“I did very well on that audition, I’ll have you know,” Bell protested.
“And who just happens to have witnessed the Jasconius crash, too?” Grit continued. “It’s just too much coincidence, Carmer.”
“It still might be that,” Carmer insisted.
Grit huffed and turned to face Bell again. “Well, there’s one way to find out. Bell, this woman you met. I need you to try as hard as you can to remember this: did she put her hands in your hair?”
Bell saw Carmer’s hand drift up to his own hair, but Bell’s mind wasn’t in the kitchen of the Moto-Manse anymore; it was back on the Jasconius, where he was staring into the white, veiny face of someone who shouldn’t have been there at all.
“Oh, don’t worry,” said the young woman. She looked like a girl, really—except for her eyes. There was something older in their gray depths. Something darker. “I’m not a passenger.”
Bell staggered back, but her icy hands had already clawed up into his hair, fingers snagging in his short, tight curls.
“Bell!” A spark zapped in front of his nose; the smell of burning hair told him his eyebrows had been singed. He opened his eyes with a start. He hadn’t even realized they’d drifted shut.
“Grit!” scolded Carmer, but Bell waved him off.
“Whatever you need to do to bring me back to planet Earth, little miss, you go ahead and do it,” Bell said breathlessly. What was happening to him? He shook his head. “Though I admit, this’d be a beautiful face to waste.”
“Yes, yes, you’re gorgeous,” said Grit. “Now do you remember? Did the woman put her hands in your hair?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Bell, almost not quite believing it himself, “I think she did.”
Grit flew back to the teakettle and leaned against the lid, crossing her arms with grim satisfaction. “I knew it.”
Carmer looked far from pleased.
“Faerie knots,” Grit concluded, as if this explained everything. “It’s one of the ways powerful faeries can manipulate humans,” she said. “It’s much, much easier if you’re already asleep or unconscious—”
“Or otherwise not in control of your mental faculties,” Carmer muttered, blushing.
“—but it’s not impossible otherwise,” Grit said. “At least, I don’t think so . . . Anyway, faeries can weave spells into human hair—”
“That is profoundly disturbing,” said Bell.
Carmer nodded in agreement.
“Would you let me finish?” Grit glared at the both of them. She curled her legs underneath her on the teakettle. “They can weave spells into human hair to do all sorts of things. Most of the time it’s just mischief—make a human who’s offended the fae sleepwalk into a cowpat or something—or make a child forget they’ve wandered off and spent a night in Faerie. They wake up in the morning none the wiser.”
But Bell had already heard enough to make the room feel like it was spinning again. “Just mischief,” he said flatly. “Making people do things against their will, making them forget?”
Grit hugged her knees into her chest. “Sometimes it’s not.”
“And you think a faerie did this,” Bell said. “Brought down an entire airship, and made me forget? Forced me to abandon my post?”
Bell Daisimer didn’t come from a world where faeries existed, never mind one where they could get inside his head. It was hard for him to imagine someone the size of Grit—and the woman on the ship most definitely hadn’t been—causing so much damage. But a small part of him dared to hope. If it wasn’t his fault, if he really wouldn’t have run away . . .
“Grit thinks it’s a possibility,” Carmer answered. “And I do, too. But—”
“Well, how do we prove it?” asked Bell, leaning forward.
“The thing is, Bell,” Grit said slowly, “I’m not sure we can.”
Bell dropped his head back into his hands.
“Carmer once got his memories back through a lucky encounter with some faerie dust,” she explained. “But I can’t make any on my own, and I don’t trust those Free Folk—especially when they might be knee-deep in all of this. What we really need to know is what that woman looks like. If she took human form long enough, she must be an incredibly powerful fae . . .”
“Or Friend of the Fae,” suggested Carmer. “She could still be human. I can’t be the only one who’s hidden a faerie under their hat when they needed magic close at hand. After Bell blacked out, the real faerie could’ve done most of the damage, and altered his memory, too.”
“So, we keep an eye out for more magic and . . . strange women?” Grit asked skeptically.
“Always happy to help narrow down your list of suspects to only half the population,” Bell said, raising his teacup for a weary toast.
“You’ve narrowed it much more than that,” Carmer said. “Before today, I thought Tinkerton’s competitors were the most likely suspects.”
Grit sniffed, but Carmer plowed on. “And I don’t see any reason to stop thinking that completely. Maybe one of them is using faerie magic, the same way Grit and I have in the past.”
“Excuse me, when have we killed people?” Grit protested, then bit her lip.
Carmer looked at his feet.
Bell remained firmly glad these two were on his side.
“Anyway,” Carmer muttered, “it’s worth asking: is there a chance any of Tinkerton’s major rivals are women?”
Bell didn’t even have to think about his answer. “Actually, yeah,” he said. “Much more than a chance. And she lives right here in Driff City.”
BELL TAPPED THE picture Grit had just pinned to the wall. “Isla and Robert Blythe,” he said.
The Moto-Manse’s attic laboratory had changed some since the Amazifier’s departure, mostly due to Carmer’s organizing influence. Drawers that were previously bursting with gears and cogs were now neatly shut, their contents labeled in Carmer’s small but legible hand. Many of the mysterious jars of specimens and other unidentifiable things had left with the Amazifier. The tools were now more likely to be used for crafting model automata than making magicians’ linking rings. But the moving model solar system still hung from the ceiling, spinning slowly, and a model train, the very first device that Grit had ever powered with her fire magic, was still mounted on its track that ran all along the walls. She shot a few sparks at it occasionally, just to see it run its circuit around the room.
But now, they’d transformed the lab even further. It had been Grit’s idea to put all of their information about the Wonder Show and the Jasconius crash on the wall above Carmer’s desk, where they could see it all in one place. Newspaper clippings, copied excerpts from the police reports—even Bell’s picture—were all mounted on the wall in the best timeline they could cobble together, from the first accident on a small model plane all the way to the disaster on Bell’s ship.
“You may be able to keep track of everything you’ve ever read,” she’d told Carmer, “but some of us need a little reminding.”
They took Carmer’s list of Tinkerton’s top competitors, along with a few additions from Bell, and mounted their names (and pictures, when they could find them) on the wall with everything else. A studio portrait of Isla and Robert Blythe, cut out of a newspaper clipping about their latest test flight, was now pinned to the very top of their list. Grit gave the pin an extra push, for good measure.
“Look familiar?” she asked Bell.
He squinted at Isla’s serious face. She had hair of some medium shade—it was impossible to tell from the black-and-white picture—arranged in becoming waves around her face, but it did little to soften the severity of her cheekbones or the triumphant-looking glint in her eye. The man next to her shared her features, but his hair was darker, his jutting chin covered by the kind of bushy black beard that had gone out of fashion years ago.
It was obvious even from the picture that the Blythes were . . . well, even bigger than most big folk Grit was used to. Their broad shoulders pushed at the edges
of the frame, though they were posed quite close to each other. Grit could hardly imagine such a distinctive woman sneaking into a restricted area of an airship without anyone noticing.
“Well, yeah,” Bell said, sighing, “but that’s because I’ve seen both of them before. Even before the accident. Blythe Flights, Inc. isn’t exactly a secret.”
Unlike Tinkerton, Bell had explained earlier, the Blythe siblings made no attempt to disguise their ideas, or their identities. They were determined to be the first aviators to successfully fly a manned airplane, and they made sure everyone knew it. They ran an entire research laboratory in Driff City dedicated to discovering the secrets of motorized flight, and even owned their own stretch of private beach along the coast for testing their machines.
They were also, as Bell attested and Carmer confirmed with some research, expertly aggressive at eliminating their competition. They frequently bought out smaller firms and independent aviators to claim new technology under the Blythe Flights umbrella. They’d never made Tinkerton an offer—or so he claimed when they asked—but there were, of course, less public and less acceptable methods of ensuring his failure.
“Would it help if you saw her in person?” Carmer asked Bell.
Grit held back a sigh of frustration. They wouldn’t need to waste time going after human suspects when Grit could just ask the closest faeries around about their mystery woman, but Carmer had insisted they give the Wonder Show faeries a wider berth, at least for now, when they couldn’t be sure of the faeries’ involvement in Mikhail Hunt’s death.
“We should be asking both of them a few questions, anyway,” added Carmer. “We can pretend to be visiting engineering students from Skemantis here on winter break between terms.”
“Look at you,” Grit said proudly, “lying and sneaking and willingly talking to people you don’t know!” She flitted from one of his shoulders to the other until he affectionately swatted her away.
“It’s a Christmas miracle,” Carmer said, making Bell laugh for the first time since the night before. “But we’ve still got to be careful. It’s likely they might recognize us.”
Bell’s smile fell. “You think so?”
Carmer pointed to the intimidating, bearded figure of Robert Blythe. “It’s possible. Because I’ve never seen Isla, but I recognize him. He was standing behind us in line for the Wonder Show.”
BLYTHE FLIGHTS, INC.
will be CLOSED
Thursday, December 21–Tuesday, January 2
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
That the sign was posted on the inside of the firm’s glass-paned door only added insult to injury, as if to say, Ha! You can’t even reach me to give me a good whack, and I know how much you want to.
Grit compensated by snapping a spark at it with her fingers. It pinged off the glass and nearly hit Bell in the face.
“Whoa! Contain the rage, little miss,” said Bell. “Contain the rage.”
“You’re going to have to explain to me exactly what Christmas is again,” Grit complained to Carmer, “because I still don’t understand why the whole human world shuts down for someone’s birthday.”
Bell chuckled, but the disappointment hung thick in the air around them. The Blythes had been their best human lead, and now they would have to wait.
“Why can’t you just count summers, like reasonable people?” she muttered. “What now?”
Carmer stomped his feet in the biting cold. Grit had ridden in his hat on the way there, her warmth staving off the worst of the cold, but now the wind was really picking up. The gray clouds above looked packed with snow. For all of Carmer’s insistence that Virginia would make for a milder winter, it didn’t feel like it then. Billboards and marquees all around the city had been plastered with warnings for residents to keep their ships firmly on solid ground; a storm was coming.
“Maybe we should check in with Tinkerton again,” suggested Carmer halfheartedly. “See if there’s anything else he can tell us.”
“I vote for that,” Bell said, rubbing his hands up and down his arms and looking up at the sky. He had a lumpy knitted scarf of Carmer’s wrapped around his neck, but was otherwise unprotected. “Or really, anything that gets us out of Scudside before that Snowpocalypse hits.”
The Blythes’ office skirted the edge of the neighborhood affectionately (or not so affectionately) known as Scudside. It was dingy, muddy, and home to the few remaining factories that didn’t produce airship parts, as well as many Driftsiders too poor to live in the more desirable parts of the city. There were few streetlamps, and the chugging smokestacks made visibility even poorer, despite the brisk wind.
Carmer, Grit, and Bell just managed to get onto one of the last departing air-buses of the afternoon before Driff City suspended service in anticipation of the storm. The ship was nearly empty, and the ticket-taker looked as if he wanted to scold them for even being out at all.
Carmer kept to the middle seats, as was his custom—it was easier that way to pretend that he was on a train, or a regular bus, and not a hundred feet in the air—but Bell took advantage of the empty gondola to look from window to window.
“I can’t believe it,” Bell said, stopping short. He pressed his face nearly to the glass. “That’s not . . .”
“The Jasconius, all right,” said their air-bus captain over his shoulder. “Feds dropped her in there this morning. Guess they found all they was gonna find.”
Carmer sat up straighter, craning his head toward the window, and started at the sight below. “Is that . . .”
Bell nodded, a faraway look in his eyes. “An airship graveyard.”
And before Carmer could say another word, Bell pulled the lever to request the next stop.
“I DON’T THINK this is a good idea,” Grit said. “And if I don’t think something is a good idea, chances are, it’s a terrible idea.”
The three of them stood at the entrance of the largest junkyard Carmer had ever seen, on the western edge of Scudside. It stretched as far as his eyes could see. A wrought iron arch overhead, jet-black laced through with crumbling veins of rust, formed the words DRIFTSIDE METALS, INC. Snow flurries were already collecting on the sign like a thick layer of dust.
“Yeah,” admitted Bell. “Plus, this place is a dump.” He laughed nervously. No one joined in.
“You really think this will help?” Carmer asked for what was probably the third time.
“I just need to see her,” said Bell. “If it helps me remember, great. If you guys find some sort of clue in there, even better. But I just need to see that ship. For me.”
Carmer nodded. Grit stood with her hand on her hip, still unconvinced.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Bell insisted. “But if you wanted to take a look around, I can’t think of a better time to do it.” He looked up at the dark gray sky, snowflakes clinging to his lashes. “I hardly think we’ll run into anyone else out here today.”
“You’re not going in there alone,” said Carmer firmly. Grit groaned. “We get in, we find the ship, we look around, and we get out.”
“And how do you propose we do any of that?” Grit asked. But she had already flitted to the padlock on the gate. She sent a blast of energy toward it, breaking it with ease.
“Easy,” said Bell, starting forward. “We already saw her from the air. Just look for the biggest shipwreck in the sea.”
11.
BLOSSOMS IN A BLIZZARD
The airship graveyard, Carmer thought, felt more like a place for dead things than any cemetery he’d ever set foot in. Perhaps it was because the only sound was the crunching of their shoes over fresh snow, unidentifiable bits of metal, and (real) grit. Perhaps it was because the falling snow made it hard to see more than a few yards ahead of you, and when you did, all you saw were glimpses of the great, hulking frames of airships long past any hope of flight. These were not the ships stored in protected hangars in other parts of the junkyard, carefully preserved to return to service one day—o
r even to be formally harvested for their most valuable parts. These were the leftovers of the leftovers.
Most had been stripped of their envelopes, leaving only the rigid frames behind, usually half caved in or simply splintering away piece by piece. They lay empty and abandoned, like the skeletons of great beasts.
Bell had been right about two things. The first was that there were no Driftside Metals staff or other scavengers to bother them; there wasn’t another human in sight, making the alien landscape of hollowed-out ships feel even stranger. Even the guard’s shed by the gate stood empty. Clearly, the native Driftsiders had taken the warnings about the upcoming snowstorm seriously and battened down their hatches. All it took was a frozen envelope to make even the slightest, lightest balloon sink like a stone. There wasn’t a single ship in the sky.
The second was that the Jasconius was easy to find. Its envelope was still mostly intact, except for various punctures and slashes from the initial collision and general rough handling; no one had had a chance to strip it for everything it was worth yet. Or maybe they just didn’t want to risk the bad luck. A ship as large as the Jasconius wouldn’t normally be dumped in a graveyard like this—the parts were too valuable, and it simply took up far too much space. But it seemed that the Jasconius’s owners didn’t want to hold on to any reminder of their biggest tragedy.
The ship towered over all the other wrecks and scrap piles around it like a great beached whale. The frame was the only thing holding it together, and gravity was already taking its toll. Frames weren’t designed to support a ship’s full weight on the ground, and the sides bowed out while the underbelly pressed into the dirt. The gondola and the engine cars might be inaccessible, if they hadn’t been totally crushed beneath the weight of the ship already. Carmer could hear the supports creaking, even over the rushing wind.
“How do we get inside?” asked Grit, gripping the brim of Carmer’s top hat so she didn’t blow away.
The Crooked Castle Page 10