They stayed silent as J skirted the high edge of the storm, staying just out of reach. None of them had ever seen a storm from above before, and Thaddeus watched, fascinated. It was like watching some kind of battle. The clouds roiled around each other, spitting out fury and bellowing at the ground. The airship shook, J’s knuckles white on the controls as he fought against the winds pounding them. The ship dropped lower as the boy guided it toward the pass. The trees still hid the road, and for a while Thaddeus thought that J must have been mistaken — there was no pass, or at least no road that carts could cross over. But then, there it was, snaking out from beneath the forest canopy and up over the rocky incline.
“Yes!” J whooped in relief. “We’re nearly there! Now, I think I can hold her just as long as that storm doesn’t change direction . . . but hold on to your hats, ladies and gents, we’re in for a . . .”
A huge crack! sounded from above. A flash of white light filled the portholes. The airship jerked and hummed. Something hot raced along the metal bands that held the ship together. There was a groaning sound as if the craft itself was screaming in pain. They began to pitch into a spin, sinking toward the ground as a hissing filled the air.
“We’re hit!” J yelled, his arms juddering with the effort of pulling back on the controls.
The ground was rising toward them fast. Thaddeus looked up, seeing the hatch that led on to the roof. He wrenched at it, pulling it open to let the lashing rain cut across his face like icy knives. Through the open square above him, he could see the balloon, a ragged hole torn in its side.
“We’re losing gas!” he shouted. “But we’re not on fire!”
Thaddeus clambered on to one of the top bunks and then pushed himself out through the hatch. Outside, the storm had shifted, sucking the airship into its grip like a creature pulling food toward its maw. The dark clouds pressed down on them from above, spitting rain and fire. The wind raged, wild and angry, making it almost impossible to breathe. He stuck his head back inside, already out of breath.
“There’s a tear in the balloon,” he gasped, wiping icy water from his cold-stung face. “If we could reach it, we might be able to patch it. But I can’t. I’ll never be able to steady myself long enough.”
“Do sumfin’, Thaddeus,” J said, his arms shaking as he tried to hold the rapidly sinking airship steady. “Do sumfin’, or we’re done for!”
“Lassen sie mich,” said Dita. “I can do it.”
“No,” Thaddeus shook his head, “you’ll fly off into the storm. There’s nothing to hold on to, Dita.”
“Then you hold on to me,” the little girl ordered. “My legs, yes? Come on, quick, quick!”
“If she can do it, better let ’er,” J said grimly. “Ground’s not coming up any slower while we stand around and chat!”
In a second, Dita was beside Thaddeus on the bunk, and in another she had clambered through the hatch into the roaring maelstrom beyond.
“Legs,” she shouted back to Thaddeus, her voice almost torn away by the storm. “Hold my legs!”
Thaddeus leaned out of the airship as far as he could, until his arms and shoulders were exposed to the fury of the sky. He grabbed the girl’s ankles as she scrambled across the wet wood. Above her, he could see the balloon’s hole, small but rapidly billowing gas through the flapping scraps of fabric torn by the strike. Dita reached for them, pulling the ragged edges toward her and winding them around in her hands to close the gap.
“Refill,” she screamed over her shoulder. “The balloon — tell the knabe —”
Thaddeus understood her at once. “J,” he shouted over the howling wind, “can you deploy the ruby? Refill the balloon?”
“Ain’t never done it in flight before,” J yelled back. “I ain’t sure it can be done!”
“Try it, J — now!”
The boy did as he was told, winding the ruby machine’s handle as fast as he could. Thaddeus watched as Dita was buffeted by the storm. She was already soaked through, her old dress sticking to her. Her hair had fallen out of her headscarf and was plastered over her face, but she clutched the balloon valiantly, the girl’s small hands seeming even tinier against the huge contraption. More lightning strikes lit up the raging sky around them, the thunder an incessant drum roll right above their heads.
Thaddeus heard the hiss as J refilled the balloon. He watched as it swelled away from Dita. She had to battle to keep her grip as it struggled to jerk away from her with every new puff of gas. Thaddeus held on to her, feeling his legs beginning to cramp. His hands were numb with cold. He couldn’t see for rain, and several times he felt the hot crackle of electricity as the clouds continued to hurl spears of lightning. He felt Dita move, and blinked the rain from his eyes long enough to see that she had something in her mouth. He realized in a flash that it was her headscarf. Dita struggled to wind it around and around the torn fabric that she still clutched in her hands, tying it off in a complicated knot. The balloon was full now, bobbing and struggling to get away from her. She let go.
Thaddeus held his breath, but the knot stayed fast. All it had to do was last until J could bring them into land.
Dita was scrambling backward when the airship gave a tremendous jerk. The little girl screamed as she was flung flat against the slippery wood, only Thaddeus’s grip stopping her from sliding off the roof.
“Dita!” Thaddeus yelled over the storm. He tried to pull her toward him, but she was a dead weight. His hands were so frozen he could hardly feel them.
“What’s happening?” J shouted.
“Just get us down, J!” Thaddeus bellowed. “I can’t hold her . . .”
A moment later, the ship touched down with a jaw-crunching jolt. Thaddeus’s icy hands gave up and he lost his grip on Dita. She disappeared from sight, slithering down the rough side of the airship.
J appeared in the hatch. “Thaddeus! Are you —”
Thaddeus jumped to his feet, feeling the rain sluice down his neck. “Dita fell,” he yelled. “Get out there!”
J uttered a curse and vanished, Thaddeus struggling after him. He followed J out of the gangplank and into the pouring rain, both of them running for the huddled figure. Thaddeus dropped to his knees beside the girl, feeling for a pulse.
“She’s alive,” he told J with relief. “But I don’t know how badly she’s hurt.”
“We gotta get ’er inside!” J shouted over the noise of the storm.
“I don’t know if we should move her!”
“We can’t leave ’er out ’ere!”
Thaddeus nodded, pushing his hair back again, feeling the icy water cascade down his neck and into his sodden shirt. He lifted the little girl up. She weighed almost nothing.
“Put ’er on my bunk,” J said, when they got inside.
Dita groaned and opened her eyes as Thaddeus laid her down. “There you are,” he said in relief as her green eyes blinked at him, pained but at least clear. “Where does it hurt?”
Dita was silent for a moment, a look of concentration on her pale face, as if she were working out the answer to Thaddeus’s question.
“My . . . my arm,” she said. “I think it’s just my arm . . .”
Thaddeus rolled up her torn sleeve as gently as possible. Beneath was a nasty wound, open and bleeding. It gaped its ugliness at Thaddeus, who took a deep breath and forced a smile.
“I’m sure we can sort that out in no time.”
Dita smiled faintly, and then fixed her gaze on the ceiling. Thaddeus could see she was biting her lip. Against the pain or to stop herself from crying, he couldn’t tell, but either way the policeman was astounded by the little girl’s silent bravery. He’d seen grown men wail over far less.
J had vanished to one of the wooden cupboards at the other end of the cabin as soon as Thaddeus had revealed Dita’s injury, dragging out a tin box and scrabbling around inside. He returned
a moment later with a needle, thread, and roll of bandage.
“It ain’t much,” he said in a hushed, apologetic voice, “but it’s the best I can do. Be careful wiv the needle, too — we’re going to need it to fix the balloon later.”
Thaddeus nodded grimly, taking the offered items. “Have you got any alcohol, J?”
J looked shifty. “A quart of cheap whisky, but don’t ask me where it came from.”
“I don’t care where it came from, bring it here.”
“Really? Is now the right time for a tipple, Thaddeus? I mean, I know we’re all in shock and all, but . . .” The boy nodded at Dita, pale and still and trembling.
“It’s not for me,” Thaddeus snapped. “It’s to clean this needle. Hurry!”
J scurried away again, coming back with a small bottle of clear, amber-colored liquid. Thaddeus grabbed it from him and uncorked the bottle, splashing the contents over the needle and thread, as well as his hands. He heard J stifle a squeak as a good deal of the whisky ended up on the floor.
“Right, Dita,” said Thaddeus, as the crack and roll of thunder went on overhead. “This is going to hurt, but it’s got to be done. I’ll be as quick as I can, all right?”
Dita nodded and then raised her arm across her mouth. It took Thaddeus a moment to realize that the girl had taken the thin fabric in her teeth and was biting down against the pain.
He splashed whisky across the girl’s wound, hoping to clean the worst of it. She shuddered, squeezing her eyes shut. After that, the first stitch was the worst — pushing the needle through the skin and out the other side. Thaddeus felt sick, but as he’d told Dita, it had to be done — the wound was too bad to heal on its own.
“Bleedin’ ’eck,” J muttered, slumping to the floor, white as a sheet.
Thaddeus sewed quickly and as neatly as he could, pulling the torn skin together. Then he splashed his hands with more whisky to clean them a little and wrapped the girl’s arm in a bandage. Dita had passed out toward the end. She lay still and quiet in J’s bunk.
Once the wound was wrapped, J and Thaddeus stood looking down at her. “She’s a braver soul than maybe I’s gave her due for,” J conceded. Thaddeus was inclined to agree.
Exhausted and drained, they just managed to stay awake long enough for J to stow the balloon’s remaining gas in the storage canisters. Then they collapsed into two of the remaining bunks, sleeping despite the storm raging on above their heads.
{Chapter 26}
REGRETS
The storm had raged all night, the cold rain pelting Rémy and Yannick hard until they eventually decided to find shelter under the trees. They turned off the road and secured the horses under the leafiest branches they could find before huddling, wet, bedraggled, and hungry, inside the tattered remnants of a dead oak tree.
Yannick managed to doze, but Rémy could not. A nameless worry nagged at her, a notion that something here wasn’t quite right. But every time she almost caught it, the thought was engulfed by a buzzing that seemed to come and go inside her head. Rémy wondered whether it was caused by the storm, which seemed to be powered by the fury of heaven itself. She toyed with the idea of getting out the golden cube again but resisted the urge. Rémy was still unsettled by the loss of her opal and the discovery that Yannick had stolen something — however insignificant — from the Professor’s workshop. Show it only to the one you trust most, the old woman’s note had said — and that definitely wasn’t Yannick. Not anymore.
She wished Thaddeus were there to talk to about everything else she had learned in the past twenty-four hours. That she had met someone who had known her mother, and her father, too. That perhaps she had a brother. That she had lost her beloved opal. Now that it was gone forever, Rémy kept touching her throat where it used to lie and wondering what had seemed so important that she would take it off. Why had she never explained to Thaddeus and J what it could do, or even Claudette and Amélie, before they had left? If Thaddeus had known, if they could have been more open with each other, none of this would have happened.
Rémy shut her tired eyes, willing herself not to cry. All of this was her own doing, and she had no right to feel sorry for herself. She knew the real reason she had kept the opal’s powers secret. Because telling Thaddeus the truth would have meant confronting what he had said in Abernathy’s underground chamber. Now, Rémy couldn’t even work out why that would have been a bad thing. What could he possibly have told her that would have made things worse between them than the way they were now? Had she been afraid that he’d say he didn’t love her after all? No, that wasn’t it. The truth was precisely the opposite. She’d been afraid that he did love her — she knew it, in fact. Rémy knew that he loved her, and knowing that scared her more than anything else in her life.
Yannick’s scornful words rang in her head again. What did you think you were going to do? Wed him? Become a respectable little London housewife?
The answer was, in fact, no. No, that wasn’t what Rémy thought she was going to do. But she was afraid it was what Thaddeus was expecting. And the circus girl knew, hopelessly and with absolute certainty, that she couldn’t do that, she couldn’t be that. It wasn’t her, and it never would be. So she’d avoided any chance of him ever bringing it up, because that was better than losing him completely.
She’d done that anyway in the end, of course, thanks to her stubborn pride. Rémy had told herself her anger back in London was justified because Thaddeus had chosen the easy route and shifted the blame for the burglaries onto her trusty old friend Yannick. And how dare Thaddeus imagine he knew this friend of her childhood better than she did? How dare he assume that because Yannick was of the circus, he must automatically be a crook?
What a rank fool you are, Rémy Brunel, she thought now, hugging herself and staring out into the rain. Since when has Thaddeus assumed anything? Did you stop to ask him his proof? No. Would you have listened even if he had told you? Probably not. Your pride has always been your downfall, and so it proves to be again. And now here you are with a thief, just because you were too much of a coward to face up to the truth. Worse, you’ll never see Thaddeus again, and he’ll think you were a part of it after all.
Still, there was nothing she could do about any of that now. The best thing to do was to put London behind her, find Claudette, and get back into the circus life. Things could be worse, after all. At least she knew a warm welcome would be waiting for her once they finally caught up with Le Cirque des Secrets.
With that in mind, the sun was barely up when Rémy nudged Yannick awake. The storm had finally burnt itself out, and the landscape was peaceful once again.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get back on the road. We’ve still got so far to go before we catch up. They must be at least two more towns ahead now.”
Yannick rubbed the sleep from his eyes and then looked at her carefully.
“What?” Rémy asked, suspicious.
“Do you feel all right?” the magician asked.
“What, other than being soaked through and very hungry?” Rémy asked. “I’m fine, why?”
Yannick grinned, jumping to his feet. “Nothing. Just wondered. Come on, then — let’s go.”
Rémy looked after him with a frown, almost remembering something. It faded amid another bout of buzzing.
{Chapter 27}
REPAIRS
Thaddeus woke to the delicious smell of coffee and to sun streaming through the portholes. Two of the pigeons were pecking about the floor, looking for breakfast, the third was cooing softly from its hutch. He blinked sleep away as he turned over to look up at the curved ceiling, when suddenly the events of the previous night came flooding back. Sitting up, Thaddeus looked at the opposite bunk. Dita was still there and seemed to be asleep. Her skin was paler than usual, but her cheeks were rosy. He got up and laid a hand on her forehead, relieved to feel no signs of a fever. The little girl stirr
ed and mumbled, but did not wake.
From outside came brisk whistling and the clatter of tin pots. Thaddeus ducked his head out of the open gangplank to see J fussing over a cooking fire, smoke rising steadily into the blue sky.
“Morning,” Thaddeus said, stepping out. “Storm’s passed on then?”
J looked up at him with a cheery grin. “Mornin’. Aye, looks like the weather’s turned. Ain’t it pretty out ’ere?”
Thaddeus had to agree. They had landed at the apex of a rough road that passed between two mountains. The thick forest that had forced them to fly on dwindled into scrub, and beyond the pass, the road wound slowly down to the base of a fertile, green valley.
“I ’ad a bit of a look-see earlier,” said J, as he lined up three tin mugs and began to pour thickly-brewed coffee into them. “I fink there’s a village on the other side of the valley. What a place to live, eh?”
Thaddeus turned as the boy offered him a steaming mug. “You’re strangely happy after what happened last night.”
“Ah, well,” said J, “the little miss looks like she’s going to be fine so, all fings considered, it could ’ave been worse. That’s why I made the coffee — thought she could do with a nice way to wake up.”
The policeman raised his eyebrows. “I actually meant the airship. The damage, from the storm? It wasn’t just the balloon, you know — the wood up there’s badly gouged, too.”
“Oh,” said J awkwardly. A faint blush tinted his cheeks and he turned away to pick up the last two mugs. “Well, fing is, it ain’t like it’s not fixable, or nuffin’. So like I says, all fings considered . . .” He trailed off, looking down at the two mugs he held. “Er . . . I’ll be back in a tick.”
Thaddeus smiled to himself as J disappeared into the airship, though his heart ached a little. J’s abashed look reminded him of himself, and that made him think once more of Rémy. He sipped his coffee — which wasn’t at all bad — and gazed down into the valley beyond the pass, wondering where she was at that moment. He still didn’t really know what he and J were doing there, or what he was expected to do when — if — he found her. The further they got into their journey, the more Thaddeus felt he was on a fool’s errand. If it hadn’t been for his worries about the Comte and for Dorfmann’s concerns over Claudette, Thaddeus would probably have told J they needed to give up now. He thought it very likely that Rémy would simply laugh in his face when she saw him here, in any case. What did he have to offer her back in London, compared to the freedom of this landscape he saw around him — compared to the country she called home?
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