Miss Sally's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The lean man with ink-stained fingers didn't return what he'd taken. By the time dawn broke gray over the docks, Sally's threat had spread through every corner of the port. Now a ship sat waiting at her pier—her ship, loaded with cargo that would put a noose around her neck if the Crown's men found it. Sally led two dock workers to the storage shack on stilts at the water's edge, where lantern light barely reached through patched walls. They hauled crates of over-proof rum and silk bundles down through the trapdoor into the space below the floorboards, working fast while the harbormaster kept his guards occupied three piers over. She pressed a coin into each worker's palm and watched them drink from the flask she offered—her special rum that would blur the last hour from their minds by noon. But when she turned back to secure the hatch, one crate sat open, its false bottom exposed. A bolt of silk had caught on the latch, and now Crown patrol lanterns bobbed closer along the dock. Her fingers found her sea-glass pendant. The workers had already wandered off, their memories fading. She could run, or she could fix this. Sally shoved the silk down and slammed the false bottom shut, then dragged an empty barrel over the trapdoor. When the patrol reached her shack, she was washing salt from the barrel's sides, her sleeves rolled up and her smile easy. They asked what she was storing. She told them fish oil and showed them three legitimate barrels stacked near the door. They left, boots heavy on the pier planks. The cargo stayed hidden. The port stayed orderly. But Sally's hand shook as she locked the shack behind her, because for the first time, her careful plans had nearly cracked open in full view of the Crown. She walked back to the tavern with the key to the storage shack burning in her pocket. The harbormaster waited by the door, his face tight with worry—the guards had asked questions about her pier, about her ships, about why she needed storage space when she ran a tavern. Sally handed him a bottle of her special rum and told him to forget the questions and remember only that she'd stored legitimate goods. He took the bottle and left. Her web was holding, but the threads had stretched thin tonight. She'd proven she could hide what the Crown wanted to hang her for, but now she knew the cost: every secret stored below those floorboards made her authority in this port more fragile, more dependent on memory and fear and the willingness of others to look away.