Day 3 – Where the Silver Current Is Now
Three days out, the Silver Current is mid-leg between Lyra and her first real port-of-call on this circuit:
a cluster of trade towers and low islands loosely affiliated with another tribe farther along the Open-Sky route (not Pua Hala—this leg veers a different way first).
They are still flying, not landed, skimming the high thermals above a broad stretch of open ocean.
They have:
completed one sky-message pickup (the kite-tower);
adjusted course once to skirt the edge of a distant storm bank (Dante watched lightning flicker inside a cloud mass miles away, like someone shaking a lantern in cotton).
They have not yet docked at a full port—no sky-dock or water-dock under Dante’s boots since he left Lyra. The ship has stayed in motion, sleeping on the wind, engine cores and lift-fins doing their work.
Right now:
It is late afternoon aboard the Silver Current.
The air is thinner and cool, but the sky is clear—a deep, saturated blue above and a sea of broken cloud below.
Dante is on the mid-deck, harness clipped in, working alongside two other hands to re-lash a cargo net that worked loose in a gust.
His muscles ache in that satisfying, used way:
hands rope-burned,
shoulders sore from three days of lifting and bracing,
mind just tired enough that the constant ache in his chest has dulled to something he can breathe around.
He has learned, in only three days:
how to read the first mate’s tone well enough to tell when “move” means now,
which lines never to stand under when the wind shifts,
how to keep his balance when the ship tilts into a banking turn,
and that on this deck, nobody particularly cares who he was—only whether he shows up, holds the rope, and doesn’t freeze when someone yells.
Behind his ribs, he still counts:
Day three. Just four months. I can do this.
Ahead, on the horizon, the faint silhouette of a sky-dock tower is beginning to show—tiny against the haze, but growing with each heartbeat o
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