Chapter Text
If it were up to me, no, I would not have been attempting to scrape barnacles off the side of a ship in the middle of a downpour to meet some important person. But it very much was not up to me, rather the overseer, Christopher Manning.
Quite the salty man; my coworkers and I tended to joke that when he was a ship captain, he absorbed a bit too much sea water. That, or when the Confederates lost, it broke the old geezer’s heart so greatly the only thing able to fill the void it left was whiskey and poisoned oysters from the Hudson (both of which he built an immunity to).
I had been tasked with dealing with scraping barnacles off for talking out of turn. Manning had been bullying a young boy who worked with us, so I did what any decent person would do, and interfere.
‘He’s just a kid, sir,’ I had said. ‘You can’t expect such a young fella like him to lift two tons of rope himself.’
Apparently, telling an old man that a twelve year old wasn’t as strong as eight other men, ages ranging from sixteen to twenty-six, was “incorrect” and “insubordination”. It earned me two weeks of barnacle scraping alone, on the hull of a massive trolling vessel. I was told that it would give me plenty of time to think about my “offense”. Honestly? I was cracking the barnacles open and feeding them to crows and gulls that came to me as I worked—no time at all was being used to think about how I was in the wrong.
I spent more time watching the few remaining catfish slurp their ways up to the shallows, and the less scavenger-y fish swim in shoals in the polluted water than I did actually doing my job. Of course, I always looked busy when Manning checked.
‘Keeping busy there, Jeremy? Or should I have Collins come to make sure you’re actually scraping?’ Manning asked. I told him that I was just fine bleeding from my hands without someone breathing down my neck.
Jeremy. That name still never felt right when I was called it. Maybe it was because it felt too foreign and modern for my…old German self. While being called Albrecht, or even just Albert, was so far away from me, I still felt more connected to those names than the one I had chosen—Jeremy Hastings. I guess trying to be an ecosystem of your own was more exhausting than I thought originally. Your identities consume each other, they leech into each other at the edges, and everything becomes so connected all you know is how to trace the string to each of them. They would all lead back to who you were before being someone else, but that “original” didn’t feel quite right anymore because of how much you’ve lost your identity.
Hugo Weiss found a passion for the open ocean Albrecht Krüger never discovered for himself, yet Albrecht’s actions led to Hugo commandeering a ship in the Chinese sea and sailing to the Society Islands alone. If Hugo never sailed there, Wilbur Vahn wouldn’t have met the ruling family of Britain, and would never have become an animal doctor and philanthropist—another two things the others wouldn’t have ever imagined being invested in. Then, trying to go back to being Albrecht after decades of not being him, it felt like trying to put on an old shoe.
As I said, it was an ecosystem.
I stood up to crack my back, and held my palms up to wash off any blood that may have gotten on my fingers and tools. That’s when I noticed a woman standing on the dock above me, staring down with piercing eyes swimming in different shades of depressed blues. She was rather out of place, with black hair cropped above her shoulders, a wide-brimmed hat that shaded her face, black umbrella, and an elegant black dress. She looked maybe twenty-seven at most, held a briefcase, and, I noticed, on the hand holding the briefcase was a black glove covering all but her fingertips.
‘Ma’am!’ I called out. ‘You’d be better finding the graveyard down nine blocks over ’n that street there! Are you looking for Mr. Manning? I could come up there for a moment, if you need me to help you!’
‘I think you will find I am here to help you.’ She said in response.
‘What the devil do you mean? Unless you mean with the barnacles? What’d a dame like you want to be doing scraping these old white things with a random dock worker?’
‘I do not mean with the barnacles,’ the woman responded sharply. ‘Now shush, I know you have questions, but I cannot answer them here. Your curiosity will yield answers later, I promise. For now, you need to come with me.’
I blinked. It was rather childish of me, but I decided that going with the rich-looking woman was better than getting any more soaked in the rain while scraping skin away on a barnacle-ridden boat. I followed her without any hesitation—I obviously was about to ask a hundred different questions, but judging by the black shawl, esteemed aura, and the fact pistols came in all different shapes and sizes nowadays, I thought it better to keep relatively shut. Less I wanted to be found floating dead in the Hudson the next morning.
‘I do have one question,’ I told her. She turned abruptly to me. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Vanora,’ she said simply. ‘Walk with me. I have clean clothes with me and towels. From here, we board the transcontinental railroad to San Diego where you will get all the answers you want.’