by Joel Ross
“Thank you!” Bea scampered across the hallway. “Thank you, thank you!”
“Wait, child, I—” Isandra started.
Bea hugged her tight. “Thank you!”
“Oh!” Isandra flushed, in what looked like both pleasure and embarrassment. She wasn’t used to random hugs from overeager geargirls. “You’re very welcome.”
Bea buried her face in the cog’s shoulder. “Mrs. E’s been so sick for so long, and now she’s so much better!”
“I—I’m pleased to hear that,” Isandra said, trying to disentangle herself.
Bea clung tight. “I never thought she’d talk to us again! Not like that! Not like herself!”
Isandra shot Isander a desperate look, but he just laughed. “We’re happy to help, Bea. Ekaterina is a remarkable woman.”
“Sure is,” Swedish said.
“Chess?” Hazel’s dark eyes shifted toward me. “What do you think?”
She meant what did I think about diving for the Subassembly. And with Mrs. E’s laughter still echoing in my mind, I said, “I think, yes.”
“Okay,” she told the cogs. “Let’s hear about this Station.”
Isandra’s shoulders sagged in relief. “He’ll do it, bonita? He’ll dive?”
“We’ll listen,” Hazel said. “That’s all we’re saying.”
“No promises,” Swedish said.
“Fair enough.” Isandra tapped the tabletop a few times.
“We need to find the Compass before Kodoc does, or—”
“We know that part,” Loretta interrupted. “But how come Kodoc hasn’t already grabbed this thing?”
“He doesn’t know where it is,” Isander told her. “When he destroyed the Subassembly on the Rooftop, he stole all our records—”
“—all our knowledge,” Isandra continued. “But we kept studying, here on Port Oro. We found a map to the Compass. Or at least—”
“—we think we did.” Isander shuffled the playing cards in front of him. “We believe the map is on the bottom floor of the Station, deep inside the Fog. And that—”
“—is why we need you,” Isandra finished, looking at me.
“We’ll do anything,” Swedish muttered, “if you’ll stop finishing each other’s sentences.”
“What’s the catch?” Loretta asked, squinting at them.
“The ‘catch,’” Isandra said, “is that the Station is dangerous. The top floors aren’t always so risky, but the bottom floor . . . is.”
“That’s why you don’t send your own tetherkids,” Hazel said, an edge to her voice.
“Yes,” Isander replied. “At least—not anymore.”
Hazel frowned. “You used to? What happened?”
“In the past five years” —Isandra took a quavering breath— “we sent nine tetherkids to the bottom floor of the Station.”
“And?”
“And,” Isander said, bowing his head in grief, “nine of our finest young people now rest with the Fog.”
For a second, I didn’t understand—then a chill touched my heart.
“Are you out of your ever-fogging minds?” Loretta snarled. “You sent nine kids to die for this map?”
“If Kodoc reaches the Compass first,” Isandra said, her blue eye glinting with unshed tears, “many more will die.”
“Chess is different,” Isander added, raising his head. “He can do this.”
“None of our tetherkids had his”—Isandra looked at the hair covering my freak-eye—“background.”
“His background isn’t armor,” Swedish snapped, stepping closer to the cogs like he might hit them. “You want to see his scars?”
Hazel put her hand on his arm. “So you want Chess to search the ground floor of this Station. Is that right?”
“Not the ground floor,” Isandra said. “The bottom floor.”
“Huh?” Loretta said.
“The Station is underground,” Isander told us, shifting in his chair. “In what was once called a ‘subway.’ We want Chess to dive three floors below the ground, past stairways and platforms and train tracks. And then, yes, he must find the map.”
A sick feeling twisted in my stomach as I imagined a thousand Fog-blurred dangers and nowhere to run.
Swedish clenched his jaw. “If he’s underground, he’s trapped. He’s stuck. We can’t drag him out of trouble with his tether.”
I frowned at my boots. There was something else, too, something they weren’t telling us. No way had nine kids died in regular dives—even underground dives—if they’d just needed to get to the bottom floor.
“There’s something else,” Hazel said, sharp enough to cut glass. “Something you’re not telling us.”
“You’re right, bonita,” Isandra told Hazel.
“The truth is”—Isander took a breath—“the Station attracts driftsharks.”
13
“ARE YOU LOCO?” Swedish gaped at them. “You want Chess to dive with driftsharks?”
“What are driftsharks?” Isandra asked. “Merely dense ropes of Fog. And what is Fog? Clouds of tiny machines called nanites that—”
“I don’t care!” Swedish slammed the table with his palm, which made the playing cards jump. “We’re not feeding Chess to the sharks! That’s final.”
For a moment, the only sound was the whir of medical equipment from inside the infirmary.
“Very well,” Isander said.
“We respect your decision,” Isandra told Swedish.
“What?” Swedish looked baffled. “You what?”
Isandra grabbed her cane and pushed to her feet. “You’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you need.”
“For as long as any of us survive,” Isander said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Until we lose Port Oro.”
A snake of worry coiled around my heart . . . but Swedish just snorted. “What’s the rush? Kodoc’s been looking for this thing forever.”
“Yeah.” Loretta rubbed the tattoo on her face. “No way he’s going to find it now.”
“They want us to think this is urgent,” Swedish said. “But nothing’s changed.”
“One thing has,” Hazel told him.
Before she could explain, a shadow fell across the card table from the end of the hallway. A figure strode toward us, silhouetted in the light of the windows, and a man prowled closer, his cloak rippling.
Then his voice echoed in the corridor. “More than one thing has changed, poppet.”
Hazel lifted her chin. “Captain Vidious.”
Vidious stepped into the light, a tall man with a scarred face, a cutlass on his belt, and rings on his fingers. He was Nisha’s brother, the captain of the ship called the Night Tide. He’d once threatened to toss our crew into the Fog—and he’d once saved us all.
“How’s the Tide?” Bea blurted, her eyes wide. “Is her hull okay? She was feeling all tilty and embarrassed.”
“The Tide is fine,” Vidious assured Bea, sprawling onto the empty chair at the card table. “Which is more than I can say for the Port.”
Bea blinked. “What’s wrong?”
“Ask your captain.” Vidious gathered the cards in front of him. “What one thing has changed?”
“Kodoc saw Chess,” Hazel told him. “He knows Chess is alive, and in Port Oro.”
“Which means what?”
“That Kodoc can’t wait any longer. He has to strike, or the Subassembly might get the Compass before him.”
“Yes. And the question is, what are you going to do about it?”
“Captain Vidious,” Isandra said sharply. “I’m not sure if we can ask the children to—”
“I didn’t come here to play games.” Vidious threw his cards onto the table. “I came to talk to the girl.” His cold gaze flicked to Hazel. “More than one thing has changed. The entire world is changing. Kodoc is—”
“They don’t need to hear this,” Isander cut in. “We never agreed to tell them—”
“They’re slumkids,” Vidious said. “No
t idiots.”
Isandra rapped her cane on the floor. “They’re children.”
“Do you think Kodoc will spare children?” Vidious demanded. “You sent me and Nisha to bring you a salvage crew. We brought them. Now use them, or watch them die.”
The cogs exchanged a glance and fell silent.
“What’s happening?” Hazel asked Vidious. “Kodoc is what?”
“He’s coming. With an armada.”
A prickly silence fell.
“So what?” Swedish said, after a moment. “Every time the Rooftop attacked Port Oro in the past, you mutineers beat them.”
“This time it’s different. This time he’s invading with everything he’s got.”
“Why?” Bea asked, her eyes shiny with worry.
“Because for the first time,” Vidious told her, “we pose a threat to him.”
“We do not! We just want to be left alone!” Bea said.
“Chess is the threat,” Hazel told her. “Kodoc is coming for Chess.”
My throat tightened, and my shoulders hunched. Kodoc was coming for me with an entire armada. The whole Port was in danger because of my freak-eye.
“If we reach the Compass first,” Isander explained, “we’ll control the Fog. We’ll clear new mountaintops, where people can live free.”
“And we’ll use the Fog to stop Kodoc,” Isandra said.
“So either you find the Compass and life gets better,” Vidious said, pinning me with his gaze, “or you don’t, and Port Oro dies.”
“Maybe I don’t care about the Port,” I told him.
I knew that I sounded like the worst kind of slumkid, a junkyard thug who didn’t give a fog about innocent people. I sounded exactly like a kid who’d attack a couple of friendly bootball players for talking to Bea. I still felt ashamed about that, but . . . I was a slumkid. If you pushed me, I pushed back. Plus, I wasn’t about to let Vidious order me around; that was Hazel’s job.
“You care about your crew,” Vidious told me, unruffled. “And your crew doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“We’ll talk it over,” Hazel told Vidious before I could say anything, “and we’ll tell you tomorrow.”
Vidious glared at her. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Then don’t say anything.”
Vidious leaned toward her again, his expression darkening. “I didn’t drag my crew to the Rooftop to save you for nothing.”
“I didn’t drag my crew to Port Oro,” she told him, “to lose one of them in a suicide dive.”
He started yelling at her, and I quaked in my boots. Vidious was scary when he got mad. Hazel looked scared, too, but she refused to back down. Swedish cracked his neck, I stepped in front of Bea, and Hazel tilted her chin higher and higher until she finally said, “We’ll talk it over,” and stalked away.
As I followed along, I caught Vidious watching her, a faint smile on his scarred face.
WHEN WE GOT back to our room, Hazel said, “You know what?”
“What?” I asked.
“Let’s not talk it over.”
Instead, we dug into the baked yams that Loretta had swiped from the kitchen. Swedish flopped onto his pallet and groused about them while Bea worked on a twisty. Hazel and I sat against a beam and watched the sunset through an opening in the tarp that covered one window.
We talked about the junkyard and the Port, about our best salvage dives and our scariest one. We talked about nothing, falling into the aimless chatter of an airship crew drifting high above the Fog. We’d spent years searching for new places to scavenge, new places for me to dive into the mist—because diving was what I was trained for. It’s what I was born for.
So after we climbed into our beds, I said, “I’ll need a new rig. Not a regular tether, something special.”
Hazel’s breath caught. “For diving inside the Station?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
Bea peered at me. “Three stories underground? You’ll need a tether that never snags. I wonder what the Assemblers use.”
“They lost nine kids,” I told her. “I need something better.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Swedish grumbled.
“I’m not exactly thrilled myself,” I said.
Swedish ran his fingers through his shaggy hair. “We could sneak back into the junkyard.”
“Really?” Loretta asked, brightening. “Could we?”
“No,” Hazel said.
“Oh.”
“What about driftsharks?” Swedish tossed a bootball at me. “You think you’re faster than a shark?”
“No.” I caught the ball. “But I’m close.”
“Would you tell him, Hazel? Diving underground is loco.”
“It’s loco,” Hazel agreed. “But Chess can handle it.”
Swedish scowled. “Unless he can’t.”
“Swede,” I said, “what if it was you? Would you dive? To save Port Oro, to stop Kodoc?”
“No,” he muttered, but we all knew he meant yes.
“I would, too,” Hazel said. “How about you, Bea?”
“You wouldn’t let me!” she said.
“No, but would you?”
Bea nodded. “This is important.”
“I wouldn’t jump into the Fog in a million years,” Loretta said. “But stop acting like garbos. Of course Chess is going to dive. What else is he good for?”
14
TWO MORNINGS LATER, I climbed up a ladder to the lowest Fog-free floor of the skyscraper after my tether practice. I’d been messing around in the white so I wouldn’t get rusty. The only problem was, every time I emerged, a bunch of kids—and a few adults—stood on the walkway, watching me with wide eyes.
I shot them an embarrassed smile, unhooked my tether, and found Bea on the walkway two flights up. She hopped to her feet when she saw me. “C’mon, Chess! Your harness is done! I’ve been waiting forever.”
She tugged me into the elevator—which she still called an up-and-downer—and we rose through the open shaft. When we reached the garage, Bea yanked me toward her workshop in a well-lit corner of the garage. A few gearslingers worked on metal lathes nearby while Hazel and Captain Osho pored over charts.
“Here.” Bea tossed me a harness. “Wiggle into this. Buckle there and there—the belts, too.”
“Okay, okay.” I tightened the final strap. “It’s pretty much like my old harness.”
“You only think that because you’re a chuzzlewit,” Bea explained. “Your old harness connected in one place. This one has three pivot joints—you can turn a backward somersault sideways.”
I half laughed. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“Oh, hush!” She showed me a length of tether. “Look—no links, no joints.”
“It’s five times thicker than my old tether.”
“Because there’s a torsion cable inside, so you can whip yourself through the Fog like a, um, like a—”
“A whip?”
“Yes!” She beamed. “Exactly! Like a whip.”
“Good guess,” Hazel called over.
“I’m still working on the hand brake,” Bea told me. “So you can ring the bell like before, if you want to tell us something.”
I never should’ve doubted Bea. The tether might be heavy and slow, a flexible black hose as thick as my wrist, but it carried me through the white in a blur. With a tether like that, I actually had a chance—even against driftsharks.
When I finished testing the tether, I climbed from the Fog to find Loretta on the walkway, stabbing a cushion beside the tether ratchet that Bea was operating.
“What are you doing?” I asked Loretta.
“Stabbing a cushion,” she told me. “How’s the harness?”
“Totally harness-y.”
Bea giggled as she coiled the line. “And this new tether won’t snag on anything.” She turned to Loretta. “Help me drag this stuff to the up-and-downer while Chess unbuckles?”
“Sure,” Loretta sa
id. “The elevator.”
“It’s not an elevator!” Bea said. “You might as well call it a lowerator.”
Loretta shot me a grin, then headed off with Bea while I started on my harness. It might have three pivot joints, but it also had a thousand buckles. I was only halfway done when Mochi and Jada came down the ladder.
“You look like you need a hand,” Mochi said.
“I need at least three,” I told her, “to get out of this thing.”
Jada grabbed my elbow and spun me around. “I’ve got the ones in back.”
“Thanks.”
Behind me, Jada started tugging and jerking at the harness straps. I felt like a human-sized puppet.
“I’ve never seen a tether that thick,” Mochi said.
“Yeah, but it’s crazy fast,” I told her as Jada roughly turned me back and unwound a strap from a loop. “You want to give it a try?”
Mochi brightened. “Oooh, that sounds—”
“No, thanks,” Jada said. “All done.”
As I tugged the harness off, Mochi said, “So what’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“You know.” She glanced toward my freak-eye. “Diving into the Fog when you’re . . . you.”
“I don’t know. What’s it like when you’re you?”
“Scary and quiet and . . . scary.”
“Like walking blindfolded past a hundred rattlesnakes,” Jada said. “Over broken glass.”
“Same for me,” I told them, and didn’t mention the rush of speed and freedom that I felt every time I dove. I was enough of a freak already, my one eye filled with Fog.
Nobody spoke for a minute. A ticking sounded, and the scent of roasting grain surrounded us. Then a flock of birds rose from the Fog nearby, wheeled in the air, and darted back into the mist.
“I still can’t believe we’re standing in a skyscraper,” I said.
“In the old days,” Mochi told me, “there were hundreds of them.”
“There were pyramids, too. At least, according to my dad’s scrapbook.”
Jada squinted at me. “What’s a pyramid?”
“They’re where mummies come from.”
“Mummies?” Mochi squinched her face. “Mummies come from when a woman has a baby.”