The Desert Blooms in Blood on AO3
Twelve days across the Atlantic had done nothing to dull the edge.
Caitlyn shouldered her bag and drew her travel case in against her hip, and she felt the eyes find her the way they always did—the offended glances of passengers who'd spent the crossing deciding what she was and resenting that they couldn't place it. A woman traveling alone. A woman in a man's tailored suit, dark as a closed door, with a low-crowned felt hat tilted just so against the New York glare. She'd long since stopped giving a single damn what peasants made of her.
She let them look. She glared back at the ones who held it too long, and to the women who kept staring anyway she gave a slow, sly turn of the mouth that was not quite a smile and not quite a promise, and watched the color come up in their faces. She looked stellar. She knew it. That, at least, exile hadn't taken.
The ramp gave under her boots as she came down onto the docks, into the reek of brine and tar and unwashed bodies and the great churning noise of America's busiest port. She set her case down a moment, scanned the chaos with a sharpshooter's patience, and began to map her way through it.
New York was only the door. The road ran on from here—a ship south to Panama, a wretched scramble across the isthmus to Panama City, and then a final steamer up the Pacific coast to San Francisco. Five more weeks of travel she was not remotely looking forward to. She found her vessel, presented her papers, and went aboard, and as she ran her eye over the passengers crowding the rail she felt something in her ease by a fraction.
Well, she thought, the corner of her mouth curling. If the women aboard are going to be this attractive, perhaps it won't be such a terrible trip after all.
Read the rest on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87158051