by Joel Ross
Of course the crew didn’t care about my freak-eye, because they were my family. The only family I had left. So I brushed my hair away and scanned the sky again for the buoy.
“No luck,” I called. “I don’t see it anywhere.”
Hazel swung down from the crow’s nest. “It’s gone.”
I stared at her in disbelief. Buoys didn’t just disappear. “What do you mean, it’s gone?”
“It should be right there,” she said, pointing to an empty stretch of Fog. “But it’s not. Full stop, Swedish.”
Swedish clattered on the organ keyboard, and the raft jerked to a standstill.
I shaded my eyes. “How can it be gone?”
“Only two ways,” Swedish muttered.
Either the buoy malfunctioned or someone messed with it. And if someone messed with it, they might start messing with us. A worried silence fell . . . then a hatch slammed open and Bea popped through, her leather cap askew.
“Look at that!” she cried happily. “She still stops on a thumbnail! This raft is purple as a real airship.” For some reason, Bea considered “purple” the highest praise.
Hazel quirked a grin. “I don’t know what we’d do without you, Bea.”
“We’d sink,” Swedish muttered. “We probably still will.”
“She likes stopping,” Bea said, her soot-smudged face flushing as she looked past us. “Um, guys, where’s the buoy?”
“Gone,” Swedish told her.
“Oh.” Bea fiddled with her tool belt. “Where’d he go?”
“Now that,” Hazel told her, “is a good question.”
“I’ve got a feeling about this,” Swedish declared.
“Yeah?” I said. “What kind of feeling? Surely not a paranoid, doomed sort of feeling?”
“No,” he said. “A realistic one. Someone stole our buoy.”
“Who’d steal a buoy?”
“Who knows?” Swedish said as he nervously squeezed the bootball he kept beside the wheel. “We’re too far from home this time. Probably in mutineer airspace.”
My stomach clenched. Everyone knew that the mutineers sometimes shot trespassers on sight. “Don’t even say that!”
Hazel tucked a braid behind her ear. “We’re not in mutineer territory. We’re in no-man’s-land.”
“Oh, that’s much better,” Swedish muttered.
“Maybe the buoy just deflated?” I asked.
“It’s possible,” Hazel said. “Bea, check it out.”
“Sure thing, Cap’n!” Bea knelt at the bin where we kept the buoys. “Remember that buoy who went out yesterday?” she asked the spare buoys. She “listened” for a moment, then nodded. “That’s right, Bumbleboy.”
Hazel and I exchanged a glance. Now Bea was naming them?
“How was he feeling? Hmm? Purple as the day he was stitched.” Bea frowned, then raised her head to Hazel. “The buoy’s fine. I don’t know where he is now, but he definitely didn’t deflate.”
“So somebody took it,” Swedish said. “We’re not alone out here.”
6
THE DAY SUDDENLY FELT cooler. The raft swayed in the breeze, the rigging creaked under the balloons, and foggium whooshed through the copper pipes.
“You mean mutineers?” Bea finally asked.
“They’re not so bad,” Hazel said.
Swedish snorted. “Yeah, they just shoot down any airship that gets too close to Port Oro.”
“They’re defending themselves,” Hazel said. “You know why they’re called ‘mutineers’?”
“Because they rose up against the Rooftop?” Bea asked. “A long time ago?”
Hazel nodded. “They were ordinary people, like us. Not nobles or merchants. They got fed up with paying the Five Families for the chance to breathe clean air. They gathered on Port Oro, fought off the Rooftop, and started ruling themselves.”
“Roof-troopers.” Swedish snorted. “They’re the worst.”
“They’re not as bad as Lord Kodoc,” Bea said, fiddling with her cap.
“Kodoc’s not worse than the roof-troopers,” Hazel told her as a breeze rose around us. “He is the roof-troopers. They’re his private army. Nothing’s worse than him.”
“Except driftsharks,” I said. “But they stay in the Fog.”
Swedish tapped the steam organ keyboard to keep the raft in place, but nobody spoke. They knew how much driftsharks scared me, swimming through the air with lashing tails and gaping jaws.
Driftsharks were about the size and shape of real sharks I’d seen in pictures, except they didn’t have solid bodies. They were dense swirls in the Fog, with bulky heads, misshapen fins, and wispy tails. They were made of billions of tiny nanites, but they seemed like a single animal, driven to destroy any human in the Fog.
A year earlier, I’d seen a driftshark kill another tetherboy right in front of me. I still heard his screams in my nightmares.
“Um,” Bea said after a second, “now I’m getting an itchy feeling.”
“Let’s find a different site,” Swedish said. “Something closer to the junkyard.”
The “junkyard” was what everyone called the slum where we lived, because it was a sprawl of floating platforms jam-packed with shacks and trash, held aloft by rusty fans and creaky balloons. It was shaped like a huge, uneven ring and encircled the base of the craggy Rooftop mountains that towered above the Fog.
The Five Families lived high on the rich green peaks of the Rooftop, descendants of the people who’d grabbed the best land when the Fog started rising. The farther down the mountain you lived, the less powerful you were, until you came to the junkyard, where the air stank of garbage. Rats swarmed the streets in the night, at least until someone trapped them for dinner. It was dangerous and dirty, and the only home we’d ever known.
We lived in a run-down shack crammed in among thousands of other run-down shacks. And we didn’t even own our shack, or the raft. We weren’t allowed to. Instead, we rented them from the junkyard bosses, who called us “bottom-feeders” and took all of our best salvage. They answered to Lord Kodoc, and we were lucky if they left us enough salvage to buy a sack of rice every week. Some neighborhoods weren’t so bad—like the ones where servants lived, crossing the bridges every day to work on the Rooftop—but most were shaky, violent, and mean.
So, after swallowing my nervousness over the missing buoy, I pleaded my case. “We need this. There’s an iron gate waiting, and probably more. We didn’t come this far to turn back now.”
“Forget it,” Swedish said. “There’s enough salvage near home to buy food, if we look hard.”
“We need more than food,” I said.
“Tell that to my stomach.”
“If we stick close to home, we’ll never raise the money to reach Port Oro.”
Swedish snorted. “You really think they can heal Mrs. E?”
“They can!” I said. “I know they can.”
“And there’s food in Port Oro, Swedish,” Hazel said. “Enough food that you won’t be hungry.”
“We do okay in the slum,” he said stubbornly.
“Enough food,” she said, “that Bea won’t go hungry.”
Swedish looked at Bea and his expression softened. Ever since she’d joined the family, we’d tried to protect her from the worst of the slum. Maybe we were used to it, but she deserved better.
“There are real houses, instead of living in shacks,” Hazel continued more gently. “Real jobs, instead of dropping Chess into the Fog. And no Lord Kodoc. Port Oro is—”
“It’s paradise,” Swedish scoffed, tossing his bootball from hand to hand. “They’ll heal Mrs. E and we’ll live on a cloud. You keep saying that, but you don’t know what it’s like there. Nobody does. All we know is that the mutineers will blow us from the sky if we get too close.”
I started to answer, then hesitated. He was right. Port Oro reminded me of a magical island in one of Hazel’s storybooks, a golden land of fruit trees and freshwater springs . . . guarded by a ferocious
sea serpent. Maybe the island was great, but the serpent would eat you before you even saw the beach. And it didn’t help that the roof-troopers arrested anyone who tried to move to the Port. They didn’t care if you lived or died, but they’d be damned if they’d let you join the enemy.
Still, we needed to try. For Bea. For Mrs. E. For all of us.
“I’m diving.” I grabbed my harness. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“You could slice yourself on broken glass and bleed gallons,” Swedish said. “Again.”
“That was a scratch!”
“Hazel gave you twenty stitches,” Bea reminded me. “And I heard alligators are coming back.”
“You don’t even know what alligators are,” I said.
“Like snapping turtles,” she said. “Only bigger.”
“And what are snapping turtles?”
“Turtles,” she said. “That snap.”
“It’s not animals I’m worried about,” Swedish said. “Someone’s out here. They’re probably watching us right now.”
I didn’t bother answering. I just turned to Hazel and waited.
She tapped her spyglass against her leg, her forehead furrowing. I knew she was thinking that we needed a big find, to save Mrs. E—and ourselves. But she also worried that we couldn’t afford to take stupid chances, and that every day I spent in the Fog, I came closer to losing my strength and my mind.
“That missing buoy means trouble.” Hazel rubbed her nose. “Are you sure this is a good site?”
“Well, nobody’s scavenged here in forever,” I told her.
“Nobody else is dumb enough to dive in the middle of nowhere,” Swedish grumbled.
“Plus, I smelled roses,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Bea asked.
“They used to plant flowers around fancy houses, so it means this is a good site.” I looked to Hazel. “There are roses on the Rooftop, right? On the upper slopes, near the fancy houses?”
“Red and white and pink,” she said with a wistful smile.
“How would you know?” Swedish growled at her. “You’ve never been to the Rooftop. Born and raised in the junkyard. If it weren’t for Mrs. E, we’d all be working in a refinery for a bowl of gruel and a beating.”
“I know,” Hazel told him, “because I read.”
Swedish cracked his knuckles. “You can’t believe those stories. They control the books.”
“They don’t control my dad’s scrapbook,” I told him.
“That’s just odds and ends from before the Fog.”
“It’s history,” I said a little defensively, because the scrapbook was my only connection to my father. “How else would we know about the weird animals that used to exist? Spelling bees? Hello Kitties?”
“How did kitties say hello?” Bea asked.
“The same way bees spelled, I guess,” I said.
“Someone took the buoy,” Swedish said. “And even if the roses—”
“I’m diving,” I interrupted. “This site is special.”
Hazel took a breath. “Promise you’ll run like a cockroach at the first sign of trouble?”
“With all six legs,” I told her.
“And hope you don’t get squashed,” Swedish muttered.
“You know me,” I told him, crossing toward the diving plank. “I’m unsquashable.”
Swedish jostled me as he headed for the wheel. “Just watch out for geese, okay?”
I strapped my harness around my chest and attached my tether to the winch on the deck. Bea checked my buckles; then I stepped onto the diving plank, my heart beating fast and hard.
“Goggles down,” Hazel called from the winch.
I lowered my goggles. “Goggles down!”
“Tether free?”
I checked my tether. “Tether free!”
“Dive at will, Chess, and—” Hazel paused. “Come back safe.”
“Every time,” I told her.
Behind me, Bea asked, “What do roses smell like?”
“Like a full belly and a warm bed,” I said, and dove into the Fog below.
7
MY TETHER HISSED THROUGH the air, uncoiling from the raft.
The winch squeaked as I fell—then I hit the Fog, and the world disappeared into a silent blur of white. Wind whipped my face and ruffled my pants, and I whooped in excitement, forgetting my worries as I somersaulted through the mist.
I loved diving. Sure, the Fog scared me half to death—but it was also the only place I felt fully alive.
I’d been a salvage diver for three years, and most divers didn’t even survive one. There were too many dangers in the Fog: wild dogs, driftsharks, and—worst of all—the jagged branches of trees and the spiky edges of crumbling buildings. I knew Hazel had nightmares about hoisting my tether above the Fog and finding an empty harness.
The Fog was treacherous and brutal, but it was beautiful, too. Shimmering shapes tumbled in the mist, and my body felt different. Buoyant, weightless. I jumped impossibly high, I twirled and flipped and sprang.
I never talked about how much I loved diving. I knew the Fog was terrible, I knew that millions—billions—of people had died when it rose. I hated the Fog for that, and I hated that the Fog was inside me. Most of all, I despised Kodoc for making me like this: afraid of strangers, afraid of exposure, afraid of myself. Scarred for life by a freak-eye that affected me—or infected me—in ways I didn’t understand.
But I loved how the Fog carried me like a leaf in the wind, how it freed me. And I loved that diving would help me care for Mrs. E.
The junkyard bosses had taken my father’s shack after he died, so I’d been sleeping under a pile of molding roof shingles when a gray-haired lady with sharp eyes and a hawk nose started bringing me food. I’d spent my days stealing and my nights trying to spear rats with a stick. I’d almost turned into a rat myself, filthy and skinny, and driven by exactly two things: fear and hunger.
Sometimes I’d hang around marketplaces, keeping my right eye closed and whining for food, but the beggar gangs usually chased me off. One day, though, I’d found a bag of potato peels. I’d scampered into a gloomy alley, and shoved handfuls into my mouth.
“I’ve been looking for you!” a woman’s voice rang out.
She stepped toward me from the end of the alley, and I stopped chewing, my gaze darting everywhere, looking for escape.
“Don’t be frightened,” she said soothingly. “I knew your father.”
I wasn’t loco enough to believe that. I figured I’d stolen from her, and she wanted to get close enough to kick me.
“I have food.” She reached into her bag. “Grilled pigeon feet.”
Even from ten feet away, the meat smelled delicious. My mouth watered and my stomach gurgled, but I looked at her kindly face and followed my instincts: I ran.
Two days later, she found me again. She put a pickled egg on the ground and walked away. The day after that, she left me a bunch of toasted grasshoppers, and a pair of shoes.
Over the next few weeks, she kept feeding me . . . and I kept mistrusting her. What could she possibly want? What horrible thing was she planning for me?
She treated me like a skittish wild animal, slowly guiding me across the slum toward her shack. She’d already adopted Swedish and Hazel, which reassured me. She hadn’t cooked them in a pot and chewed on their bones. I figured that was a good sign.
Finally one day, after giving me a bowl of corn mush, she told me, “When you’re finished, bring the bowl inside, please.”
Against my better judgment, I went inside and put the bowl on the cabinet. And from behind me, she said, “Chess?”
I spun toward her, tensed to flee.
“Welcome home.”
Her name was Ekaterina, but we called her Mrs. E, and she raised us like some combination of mother, teacher, and boss. She made me practice my tetherskills until my fingers bled. She made Swedish fly thoppers in under-slum drag races. When Bea came, she made her fix engine
s in the dark, until she knew every valve with her eyes closed. She was the hardest on Hazel, though; she made Hazel make the rest of us do our jobs. And at the end of the long, exhausting days, she taught us to read and told us stories of the time before the Fog.
She was the kindest thing in our lives. I once woke up in the middle of the night and caught her sewing scraps of cloth by candlelight, making a poufy dress for Hazel’s doll. She did the same years later for Bea—except instead of a dress, she made overalls and a tiny wrench. And when Mrs. E teased him, Swedish used to laugh, this big booming laugh.
Then the fogsickness began to sap her strength. And nobody could cure the sickness except the Subassembly. They were our only hope. We just had to find them.
Only a few “fogheads”—Subassembly members—had stayed on the Rooftop after Kodoc’s attack. They lived in hiding, though, and studied the Fog in secret. If they were discovered, they were sentenced to hard labor in the stinking refineries that produced foggium.
Somehow, Hazel had tracked down one of their hideouts in the junkyard. And after Mrs. E started getting feeble and confused, she’d dragged me to a Subassembly meeting in a dank chamber that dangled under the floating slum platforms.
We’d covered ourselves in cloaks, but the fogheads still stared at me like they knew all my secrets.
“We can’t cure your friend,” a hard-faced woman told Hazel. “We don’t have the right gear.”
“Who does?” Hazel had asked.
“Our brothers and sisters on Port Oro,” a younger foghead had told her, eying my cloaked face. “They’re your only chance.”
“But you’ll never reach Port Oro by yourselves,” the woman said. “Now, tell us how you found us. We never meet in the same place twice.”
“You always meet in whichever hideout is closest to the Fog,” Hazel told her. “I looked for the highest peaks of Fog under the slum.”
The woman inhaled sharply. “You read the Fog as well as one of us! Who are you?”