Even now, as they both readied the airship for its first flight since the crash, Kali wanted to cross the deck and press herself against Fletcher, feel the movement of his body, the steady rhythm of his heart.
Instead, she continued with the rest of her tests. Each minute they spent on the island meant Mayhew was closer to obtaining his own airship. A minute closer to unleashing his madness on an unsuspecting world.
She’d lived through death and devastation before. There wasn’t a chance in Hell or Naraka that she’d knowingly let that kind of destruction happen and not try to stop it. At least with the war, there was a terrible sort of sense to it. But Mayhew would bring only meaningless chaos. It wouldn’t be a far leap for him to go from killing Man O’ Wars to leveling towns and cities, simply because he could.
After Kali finished the last of her checks, she approached Fletcher, standing in the rebuilt forecastle. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he stared out at the moor rolling around the ship, and the tall hills to the southwest.
She knew he heard her coming, but he didn’t turn when she approached. Instead, she stood beside him, taking in the land, the place that had been her home these past months.
“Everything’s tested well,” she said. “We can leave at your discretion.”
“A minute more,” he answered, voice distant. They both seemed to understand that there’d be no return to Eilean Comhachag once the Persephone took to the air.
This place had been theirs, but no longer. Her chest ached, and she had the absurd impulse to run and hide somewhere. The marshland that lay between her cottage and the ship might do—but he’d find her, and the time for hiding was over, anyway.
For a brief while longer, they had each other. But only fleetingly.
“It’s time,” she said.
He did turn to her then, one dark brow raised sharply. “Eager to put this place behind you?” And me? was the unspoken addition.
“He’s out there,” she replied. “There’s no luxury of self-indulgence. And . . .” She made herself gaze directly into the unforgiving blue of his eyes. “I can’t draw this out longer.”
The anger cooled in his eyes. Something that looked suspiciously like heartache took its place. He unfolded his arms and wrapped them around her. His hand stroked down her hair, and he ran his mouth back and forth over the crown of her head. She let herself be held, her own hands pressed tight between the hard jut of his shoulder blades.
There might not be another chance. It wasn’t wrong to need him like this—there would be plenty of time later to be on her own, independent. Even if they continued their relationship once they returned home, they’d never have this kind of time again. But for this small moment, she could have this. Have him all to herself.
And then it was over. By a silent, mutual agreement, they separated, then walked without touching to the pilot house.
Below deck, she had reexamined the fruits of their combined labors. She’d learned volumes about the design and functioning of an airship these past weeks, but it’d been fortunate that most of the controls within the pilot house hadn’t needed too much repair. Just a matter of making certain the connections to the different parts of the ship still worked.
Now in the pilot house, she noted again how one panel controlled the ether tanks—the main tanks on the support beam, as well as the auxiliary ones below decks in the aft of the ship. There was a dial that controlled the levels of the buoyant gas in all of the tanks, and separate dials to adjust the levels in each one, giving the ship its lift and balance. Gauges atop the panel showed the level of ether in each container.
The other main control for the ship was the steering—a wheel mounted atop a column that moved back and forth in its yoke. The wheel controlled the louvers of the engines—louvers she and Fletcher had had to rebuild using pieces of bulkheads from inside the ship. Beside the wheel was the throttle, which regulated how much power went into the turbines.
And all of it was fueled by Fletcher. The batteries absorbed energy from him, and those batteries powered the turbines. The process even created the ether that enabled the airship to fly.
“The more I worked on this,” she murmured, “the more I realized Dr. Rossini’s genius.”
“Genius that drove her mad,” he noted.
“Everything has its cost.” She knew that now, more than ever.
They were silent for a moment, each absorbing her words. Then, “Ready?” he asked.
“Yes—wait!”
His hand paused above the lever that activated the ether tanks.
“What about Four?”
“What of him?”
The rat himself was snug below decks, in a bed of rags in a corner of the galley. She’d fed him that morning and he’d fallen promptly asleep, utterly uninterested in the concerns of man.
“Perhaps Four needs to stay,” she said. “The island’s been his home his whole life. He might not want to leave.”
But Fletcher’s mouth curved into a brief smile. “He’s protected, fed, and warm on the Persephone. And we’ve fattened him up nicely. An owl would take one look at him and see a banquet.” He shook his head. “The rat stays with me. For his own safety.”
“His safety. Of course.”
Fletcher scowled at her. Then, drawing a deep breath, he pulled the ether tank activation lever.
For a moment, everything was still and silent. Kali’s frustration surged. She’d been so certain that she’d done all the repairs, and her skills were up to the task of bringing Persephone back to life.
Her mind raced. There might still be time to build a boat, but she’d already cost them valuable time by attempting to fix the airship. Had she been too ambitious? Too full of hubris?
“Wait.” Fletcher reached out and took her hand in his. As if he knew the twists and configurations of her mind and thoughts.
“But—”
An almighty groan sounded, shaking Kali all the way to her marrow. She braced herself in the doorway of the pilot house. The ship juddered, complaining loudly. It was if some massive creature was trying to crawl its way up from the depths of the earth.
And then—she felt the lift from the activated tanks. The ground moved away as the Persephone pulled herself into the air. It wasn’t an easy rise upward. The ship had dug herself in deep when she’d crashed. Rocks and scrub held tight, then fell away as the airship went higher. Three feet. Ten. Twenty. Higher still. Until they were over one hundred feet above the ground.
Kali’s heart leapt. They’d done it. After months buried in the earth, the Persephone flew again.
But she wouldn’t allow herself any real celebration. Not until the ship did more than hover.
Fletcher’s own expression was unreadable as a mountain. He seemed satisfied with the height of the ascent, but now was the crucial moment: could the Persephone move?
He pulled the lever that completed the circuit that activated the batteries, and powered the turbines. Again, everything was silent. The ship hung suspended in the air. Then a low hum began, deep in the hull. The same hum she’d heard faintly her first night on the island. Now the sound from the batteries was much louder, growing in volume. Suddenly she felt it—the turbines spinning to life.
Still, she kept her hands tight on the pilot house door frame, her excitement fiercely tamped down. But when Fletcher put his hands on the wheel and piloted the ship forward, and the vessel actually responded, the ground below sliding away, she let out a small yelp of exultation.
Fletcher kept silent, and stayed that way as he steered the ship up and around in gentle circles over the island. Kali released her grip on the door frame and edged cautiously across the deck toward the rail. There, below her, was Eilean Comhachag. Fletcher took them higher than they’d gone in the barrel, and she could see everything now. It stunned her how small the island appeared—just a collection of rocks and greenery clustered together in the middle of an iron gray sea. A deep wound marked the earth where the Persephone had lain.
Such a little place, hardly anything at all. But it had altered her. Brought her and Fletcher together, transforming them both.
Such huge metamorphoses seemed to demand someplace larger—a landscape as vast and remarkable as the Thar Desert or the Himalayas. But no, the island was a tiny, humble speck of land.
A great change can happen in the smallest of spaces. Even somewhere as modest as the human heart.
And what of her birthright? She could see the cottage, still in shambles, only a pile of pebbles from this height. Another MacNeil might come along in the future to repair it, though it wouldn’t be her.
Before they’d gone, she’d insisted on leaving Campbell a note, telling the ferryman that, after her cottage had collapsed, she managed to get a ride back to the mainland from a passing fisherman. Hopefully, he’d find the note and believe her story.
“Careful.” Fletcher’s voice was sharp. “You’re not used to being on an airship. Can’t have you tumbling over the rail.”
She wouldn’t argue. Her head spinning from the height, she wobbled back to the pilot house. Fletcher continued to navigate the ship above the island, practicing, she supposed. It had been a long while since he’d been at the wheel of an airship. And he likely needed to test whether or not her repairs would hold. Staying close to the island would give them someplace to land if they needed to do so in a hurry.
He glanced over at her. “All right?”
She offered him a smile, thin though it was. “Sound as a bell.”
“You’ll get your airlegs.”
“I never get seasick,” she muttered.
“Not the same as flying. But I know you’ll adapt. You always do.”
His words helped steady her, even as he took the Persephone through her paces. As he piloted the ship, she studied him, watching how he seemed to grow even bigger, taller. His back was straight, his legs braced wide, and his hands were steady on the wheel. If he had any trepidation about flying again, he didn’t show it. In truth, she’d never seen him so at ease. Confidence radiated from him as he steered the airship. He took expansive breaths, and his eyes gleamed with satisfaction.
This was his home. He might not have been born a Man O’ War, but she saw now that it had always been his kismat. He’d moved with steadiness and purpose on land. But here . . . here nothing held him back.
Her eyes grew damp and hot, and she dug the heels of her hands into her eyes to keep her cheeks dry.
“Damn, I forgot.” He shook his head at himself. “Spare goggles. Even in the pilot house the wind can get you.”
She nodded. He didn’t need to know the reason for her tears.
“You’ll want your cloak, too,” he added. “When we pick up speed, it gets bloody cold topside. That’s what the crew told me. Never felt the chill, myself.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” She knew from experience how warm he ran. Heat rolled off of him now, the scent of warm metal enveloping her, as his implants fed the airship with his energy.
A few more passes over the island, then, “We’re ready. And losing time.”
This was it. Though they flew above the island, they were still close. The open sky beckoned. Once Fletcher took the Persephone out there, neither of them would come back. She might return. Perhaps. But if she did, she’d be alone.
“All right,” she answered tightly.
Fletcher pushed on the throttle, and the airship flew onward. They were headed south, to the closest telegraph station.
Don’t look back. Nothing good ever came from looking back.
But she did, poking her head out from the pilot house and peering past the turbines to watch Eilean Comhachag grow smaller and smaller, until it disappeared like a dream upon waking.
She pulled her head back into the pilot house and kept her gaze fixed on the horizon.
“Kali,” he said, as quietly as he could above the drone of the engines.
She looked at him. “I’ll get my airlegs, like you said. No worry needed.”
“I’m not worried.” He kept his hands on the wheel, his gaze forward. “Only . . . I wanted to say . . .” He seemed to struggle with his words. “. . . Thank you. For giving this back to me.” He waved at the pearl-colored sky, expansive as thought itself. “I’d forgotten what it meant to fly, how I . . . loved it. Never thought I’d know it again.”
His gaze turned to her, and his eyes shone, almost as if tears gathered there. “Yet you gave me this . . . this gift. Thank you is such a puny thing to say for something so big. But those are the only words I know.”
“Dhanyavad,” she said. “That’s how it’s said back home. Only for the most significant occasions, though.”
“Dhanyavad,” he repeated. It sounded clumsy on his tongue, but no one had ever thanked her with such truth or sincerity.
“Main tumse pyaar karthi hu,” she said.
“Is that You’re welcome?”
“Yes,” she answered. It meant, in truth, I love you.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
* * *
Kali stood at the rail—having gained her airlegs just as Fletcher had promised—and watched the shadow of the Persephone pass over the town of Lochboisdale. While it was a thriving port on South Uist, airships didn’t likely make appearances here. As Fletcher brought the ship lower, she could see people hurrying out of their homes and businesses, staring and pointing up at the sky.
Even if the people of Lochboisdale were familiar with airships, no one here, nor anywhere else, had seen one like the Persephone. Missing half of her lower decks, she was flat-bottomed, not curved, and with all the other makeshift parts, she was a rare creature. But Kali took pride in it. She’d made the airship fly again. Otherwise it would’ve remained permanently berthed in the middle of a moor.
And Fletcher would have stayed with the ship. Both of them dug into the earth, lost.
“Where are you going to land?” she called over her shoulder. Neither had spoken since their exchange in the pilot house, a fine tension was growing tighter and tighter between them the closer they came to civilization and the outside world.
“There’s a field north of the town,” he answered, then smiled a little. “Advantage of having a flat-bottomed ship—I can set her down on land.”
Most airships used jolly boats and other small ether-lifted vessels for transporting crew and cargo. Since they had neither, it would have to be an actual landing.
Her stomach tightened as they glided lower and closer to the town. Seven weeks, it had been, maybe more—she couldn’t remember—since she’d last been around so many people. It was a small place, really, but compared to what she’d been used to, Lochboisdale seemed a bustling metropolis. After the heath and hills of Eilean Comhachag, these buildings jarred her eye, sharp and man-made. They clustered around the bay in little groups. Some boats bobbed in the harbor, fishing vessels and a ferry, and crewmen gathered on their decks to watch the Persephone.
Fletcher passed the Persephone over the town and brought the airship down in a field, just as he’d said. Kali braced herself as the ship bumped and shuddered with the landing.
“Not used to actually taking her down like this,” he said as he strode from the pilot house.
“You’ll get the way of it,” she answered, but as soon as she said it, she realized that he likely wouldn’t. As soon as the navy learned he was alive, he’d return to Admiralty headquarters at Greenwich and be assigned a new airship. One that didn’t have a flat, patched-together keel or Kali’s improvised repairs. The Persephone would probably be disassembled and her parts used for other airships. There’d be no record of Kali and Fletcher, of what they’d built together.
He seemed to grasp this, too, because his mouth flattened into a tight line. “Wait here.” Then he disappeared down the companionway.
She tugged off her goggles, which she’d salvaged from a cabin, and watched as curious townsfolk gathered at the edge of the field. None of them approached the ship, held back by an invisible wall of trepi
dation. But she could hear the murmur of their joined voices, the fragments of their uncertainty.
“Is it the Huns?” “Never seen an airship like it.” “You’ve never seen any airship.” “Are we under attack?” “Pretty sorry specimen if we are.”
An odd bubble of anger rose in her chest. Did these people know what the Persephone had endured? How hard Kali and Fletcher had worked to get her back into the sky? What did any of them know? The Persephone persevered and lived, and Kali would punch anyone who’d say an unkind word about the airship.
Survival left scars. And those scars needed to be celebrated.
Moments later, Fletcher returned topside. He carried a brass and wood device that resembled a cross between a telegraph and one of those new typing machines, though instead of letters, odd symbols covered the keys, and ports for connecting to electrical wires were fitted into its side.
“Can you operate that?” she asked, eyeing the device.
“Usually, an airship’s got a crewman in charge of communications, but we’re all trained to send and receive messages, in the event that crewman’s hurt or killed.” He raised a brow. “The bigger concern is whether you can make it work with the town’s telegraph lines.”
She patted the pouches on her belt, fully stocked with tools. “You fly the ship, I make mechanical apparatuses work.”
She clung to his brief smile, flashing white in his dark beard. “A crew of two,” he murmured. “That suits me.” Then he studied the crowd gathered at the edge of the field. A shadow passed across his face—he must feel as she did about being amongst people again, or perhaps he felt it even more strongly, having been on his own for so much longer.
But the shadow vanished beneath the dispassionate look she now knew so well. He’d worn that same distant expression those first times they’d met, as if impassivity formed a protective barrier that couldn’t be breached.
She wanted to tell him that she was afraid, too. Words felt hollow, so she pressed her hand to his chest.
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