by Ryan Dunlap
“Aside from my last year at the University, I’ve spent most of my life in my family’s basement or in doctors’ offices.”
Hal looked over to Dayus before nodding somberly as though he fully understood. Ras picked up on why he was asking about the people. He lived vicariously.
The old man probably hasn’t been outside this airship in over one hundred years. No wonder he’s the youngest on the ship full of people who occasionally leave, Ras thought.
“What are you waiting for?” Ras asked bluntly.
“Pardon?” Hal asked, affronted by the abrupt tone.
“One-hundred and sixty-four. That’s a lot of time.”
“Yes.”
“The world thought you disappeared after you shut The Elders into The Wild,” Ras said.
“I did, in a way.”
“I mean no disrespect, but feasibly you could live for, say, at least a thousand years, right?” Ras asked. “But you stay on this ship writing and painting. It seems like a self-imposed prison sentence.”
Hal firmly placed his water glass on the table. “Let me ask you this: When would you step off the immortality train? Hmm? When would you decide you’ve lived long enough and it was time to stop taking your medicine?” Hal’s eyes narrowed. “You speak of things you don’t understand. I hired you to bring me my medicine and you question why I choose to take it? You just concern yourself with repenting of your sins and I’ll do the same.”
Breakfast was concluded.
The Kingfisher descended all the way down to The Brass Fox’s altitude and sidled up to the other ship. Ras and Callie stood inside the control room next to Hal.
“I don’t know why I expected more out of a ship found in three days,” Hal said, surveying The Brass Fox. He pressed down on the intercom button. “Dayus! Bring something from the treasury for Flint.” He turned to Ras. “If you’re going to be outrunning Elder ships, you’ll need better engines than that.”
“Hey! My mother sold our home for those engines.” Ras said, his eyes narrowing.
Hal sighed and inspected the engines as though to see if she got her money’s worth. “I’ll send Dayus to fetch her if Verdant is to sink.”
Dayus arrived in the control room with a stack of bound currency that Ras didn’t recognize. Hal flipped through it and approved. “Fly to Derailleur first and find a mechanic named Flint. His shop is on the first level in the main channel.”
Slipped into the band of money was a piece of fine paper with a set of coordinates written on it. Hal pointed to it. “Once inside The Wild, that’s where you will collect the air. Don’t let these numbers or Callie’s device fall into the wrong hands. There will be other interested parties,” Hal said. “Do you understand?”
Ras nodded. “Got it.”
“I’ve had Dayus take the liberty of adding to your food supplies. You have quite the trip ahead of you.”
As Ras and Callie were ushered back over to The Brass Fox, there were so many things Ras felt he should be asking Hal, but he didn’t even know where to begin. He watched The Kingfisher ascend into the clouds, and kicked himself for forgetting to ask Hal what allowed his ship to fly so high. He wished he hadn’t spent most of his time aboard the fabled vessel with his faculties dulled by the medicine.
It dawned on him just how little he knew about the world outside of The Bowl, and he was about to cross the entirety of it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Great Below
Foster Helios III watched with little interest as the movers skittered about his father’s mansion, packing up boxes and lugging them out the massive front doors to be packed into an air transport parked on the front lawn. It was the seventh ship of the day.
It all had to go.
After a month of living with austere portraits and busts of his late father staring him down, he had called the movers. He didn’t know where they were taking everything and he honestly didn’t care. Here in Derailleur there were committees, sub-committees, and foundations devoted to preserving the legacy of his father: Foster Helios II, the richest man in the Atmo, who couldn’t buy himself another second no matter how hard he tried. And he tried.
Echoes filled the mansion now. The emptiness wasn’t for want of money, as The Collective had compensated young Foster amply ever since he was old enough to command the attention of his father. He would make his own way, filling the mansion with the mementos of his conquests, and he would have many opportunities as he commanded The Collective fleet to wipe the sky clear of pirates. He was already thirty-five, which meant it was high time for a Helios man to save the world again.
A man wearing The Collective’s insignia on his arms dashed into the main foyer and saw Foster standing on his interior balcony. “Sir!” he called up.
“What is it?” Foster said, more interested in guessing the length of the foyer than speaking to the man.
“The Kingfisher was spotted with another ship outside of Verdant!”
“What? Intelligence said he was on the city.”
“I know, sir, but a dive team stayed behind to investigate the residue of the Convergence and—”
“Did we capture Napier?”
“No, sir, he flew higher than we could follow.”
“What about the other ship?”
“A junker. We don’t have a ship in the area that’s not a diver or one of Bravo’s,” the lackey said.
“Send one of the Derailleur detachments. I want the Captain of that ship brought directly to me.”
“Yes, sir!” The man left the mansion as quickly as he had entered.
Foster looked at one of the paintings of his father that had not yet been packed up. “You search your entire life for the ageless Napier and he falls into my lap just after you ran out of time…Looks like I won’t need a son to carry on the Helios name after all.” He smirked. “After all, sons just throw away what their fathers spent their lives building so they can make their own name anyway. What good are they?”
Ras’ one memory of flying through the main pass leaving The Bowl had frightened him as a small boy, but at least he had had the reassurance of his father being at the helm. The wind tunnel effect jostled the ship, but back then he knew without a shadow of a doubt that they would never crash as long as his dad had the wheel firmly in his capable hands.
Having cliffs on either side of him once again drew Ras’ mind unwillingly to Framer’s, but he was determined not to let another Fox fall prey to further scrapes if he could help it. If the main pass to The Bowl was wide enough to let a dreadnaught like The Dauntless through, he could literally fly in circles and be fine.
Callie stood next to Ras, gripping the railing near the helm tightly, laughing nervously with every bobble. “So, what’s the number one rule of being on an airship?”
“You want rules?” Ras asked.
“I want to make sure I know what I’m doing,” she said. “I just figured there was a list of rules for wind merchants.”
“Let’s go with ‘don’t fall off,’” Ras said.
“Good rule.” A current rocked the ship quickly to port and Callie wrapped her elbow around the railing for extra support. “Let’s follow that one.”
“The second rule of being a wind merchant is when you see sky pirates, you run,” Ras said. He spun the wheel to starboard, correcting their altered course. “More often than not they’re interested in the ship instead of a ransom.” He looked over to see Callie’s eyes fixed on the grand horizon unfurling before them as the cliffs gave way to the end of the pass.
“Sky pirates, bad. Got it,” she said absentmindedly as the last of the turbulence subsided. She released the railing, taking in the vista. “This is magnificent,” she said, raising a hand to her mouth.
Looking at the clouds with Callie present made Ras feel like he was seeing the world anew. Her excitement passed to him, almost overcoming his nervousness about spending the foreseeable future with her. “It’s a big world out here,” he said, looking back to the opening of
The Bowl. The last vestiges of home fell away, and he knew he couldn’t face himself if he saw those cliffs again without a full tank of Hal’s air. He pushed the throttle forward, flexing Old Harley’s engines on the open sky. They responded sluggishly, but reached a top speed higher than his old set.
“What else are we going to see?” Callie asked.
“I don’t know. Floating cities, more clouds…hopefully not sky pirates. What about all of your books, don’t they talk about Atmo?”
She shook her head. “New books are kind of hard to come by.”
“Because paper is hard to make up here?”
Callie shrugged, transfixed on the horizon. “Partly, but when the cities were built, they couldn’t take everyone that survived the overload, so they focused first on taking doctors, scientists, engineers—basically the people they felt could keep humanity afloat—and since everyone else had to make it into one of the cities by lottery, not a whole lot of writers made it onboard.”
Ras didn’t quite remember learning that lesson in school. “Is that why you’re writing your book?”
“Kind of,” she said, drumming her fingers on the railing. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“It’s just you, me, and the wind, so I’d say it quietly,” Ras said.
“I set my book during The Clockwork War so I could investigate why The Great Overload happened without getting kicked out of the University,” she said.
Nobody liked talking about The Great Overload. The concept of millions of people exploding into vapor throughout cities deeply frightened Ras, and rightly so. Most parents avoided telling their children about it for as long as possible. Ras was eight when Elias sat him down and explained what happened as best he knew. “What’s the popular theory there?”
“All the professors would do was refer me to books in the library that were continually checked out or had the important pages missing,” she said. “I think someone is trying to cover up why it happened.”
“Well, that makes sense. If it was manmade and they survived it, I’m sure they wouldn’t want to go down in history as the destroyer of mankind,” Ras said, locking the wheel to set course for Derailleur before leaving the console.
“Where are you going?” Callie asked.
“To check the rigging and the engines. I just want to make sure everything is running all right before we get too far,” Ras said, “So, you were saying about ripped out pages…”
“Yes, that’s why I think it wasn’t an accident or a natural occurrence. There were a lot of books with pages missing,” she said, following Ras down the stairs to the deck. “If someone didn’t want people knowing why it happened, they’d have to rip pages out of way more books than just the ones on Verdant.”
Ras tugged on the ropes securing the balloon to the body of his ship, inspecting the knots. “How are you going to continue your research?” he asked as he unfastened one of the knots and began retying it.
“We have to get our engines upgraded on Derailleur, right?” she asked in a tone Ras recognized as one usually preceding a request.
He finished the knot and turned to face Callie. “Yeah…but if Hal was right about India Bravo being in The Collective’s pocket, we’re going to need to lay as low as we can there.”
“Well, I hear libraries are excellent places to lay low,” she said, shifting her weight back and forth playfully. “And Derailleur’s is the biggest of all of them. Very easy to hide in.”
He considered it. It wasn’t a bad idea, but he didn’t like being apart from the ship while it was being worked on. Leaving Callie alone to wander by herself in the metropolis wasn’t an option either. “We’ll see how things are when we get there this evening. For all we know your father has radioed out to every bounty hunter with an open channel to bring back his kidnapped daughter.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Callie said.
Ras lifted an eyebrow.
“All right, he’d probably do that,” she said. “But would they really let a bounty hunter waltz into that library?”
Ras considered it. Hiding in a place that made Callie happy beat out being trapped in a waiting room at Flint’s. “All right, we’ll check out the library. Carefully,” he said, holding up his index finger as a warning.
“If you can’t be good, be careful, Mr. Kidnapper,” she said playfully.
“You do know you’re going to have to clear all this up with your father when we get back, right?”
Callie sighed. “I’d prefer not to think about that until I have to.”
Ras checked a few other knots, satisfied with their security before heading toward the ladder down to the hold. “So, what’s got you interested in The Great Overload?” he asked, lowering himself below deck. He stood at the base of the wooden ladder and held out a hand to assist Callie in reaching the floor.
“Well, if we can figure out why it happened, then maybe there’s a way to reverse it,” she said, opening her eyes wide to drink in the little bit of light from the porthole in the otherwise dark hold.
Ras pulled the Energy bulb’s slender chain, bringing the room into illumination.
“What is that?” Callie asked, nodding toward a vehicle sitting next to the collection tank. The single seater open-air skiff sat with a wheel almost as tall as Ras at either end of it, but didn’t need to be propped up. Its bronze finished gave it a classic, sleek look, and its small wings were currently folded back into its body.
“It’s a jetcycle!” Ras exclaimed with a laugh. “Oh, my mother would absolutely kill me if she knew it was in here. It must have been Tibbs’.”
“I had him throw it in. Happy birthday,” Callie said.
“But it’s not—”
“I know when your birthday is,” she said, giving him a playful shove.
“How did he get it in here?” Ras looked over until he saw a new control panel and a hydraulic system that outlined the side of the hold. “I just thought this was a patch job, not a bay door.”
“He was going to use it as a patio…or something,” Callie said with a shrug. “He said you’d have to flush the engine a few times to break it in. I assume you know what that means.”
“More or less,” Ras said absentmindedly. It was a new model, just like anything else Tibbs ever bought. He threw a leg over the body, straddling the seat. The odometer read all zeroes. “He never flew this thing.”
The idea of a jetcycle had honestly scared Ras to death growing up. Several wind merchants he knew had died in accidents when their motors clogged and fell out of Atmo, never to be seen again. But having another transport option if something happened to The Brass Fox made him feel safer.
“Thank you,” Ras said. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“I know,” she said. “You helped me escape Verdant. I owed you.”
Ras dismounted and walked over to her, taking her up in a hug. “Your math is fuzzy.” He squeezed her tight before releasing. “Now let’s see what Old Harley left us.” He walked over to one of the Windstrider scoop engines and squatted down, running a hand over the dusty metal casing before wiping his palm onto his pant leg.
“Are they any good?” Callie asked.
“Oh, they’re fine. Well past their prime, but what isn’t?” Ras asked. He felt the cabling along the underside, pulling it into the light to inspect. “Corroded.”
“That’s another reason I want to find out if the Great Overload can be reversed,” Callie said. “I don’t think we were meant to fly. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but even birds can’t stay up forever.”
Ras retrieved a wrench stuck to a magnetized metal bar on the wall before moving to an upright toolbox. “Could you flip the left switch by the ladder?” He rooted around until he found old cables comparable to the corroded set.
At the flick of a switch, one of the engines fell silent and the ship tilted a little to starboard.
“Are we turning?” Callie asked. “Should I flip it back on?”
“We’re fine. I�
�ll correct course after this. Might as well keep moving forward,” Ras said. He moved to position himself on his back underneath the engine and began loosening the nut securing the cabling system. “Do you not like flying?”
“Oh, I love it out here,” she said. “It’s just…”
“Clouds get boring?”
“Nothing is boring compared to that basement,” she said. “It’s just that I want to see lakes and rivers and mountains and forests full of trees. It’s all going unappreciated right now.”
Ras carefully removed the corroded cable, but oil immediately spurted across his face. This would happen in front of her, wouldn’t it? He wiped his mouth before berating the engine. “I don’t care what anybody says, that was not a feature. You deserved to be updated, you know that?”
“Are you all right?” Callie asked.
“Fine. Just reminding myself what oil tastes like.” He turned his head to spit a greasy strain of saliva. “Sorry. You were saying, about those things that all sound like they’re words you know and I don’t. Rakes and livers and whatnot.”
Callie laughed. “It would just be nice to see them, is all.”
“Energy poisoning and exploding aside…you’re not afraid of Remnants?” Ras asked.
“That’s not a nice way to refer to them,” Callie said.
“What do you call them?” Ras plugged the hole with the new cables, fastening the nut.
“They’re just people that got left behind…assuming anybody is still alive down there.”
“Oh, they’re down there,” Ras said, pulling himself out from underneath the engine and wiping his blackened face with a handkerchief. “My dad knew a few pilots who weren’t afraid to dive for relics. Months later he saw their ships crewed by pale men with ragged clothes that didn’t know how to fly. Probably murdered the pilot.”
“You talk about them like they’re bogeymen,” Callie said. “You missed a spot.” She pointed to her forehead.
Ras rubbed his forehead with the rag. “I mean, it’s not their fault Atmo cities couldn’t hold everyone…I just wouldn’t want to meet the kind of people that are slowly poisoned by Convergences generation after generation. That has to do something to them,” he said. “Besides, imagine not knowing if your baby would be born a Knack—”