by Joel Ross
“As soon as Chess dives for those fogheads.” Loretta rolled onto her side and prodded Swedish awake. “I don’t see what the big deal is. He’s a diver. He dives. If they wanted me to bust heads, they’d just have to ask.”
“’Cause you’re sweet that way,” Swedish told her, crossing to the water pump.
Hazel fanned her hand at her toenails to dry the paint. “The question is, why not use their own tetherkids? Why Chess?”
“Because he’s a fog-monster,” Loretta answered. “You’ve seen his eye.”
Bea whacked her with a pillow. “He is not a monster!”
“He’s a fog-goblin!” Loretta giggled, curling into a ball beneath Bea’s blows. “He’s a mist-monkey!”
I’d never heard Loretta giggle before, and it made me smile. “I’m more of a steam-beast,” I said, making claws with my fingers.
“For an ordinary dive,” Hazel said, her voice sharp, “they’d use an ordinary diver. Whatever they want Chess for, it’s something big. They know what he is, and they’re still afraid to make him dive before they test him.”
Bea lowered her pillow. Loretta stopped giggling. I unclawed my fingers. Swedish kept working the water pump, though, which creaked and groaned and spewed into a sink.
“So . . .” Loretta scratched her cheek. “What’re we going to do?”
“Muddle through,” Hazel said, grabbing a ladle from a hook on the wall. “Like always.”
“I just want this diving stuff to be over.” Bea wrinkled her nose. “I mean, we lost everything. Hazy’s clothes and my workshop and our shack—”
“We didn’t lose the diamond,” I told her.
“Yeah, and now I want to spend it.” Bea grabbed her leather cap from beside her mattress. “We can afford to buy a whole garageful of tools!”
Hazel dunked the ladle in the water-filled sink, then raised it in a toast. “Here’s to turning our sparkly diamond into sparkly new lives.”
She drank and passed the ladle to Swedish, who said, “Here’s to my own bedroom, so I don’t have to sleep in the kitchen.”
“Here’s to Swede’s own bedroom,” I said, taking the ladle, “so I don’t have to listen to him snore.” I gulped the cool water. “And to a comfy shack on the Port, with a woodstove and blankets and so much food that we forget what hunger feels like.”
“And to rivets!” Bea said, taking the ladle. “And foggium filters!”
She drank and babbled about intake valves until Hazel told her that it was Loretta’s turn.
Loretta dipped the ladle, then didn’t say anything.
“Retta?” Swedish prompted.
“Here’s to . . .” She frowned at the water for a moment. “Here’s to making one good choice in my whole entire life. Here’s to leaving the Rooftop slums and joining the crew. Everything else is gravy.” She wiped her eyes with her shoulder. “And if you ever tell anyone I said that, I’ll bite you.”
“We won’t say a word,” I promised. “But Hazel will write it in her logbook, so future generations will know what a garbo you were.”
Loretta threw one of her shoes at me. “What’s a garbo?”
“Like a lug nut,” Swedish told her, “with double the ‘lug.’”
“You have a logbook?” Bea asked Hazel.
“Don’t look at me,” Hazel told her. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Hazel needs a captain’s log,” I said. “I read about them in my dad’s scrapbook. You begin every entry with ‘Start-8’ and some numbers. Like, ‘Captain’s Log. Start-8 nine fifteen point four five. Today Loretta cried like a baby and sang a song thanking Chess for being so awesome that—’ Hey, ow!” I fended off Loretta’s punches. “Ow—help!”
I dashed behind Swedish, and Loretta chased me around him a few times before we knocked into the sink. The water sloshed and some spilled onto the floor—which wasn’t a big deal in a Subassembly skyscraper, maybe, but water was precious back in the junkyard. So we stopped fooling around, finished drinking, then grabbed our shoes and jackets.
“In the old days,” I said, pulling a boot on, “they pooped in fresh water.”
Bea giggled, and Loretta scoffed. “They did not.”
“They did! Then they’d flush it away into the ground.”
Hazel dried her face with a cloth. “They pooped in drinking water?”
“And peed, too,” I said.
“In drinking water?” Swedish asked.
“Yep.”
“Sometimes,” Hazel told me, “I think you get your facts wrong.”
I tugged on my bootlaces. “Yeah, this one might be fiction.”
“Fixin’ to what?” Loretta asked.
“Fiction,” I repeated. “That’s another word for lies. Like stories about jellyfish and the Olympics.”
When we headed into the corridor, nobody was in sight. We were alone in a Subassembly skyscraper on the edge of Port Oro. Far away from the Rooftop and the slum. Hazel caught my eye, and I saw that she was thinking the same thing: not too shabby for a bunch of kids from the junkyard.
She gave a lopsided grin, and I said, “Ha!”
Bea giggled. “I know, right?”
“Free food, too,” Swedish muttered—and we all started laughing.
Loretta tossed Swedish the bootball that she’d swiped from somewhere, and he juggled it on his knees, then kicked it to me. I whacked it toward Hazel with my head, but Bea jumped up and caught it.
“No hands!” Hazel scolded.
“I’m the goalie!” Bea told her, and tossed the ball to Loretta.
Loretta punched it down the corridor. “What?” she asked innocently. “I’m the other goalie.”
We swaggered the rest of the way to the infirmary, but our smiles faded a bit after we stepped inside. Mrs. E still hadn’t woken. The doctor told us she’d slept well, though, and that her condition was stable.
“What does that mean?” Bea asked.
“That she’s not getting worse,” I told her.
“Which is the first step,” the doctor said, “of getting better. Give her time. And a reason to recover.”
Hazel sat with Mrs. E for ten minutes, holding her hand and murmuring in a low voice. Mrs. E didn’t move a muscle and didn’t hear a word. The whole thing seemed sort of pointless . . . but then Swedish and Bea did the same.
When it was my turn, I looked at Mrs. E’s wrinkly face and watched her eyelids flicker. She looked so small and weak, but I knew the truth. She’d been the biggest thing in my life, and the strongest. I owed her everything—even though she’d never accept payment.
“Well, this time,” I told her sleeping face, “it’s my turn to take care of you.”
7
WE FOUND ISANDER and Isandra in an observatory on the roof, peering at the Fog through big scopes on tripods.
“What’re you looking for?” Bea asked.
“Patterns,” Isander told her.
“Like Norse code?” I asked.
“What’s that?” Bea said.
“An old tapping code,” I told her. “That Vikings used.”
Isander coughed into his hand. “Not exactly. The nanites that make up the Fog are machines. Their behavior is complex, but we believe that if we watch how the Fog acts, we might understand why it acts that way.”
“We’re ready,” Hazel announced. “Chess is ready. For the test.”
Isandra turned toward me, her white eye flashing. “Not a moment too soon.”
“Are you sure?” Isander asked me.
I fiddled with my jacket.
“Of course he’s sure!” Isandra said, her dreadlocks bobbing. “Look at him! He’s the very picture of certainty!”
“You must be looking at a different picture,” Isander said, with a laugh in his voice. “Are you ready, Chess?”
Sometimes I liked speaking for myself, but sometimes I didn’t. So I shrugged and kept my mouth shut.
“That depends,” Hazel said. “What’s the test?”
“The Fog ebbs and flows around this skyscraper, bonita,” Isandra told her. “Sometimes covering one floor, sometimes another. Rising and falling.”
“Ebbing and flowing,” Isander said.
“I just said that,” Isandra told him.
“Did you?” He tugged at the collar of his robe. “Well, I couldn’t agree more.”
Isandra clunked her cane against the floor. “The Fog covers the lower half of the skyscraper,” she told Hazel. “The floors where nobody lives. And that is where we—
“—test ourselves,” Isander continued. “On the highest floor that’s completely covered by the Fog.”
“You test yourselves?” Hazel asked. “So you’ve done this?”
“We have,” Isandra said. “Though Chess’s test will be far more challenging.”
“Your tetherboy will climb into Fog on one side of the building,” Isander told Hazel. “He’ll walk across a slippery beam, with nothing below him, until he reaches the other side.”
“He must balance high above the ground,” Isandra said, gesturing with her cane, “inside the Fog, with his senses dulled and the wind whipping past. One false step and he’ll fall.”
“Chess is a salvage diver,” Hazel said, “not an acrobat.”
“He once lost a fight to a goose,” Swedish muttered.
“I crossed the beam,” a voice from the observatory crowd called. “We all did.”
“On our hands and knees,” Isander said. “And with a rope to guide us.”
“If he’s so special,” the voice said, “make him walk the girder twice!”
“Three times!” a woman shouted.
Isandra lifted her cane until the crowd quieted, then asked Hazel, “Do you agree to the test?”
A warm wind swirled past. The ribbons in Hazel’s braids fluttered, and she chewed her lower lip. She trusted me in the woods and ruins, but she didn’t know about a slippery beam.
“I don’t see what walking across a skyscraper proves,” Hazel said. “When Chess dives, he has a tether.”
Isandra spoke more gently, her expression softening. “Because if he can’t pass even this simple test, bonita, he’ll never survive the real dive. We must know what Chess can do before we send him to the Station.”
I met Hazel’s gaze. We didn’t need words. A glance, a stillness, the twitch of her lips or shrug of my shoulder, and we understood.
“Then let’s do this,” Hazel said.
Isander and Isandra took the elevator and invited Bea to join them. She squirmed with eagerness to try the “up-and-downer,” but in the end she took my hand and led me into the building. She told me that everything would be okay. She said that I’d pass the test easy-peasy, and there was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Not even a smidge of a sliver of a shiver of something.
The more she reassured me, the more nervous I felt.
After we followed the crowd down five or six flights, Swedish said, “Bea? Bea! Stop helping.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, then stopped short when a pipe whooshed nearby. “Whoa! Purple!”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Pneumatic tubes! Can you hear that?”
“Hear what? Are those pipes chatting at you? I bet they know all the gossip.”
She wrinkled her nose. “This entire building is geared like an airship.”
“Like an airship?” I blinked in surprise. “Can it fly?”
“Not a real ship, silly! The Subassembly’s tech is completely loco.”
She babbled about gears until we reached the lowest livable story of the building. Then we descended into the exposed skyscraper skeleton, where there weren’t any walls or floors, just a framework of beams with ladders and walkways around the edges. We followed the crowd of Assemblers down three flights of jury-rigged stairs to the lowest Fog-free floor. The basket from the elevator had already arrived, and the cogs watched the rest of us spread out on the narrow walkway.
Isandra thumped her cane for attention. “Are we testing this tetherboy today?”
“Yes!” someone shouted. “Make him cross ten times!”
“No,” Isandra said. “We are not testing him. The Fog tests him, the Fog judges him, the Fog saves him or swallows him whole. . . .”
Hazel leaned closer to me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” she said, “because if you fall off a skyscraper, I’ll be so mad at you.”
“Um, do you want me to pass the test?” I asked, keeping my voice down.
Hazel understood immediately, of course. “Because if you fail on purpose, maybe they’ll think you’re useless and leave us alone. . . .”
I nodded, then shoved my hands into my pockets and watched her think. Maybe some kids wouldn’t lie, but we’d been raised in the junkyard. We knew that the truth could be dangerous.
A thousand options flashed behind Hazel’s eyes. “No,” she said. “We owe them for helping Mrs. E. Show them what you’ve got.”
I nodded again, and we listened to the cogs for a few minutes before Isander turned to me, his dreadlocks bobbing.
“Go and face the Fog, young Chess!” he called from his place in front of the crowd. “Climb down the ladder and cross the beam—” He turned to Isandra. “How many times?”
“The tetherboy knows the Fog,” Isandra said, her glass eye shining. “He knows the swirl and the flow and—”
“—the swirl,” Isander said.
Isandra cleared her throat. “Let’s let Chess decide what will satisfy us. The ladder awaits.”
I crossed to a ladder that disappeared into the Fog. The crowd rumbled in anticipation, but instead of climbing down, I turned my back on the Fog and stood with my heels on the edge of the walkway. I felt the emptiness behind me, the endless sea of Fog five feet below.
The crowd hushed. I swallowed a lump in my throat and almost smiled, hearing Hazel’s words—Show them what you’ve got—and feeling the thrill that came before a dive.
“You want me to cross that beam?” I called to the crowd. “Three times? Five times?”
“Ten times!” someone shouted.
“You think I’m afraid of falling?” Sudden excitement bubbled in my chest. “You want to know what happens when I fall?”
Everything went quiet, except for the muffled grinding of gearwork and the cry of a distant bird.
“When I fall,” I said a little softer, “the Fog catches me.”
I spread my arms and fell backward off the walkway. Bea screamed, the Assemblers gasped, and the Fog surrounded me.
8
A COOLNESS TOUCHED my face, and the silent white world slowed. I was diving with my back to the skyscraper, but that didn’t bother me. In a split second, I completed the flip, my reflexes faster and my mind quicker than in the world above, until I was facing the building as I dropped through the mist.
I flexed my fingers. No sound except my ragged breathing, no smells this high above the ground. White on white. So peaceful that I almost wanted to stay forever.
Then a beam whooshed at me from below. With a grunt, I grabbed for it. In the clear light above the Fog, I would’ve missed, and splattered on the ground.
Good thing I wasn’t in the clear light above the Fog.
My palms slapped the beam. I was falling too fast to stop short, so instead I swung toward the interior of the skeletal skyscraper. I flew through the center of the building with nothing in sight except whiteness.
Then . . . there!
Another beam, one story below. I grunted in triumph and landed hard, smacking the metal on all fours. Pain flared in my injured leg, but nothing I couldn’t handle. The world was my pigeon pie.
Then a whirl of dense Fog caught my eye, and my feeling of triumph shriveled. I’d heard that driftsharks liked cities, especially skyscrapers. I couldn’t smell their sulfuric stench, but I scrambled away just in case.
I ran across the beam, found a ladder, and climbed. I expected to pop out of the Fog on the nex
t floor but didn’t. I frowned in confusion. Where was I? What went wrong?
Oh! I must’ve fallen two stories!
I climbed another ladder, and when I emerged from the Fog, I saw the crowd on the walkway opposite, staring into the white where I’d disappeared. The Assemblers muttered, Bea gazed down with wide eyes, and even Loretta seemed a bit uneasy, scratching nervously at her scarred arm.
Hazel, however, wasn’t looking over the edge. She was standing at the rear of the crowd, facing away from them. Facing me. Waiting for me. She’d known exactly where I’d reappear.
She mouthed, “Took you long enough.”
I grinned, tugged my hair lower, and called, “Are you looking for me?”
The crowd turned toward me, gasping in amazement. I felt a familiar flush of self-consciousness—but also a tingle of pride. For the first time in my life, a bunch of strangers knew about my freak-eye and didn’t want to beat me for it. Instead, they gathered around me and looked like they wanted to applaud.
Still, I was pretty relieved when Swedish shoved through the Assemblers and stood beside me, with Hazel and the others trailing in his wake.
Isandra banged her cane for silence. “This is the fog diver,” she called. “The one we’ve spent so long—”
“—searching for,” Isander continued. “This is the tetherboy who will dive into the Station and find the Compass.”
“The path ahead is dangerous,” Isandra said, “and we may not succeed. He may not succeed. First, we must—”
“First,” Isander interrupted, shooting her a look, “we must let Chess explore his new home. While we prepare.”
“Prepare for what?” Swedish asked, but the cogs didn’t seem to hear him.
“Who cares about prepare?” Bea piped up. “He said ‘explore’! And we’re in a skyscraper!”
“Bea’s right.” Hazel tugged me through the crowd. “Let’s poke around.”
“I bet there are tools I’ve never even seen before!” Bea gushed. “And valves and—”
“Ribbons and bows?” Swedish interrupted. “For Hazel?”
Unlike most slumkids, Hazel liked wearing bright colors, with veils and bangles and sparkles. And we liked teasing her about it, though sometimes I wondered if she did it as camouflage. Because her clothes were gauzy and decorative, but her mind was a scalpel.