The Lost Compass

by Joel Ross

  The shapes reminded me of driftsharks. I thought about blunting the sharks with my mind. Had the nanites in my brain spoken to them? Had they seen me not as a stranger, but as a brother? As a fellow fog-monster? And had I really seen a ticktock?

  The memories kept slipping away, like a fever dream. But I’d found the map! I remembered that much. Then how come I felt anxious instead of victorious? Something about my eye . . .

  A warm grip squeezed my left hand, interrupting the thought. I weakly lifted my head, peered a hundred miles down the bed, and saw skinny fingers wrapped around my palm.

  Mrs. E lay in the next bed, holding my hand in her sleep. I felt myself smile as I watched her eyelids flicker with dreams. She looked peaceful and safe, and I enjoyed her silent company for a minute. Then I realized we weren’t alone.

  Loretta sprawled in a chair beside my bed, her legs up and her boots on the mattress. “Hey, Chess,” she said, her voice softer than usual. “Can you hear me?”

  “Course I can hear you,” I said. But my tongue felt too big for my mouth, and it sounded like “Curzacaneeroo.”

  “What?” she said. “Who?”

  “Course a can eer oo!”

  “Oh! Why didn’t you say so?” She plopped her feet to the ground. “Hazel told me to stay by your bed till she’s done inspecting her ship.”

  “Erzip?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Captain Vidious gave her a ship. She’s helping the mutineer fleet hold off Kodoc, to buy you time to find the Compass.”

  I worked my tongue around in my mouth. “When we leave?”

  “As soon as you get your skinny butt out of bed.”

  “Sushagarbo,” I said, which meant “You’re such a garbo.” “The map ’sokay?”

  She nodded. “The map is good. Well, the fogheads figured the general area. You’ll still need to find the exact spot.”

  “Wazlooklie?”

  “‘Wazalooklie?’ That sounds like one of Bea’s names for an airship.”

  I spoke more carefully: “Wha duz it look like?”

  The clomp-clomp of a cane sounded, and Isandra appeared at my bedside. “You want to know what the Compass looks like?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yuh.”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “Guess,” I told her.

  “It’s probably a machine powered by Fog, or perhaps a building or an ancient workshop.” She lifted a washcloth from a steamer. “Maybe trillions of nanites, joined together into some sort of construct.”

  I grunted, which meant, “How’m I supposed to find it if I don’t even know what it looks like?”

  “We hope that when you see it, you’ll know.” Isandra showed me the still-steaming cloth, then nodded at my eyes. “May I?”

  In a sickening flash, I remembered Hazel saying, “The Fog’s in both your eyes.” My stomach soured, and fear and disgust clogged my throat.

  Still, I swallowed a few times, then managed to nod. “’Kay.”

  Isandra brushed my hair off my forehead. She took a sharp, amazed breath. A smile tugged at her lips, and she made a noise that was half gasp and half laugh.

  “Is . . .” I swallowed again. “Are they both foggy?”

  “Not anymore. Just the one you keep hidden.”

  Relief swelled in my chest. “Why? Why’d the other one change?”

  “It was jealous,” Loretta said. “It never got any attention.”

  “We don’t know,” Isandra told me. “Perhaps the concentration of nanites in the Station drew more into your other eye—or activated ones already there. And then, after a few hours topside, the nanites dissipated from your left eye.”

  “She means they faded,” Loretta explained. “That’s what dissipated means. They talked like this for hours while you were sleeping.”

  “The doctors say you’re not getting fogsick.” Isandra focused on my freak-eye. “It’s like floating pearls of Fog. Do you know what Hazel told me?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That your eye is the least special thing about you.”

  I felt myself flush.

  “I don’t know,” Loretta said. “I can think of plenty of things that aren’t special about him. His feet, his cooking. His sense of humor.”

  Isandra wiped sweat from my forehead. “You must find the Compass, Chess. This is our last chance, our only chance.”

  “Whazzat mean?”

  “His clothes,” Loretta continued, “his hair . . .”

  “While you were diving,” Isandra said, her blue eye intent, “the Fog rippled. Like dropping a rock in a puddle.”

  “The Fog doesn’t ripple.”

  “It never has before,” she agreed.

  “His face,” Loretta suggested, still listing the things that weren’t special about me. “His personality.”

  “But—” I shook my head and asked Isandra, “Why?”

  “We don’t know. Either Kodoc learned how to interfere with the Fog . . .” Isandra’s white eye glinted. “Or something changed, and the Compass is ready. Maybe it’s waiting. Waiting for you.”

  Captain’s Log. Start-8 312.93

  Two days have passed since Chess dove into the Station and found the map. He still tosses and turns in a fog-fever in the Subassembly infirmary, though the doctors assure me that he will soon recover.

  Upon the recommendation of Captains Nisha and Vidious, I’ve been given the command of a gunship. More of a gun raft, a six-person vehicle, the smallest combat ship in the mutineer navy.

  Bea wanted to name her the Purple Piston. Swedish voted for “nothing.” As in, a ship called the Nothing. He thought that might confuse them. Loretta suggested the Bloodcutter. In the end, we settled on the Bottom-Feeder, because she’s an ugly little thing, patched together with castoffs and stubbornness—just like us.

  I adore her.

  Swedish is learning how she flies; Bea is furiously upgrading her engine; and before I sent Loretta to sit with Chess, she struck a pose beside our new, undersized harpoon and declared herself “chief harpoonist.”

  We may need a fighter on deck, so I asked one of Nisha’s marines to teach Loretta how to repel enemy boarders. After a few hours, he bandaged the bites on his arm and said, “That girl fights like a wild animal.”

  “That’s my Retta,” Swedish said proudly.

  We’re not a crew without Chess, though. We’re a sail without wind, a bow without an arrow. Especially me. I need Chess. I check in with him a hundred times a day, with a word or a glance. Swedish judges a ship by the feel of the controls, Bea checks an engine by the sound of the exhaust, and I measure the crew by the hunch of Chess’s shoulders.

  Thinking of him lying on his cot, limp and flushed, makes my stomach ache. He didn’t even get beaten up that badly. Not for him. After three years in the Fog, there isn’t a square inch on Chess that hasn’t been broken or slashed or stabbed. He’s usually a fast healer, uncommonly fast, but not this time. This time, a driftshark touched his mind. That’s worse than any injury.

  I refuse to worry, though. Chess will come through. He always does.

  22

  THE NEXT TIME I woke, Hazel was curled into a chair beside my bed, writing in her logbook, her tongue peeking between her teeth.

  I watched her for a while. She finished a paragraph. She wrote another few words. Then she glanced at me and her brown eyes sparked. “Welcome back.”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Three days, on and off.”

  “Three days! No way.”

  “We had this same conversation this morning. You don’t remember?”

  “Not really.” I yawned. “No wonder I’m so hungry.”

  “You ate this morning, too,” she said, but she brought me a tray of rice balls and eel jerky, along with a jug of goat’s milk.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked around a mouthful of jerky.

  “Swede’s playing bootball. Bea’s in the dry dock, rebuilding the engine from scratch.” She grabbed a rice bal
l. “You’ll never guess where Loretta is.”

  “Knocking someone down?”

  She laughed. “In the kitchen.”

  “She’s knocking someone down in the kitchen?”

  “Helping the cooks. She decided she likes cooking.”

  “Nah,” I said, licking my fingers. “She just likes cutting things.”

  Hazel smiled. “And Mrs. E is out there.”

  “What do you mean, ‘out there’?”

  “In the hallway, with the doctors, exercising.” She looked toward the door. “She’s still sleeping most of the time, but she’s getting better.”

  “Not bad for a bunch of slumkids.”

  Hazel nodded, her braids clattering with new beads. “Could’ve been worse.”

  “So . . . what’s next?”

  She brushed my hair from my face to check my eye. “After the Station, the Fog was in both your eyes.”

  “Yeah.” I felt myself frown. “They still don’t know why?”

  “No.”

  “How come you’re not freaked?”

  “I was,” she admitted. “But the cogs say you looked okay, and your eye returned to normal, and—you’re okay. At least for now.”

  “Thank you, Little Miss Cheerful.”

  “Well, the good news is that Loretta hasn’t decided if you’re a ‘biclops’ or a ‘binoculon’ yet. And you’ll never guess what Swede thinks.”

  “That they turned my other eye white?”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “What did Bea do? Try chatting with it?”

  “No, she said . . .” Hazel paused, remembering. “Uh, she said maybe your eyes matched the Fog like a synchronous magnetic field?”

  “I don’t even know what language that is.”

  “Me neither,” she admitted. “But Bea thinks it’s pretty purple.”

  I grabbed a rice ball. “What do you think?”

  “I think we’re good to go.” She patted my hair back into place. “Thanks to you, the cogs now know where to find the city with the Compass.”

  “And they gave you a ship?”

  “The Bottom-Feeder,” Hazel said with a proud glint in her eyes. “She’s just a harassment raft. We were going to annoy the roof-troopers, to keep them busy while the muties took them down.”

  “It was going to be our job to annoy someone?”

  “I know—it’s a dream come true!” She laughed. “But that was only if you didn’t wake up.”

  “So what’re we waiting for now?”

  “Nothing. If you’re awake for real this time, we’ll leave in the morning.”

  “I’m awake for real.” I wiped my mouth. “How close is Kodoc?”

  “A few of his ships are already here.”

  I frowned. “They’re here?”

  “They’ve tested our defenses a few times.” Hazel tucked a braid behind her ear. “The bulk of his fleet is farther out, but I don’t see how he can take the Port without heavy losses.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t care about losses.” A chill touched me. “Wait. So Kodoc is almost here, and we haven’t even started looking for the Compass? Aren’t we supposed to use the Compass to beat him?”

  “Yeah. The muties will have to hold him off till we get back.”

  My stomach twisted. “They’ll fight him for days?” An alarm shrilled in the distance. “What’s that?”

  “Probably just a few more Rooftop scout ships,” Hazel told me, crossing to the window. “I guess Kodoc’s trying to find weak spots in the Port’s defenses.”

  “Are there any?”

  “We’re outnumbered and outgunned,” she said. “But Kodoc is five days from home. If he runs low on supplies before—”

  A cannon roared outside, and Hazel pushed the curtain aside and squinted into the day. The sunlight painted stripes on her face, and her squint turned into a scowl. “Oh, no,” she cried.

  Another cannon roared. “What?” I asked, suddenly edgy. “Hazel, tell me!”

  “This isn’t just a few scout ships,” she said, her voice strained.

  I half raised myself from the bed. “How many?”

  “Three warships. Also three gunships and six or seven clippers.” Cannons boomed, and faint voices shouted. “This is it. This is the invasion.”

  “What—what do we do?”

  She kept staring outside. “They’re never going to break through. What’s Kodoc doing?”

  “I don’t know; I can’t see!”

  She described the chain shot and broadsides as the battle crackled and roared outside. “Now the Rooftop ship’s taking aim at— Oh! That’s the Night Tide and the Anvil Rose! They’re swooping into battle— Ha! Take that, Kodoc!”

  I threw off my blanket. “I’ve got to see this.”

  “You stay there!” Hazel snapped at me.

  “I’m okay—I can stand up.”

  “That’s what you said two days ago. Stay!”

  “Fine,” I grumbled, staying on the bed despite the air battle in the distance and the footsteps pounding in the hallway outside.

  Hazel turned back to the window. “What’s Nisha doing? She’s flying too high. No, wait. Vidious is drawing them into a trap and—”

  The infirmary door crashed open. Medical gear rattled and boots scuffed, and I turned, expecting to see Swedish and Loretta and Bea.

  Instead, three strangers burst in, wearing goggles and camel-leather helmets, carrying clubs and knives—and one was wearing a necktie. They looked like junkyard thugs, but that was impossible. There were no junkyard thugs on Port Oro.

  The tall one was holding a little girl’s upper arm like he’d dragged her through the skyscraper. When he spotted me, he shoved her into the corner and said, “Looks like I don’t have to slit your throat after all.”

  “She led us straight here,” another thug said. “Just like she promised.”

  The little girl pulled her knees to her chest and started sobbing.

  “Just like I made her promise,” the tall thug said.

  I barely heard them. Because when the tall one spoke, I recognized his high-pitched voice. And as he pulled off his helmet and stepped toward me, yellow hair fell around his shoulders.

  “P-Perry?” Hazel stammered.

  Fear clawed at my chest. Perry was one of the Rooftop bosses’ scariest hitters. But—but we’d left him behind. We’d left all that behind forever.

  “Happy to see me?” Perry squeaked, a mean smile on his face.

  Hazel’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?!”

  “Lord Kodoc needed someone who could recognize Chess. All that?” Perry nodded toward the window. “That’s a distraction so nobody would see us tethering onto foghead territory and grabbing him. He’s the only thing Lord Kodoc cares about.”

  “Over my dead body,” Hazel said, stepping closer to him.

  “Sure,” Perry squeaked, and swung his club at Hazel’s head.

  She threw a punch at his face, but she was a captain, not a brawler. Perry’s club blurred past her fist and I heard a dull thup, and Hazel collapsed onto the floor. Still breathing, but barely.

  A red haze of anger filled the room, and I threw myself at Perry. Except I was still weak—and I wasn’t a brawler, either. I staggered toward Perry, and he punched me in the stomach and grabbed my neck.

  “I always thought you were worthless,” he sneered, “but his lordship’s paying a heapload for you. You’re going to make me rich.”

  From the hallway, Bea’s voice shouted, “—telling you, I finished the engine and came to get Hazel and saw Perry heading this way!”

  The door slammed open again, and Swedish and Loretta shoved inside.

  Swedish paused in the doorway, looking big and angry and surprised—but Loretta didn’t pause at all. She was a brawler. She struck fast like a snake, dropping a shoulder and ramming the nearest thug. He sprawled backward, and she sprang at the second thug, a girl with stained teeth. The girl punched Loretta once, then Swedish body-checked her into a
cabinet so hard that she broke the door and fell moaning to the ground.

  Perry dragged me closer to the window while Loretta stalked him, wiping blood from her mouth.

  “You can’t beat me,” Perry told her. “You never could.”

  “Not by myself,” she said.

  Swedish stepped beside her, cracking his knuckles. “She ain’t by herself. Not anymore.”

  “Neither am I.” Perry whistled a piercing note. “You think you can mess with Lord Kodoc? He’ll stomp you into paste.”

  “I don’t see Kodoc,” Swedish said. “All I see is you. And if you hurt Chess, I’ll rip your spine out.”

  A figure swooped through the open window, a skinny boy wearing goggles and a tether. He landed just inside, then caught his balance and scuttled toward Perry, unfastening a spare tether from his belt.

  Ice gripped my heart. I knew that a spare tether meant Perry hadn’t come to kill me—he’d come to kidnap me.

  “Keep him away from Chess!” Loretta snapped.

  I took a shaky breath and was about to throw an elbow into Perry’s gut when I felt the edge of a blade on my neck. My knees wobbled, and my breath caught. Forget throwing any elbows. Even without a knife at my throat, I was too weak after three days in bed.

  “Take one more step!” Perry squeaked. “And I’ll cut him.”

  Swedish stopped were he stood, his fists clenched and an angry flush staining his cheeks. The little girl in the corner kept sobbing softly. The ice from my heart flowed through my veins as the skinny boy hooked the spare tether to a harness beneath Perry’s jacket.

  “Next time I see you,” Loretta told Perry, her eyes murderous.

  “You’ll never see either of us again,” Perry said.

  Swedish didn’t even glance at him. “We’re coming,” he told me, his voice shaking with emotion. “We’re already on the way.”

  Perry grabbed me in a bear hug and jumped backward through the window. We flung into the air. Tears stung my eyes, and the night sky blurred overhead. Swedish shouted my name from the infirmary window. We dropped twenty feet; then the tether swung us away from the skyscraper.

  In the distance, Rooftop warships blasted at the Nisha and Vidious and mutineer navy. Cannons roared, and harpoons hissed. And high above, a small, stealthy airship towed me away from the Port, away from my crew.