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Cloudmining is a rough business at the best of times, mostly because everyone on the ground wants to kill you, but I had more particular problems. The day my past caught up with me, I was working for cloudboat captain Clandestine Ham—such a pompous name, everyone knew it must be an alias—as a refueller, the fourth-worst job in any cloudboat crew. We came cruising along at a middlish altitude, just beneath the lowest cloud level, over a pleasant little farming community called Crater Rim. Despite the name there was no actual crater in sight, which was something to be thankful for, at least.

The cloudboat—named the Corpulent Whale—had four big tight-woven gasbags packed with buoyant cloudstuff, and I was in charge of keeping #3 topped off. Not that it mattered much now, as we’d dropped our load of silver at one of the less reputable trading posts along Precipitous Bay, and the cloudboat was riding empty and high and light. Cloud silver is exactly the same as silver pulled out of the ground, but so much easier to mine; digging in fluffy floating cloudstuff is far easier than cracking open mountains, but there was the little matter of cloudmining being banned under sixteen different treaties, so it wasn’t precisely honest work. It required middlemen of optional morality to get the silver to market, and a desperate crew to mine it, of which I was technically more desperate than most.

“Nice bank there,” my co-refueller, a pink-faced man named Salmon, said, leaning way out against his harness line, gasbag squeaking under his feet. “Must be ten, fifteen tons right here in those cumulus humilis.”

I nodded, but I was leaning out and looking more at the farms below, neat squares of more or less dark earth. The cloud cover here was patchy, allowing lots of good sunlight in but also promising ample rain in season, making it a prime area for agriculture, one of the region’s many little breadbaskets. It was autumn, harvest time, so the people down below wouldn’t starve this winter at least, and maybe they’d have time to move on before Crater Rim became a bowl of dust, its clouds gone forever and all hope of future rain stolen away.

Of course, Captain Ham hadn’t chosen this season to strike out of kindness—mining the clouds during spring rains and summer thunderstorms and winter snow is much harder, so inert autumn clouds were easiest. And cloudminers, like most kinds of pirates and poachers, tend toward the lazy.

I wasn’t lazy, but my past made me unfit for most kinds of work, and clinging to a wooden vessel tied to a bunch of inflatable gasbags several thousand feet in the air was among the least dangerous of my available options.