by Joel Ross
“You can do this, Chess,” Hazel said, fastening my buttons. “Swedish, are you done?”
He patted the harpoon. “The pig-sticker is in place.”
“Bea?” Hazel hopped from the warship onto the still-deflated cargo raft. “How’s the engine look?”
“One minute, Cap’n! The spark plugs are a weensy bit scared.”
“Well, sweet-talk them—quickly.”
I crouched at the base of the harpoon and pretended to check the long rope coiled there. Trying to look busy instead of petrified.
“How about you, Loretta?” Hazel asked.
“I am awesome.” Loretta flashed a gap-toothed smile. “I get to shoot a harpoon directly up Kodoc’s nose.”
“Loretta!” Hazel snapped, grabbing a strap near the mast. “Do not aim at Kodoc. You only get one shot.”
“I know, I know,” she grumbled. “I’m just kidding.”
“The plugs are happy!” Bea chimed, lifting her head from the hatch.
“Swedish?” Hazel called.
Swede ran his fingers over the steam organ keyboard. “She’s just like the salvage raft,” he said with a satisfied grunt. “But slicker than a snail’s sneeze.”
“Then everyone fasten down—we’re going for a ride!” Hazel reached for the emergency inflation handle . . . then paused. “Um, Chess? Would you please keep Loretta from plunging to her death?”
“I’m fastened!” Loretta insisted, gripping the railing tighter. “Stop picking on me!”
“Well, just in case,” I said.
“Thanks,” she muttered. “How come all this airship stuff always happens in the air?”
“In three,” Hazel said. “Two, one . . .”
She turned the handle, and the tank of foggium coughed to life. The hose stiffened for a few seconds, then the cargo raft woke. The mast unfolded on pneumatic hinges, pulling the rigging taut. The propellers straightened, the deck snapped straight, and whoosh, the raft’s balloon inflated like a frog’s throat.
Loretta stumbled, and I steadied her as we drifted free from the Anvil Rose. A shiver of excitement ran across my skin, along with an edge of terror. I was on a raft again, flying over the Fog with my crew . . . and heading for Kodoc’s ship.
I lowered Bea through a hatch, where she started scolding and tinkering as the cargo raft dropped through the air. Swedish was taking us beneath the Anvil Rose, because we needed to get to the other side, closer to the Predator.
“Okay,” Hazel said, chewing her lip nervously. “So much for the easy part.”
“Look on the bright side,” I told her. “Now we’re stealing from muties. We’ve come a long way.”
She raised her spyglass to look behind us. “What’s next, mugging the Five Families?”
“Either that,” I said, “or winning a fight with a goose.”
I followed her gaze and caught a glimpse of the nine warships approaching from the Port, closer than ever. “How long before they get here?”
“Fifteen minutes,” she said.
“That’s great! We can wait for them to catch up instead of—”
“No,” she interrupted, pointing her spyglass in the other direction. “Look.”
As we flew out from beneath the Anvil Rose, the Predator swooped into firing range.
47
THE PREDATOR’S BIG GUNS swiveled toward Nisha’s airship, and a roar slammed across the sky. A volley of cannonballs barely missed the Anvil Rose’s zeppelin—a warning shot.
“Give me the boy!” Kodoc shouted into the sudden silence. “Or the next blast guts your ship!”
“Come get him, you slime-sniffing roof rat!” Nisha shouted back. “If you can.”
“Sweet,” Loretta murmured beside her harpoon. “The captain knows how to sling an insult.”
The Predator fired again. The sound of the blast almost split my head—and the impact almost split the Anvil Rose’s propellers. Smoke billowed and bits of wood and copper rained around us.
“Watch out!” I shouted to Swedish. “It’s going to squash us!”
“Not today,” he said between gritted teeth. “That’s what they want.”
His fingers danced across the keyboard organ, and we zoomed from the shadow of the Anvil Rose as flaming debris plunged around us.
“Whoa,” Swedish said. “This thing really moves.”
He spun the wheel and clattered on the organ. With a hiss of foggium, the propellers sliced through the air as explosions and screams sounded high above. A quick glance at the Anvil Rose made me wince: jagged holes pocked the hull, smoke poured from two gun emplacements, and the rigging crew frantically patched the balloon.
“Lord Kodoc!” a roof-trooper cried from the Predator. “Down there! There are three boys in that raft! Is that him?”
“Heh-heh,” Loretta snickered to Hazel. “They think you’re a boy.”
In middle of the fear and the danger, Hazel and I looked at each other and almost smiled. Did Loretta really think that the trooper had mistaken Hazel for the third boy?
Then the cannons roared again. “Catch him!” Kodoc roared. “I need him alive!”
Swedish swooped low, speeding away from the Port, away from the Rose—away from the safety of the nine incoming mutineer warships—and dove under the Predator. The cargo raft zigzagged, swerving in sharp angles to avoid harpoons and nets, and I closed my mind against the racket, trying to tame my fear.
Then I heard Kodoc’s voice directly above me, cutting through the air. “You will never escape me, Chess. Not ever.”
My heart beat so hard in my chest that my ribs ached. I raised my head and saw Kodoc standing on the bridge of the Predator forty feet away, pinning me with his stare. I couldn’t do this. Hazel’s plan was loco. How could I walk onto Kodoc’s ship . . . and then defy him?
What if I couldn’t stand up to Kodoc? He’d created me. He’d transformed me from a normal baby into a cowardly freak, just like he’d transformed the Teardrop into the Predator, and I couldn’t do this.
The wind of his propellers blew the hair from my face, but I was too scared to even raise my hand to cover my eye. I wanted to scream at Hazel—Run! Hide! Get me away from him!—but fear paralyzed me.
Swedish slammed the organ and we veered forward, past the Predator, heading away from the Anvil Rose. We needed to draw Kodoc as far as possible from Nisha. The cargo raft spun and swooped, swerving so hard that the rudders squealed, staying fifty yards over the highest crests of Fog. Loretta gripped the harpoon, Bea peeked from a hatch, and Hazel scanned the sky, her jaw clenched.
“It’s time,” she said.
I swung from the rigging to the deck as the Predator dove from the sky in front of us. Swedish spun the wheel and hammered the organ, and we slewed to a halt.
We were ten feet from Kodoc, with nowhere to run.
48
A HEAVY BOARDING PLANK shot from the Predator and slammed onto the deck of the cargo raft. The crack sounded like a bone snapping.
Kodoc stood at the far end of the plank, watching me with hungry eyes. “Get over here, boy. You’ve caused enough trouble.”
“Y-yes, sir,” I said.
My stomach ached as I edged onto the plank with quivering legs. A sour taste rose in my throat, and I forced myself to step forward.
From the crow’s nest, Hazel said, too softly for Kodoc to hear, “Goggles down, Chess. Tether free.”
The wind stilled. I paused, wanting to look at her but afraid I’d start crying.
“Dive at will,” she whispered. “And come back safe.”
I ducked my head and crossed the rest of the boarding plank.
The instant I stepped onto the Predator’s deck, the plank retracted with an ominous scrape. I almost whimpered: utterly alone, cut off from my crew, stranded on a warship with Lord Kodoc, as his troopers hunched over their wicked-looking harpoons and cannons.
The big warship wheeled in the air, turning away from the crew, away from the Port . . . away from the nine mutineer s
hips that slipped into view behind the Anvil Rose.
“The Port Oro navy is ten minutes from firing range, m’lord,” an airtrooper said, watching the warships through a spyglass.
“They’re too slow,” Kodoc said. “They can’t catch us now.”
My teeth chattered from fear, and darkness dimmed my vision. What if I fainted? If I fainted, I was finished. So I took slow, shaky breaths as the Predator picked up speed, starting the long journey back to the Rooftop.
Kodoc looked down at me. “You will find the Compass. My other divers failed, but not you, you were born for this. Now show me your eye.”
“Y-y-yes, s-sir—”
“Stop stammering and show me!”
My mind writhed with terror. Kodoc was the monster who’d chased me every night while I slept, the beast who’d killed me a thousand times. Now he was standing two feet away. He was real. I saw the faint lines on his forehead and the cruelty in his eyes. I smelled the sickly sweetness of his breath.
“Now!” he screamed.
I flinched, then pushed my hair aside.
He grabbed my head and stared at my eye. “So you lived in the junkyard?”
“Y-yes.”
“Hidden by that coward Katherine,” he sneered. “What does she call herself now? I’ll find her next.”
Despite my fear, a spark caught fire in my heart. “N-no. You won’t.”
“Never say no to me!” Kodoc cuffed me, and my goggles clattered across the deck. “You’re not a tetherboy anymore, you’re not a slumkid or a bottom-feeder. You’re not even human, not anymore. You’re just a tool. And I’m going to beat you into shape.”
At first, I almost wet myself with fear. But as he kept ranting, a strange thing happened: my terror started to fade.
Seeing him this close, I realized that Kodoc wasn’t a monster, he wasn’t a nightmare beast who’d created me by snapping his fingers. Spittle flew from his mouth when he shouted, and one nostril hair dangled from his nose like a curly wire. He wasn’t a monster—he was just a cruel Rooftop lord with too much power.
For my whole life, I’d been afraid to call attention to myself. My whole life I’d worried that being a freak also made me a coward. But Kodoc was just an evil man, not my creator. Which meant I was not his creature. Just a kid with a freak-eye.
And I was no coward.
“You will obey me,” he snarled. “You will dive. You will find the Compass. And once the Fog is mine—”
A shrill whistle interrupted him, a sharp note from across the Fog.
Kodoc turned at the sound, and I peered past him. The cargo raft hovered a hundred yards away. Hazel watched from the crow’s nest, while Swedish stood at the wheel, and Loretta slouched beside the harpoon, two fingers in her mouth.
She stopped whistling, and Hazel gestured with her spyglass, like she was showing us the entire sky. High above her, the smoldering Night Tide limped toward the Port. And far behind her, the nine mutineer warships guarded the Anvil Rose.
Whatever happened now, Mrs. E was safe. Suck pigeon eggs, Kodoc.
Kodoc narrowed his eyes. “Nine warships could beat me, boy—but they can’t catch me.”
“They don’t have to,” I said, and kicked him in the shin.
He gave a shout of pain, then lunged at me, but I ducked and raced across the deck.
“Grab him!” he bellowed.
I dodged an airsailor and scrambled onto the railing, balancing at the edge of the airship as Hazel shouted, “NOW!” and Loretta fired her harpoon, attached to a long, coiled rope—a tether.
The world moved in slow motion. My heart thudded to a stop and my breath faded to nothing as a silver spear arced through the air toward me, trailed by the tether. A good shot, straight and true.
I tracked the motion with my gaze, my knees bent, my focus absolute. The harpoon flashed under the Predator, the rope streaming behind . . . and I jumped.
“Turn the ship!” Kodoc screamed behind me. “Battle stations! Catch him! He’s mine, he—”
The rush of air in my ears silenced him. The wind whipped my face and ruffled my jacket, and my heart pounded with sudden, thrilling hope. I’d done it. I’d walked onto Kodoc’s airship of my own free will, I’d kicked him in the shin, and I’d walked back off again.
Well, I’d jumped off. Without a tether. Maybe it wasn’t time to celebrate yet.
But everything was going according to Hazel’s plan . . . so far. “You’re going to dive without a tether,” she’d told me. “You’ll jump from an airship a half mile above the ground and catch a rope in midair.”
“What—what airship?” I’d stammered.
“The Predator,” she’d explained. “We’ll fly you to Kodoc and hand you over. That’ll buy time for the mutie warships to reach us. Then you’ll jump overboard and catch the rope.”
“What rope?” Bea asked.
“The one Loretta’s going to shoot, attached to a harpoon. Like a tether.”
“No way.” Bea chewed her lower lip. “Shoot from where?”
“From the cargo raft we’re about to steal.”
I’d gaped at Hazel. “Are you trying to kill me? You want me to jump from a ship and catch a rope in midair? There’s no way I can do that.”
“You listen to me, Chess,” Hazel had said. “I know exactly what you can do.”
And I’d seen the truth in her face: she trusted me the way I trusted her, she saw me the way I saw her, as someone special, someone extraordinary. She believed in me, which made me believe in myself.
Except now, falling through the air, I couldn’t see the rope. Without my goggles, the wind brought tears to my eyes, and the endless white crests of Fog, five hundred feet beneath me, reflected the sunlight too brightly.
Where was that tether? C’mon, c’mon. . . .
“Yes!” I breathed, spotting the rope below me.
Ha! Can’t stop the tetherboy. I spread my arms to catch the tether, and a blow slammed into my shoulder from behind, spinning me off course.
Then a grappling hook sheared past.
Kodoc was trying to fish me from the air.
I lashed out with my left leg and barely caught the tether on the tip of my boot. But when I curled in midair to bring it to my hands, a harpoon shot from the sky and grazed my leg.
I flinched at the pain, the tether slipped from my boot—and another harpoon flashed past. Kodoc was trying to spearfish me from the air.
Which was definitely not part of the plan.
Twisting wildly, free-falling hundreds of feet above the Fog, I lunged for the tether. A dozen more spears fired at me from the Predator as Kodoc attempted to spike me and drag me back on deck. The harpoons burned through the sky. Too many too fast. Too accurate. One drilled directly toward my stomach. With a panicked yelp, I arched in the air, and the razor-edged blade only sliced my hip.
I’d lost the cargo raft tether completely, and the next three harpoons were dead on target: two shooting at my chest and one about to sink into my leg. Moving too fast to miss. I couldn’t dodge them.
They were three seconds from skewering me. Two seconds, one second—
49
I HIT THE FOG, and the world disappeared into a silent blur of mist. Time stopped. Coolness touched my face and quicksilver filled my veins.
The closest harpoon sliced toward my chest—and I snatched it from the air.
Whirling as fast as a hummingbird, I swung the harpoon like a sword and deflected the second two. The clash of metal sounded soft inside the Fog, and the harpoons tumbled away into the thick mist . . . but more scythed at me from above.
I dodged and twirled, yanking hard on the harpoon in my hands.
The line immediately tightened. The harpooner must’ve thought she’d caught me, so she stopped the rope from unspooling from the Predator. It hung firmly in the air. Which meant that the roof-troopers weren’t just shooting harpoons at me: they were shooting tethers.
Despite everything, I laughed. Maybe I wasn’t good at
fighting or fixing or flying—but nobody beat me in the Fog.
Nobody.
Within seconds, dozens of harpoon ropes—all fired from the Predator—dangled around me, like a forest of tethers in the mist. A Fog diver’s dream. Grinning wildly, I yanked on a nearby rope, then another. Anchored on Kodoc’s warship, I swung between them like a monkey on a vine, cartwheeling to dodge the harpoons still slicing downward as I scanned the billows of Fog.
There! The tether from Loretta’s harpoon was a sideways slash across all the vertical lines, falling slowly through the white vapor below me.
I swung hard, released my grip on a harpoon line, and somersaulted into the blankness. Fog surrounded me. White on white. Free-falling. No sounds except my ragged breathing.
So peaceful that I almost wanted to stay forever.
Then the cargo raft tether rose through the whiteness and curled gently into my fist.
50
WITH MY HEART PUMPING and my fingers clumsy, I hitched the tether to the harness under my jacket. Safe. Connected. I slumped in relief, inhaled the cool whiteness . . . and was jerked sideways through the Fog.
“Ow!” I shouted toward the sky. “Swedish!”
The tether jolted me again—to the left, then the right—then it whipped me in a wide circle. Which meant that high above, Swedish was speeding away from the Predator, racing toward the mutineer ships.
Towing me to safety.
Pain flared in my slashed leg as the tether whiplashed, and I slumped in my harness, dazed and drained and exhilarated. The ripples and billows of Fog swam in my vision. My breath sounded loud, the world faded into a blur. . . .
When the tether started winching me upward, my head jerked and my pulse pounded. I must’ve fainted for a minute or two. Or five. I shook my head as I rose higher and higher, until in an instant, the Fog fell away.
My body felt leaden and my leg throbbed with a steady ache, but my vision suddenly extended for miles. I swiveled in my harness and saw the mutineer warships standing guard nearby. Dozens of big guns were aimed at the Predator, which hovered in the distance—too far to pose a threat.