Josephine might have passed for a respectable spinster — someone’s governess or middle-class aunt, hidden under her cloak — and she might have even passed for white, for Gifford’s mother, in a pinch. But Ruthie, in her flamboyant garb, darkened eyes, tea-colored skin, and brightened lips, would fool no one on any count.

They scrambled aboard quickly and settled in for the trip, but no one was very settled, except perhaps Ruthie, whose face had firmed into a look of grim, ambitious concentration. Despite her initial vows to the contrary, Josephine was glad Ruthie had insisted on coming along. She even reached out and took the woman’s gloved hand in her own, just to have something to hold that wouldn’t mind being squeezed a bit too hard.

Across from the pair of them, seated on a bench and trying not to slump there, Gifford Crooks worked hard to appear alert and ready for action; but it was easy to see that he’d had a rough afternoon, and he hadn’t intended to go back to Barataria tonight.

The ferry fought the river, foot by foot, and the paddle wheel dragged the lightly laden barge to the west bank. The engines strained and the diesel spewed out over the water, where fish occasionally slapped against the surface and floating logs rolled over as lazy and large as the alligators that hung closer to the marshes — outside the current’s pull, where the water was stagnant and smelly.

Behind them, the French Quarter drifted away. Its gas lamps struggled against the darkness, signaling the stars and mimicking the moon. But the fog had rolled in hard, and it blanketed the blocks with its warm coverage and left the curfew-quieted neighborhood a low, gray smear against the waterline.

Finally the ferry pulled up against the western pier, and another crane lowered another drawbridge down against the deck. The passengers disembarked into near emptiness.

Josephine shivered despite herself, and despite her too-warm cloak. “Now comes the hard part,” she breathed.

“Pourquoi?”

Gifford Crooks answered Ruthie as they walked away from the water, back toward the docks and the small shipping district that springs up around any ferry’s destination. “Now we have to cross the marshes. Now we have to get to the island.”

Ruthie nodded. “Then, on y va! Before it gets any later.”

Josephine asked, “You’ve never been to Barataria before, have you?”

“How do you know?”

“If you’d ever been, you’d understand why the rest of the trip is a problem. Gifford?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Where’s our boat?”

“A mile from here down the river road, on the edge of the canal,” he said quietly.

She asked, “Are you sure?”

“No, but that’s where we’ve been leaving the blowers for coming and going — and that’s where I left mine, when I came to town to give you Fletcher’s message. If it’s not there, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

“If it’s not there, we’ll come back and look for something else. Mr. Crooks, do you have a light?”

“I do,” he promised, and he pulled an electric torch from his jacket. It was small, but it’d have to do. The roads up and down the marsh’s edges were not uniformly lit, and they were dangerous.

Now Ruthie’s concern showed through, only a little, leaking past her determined demeanor. “We will walk a mile, in the dark?”

“Mostly in the dark,” Josephine confirmed. “But it shouldn’t be too bad. The Texians are purging the bay, aren’t they? We shouldn’t run into any robbers or mercenaries.”

“Unless they have been chased out of the bay,” Ruthie mused. “Some of them are alive. Deaderick’s still alive.”

Gifford tried to reassure them. “Most of the pirates went out to the Gulf, heading south if they could. There are ships at the coast to take them in — and those who didn’t get that far went deeper into the swamps. There are dozens of islands between the pirate docks and … and anything else. The rest of Louisiana. The river. The ocean.”

“And we have to wade past them.”

“The blower has an engine,” Gifford informed them. “We’ll get through pretty quick, all things considered.”

“I hope it has oars, too,” Josephine said, setting off down the packed-earth stretch leading in the direction Gifford had indicated. “Because we can’t risk the noise. Not once we get past Bay Sansbois.”

The Pinkerton man took a deep breath and said, “Sooner than that, to tell you the truth. We’ll have to take the water straight down to the edge of the islands at Point à la Hache, and then cross our fingers, cut the motor, and slink over to the big shore.”

Ruthie asked, “What about the siege?” and she darted to catch up as Gifford pumped a switch, then flicked it — sparking a filament to create a wobbly yellow beam. The small device hummed in his hands. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a glove, which he wrapped around the torch like an oven mitt. Within twenty minutes, the thing would be too hot to hold.

He took Ruthie’s elbow with his free hand, guiding her to walk beside him. “The siege … I don’t know. They’d done their worst by the time I left ’em, and mostly they were just sweeping the place, blowing up what airships they could reach, and wreaking havoc to wake the devil. If we’re real lucky, they’ll have gotten bored and gone home. They’ve done what they set out to do, haven’t they?”

“It depends on what they were up to. I mean, what they were really up to,” Josephine worried aloud. “If all they wanted to do was scare some pirates, or blow Lafitte’s old docks to pieces, I guess they’ve done their duty. Texas can afford to waste the time and ammunition on a bunch of outlaws who’ve been camped there for a hundred years, but why now? Why would this new fellow make it a priority, first thing? The pirates didn’t have anything to do with his predecessor getting eaten.”

Gifford speculated, “Maybe they don’t know that. Maybe they think the bay boys had something to do with it, and they don’t know anything about these … about the dead, down by the river.”

Josephine didn’t respond right away. She walked on Gifford’s left, with Ruthie on his right, and she scanned the narrow strip of road she could see by the light of the electric candle. Eventually she said, “Deaderick was there, and Fletcher Josty. I hate to wonder, but I can’t help it.”

“Wonder what?” he asked.

“Wonder if Texas didn’t follow them down from Pontchartrain. Wonder if Texas is killing two birds with one stone, uprooting the Lafittes and going after the Ganymede in one big push. Ganymede isn’t at Barataria, but Texas doesn’t know that.”

And then all of them were silent, all the way down to the canal.

North Texas was as good a place to stop as any, and on the edge of Oneida was a temporary hydrogen dock — the kind that was scarcely temporary anymore, and had become a small town of its own, hanging on to the settlement’s edge like a barnacle … a barnacle that might explode and take half the desert with it, given just the right sort of accident. Bigger cities had bigger, better regulated docks; but on the unincorporated frontier, these mobile constructions squatted wherever they found a place to do so. Dangerous, dirty, and marginally managed by whoever was richest and had the biggest guns, the docks were not popular with travelers or merchants, but they were necessary. And heaven knew the air pirates were happy to make use of them.

All across the Panhandle, the flat, brown earth was speckled with tufts of dark grass, cactus nubs, and tumbleweeds being kicked about by the occasional dust devil. It was a dry, dull, featureless place in Cly’s opinion, but he didn’t have to live there, so he didn’t feel moved to complain about it.

As the Naamah Darling arrived, the whole settlement — hydrogen barnacle and all — was digging out from underneath a windstorm that had knocked down horses, sent water troughs rolling through the streets, and picked roofs off buildings only to fling them miles out into the empty, prickly nothing beyond the town’s grid.