by A. M. Morgen
“Hah! What?” George asked.
“Don Nadie’s not in control of everything. He needs time for the scientists to arrive. They’re traveling from all over the world!”
George felt grateful for Ada, who was the picture of confidence in the face of despair. “Let’s hope that’s enough time to find the map before our nemesis does.”
Once Ada had set a course for Spain, there was not much to do except wait. George turned to exploring the rest of the vessel. He found several rooms, including a cramped engine room, a cargo hold, and a pantry stocked with weeks’ worth of food. He also found a small berth for himself with a narrow bed and a trunk that contained his clothes and a few other things from No. 8. He marveled that Ada had had time to pack not only his things, but a hearty dinner of a roast beef sandwich and hard-boiled eggs.
George sat down on his bed and took a big bite of the sandwich. His leather bag—a birthday gift from Frobisher—was tucked under his pillow. Sure enough, Useful Needlework was there, with the yellowed note stuffed roughly between the pages. George opened the letter.
I curse your true name, 1st Lord of Devonshire.
Swallowing, George folded the letter. He could almost taste the bitterness emanating from every word in it. Again, he remembered his grandfather’s stern warning that he must never hate someone, because it meant he was afraid of them. But he was afraid of Don Nadie, and he did hate him. How was he supposed to feel anything else?
Once, George had shouted the nasty phrase—I hate you—at his father. In the middle of the street, of all places. At the time, he meant it with every bone in his body. He hated his father for calling George a spineless coward. He hated him for mocking his grandfather’s stories, for abandoning George for days, and for wasting every penny his grandfather had ever made.
The 1st Lord of Devonshire never feared anyone, so he never had cause to hate. If George’s grandfather was right—which he always was—then Don Nadie must have been very much afraid of George’s grandfather to hate him so fiercely after all this time. The thought gave George a twinge of triumph.
George put the Star of Victory into the leather bag along with the letter and the crime reports from Vice-Chancellor Shadwell. Eventually, he’d be able to prove that they were fake.
Exhaustion rolled over him. He finished his dinner and joined Ada in the front of the ship. He sank into the copilot’s chair, finally able to rest. Waves of light from the portholes rippled across the room, moving and changing like a living thing. Occasionally, a school of fish would dart past the porthole in a flash of silver bellies. It was eerie, yet beautiful. If Oscar were here, he would be filling up page after page with all the amazing sights and colors beneath the ocean. George itched with anticipation to see Oscar and Ruthie again.
A loud knock from a closet at the rear of the cabin woke George from his nap that had lasted all night. Remembering how Oscar and Ruthie had stowed away on the mechanical bird during their first Continental adventure, he had the wild hope that they’d appeared again out of thin air. He called out, “Oscar? Ruthie?”
He opened the door—and sprang back. It was not Oscar at all. It was Patty. She’d come loose from her restraints inside the closet, and her porcelain head was bumping against the closet door as she tried to walk forward.
“Oh,” George said, his voice thick with disappointment.
The automaton took a step, jerkily. George instinctively reached out to help her. When he’d seen her in Ada’s workshop, she’d seemed more like a doll, but now that she’d been repaired and was moving, George remembered why he’d thought she was real when he first saw her in the Jaquet-Droz workshop in Geneva. The curls in her blond wig bounced as she shuffled past George. She was now wearing an elaborate silk gown that reached all the way to her shoes, which were painted a dazzling red. She was roughly the same size as Ada, a few inches taller than George.
Ada ushered the automaton to the pilot’s seat and made her sit down. “She’s going to make an excellent copilot one day!” Ada beamed.
“I thought you said she couldn’t walk. How did she learn how to walk?” George whispered, eyeing Patty nervously. Ada had opened up Patty’s back panel to adjust her bright brass gears.
Ada snorted. “Don’t be silly, George. She can’t hear you… yet. I gave her some new gears while you were asleep to move her legs. She can only do what she’s been given gears to do, remember. She can fire the water cannon, walk, and play music on the organ. And with a few minor adjustments, she can pull levers in a prescribed sequence.”
George peered at Patty’s serene porcelain smile, then dropped his eyes—and inhaled sharply. “The necklace.”
The butterfly gleamed around the automaton’s neck—a butterfly that resembled the decorative illustrated wings on the two bottom corners of his grandfather’s map. When the map folded along its creases, the butterfly halves came together to form a whole.
George reached up and unclasped the butterfly, studying it silently while Ada tinkered with Patty’s mechanisms. The wingspan was slightly wider than his palm. Though he didn’t have the map in front of him for comparison, George recognized the intricate patterned web on the wings, and the unique way each tip ended in a curlicue. Certainty filled him. This butterfly was similar to the one drawn on his map. Maybe identical. “May I hold on to this?”
“Be my guest,” Ada said. “It doesn’t seem necessary to her functioning. I know that you think it’s a clue, George, but I don’t know how the 1st Lord of Devonshire could have known you’d find it.”
He added the silver butterfly to his leather bag. “I know how impossible it seems, but you’re the one who taught me to believe in impossible things. Oh—”
George noticed the closet door was still open. He trotted back to close it. A coffin-shaped trunk for Patty and several other pieces of luggage were inside. Large shipping labels were stuck all over the luggage. “Ada, what’s the Somerville School—”
Ada dropped her wrench.
George just managed to read the rest of the destination on the labels, SOMERVILLE SCHOOL FOR LADIES OF SUBSTANCE, before Ada shut the closet door.
“Nothing of your concern or mine,” Ada said through gritted teeth. “But, if you must know, Mrs. Somervile teaches social graces and other charms for ladies of refinement. I know because Mrs. Somerville is friends with my mother and my mother will not stop talking about it.”
Heat crept into George’s neck. “A boarding school? Does that mean you’re leaving?”
“Not if I can help it. I’m sure stopping an international criminal organization will be enough to convince my mother not to enroll me,” she said primly.
“Right. Of course.” George managed a nod. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re very refined, Ada.”
“I agree. For example, this is how a lady holds a wrench.” Smirking, Ada retrieved her wrench and held it aloft, lifting her pinky. They burst into giggles.
When their laughter subsided, Ada looked less irritated. “They do have science classes and a metalworking course that wouldn’t be terrible. But my manners are perfectly acceptable. I don’t have to clasp my hands a certain way or spiral my hair from right to left. I don’t understand why my mother can’t let me do things my way. Ever since we got back from Venice, it’s as if she’s been trying to change me little by little,” she said, her voice falling. “What she won’t understand is that people don’t change. I certainly won’t.”
“You’re perfect the way you are,” George agreed. He remembered the lessons his grandfather used to give him. A part of him had always longed to go to school to learn more about accounting. “What if you didn’t think about it as change, but more of an improvement—like giving yourself some extra gears? What if you just stayed the same Ada with an increased talent for metalworking?”
“Going to some boring old school isn’t going to give me any new gears I couldn’t give myself,” Ada insisted grumpily.
“I suppose that’s true.” George nodded. Selfi
shly, he would prefer Ada not go away. Besides, there was no law that said children had to go to school.
A shadow suddenly fell over them. George snapped his head up. They were passing underneath something large. Heart racing, he pressed his face to the porthole while Ada ran to the whale’s head.
“A whale,” he said breathlessly. “A real, live whale. Or a sea monster. My grandfather’s map was full of beasts. Maybe we found one.”
Ada pulled back on the throttle to slow their craft, then lowered the periscope from the ceiling so she could investigate. “It’s more likely to be a ship. Although it could be an algae bloom or a large patch of flotsam. I’m not sure. The periscope is crusted over with salt and muck already, so all I can see is a great big shadow.”
Once they were a safe distance from the shadow, the little whale surfaced with a splash. Ada and George climbed the ladder to the top hatch. Ada scrambled onto the deck and called down, “I was right. It’s a ship.”
George emerged after her. He shaded his eyes against the low sun. In the northwest, a three-masted schooner bobbed up and down in the vast, choppy ocean that stretched forever in the distance. The flat-topped cliffs of Portugal in the east looked like the edge of a broken sugar cookie. “I guess that’s better than a sea monster.”
Ada continued to squint at the ship while she scrubbed the periscope lens with the fabric of her skirt. “It’s turning about. It’s coming this way. George—it’s flying a black flag. I think it’s Captain Bibble’s ship!”
George’s heart began hammering in his chest. Something about the situation didn’t feel right. “Are you sure? We thought we’d have to search the entire coastline of Spain, and they just happen to be here? With my luck, nothing is ever this easy.”
Ada laughed, then clapped her hands together. “It is, George—look! It’s Captain Bibble’s flag. Oscar must have a sixth sense for adventure. He’s found us! Can you imagine the look on Oscar’s face when he sees us? Can you imagine how many new rocks he’ll have in his collection to show us?”
George watched as the schooner sailed toward them. It was indeed flying Captain Bibble’s black mermaid flag. His ship, the Kylling, had been destroyed during their battle with the Society, but according to Oscar’s letters, he’d found (or, more likely, stolen) a new one. “I just hope Captain Bibble doesn’t fire on our ship. He can be a bit touchy.”
This was a serendipitous turn of fortune if there ever was one. George’s days of being cursed with bad luck were clearly a thing of the distant past. Joy swept through him at the thought of Oscar’s gap-toothed smile and Ruthie’s hairy arms hugging him. He jumped up and down and waved at the ship. “It’s about time something happened in my favor, don’t you think? Look, they’re waving at us!”
Ada didn’t wave back. Instead, her eyes grew wide as the wind whipped her curls around her pale face. “George, something’s not right.”
The ship’s sails billowed furiously in the wind as it gained speed. It was getting closer and closer, but it wasn’t slowing down, not even when it was only a whale’s length away from them.
The people who were waving at them leaned over the edge of the deck, but they weren’t smiling in greeting. Oscar’s face was nowhere to be seen. In fact, none of the pirates looked familiar. Bibble’s crew had been fearsome—battle-scarred and tattooed from head to toe—but these pirates looked lethal. Their teeth were capped with silver sharpened into metal spikes. Silver knives were woven into their long, braided hair. And each and every one of them was pointing a gleaming weapon down at George and Ada.
A silver arrow whizzed by Ada’s head and embedded itself in the whale’s hull with a swift thunk.
“Dive!” Ada yelled, throwing herself onto the hull.
George lunged for Ada’s arm and dragged her inside the whale. She tumbled down the ladder as George slammed the hatch shut behind them, breathing hard.
Ada scrambled to her feet and clutched George. “We’d better…”
She trailed off, her eyes drifting to the ceiling. A faint buzzing came from a spot above their heads. The sound grew louder and louder until something pointed and silver poked through the hull above them. It grew like a flower emerging from the soil.
The arrowhead.
The arrow drilled completely through the outer hull in an instant, dropping clean through the hole it had made in the whale, spinning around itself with an angry buzz. Instinctively, George picked up a metal wrench and smashed the arrow to pieces. Tiny springs and gears exploded onto the floor.
Ada turned to George, her eyes wild with excitement and fear.
The Society had found them already.
Chapter Ten
Thunk. Thunk. Two more arrows hit the hull above them. George brandished the wrench like a cricket bat, waiting to smash the arrows as soon as they drilled through.
“We have to get out of here,” George said.
Ada, however, was already dashing toward the storeroom in the whale’s tail instead of the cockpit in the whale’s head. “We’re not going anywhere if we’re leaking like a sieve. We’ve got to plug up those holes so that we can dive!” she shouted.
Thunk.
“But if we stay here, the pirates will keep putting holes in the ship and eventually start putting holes in us!” George said as he whacked another arrow into a million shining pieces.
“Stop smashing those arrows. Maybe I could use them for something,” Ada’s voice called out faintly through the walls. She reappeared lugging a heavy bucket and a paintbrush.
Thunk.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she said. Thunk. Thunk. “But this is not paint and we’re not redecorating. Remember the barnacle glue you borrowed from me? This is even stickier. It’s a highly viscous adhesive that is modeled after snail slime. It’s also waterproof, but it has to completely cover the hole from the outside like a patch. One little swipe across each hole and we’ll be as good as new. Are you ready?”
“Ready?” George screeched. Another arrow broke through the wooden hull and clattered to the floor by his feet. Spears of sunlight pierced the air around them. “How could I possibly be ready?”
“I count eight holes.” Thunk. She shoved the bucket into his hands. “Nine.”
Ada climbed up the ladder to open the hatch. George grabbed the hem of her skirt. “What are you doing? If we go out there, we’ll die!”
“And if we go under full of holes, we’ll die!” she said, pulling her skirt from George’s grasp.
Thunk.
“Ten. We’ll go up together. I primed the water cannon’s pump and opened the valve. I’ll handle the cannon because we both know you have terrible aim. Don’t worry, George, I won’t let those pirates make you into Swiss cheese.” Ada looked down at him, both of her eyebrows lifted in warning. “Oh, and one more thing. Don’t get the snail slime on your skin. Trust me. It’s very sticky.”
Ada opened the hatch and disappeared into the sunlight. Now it was George’s turn. “It would have been nice to know there was a water cannon on the ship earlier,” he said grumpily to himself. Thunk. “Eleven.”
When George emerged onto the whale’s back, the roar of the water cannon filled his ears. The pirate ship now loomed above them, as immovable and imposing as a mountain. Ada aimed the nozzle of the water cannon so that its powerful jet of water spurted directly at the archer and his arrows. The pirates screamed.
George picked up the brush and began quickly dabbing the snail slime over the round holes dotting the hull. He counted each patch to himself. Three. Four. Beads of sweat rained down from his forehead. Eight. Nine. Ten.
He whipped his head around, frantically looking for the last hole. There it was, at the bow of the ship close to where the top of the periscope poked out.
George took a step toward the hole but found that he could not move. He looked down and saw a wet face half-covered by sopping hair. It was a pirate, climbing over the edge of the whale from the ocean, a long, sharp knife clutched between his tee
th. But the pirate wasn’t the reason George couldn’t move.
He’d stepped on one of the holes he’d already patched with snail slime. No amount of jerking, twisting, or pulling loosened the sole of his shoe from the glue.
“Miss Byron, help!” George screamed as he knelt down to unlace his boot. His shaking fingers fumbled with the laces. The pirate was already up over the edge of the deck, his face twisted in a vicious snarl. He removed his knife from his teeth and raised it high.
A torrent of water hit the pirate square in the chest, sweeping him into the sea.
“Thank you,” George called out weakly. He limped unevenly toward the last hole and dabbed it with a glob of slime. “Done!”
Ada looked back at him, tipping her chin to beckon him closer. “Cover our retreat while I prepare us to dive. As soon as the front of the whale is at a forty-five-degree angle, get back inside the hatch.”
They exchanged places. He grabbed the handles on either side of the water cannon and aimed at the pirate ship. Ada took the bucket of slime and climbed into the hatch.
A flock of silver-tipped arrows soared across the blue sky. George swiveled the cannon upward to intercept them. He whooped for joy when the stream of water knocked them off course. There wasn’t much time to celebrate, though. A window opened near the pirate ship’s prow. A new weapon emerged through the window.
A cannon. Not a water cannon. The kind of cannon that shot huge, round, heavy cannonballs.
“Hurry, Ada, hurry,” George pleaded in a desperate refrain.
A billow of white smoke rolled out of the cannon’s mouth with a loud boom. George aimed his stream of water at the cannonball. The black ball slowed just enough to fall short of hitting the whale. It sent up a spray of water as George triumphantly yelled, “Huzzah!”
George felt himself rising as the front of the ship angled down. The whale was beginning to dive. Just then, the pirates’ cannon fired again. George gripped the handles of the water cannon as if his own strength could flow into the stream, but it was no use. The iron ball collided with the jet of water but was still spinning, spinning, spinning right for him.