re three days from the nearest service port, going faster than we should.”
Odis, leaning against a stack of crates nearby, casually sharpening a small hand axe, caught Brisca’s gaze. A flicker of understanding, quick as a dragonfly’s wing, passed between them. He’d seen her true face, her true mind. And now, he was her accomplice.
“A new drive shaft,” Brisca mused, tapping her chin with a paint-chipped fingernail. “My uncle once had a garden tiller that broke its… spinny-thing. He used a rather clever bypass. A sort of… short-term patch. He called it a ‘whatchamacallit linkage’.” She winked subtly at Odis, then turned back to the mangled column, her finger tracing a complex, invisible line in the air. “You’d need to reroute the hydraulic pressure from the secondary rudder, then cross-link the auxiliary pumps to a modified torque arm… Oh, but that’s far too complicated for us simple farmhands, isn’t it?”
The mechanic scoffed. “Reroute hydraulics? What are you babbling about, missy? That’s high-pressure stuff. You’ll blow the whole system.”
Odis, without looking up from his axe, spoke in a low, even tone. “She’s right about the cross-linking, though. If you could jury-rig a torque arm from the main cargo hoist’s counterweight system, it might give you enough temporary leverage to regain some directional control. Just for a few degrees, enough to catch a slower current.” He glanced at Brisca, a hint of admiration in his eyes. “It’d be tricky, but not impossible.”
Ms. Gable, despite herself, paused. She looked from Brisca’s wide-eyed, innocent face to Odis’s calm, certain one. The grease-stained man bristled. “You’re a photographer, not an engineer, Corval! And she’s… well, she’s Brisca.”
“Oh, I just meant… my uncle was very handy!” Brisca insisted, flapping her hands. “He always said, ‘Brisca, when in doubt, find the strongest thing and make it push the other thing!’” She pointed emphatically at the enormous cargo hoist that dominated the barge’s stern. “Like that big metal arm! It looks very pushy!”
Odis took over, translating Brisca’s goofy pronouncements into workable, stopgap engineering instructions. His voice was steady, confident, lending credibility to the wild ideas Brisca was carefully couching in airheaded analogies. Gable, against her better judgment, allowed them to experiment, her gaze sharp, suspicious, but ultimately desperate. Jorgen grumbled and cursed, but he followed Odis’s directions, slowly adapting parts from the cargo system under Brisca’s oddly precise suggestions.
Hours later, sweat-slicked and grime-streaked, the improvised linkage was in place. It was crude, held together with heavy chains and reinforced with thick steel plates scavenged from a storage bay, but it worked. The barge, with a groan that echoed through its colossal frame, responded, ever so slightly, to the helmsman’s touch. The immediate crisis of being completely adrift was averted, buying them precious hours, perhaps a day. Brisca offered a triumphant, if slightly lopsided, grin to Odis, who gave a small, knowing nod in return.
Brisca stepped away to check on Pello, glad to escape the smell of scorch and oil. She found him in the largest sheep pasture, a vast, emerald expanse that rolled gently under a sky of soft, bruised purples. He stood beside the fleece-heavy ram, surrounded by grazing ewes and lambs. Pello spoke to the beast in hushed tones, fingers buried in coarse lanolin.
“Good boy,” Pello murmured, leaning against the curled horns. “Just a little more, and we’ll show Brisca.”
Odis had followed her, a warm mug of herb tea in his hand. They watched from the gentle slope of a nearby knoll, the late afternoon sun painting long shadows across the grass. Pello hitched a leg over the animal's broad spine. The ram, instead of bucking or stamping, merely blinked, then with a gentle nudge from Pello’s small heels, began to trot. Not a wild, panicked bolt, but a steady, purposeful pace. Grinning, Pello rode the animal across the pasture like a little king on a woolly mount. The ewes scattered playfully, then regrouped to follow, as if accompanying their young leader.
Brisca felt a warmth spread through her chest, chasing away the chill of the morning’s despair. Her little brother, once so timid, was now riding a ram across a drifting pasture. The countryside air had worked its magic. Pello reached the far fence line, swung the ram about, and trotted back, waving wildly at Brisca and Odis. His laugh, clear and unburdened, carried across the field.
But the idyllic scene shattered with a high-pitched whine that cut through the air, growing louder, more intrusive. A sleek, obsidian drone, no bigger than a dinner plate, descended from the sky. It bore no markings of the barge’s usual delivery fleet, its polished surface reflecting the setting sun like an unblinking eye. It hovered directly over Brisca, its miniature rotors kicking up small eddies in the grass.
A blue-white holographic projection shimmered into existence beneath the drone, expanding into a stern, official-looking letterhead. The logo, a stylized capital ‘A’ interwoven with a towering skyscraper, dried the spit in Brisca's throat. *Aegis Design Consortium.* Her old firm. The name of her former boss, a severe man named Caelon Vestra, glowed at the bottom.
The words, crisp and unforgiving, scrolled across the holographic display: “*TO: Brisca Tolvay. FROM: Aegis Architectural Consortium. RE: Unilateral Contract Abandonment and Breach of Non-Compete Clause. This letter serves as a formal Cease and Desist order and a preliminary notice of intent to sue for damages incurred by your egregious and unprofessional departure from your contractual obligations. You are hereby ordered to immediately cease all structural or planning activities and return to your place of employment within 48 hours, or face full legal prosecution and financial restitution for all lost projects and proprietary designs…*”
The words swam before Brisca’s eyes. Her façade, the painstakingly built wall of carefree oblivion, crumbled instantly. Dizziness swept through her. Caelon. He’d found her. He wasn’t just going to let her disappear. He was going to drag her back, or ruin her. Pello’s joyful laughter seemed to fade, replaced by the relentless hum of the drone. Her hands trembled, her face pale, all the exhaustion and fear she’d been hiding for months rushing to the surface. She stared at the glowing letter, her vision blurring.
Odis tracked her rigid posture and the sudden hollow in her cheeks. His tea mug clattered to the ground, forgotten. Without a word, he strode past her, his movements fluid, deadly. He snatched a heavy-bladed garden shovel from where it leaned against a nearby utility shed. With a guttural cry, he swung the tool in a wide, powerful arc. The shovel connected with the drone’s sleek body with a sickening crunch. Tiny fragments of black plastic and sparking wires exploded into the air, the holographic projection flickering wildly before dissolving into nothingness. The drone, a mangled mess, plummeted into the tall grass with a soft thump, its rotors spinning erratically for a moment before dying into silence.