CHAPTER 18
IN WHICH, BRIEFLY, NADYA FLIES.
The sun flickers through the candied glass of my cabin windows like the gossamer strands of an enormous spidery god, tugging at my eyelids . . .
. . . yanking at my heart . . .
. . . jerking at my soul . . .
“Maybe all three,” I mutter, and I set my pen down. I smell bacon, which means Pep must have gotten the fire spirits that dance under the range working again.
But there’s more than just bacon waiting in the dining room.
There’s eggs, and cheese, and some of the spiced cider we picked up in the shady lakeside orchards of Nash Valour last fall. We have home fries with sky potatoes and cloud onions and crisp green peppers. Pepper’s even whipped up a fresh batch of hot sauce to go over it. And when I’ve stuffed myself as full as I think I can get, Tian Li slips into the kitchen and comes out with a platter of sweet pancakes and a flask of maple syrup to drown them in.
After the meal’s over, I loosen my belt and lean back and pat my stomach. “Wow,” I say. “You guys are amazing—next time I cook, I’ll have to do something special.” I close my eyes and slump happily into my chair.
“It was Tam’s idea,” Salyeh says.
I open my eyes again. Sal’s sucking maple syrup from his fingers. Pepper’s just slurping hers right from her plate.
Tam, sitting in the corner, is pushing a couple of uneaten pieces of potato around and staring uncomfortably at the table. He looks a little off, like he’s worried about something.
Pep sets her plate down and licks her lips. “He said that since you guys’ll be taking the Flightwing out today, we should give you a good meal. Just, um—”
The table goes silent. Everybody glares at Pep.
“Well, just in case—”
She sighs and puts her head in her hands. “I wasn’t supposed to talk about that.”
Tam gets up and starts clearing dishes. Nobody else moves.
“It’ll work,” I say. “Tam and I got it fixed last night. You’ll see.”
Pep reaches over and squeezes my hand. Tian Li and Salyeh look at me sympathetically.
“It’s going to work, really! I—Tam!”
He comes out from the kitchen and starts gathering up plates and cups.
“Tam, tell them it’s going to work!”
“It’s going to work,” he says, but he still looks worried, and he turns around and takes his armload of dishes into the kitchen.
I scoot my chair back, grab the big frying pan that held the home fries, and follow him.
We don’t talk until the dishes are cleared and we’re standing next to each other, me washing and him drying. Everybody else is gone.
“Tam, what’s your deal?” I ask.
He polishes a plate and sets it in the drying rack, then holds his hand out for another one. His fingers shake a little bit.
“Do you remember when I said I hurt someone, in Far Agondy?” he asks.
I nod. I’ve been wondering what he meant by it, but I didn’t want to pry. He seemed like he didn’t want to talk about it.
He looks up, blows out a long breath, and stops drying. “I built a machine. It was supposed to make cleaning up Gossner’s workshop a little easier. You just stoked its boiler, pressed a switch, and then instead of mopping and scrubbing by hand you could push the machine around and it would do the mopping and scrubbing for you.”
He stops talking for a bit. I still don’t want to push him, so I start washing dishes again. He starts drying. A couple dishes pass between us before he opens up.
“It had a lot of moving parts, and they weren’t all covered. There were long pistons that drove the brushes and the mop heads, and if you really got it up to full steam, they moved crazy fast. Gossner had other kids working for her, but I was the best with machines. I told everybody else that the cleaner was dangerous, that they shouldn’t try to use it without me there.”
He hands the home-fry pan to me, and I go to work. When it’s clean, I hold it up, but he’s not paying attention. He’s gripping the edges of the sink so hard I worry he might bend them, and he’s staring at the wall. His eyes are watering.
“One morning, I woke up and heard one of the other boys screaming. He’d been watching me work the machine and tried to start it up himself so it’d be easier to clean the kitchen before breakfast. I ran down to see what was wrong and saw him with his arm caught in the cleaner. He’d noticed the rag I used to polish the pistons still inside once he got it running and reached in to get it out. Stupid, but every kid makes mistakes like that. It’s why you don’t start them out with big, dangerous machines. You start them out with little ones so the worst that happens is maybe they get a bruise or lose a fingernail or something.”
He shuts his eyes, and tears well at the edges of them. “His arm looked awful when we finally got the machine shut down and him out of it. It was chewed up like a dog had gone to work on it. Gossner took him to a surgeon right away, but it didn’t matter. When they came back that night, his arm was gone.”
Gently, I put my hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t even seem to feel it.
“You should’ve seen the way the other kids looked at me, Nadya. Like I tore up his arm myself. I should’ve built the machine better. Put a lock on it so you couldn’t start it without a key. Put panels on the outside so nobody could stick their arm in while it was running.” He shrugs out from under my hand and wraps his arms around himself. “I ran away. I couldn’t stand them looking at me like that. I felt like a monster.” He wipes his eyes with his arm. “I found you guys the next morning, and when Thom offered me a chance to join the crew, I took it. I didn’t even say good-bye.”
He stays quiet for a second, then turns to look at me. “When I got back to my cabin last night, all that hit me like a sledgehammer. I don’t want you to get hurt, Nadya. I don’t want to lose all you guys too.”
I lick my lips and clear my throat. It shouldn’t be me talking to him like this. It should be Thom. Thom’s the one who takes care of Tam, like Mrs. T takes care of me. They’re thick as thieves.
But Thom’s gone, and so’s Mrs. T, and until we get them back, I guess we just have to take care of each other.
“It’s gonna be fine, Tam,” I say. “The Flightwing’ll work. We tested it.”
He nods, sniffs, wipes tears from his eyes again. “I know, but what if something goes wrong?”
I shrug. “Then we’ll fix it. And Tam?” I pull him around so I can look him straight in the eye. “Nobody’s gonna hate you, no matter what happens, okay?”
Tam takes a deep breath. “Promise?”
I let go of him and hold out my pinky, like I do with Pepper. “Swear it on a finger.”
He looks at me for a second, then smiles and wraps his pinky around mine. We shake on it.
By the time we’re done with the dishes, Tam seems back to normal. We’re laughing and joking. But I feel like something’s changed. I get him. He gets me. All this time I thought he didn’t trust me or Pep or Tian Li, but it was really that he didn’t trust himself, and that meant he couldn’t trust anybody else either.
I think maybe he’s getting over that though, and we can finally trust each other. And given what we’re about to do, that’s a huge relief.
We test the Flightwing that afternoon.
Tam digs a couple pairs of goggles out of storage, and we each put one on. Apparently, he made more modifications after I left last night. He’s rigged the pedals up so that one of us can work the tail rotor while the other works the main rotor. He’s also put a panel with six levers on it between the two front seats. Each one activates a hydraulic lift on a different side of a plate under the main rotor. We can adjust the rotor’s tilt a little bit in any direction with them.
We try the new systems out when we sit down. Everything seems to be working fine.
“You wanna steer or work the elevation?” Tam asks. The goggles make his hair stick up in a big, flowing wave. He looks like a mad scientist or a motorcycle bandit.
“Elevation,” I say. “It’s kind of my thing.”
He nods. “Put your lever forward then. I’ll pull mine back.”
We’re still in the cargo hold, but the deck’s open and the sky is crisp and blue above us. We were hovering at around 7,500 feet when I checked the cloud balloon this morning, and the air in the garden seemed fine. The birds chirped happily and asked when Mrs. T would be back, and the frogs croaked little jokes to each other in the mud. The plants presided over the whole thing like smiling, silent grandparents.
Tian Li says she read the stars last night and that we’ve drifted south a bit, toward the shipping lanes between Far Agondy and Deepwater. I wonder, briefly, what’ll happen if we run into a ship of the Cloud Navy.
Tam puts his hand on another lever and grins. “You ready to do this?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Then start pedaling!”
I lean back and pump my feet. The first few spins take a lot of effort, but once the axle gets rotating, it’s not too hard to speed it up. The rotor whizzes by above my head, faster and faster.
Tam pulls the lever that shifts the gears. It gets a little harder to pedal, but soon I’m going as fast as I can again, and the rotor’s starting to make a chuff-chuff-chuff sound.
Tam pulls the gear shift again. And again. The rotor goes from chuff-chuff-chuff to wubbawubbawubba, and then the blade sounds blur into a loud, deep rumble. Tam starts the rear rotor spinning.
The Flightwing lifts off the floor.
Getting it out of the cargo hold will be the trickiest part of the whole operation, except maybe landing it. I try to keep a steady rate of pedaling going so that the rotor spins just fast enough to take us upward. Tam’s got his feet poised on the steering pedals and his fingers on the hydraulic levers.
As the Flightwing lifts off, its nose dips down and we start to move forward.
“Tam—”
“I’ve got it,” he says. He pushes up a little on one of the hydraulics, and our nose levels out. We stop moving forward and start moving straight up again.
We’re hovering well above the shelves now, and the rotor’s almost even with the deck. The gormling swirls around in its tank anxiously, watching us.
Tam pedals gently backward. The Flightwing’s tail swings obediently to the left.
My heart’s pounding, but it’s not from the pedaling. It’s surprisingly easy to keep the rotor spinning once it gets going, courtesy of Tam’s magic oil, I guess. But I’m still scared because if something goes wrong now and we crash into the Orion’s deck on our way out, I’m not sure how it doesn’t end in serious injury or worse for Tam and me.
The rotor clears the deck. A few seconds later, so do we. Salyeh, Tian Li, and Pepper are all on the aft deck, watching. They whoop and holler and cheer.
“Steady,” Tam says.
We’re still under the cloud balloon. If we go up much higher, we risk running into it, and that might be the worst disaster we could cause. The ladder to the catwalks is right in front of us too, blocking our way out.
“I’m gonna try to back us out,” Tam says.
I look behind us. There’s nothing between the Flightwing and the blue sky off the Orion’s bow but my cabin.
Tam flicks up again on the same hydraulic he adjusted before. The Flightwing’s nose tips up slightly, and we start to move backward.
“Bit higher, Nadya,” Tam says. He’s got his head craned over his shoulder. I do the same and see that we’re not quite high enough to clear my cabin.
I give the pedals a little more juice, and we rise up another two or three feet. Then I let the Flightwing level out again.
“Good,” Tam says. “Good . . .”
We get over my cabin and out of the shadow of the cloud balloon. The Orion sits a few feet in front of and below us. There’s no wind. I’ve got a pleasant burn in my legs from pedaling, the sweat’s starting to bead on my face and in my armpits, and the Flightwing bounces gently as it hovers.
I’m flying.
Tam stops our backward motion, looks over at me, and grins. “We could land now, I guess, but I want to go for a quick spin first. You up for it?”
I grin back. “Love to,” I say. I look up.
There’s nothing above us but clear sky.
Twenty minutes later, the Flightwing’s settling down on the aft deck. Tam has the brake on. The main rotor’s whining to a stop, and I’m feeling breathless and giddy.
I’ve lived in the air for years now, but I’ve never flown like that.
We soared high above the Orion, and when Tam set the hydraulics to full forward, we moved faster than the ship does even with a strong wind behind her and the engines maxed out. We took the Flightwing up a few thousand feet too, just to see how it did at the altitude we expect the pirates to be at. It went just fine.
When we were up that high, I spotted something out near the horizon. It looked just like the enormous bank of fog that swallowed us before the pirates captured the Orion.
“Tam,” I say once we’ve got the rotors fully braked and Tian Li and Pepper are running up with chains to lock the Flightwing down. “Did you see it?”
He pulls his goggles off. His face looks grim. “Yeah,” he says. “To the southeast, maybe a hundred miles?”
I nod.
“Nadya,” he says, “are you still sure you want to do this?”
A memory flashes through my head. I’m starving. I’m thirsty. I’m alone in a rotting cloud garden, where the plants are so close to death they no longer speak and the birds and the frogs are long gone. A door hisses open. The balloon starts deflating. I breathe outside air for the first time in ages, and I panic and scream. A voice speaks, but it’s not in my mind, and I don’t understand it. I shriek until I pass out.
When I wake up, I’m in a soft bed with the sun on my face, and Nic and Mrs. T are sitting in chairs next to me. Nic’s got a steaming bowl of soup in his hands. Mrs. T dips a spoon into it and holds it out for me.
There’s so much wrapped up in my feelings for Nic and Thom and Mrs. T I can’t keep track of it all. Love and tenderness and frustration and secrets and mystery. But I know this much. They’re more than just my captain and teacher and first mate. They saved my life. And I want to do the same for them.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sure. We owe them.”
Tam stares down at the deck. Tian Li and Pepper do the same. They’ve all got memories like that, somewhere in their heads. I’m sure of it.
“I guess we do,” Tam says.
A few minutes later, we’re firing up engine number one and heading southeast as fast as the Orion will take us.