All around them, movement caught Emmeline’s eye.
Machines and people flitted about, rushing from one place to another, different tasks laid out neatly before them.
All the men wore uniforms, and all the machines were stamped with the Finchale’s Air Navy’s seal.
The lone building sat at the other end of the enclosure, and several other members of the male gender were walking towards it, varying distances away from the main house.
Also, throughout the compound, young men were training, running across the grounds, dangling above the earth attached to only a rope, a cable, a harness.
Emmeline watched in fascination as they climbed up completely vertical structures, rappelled down from them, and then ran a couple miles through mud.
Well, this was going to be fun.
Maxwell didn’t seem as enthusiastic about all the exercises, which was permissible to a point since he wanted to be an engineer. But for Emmeline, this was it. She would be topside, climbing across the skin of a mighty airship and singlehandedly saving her crew and her country from some madman with a weird fetish for bombs. Or so she hoped. Was there even a job like that?
They hurried toward the main building, which wasn’t near as impressive as all the towering construction projects and training apparatuses around her. There was also a mysterious building that lurked at the edge of the grounds, closer to the fence than the others.
And the only people who seemed to be going in or out looked rather jumpy and green-faced.
Oh, yes. This would be just marvelous.
“Don’t smile,” the old man commanded.
Emmeline was tempted to smile just to be rebellious, but controlled herself. She was joining a branch of the military. And they believed in discipline.
…And incomplete sentences. But who had time for proper language skills while they were running for their life or saving the world? No one. She was truly beginning to see the appeal.
The old man snapped the photograph, and Emmeline made sure to look straight into the lens. That’s what you were supposed to do, right?
The man grunted in approval as the photograph was revealed, sliding smoothly out of the camera with a soft ding!
“All right,” he grunted, handing her the picture and a stack of papers. “Fill these out. And be quick about it, lad!”
She nodded, wondering if she should salute. Just to be safe, she did, snapping her heels together and bringing her hand up to her forehead in the Finchalen salute.
The old man rolled his eyes, looking annoyed but acting as if he’d been expecting it. Did he get uncalled-for salutes often, then?
Emmeline brought her hand down sheepishly, shifting from foot to foot. “Sorry, sir.”
“Just fill out the papers.”
Emmeline nodded, and took the papers and the photograph with an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach.
As she filled out the papers, she tried to place exactly what it could be.
Name, Pyne, Emmet Daniel. She wasn’t nervous. Birthday, September 21st. She wasn’t afraid. Age, 1… Emmeline wondered briefly if she should change her age. How old was the age minimum for the Air Service? She could’ve sworn it had been sixteen, but what if it was eighteen?
Deciding lying about her gender was enough, she put down her real age: 17.
Hopefully, they wouldn’t end up kicking her out for the wrong reason: simply because she was too young.
She entertained that thought for a moment. If they booted her out of the service for the fact that she was a year underage, she could always call back, saying, “You think that’s embarrassing? Well, guess what! I’m also a girl!”
She finished filling out the forms. When she got to the information about her parents, she hesitated a little. Would the service read up on something like that?
Should she just make something up? Random people who just so happen to share her last name? Pretend that her uncle was her father?
Finally, she just went with the safest bet.
There were thousands of orphans in this city who’d survived and grown up to make good lives for themselves. Couldn’t she be one of the masses? They didn’t know anything about their parents, and that would explain her lack of a proper birth certificate or any sort of official proof of her existence.
For all of her parents’ information, she simply wrote “unknown”. And then at the bottom where it left room for notes, she penned the word “deceased”.
Something about writing that word on an official document—actually inking each letter onto the page—made everything seem more permanent, more real. Her old life was behind her.
The last question on the sheets of paper was simple: Reason for joining the name of Finchalen Air Navy?
Dozens of reasons raced through her mind, whirling around her head like some mad tornado ready to tear her old life away. To see the world. To escape marriage. To live my dream. To have adventures.
But one stood out amongst all the rest. It rose up above them in her mind, pushing all the others back because of its pure simplicity and allure.
So, in her slightly curled handwriting, she wrote two careful words. And when she finished, she handed all her sheets of paper and the picture of herself to the man at the desk.
She finally decided on what the feeling of something coiled in the very bottom of her gut was: Pure, unbridled, dead excitement. She was practically giddy at the prospect of finally joining the Service, doing something no woman recorded in history had ever done before.
Why was she joining the Air Navy?
Well, that was easy.
To fly.
Emmeline breezed through the aeronautics tests, answering questions and giving her opinion on different situations. Max seemed to have a bit of a harder time with it, scratching the nape of his neck and biting the left side of his lip.
Not that Emmeline had noticed.
She puffed a lock of curly hair out of her eyes, almost regretting that she’d cut it. But she could see why boys kept their hair short; it was barking easy to take care of. Just a little combing and some water, and viola! Instantly appropriate hair.
But it did get in your eyes, rather a lot sometimes.
So pinning it back also had its advantages.
Shrugging off the rather balanced scales of short and long hair, she leaned back in her chair, checking over her aeronautics answers. The questions about airflow and speed and the basics of flight had been easy, child’s play on paper compared to what it must be like in real life.
I’ll be experiencing that soon enough. Emmeline thought with a certain degree of delight. I’ll be really living like an airman.
Although Max had a little trouble with the aeronautics, he was madly scribbling down answers when it came to the mechanics section of the tests.
He was muttering about motorized parts and mechanisms and naming tools and instruments like his first word had been “lugwrench”. And he seemed to be doing bloody well at the test, too.
Emmeline racked her brain, remembering a little about the basic principles of electrical engines and alternating current, but didn’t feel nearly as confident in solving problems about the engineering on a ship as she had talking about ballast alerts.
Soon, though, the testing portions were done. Based on your scores in different sections, you were suggested to two or three stations aboard the common airship, and you could take your pick of those. You could be anything from the lowest cook to the chief engineer. It just depended on what you were good at and what you liked.
Emmeline had no idea what sort of position or rank she would be offered. She seemed to know a little bit of everything, but she wasn’t particularly spectacular in anything.
She had a feeling Max would be an engineer, probably working with several of his ship’s systems. He seemed to know everything about mechanics, as he’d said that morning.
By then it was past noon, and the two of them were sent out to fetch lunch for themselves. They were given a little yellow slip of paper that said, “New Recruits under Examination,” which basically meant that they weren’t technically part of the Service yet, but that was only because the “examiners” hadn’t had enough time to look at their tests yet.
The man who had given them the “passes”, as he called them, told them that they could find food in one of the buildings on the grounds, called Building B.
“What a creative and appetizing name for the concessions.” Emmeline said as they walked through the door, joining the thick throng of males. Some had been outside, running and climbing and rappelling down the towering metal structures, and Emmeline found herself unpleasantly elbowed in the ribs several times by hot and sweaty young men. It was vastly annoying.
So she elbowed back.
They didn’t seem to mind, though. In fact, they even seemed used to it! They elbowed and shoved and tripped others, laughing and jostling and joking. They were enjoying the experience of being bullied!
Emmeline resisted the urge to sniff. She probably would’ve been knocked out cold by the smell.
The food was fine. A little meat, some beans, and an only slightly stale biscuits. It wasn’t gourmet, but it wasn’t anything to sneeze at either. In days when she’d sulked for one reason or another, Emmeline had endured days with very little or no food. One time, she’d even lasted a whole week, eating and drinking nothing but a little rainwater she’d collected in a basin on the roof. And what little food she had eaten in those days had been more stale—and sometimes even a little moldy—than anything she’d had since.
So the food tasted fine to her.
Maxwell also didn’t seem to be picky about his meals. He ate what he got, and that was that. She’d been planning to talk some more with him, but found herself crowded out by shoving and guffawing boys.
Max, being the sociable and funny person that he was, had made instant friends with all of the young men around the table. Emmeline was jealous for his “people skills.” Sure, she knew how to act in a high-society setting. But with these ragtag, sweaty boys, she didn’t have a clue.
So instead she just ate her food, alone with her thoughts in the noisy world she’d somehow convinced herself she wanted. Hopefully she wouldn’t be this hopeless at common conversations when she was aboard a ship with her own crewmates.
Things would be a whole lot easier then.
…She hoped.