She was absolutely right, in a cold-blooded, mercenary sense. The moment she turned away to snarl at someone else, Skeeter gave her a flying eagle salute and dragged another portmanteau off a groaning luggage cart. He scowled at the enormous stack of luggage on the conveyer already, mentally damning Time Tours for insane greed. No wonder the last four baggage managers had failed disastrously with gate logistics. Time Tours was sending through too many blistering tourists at once.
Never mind way too many trunks per tourist.
If he’d kept accurate count, the last five steamer trunks and three portmanteaus alone had belonged to the same guy. Benny Catlin, whoever the hell he was. Rich as sin, if he could cart that much luggage through in just one direction. The big conveyer rumbled to life with one jolting squeal and a grating of metal gears. Then the rubberized surface began moving upward, ready to carry all that luggage to the platform overhead. Skeeter glanced around to look for the boss. Enyo wasn’t in sight, but the shift supervisor was busy sending handlers aloft. He caught Skeeter’s eye and said, “Get up top, Jackson. Start hauling that stuff off the conveyer as it arrives.”
“Yessir!”
The climb up to the Britannia platform was a long one, particularly after all the hauling he’d done in the past few minutes, but the view was spectacular. Commons spread out beneath his feet, a full five stories deep, riotous with color and sound. Costumed tourists scurried like rainbow-hued bugs whipped around in the currents and eddies of a slow-motion river. Great banners—bright holiday-colored ribbons curling and floating through a hundred-foot depth of open air from balconies and catwalks—proclaimed to the world that Ripper Season had begun, and advertised other not-to-be-missed down-time events. A cat’s-cradle tangle of meshwork bridges stretched right across Commons from one side to the other, supported from below by steel struts or suspended from above by steel cables disappearing into the ceiling. The noise from hundreds of human throats lapped at the edges of the high platform like crashing surf against jagged rocks, leaping and splashing back again, indistinct and unintelligible from sheer distance.