CHAPTER 14
IN WHICH NADYA SLEEPS, THEN LEARNS SOMETHING UNSETTLING.
“Nadya, what happened up there? We fell like a stone! Aren’t you supposed—”
I shut Pepper’s door in Tam’s face and lock it behind me.
Pep’s lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Her room’s a small one, but I’ve always liked it. Her bed nestles against the Orion’s hull, and she’s got two portholes to look through. Thom cleaned everything out of here, but it looks like Tam and the gang have moved it all back in for her. A little oil painting of the beach in the Free City of Myrrh hangs over her wardrobe, turquoise water and bright blue sky and swirling, shady buildings kissing white sand. A hand-sized statue of Goshend’s Daughter, a smiling goddess with seaweed hair that reaches down to her ankles that some people from Myrrh ask for favors, is back on her desk. Her seashell box sits on the shelf beneath one of the portholes, and the other shelf’s got her storybooks and engine manuals, all mixed up together. The big mirror she spent a month’s wages on is back in the corner. They even set up the old cargo net she hangs from her ceiling and put her collection of toy seals, dogs, and rats back in it. The room looks like it’s hers again. Maybe that’ll help.
The sky is starting to turn gray outside, so it must be close to sunrise. I pull out my pocket watch to check the time, but it’s not running. I can’t even remember when I wound it last.
My head’s still pounding and my vision’s blurry, but I’m not sure whether it’s from the lack of air in the cloud balloon or just exhaustion. Probably both. It seems like a month ago I got up to fix engine number two.
I sit on the edge of Pep’s bed and hold her hand. Her fingers are a bit warmer than they were right after we pulled her up, but they’re still cold. I touch the back of my hand to her forehead. It feels a little chilly too.
“Pep?” I say.
Her fingers twine themselves in mine.
“It broke,” she whispers. Her voice is smooth but fragile, like the wet wings of a newborn butterfly.
I squeeze her hand. The cuts on her face and arms were too small for bandages, but Tian Li told me she cleaned them with alcohol in the sickroom before putting Pepper to bed. Salyeh heated up some soup using an oil stove, and Tam made Pepper drink a cup of it.
They’re good friends, every one of them. Even Tam, I guess.
“What broke?” I ask.
Pep’s eyes drift down from the ceiling and settle on me. They’re bloodshot, like she got a bunch of smoke in them. “The cable. Rottfeuer was chewing through it, telling me if I ever wanted him to do this again, he’d need a whole barrel of garden air. Then the cable started to pull apart. There was this horrible twang, and then it just snapped, and my face and arms hurt and I was falling.”
I nod. Tian Li was able to get that much out of her, and the others pieced together that the cable must’ve shredded after they found slivers of steel in Pep’s clothing, hair, and skin.
Pepper turns to face the wall. “He got on me, Nadya.”
She squeezes my hand so hard it hurts.
Rottfeuer.
Pep shuts her eyes. Tears drip down her cheeks. “He was on my arm and in my hair, and he was laughing and roaring and I was burning and falling at the same time.”
“You sucked him back into the World Beyond.”
Pepper nods. Her fingers loosen, and I run my hand through her hair.
“Where did he burn you?”
She shudders. “Nowhere bad. Just my scalp and my forearm. But he was so close—” Her breath goes in and out in little puffs. “I panicked. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I didn’t suck him back in when I did. I wasn’t even thinking. And Rottfeuer’s strong. That’s why we use him to power the engines.”
Now that I know what happened, I can see the parts of her hair that burned.
“You’re strong too,” I say.
Pep stares out her porthole windows at the growing light. “I guess,” she says.
The Orion creaks and swings gently to the side. Nobody’s at the wheel. We’re below the fog around the pirates, down so far they won’t be able to reach us, and we’re just letting her drift in the wind while we rest. We don’t have much of a choice without running the engines, but we could rig up a sail if we had to. Nic bought a big one and stowed it down in the hold after that time we got stranded.
“The harness snapped too,” Pep says.
I run my hand over the side of her head, where she’s not burned. “I know. I saw it. But only part of it broke.”
“I thought I was going to die. The cable, the fire, the falling, and then the harness . . .” She swallows.
I can imagine.
“Will you stay with me?” Pepper asks. “Like you used to?”
Pep used to have these awful night terrors, right after we found her. She’d wake up screaming bloody murder, or sometimes she wouldn’t wake up at all, and she’d just be sitting in her bed and shrieking, lost in a nightmare that wouldn’t end.
I was the only one who could snap her out of it back then. Mrs. T would send someone running to fetch me, and I’d look Pep in the eyes and say her name and rub the back of her hand with my thumb, and eventually she’d wake up. She always asked me to stay so that the nightmares wouldn’t come back for her.
I rub the back of her hand with my thumb.
“Sure,” I say. I take my boots off, clamber over her, and slip under the covers beside her.
She curls into a ball against my chest, and I shut my eyes and realize just how tired I really am.
I leave the door locked.
We both deserve the sleep.
I wake up with the sun on my face.
It takes me a second to realize where I am, but the feeling of Pepper snuggled up against my chest reminds me. The red beams of her cabin walk the ceiling over my head beneath the crisscrossed ropes of her cargo net. The mirror in the corner stares back at me, near her wardrobe and desk.
I let out a long, deep breath. My body feels like I ran it through a clothes wringer, and my eyes keep wanting to shut again.
But sore as I am, I drag myself upright. Someone must be awake and keeping watch, and there’s a chance whoever it is hasn’t slept yet. It wouldn’t be right for me to just go on snoozing.
Pepper’s breathing changes beside me.
“You awake, Pep?” I whisper.
The blankets rustle around her. “Yeah,” she mumbles. She pulls a pillow over her head, then flops it onto my lap and sits up.
She looks a lot better than she did when we went to bed. Her skin’s not so pale, and her cheeks are less saggy. Even her cuts look smaller, but that might just be my eyes.
“I dreamed about when we found Tam,” she says. “You remember?”
I nod. Tam used to work for this inventor named Gossner in Far Agondy, making deliveries and doing repairs for her clients all over the city. Nic didn’t find him. We did. Pep and I were running around on the docks by the ship, stretching our legs a bit and kicking a ball, when we caught sight of this little boy watching us. Tam was a lot smaller then, way littler than normal for his age. I invited him to play with us, but he shook his head. He just sat there and watched. I pointed him out when Thom came to bring us back onto the ship, and Thom went and talked to him. I don’t know what all they said, but by the time they finished, Tam was on the crew.
“Yeah,” I say. “What about it?”
Pepper shrugs. “I’m just glad we did, that’s all.” She grins. “Thanks for staying.” She slides off the bed and winces, then looks down her shirt.
“Man,” she says. “You don’t even want to see the bruises I’ve got.”
And I get up feeling amazed she’s back, more or less, to her old self again.
As I leave Pepper’s room, I see Salyeh’s door wide-open down the hall. I want to make sure he’s all right after fighting the pirates last night, so I knock on it and stick my head in.
Sal’s sitting at his desk, his head in his hands, reading a book with a beam of sunlight pouring over it through one of his portholes. He’s moved some of his stuff back in from the hold too. His wardrobe’s open, and I can see the edge of the dark suit that’s his prized possession peeking out of it, along with the mess of shirts and trousers he wears around the ship.
He’s also got a lot more stuff from Vash Abandi in his room than I do. I think he feels more attached to the city. There’s no statue of Goshend by his prayer rug, which some people from Vash Abandi prefer, and he usually has some dried palm leaves on the wall and a miniature cactus on one of his shelves too.
“Hey, Sal,” I say. “You okay?”
He looks up and blinks at me. His eyes are watery, and the muscles in his face look really tight. “I can’t sleep,” he says quietly.
I yawn, thinking I could use a little more sleep myself. “What’re you reading?”
Slowly, he leans back in his chair. He focuses on the wall and grimaces, like he does when he’s wrestling with difficult math. “I don’t know,” he says after a second. “I found something the pirates took out of a locked cabinet in Nic’s desk. Come see.”
I head in and peek over his shoulder. The book he’s reading looks like a ledger, the kind Nic keeps track of money and cargo in. It’s covered in columns full of numbers and descriptions written in Nic’s chicken-scratch handwriting, but they don’t look any different from the others I’ve seen. “What’s the big deal?” I ask. “They’re just numbers.”
Sal huffs. “I’ve never seen them before,” he says, and he looks at me as though I should pick up why that’s important.
I try to fake it, but my face must show I don’t get it, because he frowns.
“Nic shows me everything, Nadya,” he says. “I know the accounts for the ship like I know my own hands. But he’s never shown me these. Look.” He flips through a few pages and points to a number. It’s a big one. “That’s as much as he has deposited at Farsky and Sons in Far Agondy, sitting in a bank I’ve never heard of in Myrrh. What’s it for?” He flips another few pages. “And this. A withdrawal this big could pay half the deposit on a cloudship. And he just has the note here: Compensation and repairs. ED.” He points to the top line of the book, repeated on every page. “It’s just labeled Diaspora. Maybe that’s the name of another ship?” He rubs the sides of his scalp. “The normal ledger says Orion Accounts, real big and clear at the top.”
I frown. “Well, maybe it’s just his private bank account or something. Nic keeps some money for himself, right? I mean, he’s captain of the ship.” When I dream about being captain, sometimes I think I’ll have a nice apartment in port at the Free City of Myrrh, full of comfortable chairs and a big bed and books and a writing desk the size of a breakfast table.
Sal shakes his head. “He keeps a little, but not this much. All this money going in and out, no records of where it came from or where it’s going.” He leans back and stares at the ceiling. “I should understand this, Nadya. Nic doesn’t do anything without a good reason, but he’s never kept secrets like this from me, and nothing in here makes sense. And then there’s this.” He reaches under the ledger and pulls out a brass badge about the size of my palm, all shined up with a picture of a skyscraper city in the middle of a river and a rat with a sword perched on the top.
I stare. I’ve seen something like it before, but it takes me a second to remember where. It’s the badge of the Far Agondy customs inspectors, who search every ship that enters the city and make them pay their taxes. “What’s Nic doing with that?” I ask.
“It wasn’t Nic’s,” Sal says. “I found it in my room when I was cleaning up. Next to the bed.” I raise an eyebrow, and Sal shakes his head at me. “Where the pirate was sleeping.”
My stomach twists a bit. Anything to do with the pirates makes it do that. But I’m having trouble putting together why my stomach, and Sal, are so worried about this badge. “So . . .”
“So the pirates have an in with the customs inspectors in Far Agondy,” Sal says, frustrated. He flips the badge over. “Look, it’s got a real serial number and name engraved in it and everything. This is legit. And if they’ve got one, they might have more. And it might not just be in Far Agondy. They could have spies in the customs inspectors everywhere.”
My brain starts to catch up. “And if a crooked inspector boards the ship and finds the pirates we tied up . . .”
Sal nods. “Bad news for us. Real bad news.” He puts his head in his hands again. “Far Agondy’s not safe, Nadya. There might not be any port that’s safe.”
I lean against his desk for a second and try to think. But every port we could reach before the gormling starves has customs inspectors. There’s some smaller towns around the coasts we could try to get to in an emergency, but even there we’d make a big splash and news would get around to the customs people eventually.
All I can think of is a hundred million ways this goes wrong and we end up in jail, or lose the Orion, or get captured by the pirates. I’m groggy and hungry, and I miss Nic and Mrs. T and Thom. They’d know what to do.
“Sal, we’re not gonna solve this on our own,” I say. “We need Nic and the others. We have to go back for them. Maybe it’s not too late.”
Sal picks up his head. He turns away from me and looks at the corner he prays in. His face goes cold, like his mind’s just walked into someplace icy and miserable. “No,” he says quietly.
“Come on, Sal! We—”
“I made a promise, last night,” he says, still looking at the corner. “To Goshend. I said I’d never lift a finger against another human being in violence, ever again. And I’m gonna keep it.”
My mouth flaps. “But—I—You—”
“You don’t know what it’s like, Nadya,” he says, and my gills burn because I hit that pirate with a bottle and it hurt my hand and my heart and I locked them up and I know exactly what he’s talking about. I think. Maybe.
“I see you watching me sometimes. And the others. Everybody’s heard about the pits. But you don’t know what it’s like down there,” he says. He squeezes his fist, then looks down at it, shudders, and slowly unsqueezes it and lays his palm flat on his desk. “Hurting people. Being hurt. But that’s just the half of it. It’s the way people look at you. The way they expect you to hurt people. Like that’s all you’re capable of. Like it’s all you’ll ever be able to do. They look at you and they see how big and mean you are and they think that’s all there can be to you, and if you let yourself, you can become that person. You can lose all that’s bright and good about yourself and just be what they want you to be. I’ve seen it happen, but it’s not gonna happen to me.”
He squeezes his fist again, and closes his eyes, and there’s tears in the corners of them. “I made a promise to Goshend,” he says again. “He got me out of there, Nadya. He brought me Nic. I made him a promise, and I’m not gonna break it. Not for anybody.”
I just stand there, not knowing what to say for a second. I think over his story. I think over the soldier stare in his eyes, the way he cried last night, the way Tian Li looked at him. I think about right and wrong, and the way Nic and Mrs. T and Thom never made us do things that would hurt us.
“Okay,” I say.
He looks up at me like he’s surprised. “You’re not gonna argue?”
I shrug, and I let my shoulders slump. “I still think we need them back, Sal. And I bet we could figure out a way to do it without you having to break your promise. But I’m not gonna try and make you.”
Something flits across his face. A look of relief, like he’s feeling the warm breeze of Goshend’s breath. “Thank you,” he says, but I don’t think he’s saying it to me. I think he’s saying it to the corner, and what it represents to him. He opens his eyes again. “I’ll think about it, Nadya. Maybe we can crack this on our own. Or maybe we can’t and we need their help, and maybe it won’t break my promise to go back and get them.” He closes the ledger on his desk and twists to crack his back, then lets out a long, deep breath. “I think I need some sleep though.” He smiles a little. “Maybe I can get it now.”
I nod. I’m glad he’s feeling better. But there are more butterflies than ever flying around in my stomach. I don’t like that Nic’s been keeping a secret ledger. I really don’t like that the pirates have some kind of in with the Far Agondy customs people. And I don’t think Sal’s going to change his vote, which means it all comes down to Tian Li.