by Joel Ross
“Bea’s arguing with the floor.”
A roof-trooper bellowed, “They’re in the walls!”
“Faster, Bea,” Hazel said, her voice tight.
“This way!” Bea said, and scurried around a corner.
My hands and knees scuffed on the rough wood floor. Gears the size of camel wagons crowded the crawl space, narrowing the passage. Swedish grumbled that he couldn’t get through, but he somehow managed, and we squeezed down a slanted passage. Waves of heat wafted around us, and a rattle-creak sounded, along with the urgent murmur of soldiers’ voices.
“Gearslingers,” Hazel said, low and controlled.
“Trying to fix the ship,” Swedish said.
The rattle-creak sounded again. “Those are wheels,” Hazel said. “They’re on carts. Coming fast.”
Bea opened a hatch on the floor and dropped into a narrow room full of gauges. At the far end of the room, she tugged at a porthole with a window of woven wires.
“Locked,” she said, rummaging in her tool belt.
Rattle-creak. “They’re still coming . . . ,” Hazel said.
“Good.” Loretta cracked her neck. “Let ’em come.”
“Close the hatch,” Hazel snapped at her.
“Or that,” Loretta said with a sigh.
The voices sounded louder, angrier, rougher. The rattle-creak-creak-creak scraped closer, then paused directly above us. “—find those crudknuckles and shred them into fetti.”
Not gearslingers. Airsoldiers.
“Unlocked!” Bea whispered, and pulled the porthole open.
She squirmed through, and the rest of us jostled behind her. Swedish closed the porthole an instant before a skinny roof-trooper fell from the ceiling hatch—and spotted us beyond the woven wire.
“Here!” he bellowed, and Swedish slammed the lock closed.
With the airsoldiers pounding behind us, we dashed through a hallway crisscrossed with pipes. My mind whirled with questions, but I kept my mouth shut and my feet moving until Bea removed a panel that opened into a vertical shaft.
“C’mon, down the ladder!” She squeezed through, and her voice sounded from the gloom. “We’re almost there!”
“What ladder?” Loretta scowled at the opening. “There’s no ladder. I don’t see a ladder.”
“The same one we climbed up,” Hazel said, nudging her forward.
“That’s not a ladder,” Loretta grumbled, putting one leg into the hole. “It’s a death trap.”
“Wait,” I said. “You climbed up? Up from where?”
“The Fog,” Swede told me.
“No, you— What?” I turned to Hazel. “What did you do?”
“You’ll see,” she said with a hint of a smile. “After you get your tetherbutt in gear.”
Shouts and hammering echoed around us. Hazel nudged me at the opening, and I groped inside, then clambered into the shaft. The “rungs” of the ladder were two inches long and studded with rubber grommets. Bea’s headlamp glowed feebly below me. My fingers cramped as I climbed down, and I followed the sound of Loretta’s cursing.
“You flew in the Fog?!” I asked, my voice hollow. “You can’t—engines don’t work in the Fog.”
“We glid!” Bea exclaimed from the darkness below me.
“Glided,” Hazel called out from above me.
“That’s what I just said,” Bea told her.
“We didn’t use an engine,” Hazel said. “We glided to the scaffolding under the Predator.”
“You landed on a diving platform?” My mind spun. “How did you see? How did you glide? What if you get sick?”
“Bea built a skyhook,” Hazel said, like that made sense. “A modified crane, on top of the glider, to hook their diving platform from underneath. From inside the Fog. We climbed up that.”
“Hazel used Captain Osho’s gear to find the Predator,” Swedish said from lower down.
“And we got lucky,” Loretta said.
The shaft ended in a big chamber with a domed sheet-metal ceiling. Dozens of winches lined the floor, each with a tether coiled on the ground. Doors were evenly spaced in the walls, and Swedish jogged to one with an airlock-type wheel keeping it closed.
“These are for Kodoc’s tetherkids?” I asked, looking at the winches and tethers.
“Yup,” Bea said. “We’re directly above the diving platforms.”
“We hooked onto the Predator from down below,” Hazel told me. “Swedish—hurry with the lock!”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Swede said, grunting over the wheel in the door.
“So our ship’s inside the Fog?” I asked.
“Yeah, dangling down,” Hazel said. “That way the airsailors couldn’t spot her while we were looking for you.”
“How’re we going to take off?”
“I built a remote engine with a long chain!” Bea said from farther in the chamber. “It’ll power the fans from high above, so we can launch the glider over the Fog—”
“We hope,” Swedish grumbled, as the wheel squeaked.
“—where the real engine will kick in!”
“Forget that!” Loretta elbowed me. “Check this out.”
She pointed to a big mesh cube in the corner, sprouting vents and a spool of nano-wire, squatting on top of a locked trapdoor.
“What is it?” I asked as Bea ran her fingers over the nano-wire braid. “A foggium generator?”
“I think these wires are a fuse,” Bea said.
“Look closer,” Loretta told me. “Inside the box.”
Shafts of light streamed through a vent on the wall and glinted inside the mesh. It wasn’t a cube—it was a cage. A weird shape hung in the center, held in place by a web of wires. A raindrop shape. A teardrop shape. And as light touched it, the shape glimmered with a zillion colorful sparkles.
“Whoa.” I blinked at the shimmering colors. “That’s, that’s . . .”
“Diamonds,” Hazel told me. “Thousands of diamonds.”
“No,” I breathed.
“With a fuse.” Swedish gritted his teeth as the wheel in the door slowly turned. “I told you they were collecting diamonds for a mountain-buster bomb. I told you!”
“C’mon, Swede,” Hazel urged. “Open it!”
“Almost there,” Swedish grunted as airsoldiers’ voices sounded closer.
“Bea—” Hazel’s eyes narrowed. “Figure that fuse out.”
“He’s some kind of cannon.” Bea fiddled with the wires. “At least, I think so.”
“He’s not telling you?” I asked, only half teasing.
“I’ve never met anyone like him before.” She chewed her lower lip and untwined a few wires. “Oh! I think he’s a remote friction trigger, a super-purple version of the hand-brake bell on Chess’s tether—”
The clang of metal echoed into the room. Footsteps scuffed and weapons jangled in the corridors outside.
“Done!” Swedish said, yanking the door open.
“Go, go!” Hazel barked. “They’re almost here.”
“No.” Kodoc’s slithery voice filled the room. “We are here.”
29
KODOC EMERGED THROUGH an archway, with a squad of airsoldiers behind him. When he lifted his hand, the soldiers fanned out, pointing steam-bows at us.
“You latched onto my ship from beneath?” Kodoc arched an eyebrow. “How ingenious.”
“Smarter than your crusty camelface,” Loretta muttered.
“Sadly,” he said in his slithery voice, “I have no need for you, except as hostages to keep the tetherboy obedient. And you’ve been sabotaging my ship. For that, you will pay.”
“Bea,” Hazel said, low and urgent. “Tell me you know how that works.”
Bea nodded, her green eyes wide with fear. “Ready when you are, Cap’n.”
“Ready for what?” Kodoc led his men closer, steam-bows raised. “Do you honestly think you can—”
“She’ll trigger the bomb,” Hazel interrupted. “She’s got the fuse in her hand.�
��
“That little girl?” Kodoc sneered at Bea. “She’ll do no such thing.”
“She’ll do what I tell her,” Hazel said, and the confidence in her voice made the airsoldiers glance at one another uneasily.
Kodoc frowned at Hazel. “You’re hardly more than a little girl yourself.”
“Unspool the fuse, Bea,” Hazel said, still watching Kodoc. “We’re leaving.”
“If you cross me,” Kodoc snarled, raising his own weapon, “I’ll ditch you all into the Fog.”
“Go on, Bea,” Hazel said, ignoring him. “Through the door.”
Bea edged toward the door that Swedish had unlocked, unwinding the nano-wire fuse behind her.
“Take aim!” Kodoc ordered, and his soldiers settled into firing position. “Fire on my mark!”
The steam-bows gleamed in the faint light, and the barrels looked like death. For a moment, the world stopped spinning, and even the Fog grew still.
Then Hazel said, “Look at me, Kodoc.”
Something in her tone must’ve struck him, because he gazed at her with his grim eyes.
Hazel didn’t flinch. “If you pull that trigger, I swear by the Fog that I’ll drop this ship from the sky. I swear by the silence and the white that we’ll trigger that bomb.” Her soft voice grew even softer. “I swear by all the high places that I will kill everything I love before I ever let you lay a hand on Chess again.”
Goose bumps rose on my arms, and a few airsoldiers took involuntary steps backward. Clockworks ticked, steam-bows bristled from soldiers’ fists, and the scent of sweat and engine grease wafted through the room.
“You won’t,” Kodoc said.
“You know I will,” Hazel told him. “You would.”
“The next time I see you, girl,” he spat at Hazel, lowering his weapon, “I’ll put you down myself.”
Relief turned my legs to jelly as his airsoldiers lowered their steam-bows, and the rest of our escape seemed to happen in flashes. We shoved through the airlock door onto a deck that hung from the bottom of the Predator. Swedish slammed the door, and Bea wrapped the fuse around the handle to keep it closed.
“Maybe Chess has Fog in his eye,” Loretta said, cracking her neck. “But Hazel’s got loco in hers.”
Dozens of ladders lowered toward the Fog like a crazy trellis, with loops and pulleys and planks. At the bottom of the scaffolding, a massive claw with grappling hooks like octopus arms clamped onto the ladders: the “skyhook” that Bea had built. A foggium engine sat beside the claw, and a chain dropped down beside a cord with evenly spaced knots, swaying into the Fog fifty yards below.
A hard, cold wind made the diving platform creak and sway. I grabbed the knotted cord and started down ahead of the others. When the world turned black with Fog, I loosened my grip and dropped until my boots scraped a huge glide-wing. The knotted cord ended at the fans of the airship.
The others followed, and I led them into place. After I strapped Hazel down behind Swede, she shouted, “Chess! Fire her up!”
I scrambled to the rear of the glider and tugged the chain. High above, the foggium engine must’ve roared. The chain blurred, and the fans started spinning. Then Hazel called my name, so I vaulted past Loretta—who was bellowing “The Stars-Tangled Panda,” for some reason.
“Here!” I yelled to Hazel.
She shouted, “Cut us loose! Top of the wing!”
I grabbed a loop and swung to the top of the glide-wing. The ship zoomed forward, tilting upward like a pendulum, still connected to the Predator with the skyhook. I groped in the dark Fog around the crane, then yanked a quick-release lever.
The airship rocketed upward through the inky black mist. Sheer terror filled me—and pure exhilaration. We rose higher until the sky opened. The whirr of the fans suddenly sounded louder, and so did Loretta bellowing, “—does that stars-tangled panda yet waaaaave, on the land of the Fog and the food that we crave!”
Then the engine kicked in, the pistons growled, and the Fog blurred beneath us.
“Stay low,” Hazel told Swedish. “Kodoc’s still close.”
When I glanced over my shoulder, the Rooftop armada shone like a globe of fireflies in the night. Dozens of small, bright torchships orbited Kodoc’s warships, illuminating the area to watch for attackers.
“Whoa,” Swedish gasped.
“Yeah,” Hazel said. “We’re still in eyeshot.”
“I’m not talking about Kodoc.”
Hazel scanned the sky. “What, then?”
“We’re alive!” Swedish told her. “I did not see that coming.”
Bea giggled, and Hazel shushed her—then she started giggling, too.
A wave of relief rose in my heart, and I started grinning madly. A moment later, we were all laughing like lug nuts, skimming over the Fog in a freaky glider.
When we settled down, I said, “If you ever do that again, I’ll kill you!”
“Eh,” Swedish said. “It was nothing.”
I’d been kidding, but a sudden chill shriveled my heart. They’d risked their lives on a loco long shot, trying to snatch me from inside the Predator. They could’ve died. Every single one of them. “You flew in the Fog,” I said. “You flew in the Fog.”
“You’re not the only fog-monster around here!” Loretta crowed.
I glared at Hazel, my fear making me angry. “If you’d missed the Predator, you would’ve crashed.”
“She didn’t miss,” Bea said.
“And you brought Bea!” I snapped.
Hazel looked so stricken that I almost wished I could take it back. But not totally, because we both knew the rules: Bea came first.
“I know,” Hazel said in a soft voice. “I’m sorry.”
“You—” I took a breath. “You saved my life. I know you did. But Bea isn’t, she’s not . . . You can’t just—”
“There wasn’t any other way,” Hazel told me.
“Next time . . .”
“I’ll leave Bea behind.”
“I hate you two,” Bea said.
Swedish scowled at me from the wheel. “Hey, Chess. There’s a reason you’re the diver.”
“So?”
“So there’s also a reason Hazel’s the captain.”
The glider banked leftward, and I swayed with the motion, grabbing a strap. Swedish meant that even though we all knew the rules, Hazel also knew when to break them.
“You’re right.” I took a slow breath. “I just— This is peanuts! I can’t believe the mutineers let you glide through the Fog. This is beyond peanuts.”
“Don’t look at me.” Loretta rubbed the tattoo on her face. “I voted to leave you there.”
“You did not!” Bea called from the engine. “You asked me to build you a portable harpoon with an airtank-backpack.”
Loretta pointed her forefingers like guns. “And a launcher strapped to each arm.”
“See?” Bea told me.
“But not to rescue Chess!” Loretta insisted. “Just because they’d be cool.” She aimed her imaginary arm-mounted harpoons at the armada. “Pew. Pew-pew.”
“What happened after Perry grabbed you?” Hazel asked me.
I told them about the flight to the Predator. I told them about Perry kicking me, and Kodoc ditching him off the side of the ship. “I hated him, but . . .”
“Not a good way to die,” Loretta said with a nod. “I’ll toss some rice into the Fog for him.”
“I don’t see how that’ll help,” Bea said, chewing her lower lip.
“It’s how gangs remember their dead,” Swedish told her, then looked at me. “Then what?”
My voice cracked when I told them about the refinery kids in the cell. I described my meal with Kodoc and the soldier prodding Rizal along the plank. I told them that now that I’d escaped, Kodoc wouldn’t have any reason to make the kids walk the plank—and I prayed I was right. Then I took a breath and admitted that I’d first drawn a messed-up map for Kodoc . . . and then an accurate one.
“You d
idn’t have a choice,” Swedish said.
“Of course he did,” Loretta said. “What does Chess owe the junkyard? He should’ve let Kodoc ditch the whole place.”
“There are kids there,” Bea said. “And—and people like Mrs. E.”
“Ignore Retta,” Swedish told Bea. “She’s just talking.”
Loretta aimed a finger at Swedish. “Pew!”
“You know I’m right.”
“What do we do now?” I asked, looking to Hazel.
She scanned the sky behind us. “First we stay ahead of Kodoc’s pursuit—”
“His what?” Loretta said as I spun toward the armada.
Sure enough, the round globe of glowing torchships now had a long point, aimed directly at us. We’d been spotted.
“How long before they reach us?” I asked.
“The glider’s not built for speed,” Hazel admitted. “Bea?”
“Depends on the wind.” Bea chewed her lower lip. “And if they’re mostly fixing the Predator or mostly chasing us.”
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“The plan ended with saving you from Kodoc,” Hazel told me. “Uh. I guess we keep heading for Port Oro, and hope we run into mutineers.”
“They’re not going to be thrilled to see us,” Swedish said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“We sort of stole the glider from them.”
“And by ‘sort of,’” Loretta told me, “he means ‘totally.’ Vidious and Nisha were supposed to fly it, but Hazel got there first.”
I winced. “So nobody’s waiting to pick us up?”
Hazel shook her head. “Nope. And it’s a long glide home.”
“We don’t have to worry about gliding home,” Bea told us, still watching the Rooftop armada. “Kodoc will reach us way before we get there.”
The glide-wing creaked in an updraft, and the frame trembled. The air seemed to thrum with tension, and nobody spoke until Loretta said, “Now don’t you wish I had a couple of armpoons?”
Swede gave a bark of laughter. “You call them ‘armpoons’?”
“I don’t call them that!” Loretta said. “It’s what they’re called.”
“Pew!” Bea aimed a finger at the gunships following us. “Pew-pew! I got one!”