by Joel Ross
Loretta made a face. “You can’t fight with that.”
“It’s not a weapon,” I told her.
“Exactly,” she said, like I was being stupid. “That’s why you can’t fight with it.”
“It reminds me of your old one,” Bea told me, touching the blade with her thumb. “Ow! But sharper.”
She sucked her thumb as Loretta swung a pipe wrench experimentally and I rummaged through a box of corroded plastic squares until I found one with writing.
“What’s it say?” Loretta asked.
“Uh . . .” I peered at the words. “‘We make no claims that the AngelSoft Life Support System will support life.’”
“Ta-da!” Hazel sang out, and offered me the hacksaw. “For you.”
“You bought it?” I felt myself smiling. “You didn’t have to do that!”
“That’s true,” Loretta muttered. “I could’ve just stolen it.”
Bea giggled, and I pulled the notebook from inside my jacket. “In that case,” I told Hazel, “here.”
“A notebook!” She flipped the pages. “This is great, Chess.”
“It’s not a notebook. It’s your captain’s log.”
“But I’m not a captain anymore!” she said. “I don’t have an airship.”
“You have a crew.”
“Yeah, and another ship is just a matter of time,” Swedish said, glancing toward Loretta’s belt, where the diamond was hidden.
I nodded, then told Hazel, “Just promise me one thing.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“That you’ll start every entry the way I told you.”
“You mean, like, ‘Captain’s Log. Start-8 three two seven point eleven’?”
“Perfect!”
“Why start at eight?’” she asked. “Why not ‘Start-1’?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Tradition.”
“You’re weird,” she said, tucking away the notebook.
“Here, Swede.” Bea handed Swedish a twisty. “This is for you.”
He frowned at the little wire sculpture. “Scissors?”
“Pliers,” she said. “Needle-nose pliers.”
11
FOR THE NEXT hour, we crossed walkways and bridges, wandering through shabby neighborhoods with patches of corn and cassava, and fancier ones where street vendors sold monkey fur and toothwash.
Two naked toddlers bolted from a roadside tent, racing toward a pile of scrap metal, and Swedish scooped them up before they hurt themselves.
“Thank you!” their father called, adjusting his turban as he trotted closer. “Sorry. Thanks. They’re small, but they’re quick!”
After Swedish set the kids down, the man chatted with us for a minute. Hazel mentioned that we were a crew looking for work, and he said, “Have you ever heard of email?”
“No,” Hazel told him. “What’s that?”
“The quickest way to send a package.”
“Like a messenger service?”
The man nodded. “Crews make deliveries across the Port, flying lightweight craft.”
“What does the e stand for?” Bea asked.
“Envelope,” he told her. “Email is short for ‘envelope mail.’”
“Sounds perfect,” Hazel said. “Where do we find an email shop?”
“They’re actually called ‘email addresses,’” he told her, then gave directions.
When we found the place, Swedish and Hazel went inside to ask about work, but Bea refused to leave a strip of grass alongside the building. She’d never seen a real lawn before, and she pulled off her boots and walked barefoot through the soft, thick grass.
Loretta and I lazed on a bench, bickering about my new hacksaw and enjoying the midday sun . . . until I saw something that turned the world to ice.
Three toughs were standing over Bea. Two girls wearing the “neckties” that only thugs wore and a boy with his hair in a topknot.
No time to call Swedish and Hazel, so I stood and said, “Get behind them.”
Loretta didn’t say a word. She didn’t waste a second. She slipped from the bench and disappeared into the shadows of a building.
I pulled out my hacksaw and headed for the thugs. If they focused on me, they wouldn’t noticed Loretta until she stabbed them in the back. In the junkyard, you only fought fair if you didn’t have a choice.
“Hey!” I called, strolling closer, giving Loretta time.
When the toughs straightened, they looked about two years older than me, and about twice as big. The older girl eyed my hacksaw warily. “Hey,” she said. “What’re you doing with the saw?”
“Cutting things,” I told her.
“Guess what, Chess?” Bea sang out, sitting cross-legged in the grass. “Antwan makes twistys, too!”
I blinked at her. “What?”
“Well, wire sculptures,” the boy with the topknot said. “I don’t call them ‘twistys.’”
I said, “Well, yeah, no—I, um . . . what?”
“He saw me making one,” Bea explained, “and introduced himself. He uses thicker wire, but it’s the same idea.” She tilted her head to look up at the boy. “Show Chess your runner!”
The boy showed me a twisty. “I’m not as good as Bea.”
“No, that’s nice,” I said faintly.
Loretta slid from the shadows behind them, and she looked like I felt: ashamed. If someone was polite, we were suspicious. If they offered friendship, we planned violence. We thought we’d left the junkyard behind, but instead we’d brought it with us. All the anger and lies, all the fighting and stealing was inside us.
“So what’re you cutting?” the older girl asked me.
“Oh, nothing. Maybe I will later if . . .” I trailed off. “Can I ask a question? Do your neckties, um, mean anything?”
“They’re our bootball colors,” the older girl told me. “We play for the best team on the Port!”
“Well, the third best,” the younger girl said.
“One bad day doesn’t mean we’re not the best!” the older girl insisted. “Our winger was sick, and their goalie is the size of King Gong.”
“Did someone say goalie?” Swedish asked, shambling closer.
“You play bootball?” the younger girl asked him.
“What’s up?” Hazel asked me as Swedish and the younger girl chatted.
I exchanged a glance with Loretta. “Nothing. We just met some bootball players.”
“Best team on the Port,” Loretta said.
The older girl laughed. “You know it!”
“How’d the email thing go?” I asked Hazel.
“They’re not hiring.” She eyed me suspiciously. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Um,” I said. “Antwan makes twistys!”
“You should see his runner,” Loretta told her.
“C’mon!” Swedish said. “They’re going to show us around!”
The bootball players spent the next few hours showing us the highlights of Port Oro. They showed us their favorite bootball patch. Their second-favorite bootball patch. And then? Their third-favorite bootball patch.
Finally, we followed the music of a brass band toward a mountainside park and saw the biggest flowering tree in the world. Streams of purple blossoms draped the branches and shimmered in the sunlight. Hummingbirds darted and swooped and vanished. The breeze smelled like honey, and a wave of warmth rose in my heart. I’d never seen a flowering tree this clearly in the misty Fog, and the others had barely even seen normal trees.
“Look, Bea,” Hazel said in an awed whisper. “Look.”
“Now that,” Swedish said, “is purple.”
The brass band played in the shade of the tree, on the bank of a wide, burbling stream. Flower petals bobbed and darted in the current, spinning around little kids playing in the water and older kids washing clothes.
We didn’t take our boots off and splash in the water. Swedish didn’t stomp around chasing Loretta, and Hazel didn’t dunk her head in the
water, then emerge sputtering and laughing, with rivulets running down her face. Bea and I didn’t race purple petals down the current.
We were way too old for that. And far too mature.
After we dried off, Hazel asked the bootball kids how to find the fishing docks. They told us to use the “steam trolley,” reminded Swedish about bootball practice, and waved good-bye.
“Probably good that we didn’t stab them,” Loretta muttered to me.
“On the other hand,” I said, “they’re only the third-best team.”
We crossed bridges over terraced hills of rice paddies. We watched camel-drawn plows dig furrows in farmland. We dragged Bea away from a glassblower’s shop, and we were following a path along a high plaster-and-Styrofoam fence when we heard the chatter of kids’ voices.
I looked at the smokestacks rising above the fence. “I wonder what’s in there.”
“Probably a playground,” Bea said.
“There’s no such thing as playgrounds,” Loretta told her. “Not even on Port Oro. There never was. I don’t care what Chess says.”
“There was, too,” I told her as we approached a gate in the fence.
We looked through and saw stubby furnaces roaring in a factory. Dozens of grimy kids shoveled gravel onto conveyor belts, and dozens more stirred vats of melted asphalt and pulled the guts from busted iSlates.
“What’re they making?” Loretta asked.
“I don’t know,” Hazel said.
“Let’s ask,” Bea said, and headed toward four kids squatting around a patch of earth outside the fence.
They were playing a pebble game. Flicking big pebbles at a smaller one, and if they missed, they spread their fingers on the ground and gave the other kids a chance to drop a pebble on their fingertips.
We watched for a while. Then I asked, “What is this place?”
“It’s the Home,” one of them said, flicking his pebble.
“What home?”
“The Noza Home for Orphan Kids.”
“The Espinoza Home for Wayward Wanderers,” another kid corrected.
“You work here?” Hazel asked.
“Ten-hour shifts!” the first kid said, puffing out his skinny chest proudly. “We live here, too. A hundred of us. Two meals a day, and it stays warm in winter.”
“Plus new shoes every year,” the second kid bragged. “Whether we need ’em or not!”
“Sounds good,” I said.
The first kid squinted at me warily. “You’re way too old.”
“Yeah, there’s no way they’ll hire you,” the second kid said. “Sorry.”
“That’s right, gramps,” Loretta told me. “Don’t get any ideas.”
Bea giggled and told the kids, “He’s not trying to move in!”
“You’re not too old,” the first kid assured her. “Are you any good at shoveling?”
“I’m not,” I said, “but I’m deadly with a pebble.”
“Oh, yeah?” a third kid asked, giving me a dubious glance.
I grabbed a pebble. “You know it.”
“Me, too,” Loretta said.
We played for ten minutes, while Hazel, Swedish, and Bea explored the neighborhood. Then Loretta and I surrendered, blowing on our aching fingertips, much to the Noza kids’ delight.
“Next time,” Loretta threatened them, “we’ll take you down.”
“Oooh, do you hear that?” One of the kids cupped his ear. “That’s the sound of me not shivering in my boots.”
Loretta mock-scowled. “Why, you little pebble-pincher!”
“Least I’m not a goat’s granny,” he said with a grin.
“What you are is a chuzzlewit!”
They happily traded insults until Bea called, “Come see the trolley!”
Loretta tossed the kids a strip of ostrich jerky that she’d snagged in the market, and then we followed Bea uphill for three blocks. The trolleys dangled on cables that stretched between the peaks and ridges of the Port, then clamped onto tracks and rumbled like trains through the neighborhoods.
Bea chatted with a foggium generator until the trolley arrived. Inside, the trolley was pretty small. It tilted when we boarded, and a curly-haired passenger snarled at us, “What’re you doing? Stupid kids! Sit down or I’ll crack your heads!”
“Finally, someone normal,” Loretta muttered with a sigh of relief.
Hazel and I exchanged a quick glance, then looked out the window at the ground slipping away. The trolley swayed through the air, and the roofs of Port Oro looked like a patchwork quilt beneath us.
A smile tugged at Hazel’s mouth, so I said, “Good to be in the sky again?”
“Where we belong,” she said.
“Speak for yourself,” Loretta grumbled, her knuckles white on the railing.
“The gearwork says that the cable can hold ten times this much weight,” Bea told her.
“Well, you can tell gearwork that I said it’s full of rust.”
Bea made a face. “I would never!”
We rode across the mountain to the docks on the lakeside of Port Oro, then wandered among the smokehouses, net makers, and land docks on the hillside above the floating piers. In the distance, airships dotted the sky, trawling for fish with nets that dropped hundreds of yards into the lake hidden below.
“Fish smell fishy,” Bea said, wrinkling her nose.
“They taste tasty, though,” Swedish said.
“You really want a fishing ship?” Loretta asked him.
“Sure. We’re a salvage crew. We’re good at pulling stuff from the Fog.”
“I guess I could learn to gut them,” she said as a shadow flickered past us.
A huge crane swiveled over the nearby wall of a shipbuilding dock, carrying a load of foambelts scavenged from pod-cars.
“We could buy a gunship,” Hazel said, watching the crane disappear back into the yard. “And join the mutineers.”
“Or we could buy a workshop,” Bea said as a rivet gun sounded with a thwp-thwp-thwp. “And upgrade the mutineers.”
“How about you, Chess?” Swedish asked. “What do you want?”
“Me?” I hunched my shoulder. “All I want is this. Hanging around without anyone chasing us. Without getting dragged into trouble.”
“Trouble isn’t so bad,” Loretta said.
“If it’s not bad,” Swedish told her, “it’s not trouble.”
“Chess is talking about diving into this Station,” Bea told Loretta. “That’s the trouble he means.”
“Once we pay back the Assemblers,” Hazel promised me, “we’ll spend years just hanging around. With nobody hurt, nobody sick, nobody hungry.”
“And a really big harpoon,” Loretta added.
“What are you going to do with a harpoon?” I asked.
“Spear things,” she said, then listed everything she thought needed spearing.
It was a pretty long list.
After we finished poking around the warehouses and wharfs, we hopped onto a trolley going back. Bea chattered with the cable assembly while the rest of us peered through the windows, watching farmers wade through a rice paddy setting eel nets. We left the trolley near the marketplace and continued on foot. When we reached the street of crushed asphalt that led to the Subassembly skyscraper, I realized that Hazel hadn’t said anything for a while.
“Why are you so quiet?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m thinking about those kids at the Noza Home.”
“Two meals a day and a warm patch in the winter,” Swedish said. “Imagine if the junkyard bosses on the Rooftop gave slumkids half that much.”
“At least the slum’s safe from the Fog.” Hazel brushed a braid from her face. “If Kodoc gets the Compass, this is all gone. The marketplace and that brass band, all the kids in that stream.”
“The bootball players,” Swedish said.
“The Noza kids,” Loretta added.
“If Kodoc controls the Fog,” Hazel said, “the Port won’t
have a choice. They’ll surrender or die.”
“What—” Bea swallowed. “What will he do with all this?”
“He’ll suck it dry,” I told her. “He’ll turn the Port into the junkyard.”
12
“HOW WAS THE mountain?” Mrs. E asked after we crowded into the infirmary.
“There was a triple-hulled thopper!” Bea blurted. “With three hulls! But the exhaust hoses were too flopsy, so I spliced ’em together with an accordion valve!”
Hazel eyed me. “When did that happen?”
“No idea,” I said.
“You were right there!” Bea told us. “Maybe you were busy shopping.”
“Speaking of shopping . . .” Hazel twirled for Mrs. E. “I bought this.”
“It’s gorgeous,” Mrs. E said, her eyes sparkling.
I looked at Hazel. Was she wearing something new? I couldn’t tell, so I just nodded and said, “Mm.”
We told Mrs. E about the marketplace and food stalls, the rice paddies and flowering trees and email address. Bea explained how the steam trolley worked, then Swedish described the fishing piers, and I described the taste of cucumber, feeling a glow of pleasure in my chest. Not just because of the cucumber, either, because with Mrs. E feeling better, we were complete again.
“Tell me about this Home for Children,” Mrs. E told Loretta.
“Chess tried to join up,” Loretta said with a gap-toothed smile, “but they just chased him off with shovels.”
Mrs. E laughed. “Is that so?”
Loretta launched into an elaborate tall tale about our flight from the kids; then we chatted until the doctor told us that Mrs. E needed rest.
When we stepped into the hall, I told Loretta, “I can’t believe you said that I lost the pebble game.”
“You did,” she said.
“Like you did any better,” I started—then stopped at the sight of Isandra and Isander.
They were sitting at a laptop-case table just outside the infirmary door, playing what looked like a three-person game called Beat the Bosses. And sure enough, there was an empty third chair at the table, behind a pile of facedown cards.
Isandra swept us with her one-eyed gaze. “So what did you think of Por—”