There’s something about coming home. Masha was pretty sure that even without her impeccable navigational skills and encyclopedic knowledge of the air currents of North America, she would still always have known exactly when she was getting close to home. Maybe it was the sight of familiar trees. The walls of evergreens were an unmistakeable part of the landscape. You could practically guess where the old border between what had once widely been (and still sometimes was) called Oregon and California had been. The trees seemed to shift over time until suddenly you knew you were in a very different place.

Maybe it was the river. That smell of the water, the fog that would roll in some nights… There was something about it that was different.

As Masha steered the airship a bit to the right to use the air currents to get to her town, she marveled at how lush everything looked. She could see orchards filled with apple trees, rows of berry bushes, fields of corn with beans snaking up them, and smaller gardens near homes laden with produce. The end of summer was always such a plentiful time of year and Masha was excited to jump into all the summer harvest festivities.

Twenty minutes later, she pulled into the docking station and powered down the ship. She flipped a switch that turned on the comms unit. “A’ight, everyone, time to unload! Make sure to get the cold stuff first—it’s a balmy 29.4 degrees outside and we don’t wanna lose all that fish we picked up on the coast!”

She moved out of the bridge and walked through the main living area. She jogged to the stairs that led down into the cargo hold and moved to grab a crate. As she carried it down the ramp and to the warehouse near the landing area, she saw the other airship crew members doing the same. It was a decent amount of work, but other people from the town showed up to help and made everything run much more smoothly. There was one pallet of oranges that took a tumble, but most of them were salvageable, and those that weren’t were either snatched up to be eaten right then or swept up into feed buckets for the pigs.