The silver curtain parted.
Grit flew past the Hall of Stories, fighting the chill that had crept into her bones. How silly, scaring herself with her own story!
But Grit could not comfort herself with the idea that it was “just” a story. The very real Unseelie king—and his real daughter—waiting a few miles away were proof enough of that. Nothing was just a story in her world, because stories were a good part of why her world still existed. If the power of the fae couldn’t even live on in rumors, or old wives’ tales, or whispers around a campfire on a dark night . . . what would become of them? What would become of them when no one was left who believed?
Grit shook her head, red and yellow curls springing out of her bun. She was starting to sound like her mother, for fae’s sake. Best leave the worrying to the old crones back at the Arboretum.
She found Carmer at what she assumed was Tinka’s desk, half buried under stacks of notes, reports, and diagrams. He was so absorbed he didn’t even notice her land on the edge of the newspaper he was reading until she started to make it smoke from the soles of her feet.
“Hey, what the—” He jumped back, patting at the blackened edges, until he saw her and sighed with relief while she cackled with amusement. “You know better than that! How many times have I told you—”
“No open flames around the airships,” she repeated along with him.
He raised an eyebrow into his shock of messy black hair.
“Do you see any flames?” she asked innocently. “Besides, it would have taken a small explosion to distract you, anyway. Anything good in there?” She nudged a stack of papers with her foot; Carmer grabbed it before it fell over.
“Not really,” he admitted, sighing. “I’ve been over every accident report from the police, every internal review Mr. Tinkerton—that’s Tinka’s real name, by the way—has done himself, and so far, I can only come to the same conclusion as he has.”
“Sabotage?” Grit asked. It made her feel rather important and grown-up to be slinging words like “sabotage” around.
Carmer nodded. “I can’t find any flaws in his inventions. In theory, they should all work without any ‘extra help,’ if you know what I mean. Bell was right—these designs are genius. The modifications to Frost’s ornithopter alone—”
Grit cleared her throat.
“Ah, right,” said Carmer, blushing. “Not strictly relevant, I guess. I should have Bell take a look at these, though. Admittedly, I don’t know as much about aeronautics as I should.”
“You should get right on that in all of your spare time,” Grit teased.
“I did notice something odd, though,” Carmer said, shimmying a few papers out from the bottom of each stack. “It’s probably nothing, and I’m probably just overanalyzing things—”
“Carmer,” Grit said, swatting the paper in his hand.
He flattened out two of the designs in front of him.
“Tinka organizes his notes for each design by date,” he explained. “And he keeps everything. It’s kind of fascinating, actually, to see someone else’s progress from the initial sketch of the idea all the way to the finished product.” With one finger, he spun the propeller on a model airplane on the edge of the desk.
“But the problem is, his original sketches . . . well, they don’t look so original to me.” He turned a diagram toward Grit; all she saw was a mess of circles, lines, and indecipherably tiny labels that made her head spin.
“It might help if I knew what I was looking at?”
Carmer waved her off. “That’s not the important part. Just look at it. I was just thinking . . . when I’m working on a new design, my drafts are, well, messy. Maybe the sketch is incomplete, or I’ve crossed out original ideas and changed them halfway through drawing . . . or if I’ve been using a pencil, there’re erasure marks all over the page. But Tinkerton . . . he keeps meticulous records of every stage of a design’s development, but his early drafts are just as pristine as his later ones.”
Grit took a closer look at the diagram and saw Carmer was right. There were no scrawled notes in the margins like she’d seen on Carmer’s designs, no crossed-out labels or even creases in the paper.
“Maybe he only preserves clean copies for his records,” Carmer suggested. “Or . . .”
“Or maybe his copies are exactly that,” Grit finished for him. “And these aren’t Tinkerton’s designs at all.”
Carmer shrugged. “He could have made copies to cover up discrepancies in the handwriting. This isn’t the same writing as the note that we intercepted.” He told Grit about the moment during Bell’s audition when he had brought up another inventor’s work on ornithopters—and how Tinkerton had seemed a little too eager to skip over the subject.
“That ticket could have been sent by anyone on the show, though, just trying to sneak in a friend,” Grit pointed out. “But there’s something else as well.” She recounted her little chat with the Free Folk on the Trailway—Carmer blanched at the mention of the Unseelie king, but said nothing—and the mysterious hand emerging from the Crooked Castle. “Beamsprout said, ‘Whoever is messing with Tinka’s ships has nothing to do with us’ . . . almost like the Wonder Show ships and his other projects didn’t have anything to do with each other.”
Carmer thought for a moment. “If he’s got a . . . a ‘silent partner,’ let’s say—”
“Or he’s forcing someone to do the work for him,” Grit suggested darkly, her mind immediately turning to the Mechanist.
Carmer nodded. “Or that. Maybe they’re fed up with being taken advantage of, and they want to discredit him . . . but . . .”
“But?” Grit turned to the newspaper she’d burned with her feet, struggling to lift the wide pages open to the full story about the Jasconius crash.
“If Tinkerton were stealing someone else’s work without their permission,” Carmer explained, “wouldn’t that person be his number one suspect? Why would he hire us to investigate, when he had the most likely culprit right in front of him? Why risk outsiders finding out?”
“That’s . . . a fair point, actually,” Grit conceded. “But what do we do now?” She smoothed out the corner of the page with her boot, careful not to singe it this time.
“Actually,” said Carmer, shifting in his seat. “I don’t think we do anything.”
“What?” Grit looked up at him in surprise.
He raised his hands. “At least not until we have more proof. The sketches could mean anything.”
“But if he’s got someone locked in a tower—”
“Grit,” said Carmer, “you saw someone in a ship that looks like a tower. Are you going to tell me that the Wonder Show performers who work on the replica of Baba Yaga’s house on giant chicken legs are really being cooked in a stew by some old witch?”
Grit pursed her lips and paced along the newspaper on the desk. “Of course not. But something’s just not right here, Carmer.”
“I agree. But in the meantime, I think we should focus on our job. And also, apparently, on our upcoming visit with the Unseelie king.”
“My upcoming visit with the Unseelie king,” corrected Grit, frowning at how pale Carmer looked at the prospect. “It’s no big deal,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I just show up, say hi, how are you, promise not to sow any seeds of magical unrest, et cetera—” Grit suddenly stopped short. “And speaking of our job,” she said slowly, staring at the newspaper under her feet, “I think I just found something that might make it easier.” She scooted the paper toward Carmer.
“I’ve been leafing through these all day, and I haven’t found . . .” Carmer trailed off as he looked at the grainy photograph, clearly taken just moments after the crash. In the flaming chaos, a young man was running away from the ship. Unlike the other bystanders around him, he had not turned back to look at the wreckage. Only a brief stop to catch his breath, or some other distraction at the exact moment the photo was taken, meant his features were in focus. And even then, he was half c
ut off at the edge of the cluttered frame.
Despite capturing the catastrophic scene, the photograph was admittedly not as striking or as well composed as some of the others Carmer had seen. He wasn’t surprised it hadn’t made it into the other papers.
He was surprised, however, to be looking down at the terrified face of Bell Daisimer.
10.
WITNESS PROTECTION
Carmer and Grit had hoped to find Bell still at the Wonder Show camp, but a quick search turned up no sign of him until they ran into Nan Tucket, who seemed sure he’d gone back to the Moto-Manse. Carmer biked to the nearest air-bus station and hopped on.
The universe seemed to sense they were in a hurry, so naturally, the bus hit traffic as soon as it neared Topside. The ship was forced to slow down, penned in between another air-bus and a sightseeing tour. The jam was so bad the ships were trapped end to end, like fish caught in a narrowing stream.
“What’s the holdup?” someone yelled from down the line.
The captain of the ship beside them stepped out onto his gondola to see if anything was up ahead. Curious passengers leaned out of the windows despite the bitter cold.
“Police action at the Topside Hotel!” a man’s voice shouted from up ahead. “Some nutter’s threatening to jump off the roof!”
“Well, I wish he’d make a decision!” a woman snapped. “We’re all going to freeze in our ships out here!”
“They say he’s wearing costume wings!”
“I heard he’s with the circus!”
Carmer’s head snapped up. If Bell was somehow mixed up in all of this . . .
He ran to the window, ignoring the fluttering in his stomach at the thought of looking down, but there was nothing to see—only the floating hulls of other ships and the occasional balloonist trying to play hopscotch over the congestion. It was twenty minutes before they came within sight of the hotel, and by then, police were already clearing the area. No one seemed to be on the roof.
“Who was it, Ern?” Carmer’s air-bus captain shouted to a policeman who was waving ships along.
The officer frowned but called back: “Some Russian fellow from the Wonder Show. I’m just glad I’m not the one scraping brains off the pavement!”
The captain shouted more questions, but “Ern” waved them along. Carmer sank back into his seat, not knowing whether to be relieved or not. Whoever the suicidal ornithopter pilot was, it probably wasn’t Bell. But it was someone.
“Carmer,” Grit whispered into his ear, “do you think it’s the pilot you said Tinkerton kept complaining was a no-show, Mikhail something? The one Bell replaced?”
“Maybe.”
The air-bus stop was crowded and noisy as they disembarked, everyone abuzz with gossip about the jumper. It made Carmer feel sick, but he listened anyway.
“I heard he was babbling about Rinka Tinka’s Roving Wonder Show,” a woman’s hissing voice declared to her neighbor. She sounded anything but upset. “Said something about that Tinka playing with power that weren’t rightfully his. ‘Flying too close to the sun,’ and all that.”
“And then, SPLAT!” interrupted a sooty-faced boy, sending his friends howling with laughter and the gossiping women tut-tutting.
Carmer pushed through the laughing boys, knocking their leader on the shoulder as he walked away. It was a move that would have normally garnered him a pounding, but something in his face must have warned the boys off.
“Carmer . . .” Grit started.
“Later,” he said. “Let’s just find Bell, okay?”
Grit sighed. It was a cold, quiet journey back to the Moto-Manse.
BELL DAISIMER SLUMPED in his chair in the tiny kitchen of the Moto-Manse, fingers shaking as he held the newspaper clipping up to the light. He barely registered Carmer and Grit’s concerned expressions. He almost wanted to be mad at them—he’d just scored the job of a lifetime, in the greatest flying circus on earth!—but he knew it wasn’t their fault. They hadn’t taken the photo. Someone would have found out eventually, and it could have been someone who would make him pay for it.
“I should’ve left,” he said, trying to fight the lump in his throat. “I should’ve kept going, busted balloon or not. I should never have come back to Driff City.”
The voice echoed in his head: Run, little boy, and don’t look back.
Carmer nudged the tea closer to Bell, and he took a half-hearted sip. Bell was pretty sure Carmer would make them all tea if the sky were falling.
“Why did you have to leave in the first place?” Grit asked, her voice uncharacteristically soft, but still insistent. “And why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because . . .” Bell put his face in his hands. “Because . . .”
“Because he was part of the crew,” Carmer said gently. “Even as a cabin boy, he was part of the crew. And that means . . . well . . .”
“It means I deserted,” said Bell bluntly. “It means it was my duty to stay with the ship, to protect its passengers with my life, and I ran. I was a coward. I felt it going down, and as soon as I could jump overboard without breaking my legs, I ran. And I didn’t look back.”
Carmer and Grit were silent. Bell could feel their hesitation, that they didn’t know what to say. But there was nothing to say. They were disappointed in him, he was sure. He was Bell Daisimer, the aspiring airman—and guaranteed to bolt at the first sign of trouble. They should put that in the advertisements for the Wonder Show.
Except there would be no Wonder Show for him now. He was an Icarus who had fallen before he’d even tested his wings.
“I need to leave,” Bell said, standing up. His bony knees clacked against the underside of the table, nearly upsetting it. “It wasn’t right of me to accept that job from Tinka, not masquerading as an honest man. And if anyone else from the crew knew—or knows—what I’ve done, my career’d be finished, and for good reason.”
“Bell,” Carmer said, “sit down, you’re in no shape to—”
“Wait,” said Grit. “So no one knows that you did this?”
“It’s only a matter of time before they do,” said Bell, shaking his head. “I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I was late for my shift, and that’s something people notice, and . . . it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t live with myself here, knowing I’d left those people, knowing I’d left the rest of the men to . . .”
“It wasn’t your fault, Bell,” said Carmer. “From everything I’ve read, the ship would’ve gone down anyway. You were scared, and—”
“So were they!” said Bell harshly. “So were the three crewmen, when they died, and the firefighters, too. And where was I? I ran . . . I ran, and I didn’t look back. I ran . . .”
The room tilted.
And suddenly Carmer was there at his side, easing him back into the chair. Grit fluttered nervously in front of his face.
“Bell!” said Carmer. “Bell, are you all right?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” said Bell, trying to catch his breath. Grit was staring so intently at his face it was making him even more uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Bell,” interrupted Grit, “I want you to repeat the last thing you just said to us. Carmer, come around and stand by me, please.”
Bell almost laughed. If Grit was saying please and thank you, he must be nearly at death’s door. Now they were both staring at him. Grit turned her faerie light on to brighten the room and hovered close to his face. The edges of her silhouette softened in the light, blurring his vision again, and suddenly Bell knew exactly what she wanted him to say.
“I said . . . I said that I ran,” he said. And then, not even sure if he was talking to himself, he remembered. Run, little boy, and don’t look back.
Bell gasped, sitting straight up and nearly knocking Grit aside with a flailing arm. “I’m sorry . . . I don’t know what . . .”
“Bell,” said Grit again, in that calm voice that commanded attention. “Do you know that your eyeballs go all funny when you say those word
s?”
Bell was stumped. “I . . . no.”
“Did you see it?” she asked Carmer.
He nodded. “She means your pupils dilate.”
“Who said that to you, Bell?” Grit asked, more gently this time. “Who told you to run, and scared you so badly you left your whole life behind?”
The woman’s cloak swished around the corner. He blinked, and it was gone.
“I wish I could tell you,” Bell said. “But honestly, I don’t remember much. I think . . . no, I know it was a woman, but after that . . .”
He trailed off, expecting Carmer and Grit to be frustrated with him, but Grit was still staring at his eyes so intensely it was making his stomach even more jittery.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember. I wish I could tell you . . . Dark hair? Pale? Maybe?” He threw up his hands. “Ugh, I’m worse than useless.”
“No, you’re not,” said Carmer. “You faced someone evil enough to bring down a ship full of people and were smart enough to get out of it alive.”
“That,” said Grit, “or this mystery woman made you run away.”
Carmer exchanged a quick, dark look with Grit and went a bit pale himself. “You don’t think . . .”
“I think there are enough signs that ignoring them would be pretty dumb,” said Grit. “I also think we’ve been going about this all wrong.”
Bell said, “Anytime someone would like to fill me in here . . .”
“What I mean is, what if these accidents aren’t about Tinka at all?” Grit asked. “What if they’re about the Wonder Show’s faeries?”
“Grit,” Carmer said, sitting back down at the table. “We’re talking about cross-continental airships here—in a multimillion dollar industry that we’ve barely scratched the surface of. Not everything traces back to faerie magic—”
“Okay, sure,” said Grit. “Let’s ignore the fact that the show we’re investigating is full of faeries. Faeries who haven’t exactly been forthcoming about their operation. And there’s also that Wonder Show pilot disappearing, and showing up again with his brains scrambled? And now Bell, who just happens to get the same job—”
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