the residents to the weather, and they are rightfully proud of their important role in the struggle against the Kurians. Their port is the main seagoing gateway across the Atlantic that is free of Kurian control—or even occasional disruption. For once, the long, cold winters worked in the city’s favor. The Kurians, while they have the technology to survive in any climate, prefer warm ones for safety’s sake. They never know when they might be forced from their holes and have to dive into the nearest waterway or drift in high winds to a new refuge. They generally leave the administration of cold climates to their allies.
From Halifax, shipping and passengers break up into smaller contingents that can be transported by lighter smuggling craft into the Great Lakes or down the eastern seaboard of the United States. Some trade, mostly furs and precious metals or rare earths scraped from the tundra and cold shores of northern Canada, heads east to Europe as well, mostly in the hands of experienced smugglers.
There’s still the fish, as well. The cod fleets are busy, save for the wild winter months, when even their tough boats and legendary seamanship are not equal to the challenge. Some larger ships, mini oceangoing factories, process the cod into frozen strips that serve as cheap, nutritious protein brought by rail and the seasonal roads to the eastern half of Free Canada that runs from the midway point between Toronto and Montreal all the way northeast to the ocean.
One could be forgiven for assuming that the isolation would make for a lifeless city where the residents scuttle from breakfast table to work, work to washing basin at home, and washing basin to curtained bed before beginning the cycle again. Nothing could be further from the truth. The little town is filled with everything from theaters to taverns to, remarkably, a pair of fine-dining restaurants, one complete with potted palms and a black-and-white checkerboard marble floor polished to a brilliant sheen and white-jacketed waiters. The people of Halifax, most of the year trapped beneath iron-gray skies, have found in this wind-and-spray whipped point of the New World cultural resources that a twentieth-century resident wouldn’t have imagined.
The cold was dreadful. The wet gave it a penetrative staying power; even after you stepped inside, it took a few minutes to warm up. She hoped the whole trip wouldn’t be like this.
They had arrived with six days until their transatlantic ship departed for the Baltic, and had already spent three of them working out the kinks from the long, segment-by-segment flight.
“Easy from here on out,” Sime announced upon their bouncy landing into the wind at the Halifax airstrip, with a smile that for once didn’t look practiced and professional. Sime was probably sick of riding in a walk-in cooler that was being tossed around like the last tablet in a pillbox on a courier’s galloping horse.
Valentine was fond of Sime, and being Valentine, wanted her to like him, too. He was always defending Sime as being “good at his job.” She could put up with him for the trip to the conference, but it didn’t mean she had to like him. He always evoked memories of the Kansas “quality” of her youth. Their faces and hair were always as polished as their vehicles’ dashboards, and to her, just as plasticine. They were all good at their jobs, too.
They were met at the airport by a bearded man in a furry hat that made Duvalier think of Russians. She had no idea what kind of hats Russians wore, honestly, but this one was tallish, with flaps at the sides, and neatly trimmed in gray fur. She’d seen something like it somewhere or other, maybe on a vodka bottle. It looked warm. Indeed, it must have been, because he wore only a goose-down vest over a wool shirt as protection against the North Atlantic wind.
“Welcome to Nova Scotia,” he said, with an even thicker accent than they’d heard in Ontario. “Name’s Preffer. I’m with the Refugee Network. I’m arranging your departure for Europe. I have a car waiting to take you to your hotel. We weren’t sure about your arrival, so you have a couple days in balmy Halifax before starting your crossing.” He cracked his knuckles before shaking their hands.
He bundled them into a delivery van that smelled like kerosene. There were little fold-down seats in the back. It made Duvalier think of the collection vans from the Kurian Zones, save that this one wasn’t armored. And there were handles on all the cargo-area doors.
“Sorry about the no-windows thing,” Preffer said. “We use this when we need to discreetly shuttle refugees around. Not that you’re refugees—no offense.”
The town was full of “refugees.” Halifax, as it turned out, had families who’d escaped from the Congo delta to the Gulf of Murmansk.
Valentine had talked on the flight about Hong Kong, how it was a poor province of China until some revolution or other. A lot of people fled to Hong Kong because it still had British law, and within a few decades a poor collection of muddy hillside villages became some of the most valuable real estate in the world.
Before she grew bored and more or less quit listening, she had heard Val go on to say that something similar was under way in Halifax. People with the means to escape the European Kurians tended to flee to Southern Argentina or Canada, and Halifax had become what Ellis Island was to an earlier generation of immigrants: a gateway to a New World. Despite the cold North Atlantic climate and the damp chill through most of the year, they stayed and prospered, bringing with them all sorts of intriguing abilities. There were restaurateurs and clothiers, makers of precision instruments and doctors, furriers and perfume manufacturers—Halifax still did a little whaling to help feed its population—making it a more cosmopolitan city than it had ever been, even during the World War booms it had known.
The immigrants had mostly settled in an area of the city known as the Beehive. It covered the old North End of the Halifax peninsula, centered around the old Hydrostone and the memorial to the Halifax explosion in 1917 when an ammunition ship in the harbor exploded, leveling most of the city. The colors, sights, and sounds of the Beehive ran almost around the clock. The locals had covered stretches of the narrow old streets with a sort of plasticized canvas to keep out the rain.
Preffer set them up in four rooms above a twenty-four-hour café. The kitchen had been stripped and turned into a dormitory with sinks for washing and laundry. Everything was double-layered. Double layers of glass to keep out the cold, double layers of door with steel bars over the regular door for security, blinds and curtains on the windows. At least there were no bugs. Duvalier was an expert on critters in cheap lodgings.
“When do we depart for Europe?” Sime asked.
“Your boat is here. She came in a couple days late, sorry to say, and the crew needs a few days of rest. Soon as the captain gives me the okay, we can ship you out.”
“A ship?” Stamp asked, making a face as Pistols removed his boots and socks to air out his toes.
Preffer cracked his knuckles. “Well, not really a ship. But you’ll be comfortable enough.”
“Must we be isolated until then?” Stamp asked, aiming the question at Sime rather than Preffer.
Sime glanced at Preffer.
“The town is safe enough. Nobody’s going to get shanghaied for their aura,” he said. “There are a lot of touts soliciting people for labor of one kind or another, long hours at low pay. Pickpockets might get something, but we don’t have a lot of violent crime. Don’t be loud and drunk; that’s a guaranteed night in the cells and while we have good relations with the black-and-blues, they don’t have to do us any favors. So please, stay out of trouble.”
He extracted a small phone from his pocket and plugged it into the wall. There were two numbers written on it in indelible pen. “Call if you’re at a loss about anything. The bigger number is mine. The smaller is the Refugee Network. Only a few people know about your trip, so if you can’t reach me and you have to go through them, just tell them you’re new arrivals and you’re above the Ballyhoo Diner. Someone will get here in minutes.”
They could order up food from the café through a dumbwaiter, of all things; Preffer had made some sort of arrangements. There were people going in and out of both front and back at all hours with no small amount of noise.
Valentine and Pistols fell asleep within minutes of deciding on sleeping locations, Sime and his secretary were comparing notes about the journey, and Ahn-Kha was pushing two single mattresses together to make a bed able to accommodate most of him.
The next morning, they ate breakfast over the smell of drying socks.
“I’ve been cooped up too long,” Stamp said as Ahn-Kha loaded the breakfast dishes back into the dumbwaiter. “Alessa, feel like exploring?”
She shrugged. The cold wasn’t what she’d call pleasant, but compared to a Wyoming winter it was within an elbow poke of balmy. “It’s what I do.”