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A parcel with an opinion
The parcel refused to be addressed to a place that did not exist. Whenever Tara wrote CENTRAL DEPOT, blue letters crawled across her writing: RECEIVER OF REED. She tried smaller handwriting. The parcel tried larger handwriting. "Excellent," said Bo. "Your first customer has opinions." Sixteen-year-old Tara tucked her short curly black hair behind her ears. Ink speckled her brown hands and the cuffs of her copper-colored flight jacket. She had expected her first courier assignment to involve fewer arguments with stationery.
Outside, Auvra spread across the sky: lemon-yellow terraces, violet orchards, islands with houses stacked like bright lunch tins. Permanent heartstones held the islands aloft. Their quarrels concerned roads, not falling. Tara and her older mentor traveled in the Button, a small red-and-teal courier sailboat whose cradle enchantment carried its passengers between harbours. Bo, gray-haired and mustached in his teal coat, was an excellent pilot and an unreliable owner of matching socks.
The surveyors had entrusted them with a sealed cobalt parcel, a gold clasp, an attached appeal strip and a brass courier token. Inside was a seasonal road-map. Reed had lost its public shortcut; its letters now traveled through Director Vey's expensive private gates. The map could change that before the ninth bell. Bo unfolded the surveyors' terms. "Read these before anyone offers you a convenient exception." The parcel underlined REED.