Andrew Malvern’s knees buckled under him. Jake wedged a shoulder under his armpit, passed an arm about his waist, and heaved him up, and together, they staggered into the navigation gondola. Maggie and Lizzie followed, in case at any moment Mr. Malvern should tip over and collapse.
“Good show,” he gasped. “I’m all right. Thank you. Dear God in heaven, thank you.”
He tottered to the navigator’s chair and clutched the map rack to hold himself upright, then gazed about at them.
Alice Chalmers looked as though the Angel Gabriel had come to give her a personal escort to heaven. “That was a close one,” she said, almost shyly, from her post at the wheel—though why she stayed there Maggie could not imagine. She was not looking at their course at all. “I’m glad we were able to help.”
Good grief, a daring rescue and a near brush with death, and she sounded like she was at a church jumble sale, presiding over the teapot. What was wrong with her?
He glanced from one to another. “Where is Tigg? And Claire? Are they with the engine?”
At the mention of the Lady’s name, some of the brightness in Alice’s face dimmed. “We think Tigg is aboard Lady Lucy, but we don’t know for sure. And Claire left on Fremont’s train this morning. At least, the girls believe she did. She never came back with them last night.”
“Why not?” Mr. Malvern tried to stand, but his knees wobbled and he sat rather suddenly. “What happened?”
“Lord James took ’er to an ’otel,” Maggie said. “’E wouldn’t let us go wiv ’er—told us we could shove off and cross the desert in a pram for all he cared!”
“Nasty old boot,” Lizzie put in. “Said ’e would lock ’er in a room with no windows and they’d be off to San Francisco this morning.”
“San Francisco!” The color drained from his face. “We must pursue them!”
Alice left the wheel with a leap. “Mr. Malvern, you aren’t recovered from your ordeal. Jake, take him to the crew’s quarters in the starboard fuselage and find a bed for him. He’ll need some—Lizzie, what’s the matter?”
Lizzie had plastered herself against the viewing window. “Alice, we ’ave to go back to the airfield.”
“Over my dead body. If we’re going anywhere, it’s the Canadas or San Francisco or—”
“No! Go back! That’s Tigg down there, runnin’ like mad. Don’t you see ’im?”
Alice leaned far over the wheel, and Maggie dove between her legs to peer out the very bottom of the viewing port. Far below, a tiny dark figure ran and dodged between the craft moored on the field, waving his arms and jumping over barrels and crates. Even as they watched, he slowed, and Maggie could see the moment when hopelessness overcame him and he realized he was going to be left behind.
“Why in tarnation ain’t he on Lady Lucy?” Alice demanded of no one in particular. She spun the wheel and the Stalwart Lass put her hip to the wind and came about in a great gliding circle.
With a leaping wave, Tigg took off for the eastern edge of the airfield, where the flattened, tended ground gave way to hillocks and dry watercourses and sagebrush once again.
Lady Lucy had lifted and gone, for her great golden fuselage was nowhere to be seen. But between Tigg and the edge of the airfield lay the Rangers’ B-30, and to Maggie’s eyes, there was far too much activity on her.
She had not been trained as a scout for nothing.
“Alice, that Ranger ship is awake and I don’t like the look of it. I bet that lieutenant who pretended to be so nice to the Lady knows we just sprung ’is prisoner.”
“Our engine ent gonna outrun that thing,” Jake said. He had not removed Mr. Malvern, and the latter was again struggling to his feet.
“We must not leave Tigg.”
“Ain’t no question about leaving him,” Alice said through stiff lips, as if he’d offended her. “Question is, how we gonna evade the Rangers when that ship lifts and comes after us? Nine, give me some reverse. Jake, get your skinny behind back to that basket. This is gonna be fast.”
Maggie and Lizzie ran after Jake to the aft hatch. He grasped the crank and began to lower the basket, but their speed was so much faster than it had been at the pinnacle that it blew straight out behind like a wind sock. “One of you, get in!” Jake shouted. “Your weight will take it straight down.”
Lizzie shrieked in an agony of indecision, torn between fear for Tigg and her own terror of heights. Without another thought, Maggie leaped into the basket, and before she could fairly get her feet into the bottom, Jake was winching her down so fast the crank was a blur.
The wind snatched the basket and swung it like a pendulum, but it did not blow back. Lower and lower they circled, and below them, Tigg’s running figure disappeared beneath a garish scarlet fuselage that would look like a setting sun if it flew. He emerged on the other side, and now he only had to get past the B-30.
Maggie could feel the Lass adjust her course to meet him, out on the far side of the B-30 in the desert. Tigg could draw a trajectory with his eyes as well as the next man, and he changed his direction to the same heading.
Talk about touch and go.
She was close enough to the ground—ten or twelve feet—to see him clearly, now, and waved encouragingly. His coffee-colored face split in a white grin, and then he bent all his energy to the task of getting to that point in the sagebrush where basket would meet body and they could do the Billy Bolt to end all bolts.
Even over the roar of the wind, Maggie heard the shouts of the Rangers as they realized what the Lass was about. If before they had meant to pursue them, now it seemed that they were simply going to shoot them out of the sky, for here came a contingent of blue uniforms dragging another one of them rocket cannon—this one long and slender and no doubt possessed of the kind of aim that could take a ship out in one shot.
“Tigg!” she screamed. “Run!”
As if he had merely been standing there sipping a lemonade before, Tigg poured on the speed and in seconds he was running beneath the basket.
“Jake!” she shrieked upward. “More line!”
But he could not hear her, forty feet above, and Tigg was tiring, his hands grasping at the basket bottom fruitlessly, trying to get a grip.
Oh, if only she had a rope!
A rope!
Scrabbling with numb fingers, she pulled at the knots of Alaia’s woven sash. She had left the lightning rifle in the gondola, for it was heavy, but hadn’t removed the sash. She tied one end to the winch line just above the join that spread four cables to the corners of the basket, and whipped the other out over the side.
“Tigg! Grab hold!”
The ground raced below her, and on the edge of her vision she saw the Rangers push the cannon into position and ram something down its throat.
With a mighty leap like his very best dive from the Clarendon footbridge, Tigg grabbed the end of the rope.
Immediately the basket began to rise—the Lass fell up into the sky—and the rocket launched from the cannon with an explosion that slapped Maggie’s ears.
Tigg kicked, hanging onto the sash with both hands and trying to find purchase on the side of the basket as Maggie grabbed him around the waist to pull him in.
The rocket struck the basket with the force of a runaway steambus, tearing the bottom and sides out of it as it blasted out the other side, trailing fire, into the sky.
Maggie screamed, dangling by nothing more than her grip on Tigg’s waist as he hung onto her sash with both hands, his fingers piercing the knotwork.
“Hang on, Mags!” he shouted.
Weeping with terror and the cruel wind that needled tears from her eyes, she buried her face in the front of his dirty shirt and prayed.
Someone must have been listening, for the next thing she knew, hands were pulling her and someone had her in a hug so hard she could barely breathe and the wind finally stopped and when her eyes opened at last, gummy with grit and streaming with tears, there was Jake on his knees on the engine-room floor, hugging her to his chest like she were his own long lost sister, sobbing as if his heart would break.
One of the children was sitting on her feet.
How dreadfully annoying. The weight kept her from turning over, from throwing off the sheets—she could hardly breathe. What were they about, the rascals? Why, she was just going to—
Claire opened her eyes.
Her cheek pressed into bare dirt that was loose and crumbly, as if it had been dug up. It smelled burned. Everything smelled burned, even the air, which had a peculiar cast to it. Not the clean, sharp light she had grown used to of late, but a smoky, rotten kind of light.
She lifted her head.
Blinked.
Her mouth fell open as she remembered what had happened—what had happened, but not why, or how.
And her feet? She reared up and attempted to turn over. Ah, there was the problem. The slatted side of a heavy crate lay across her legs.
Toes? Yes, they wiggled.
Knees? Both bent.
It had not broken her legs, thank goodness. As she moved, pain stabbed into her side, as vicious as a blow from the Cudgel, back in London. She gasped and tears started into her eyes.
Oh, dear.
Gritting her teeth, she shoved the planking off her legs, and slowly, breathing as shallowly as possible, climbed to her feet. She had never had a broken rib before, but Papa had, having fallen from a horse in Cornwall. Now she understood his bad temper. Well, she had no choice but to hope her corset would act as a binding, in the absence of anything else.
She stood, marveling that she could even breathe. The world had been transformed, and she could no longer see any familiar thing.
Yes, the sun still beat down on her bare head.
Yes, the saltpan crunched under her boots, its crystals winking and glittering.
The twin threads of the railway still extended back into the mountains, but where she stood, it was broken and twisted, dragged into tortured bends by the train cars’ derailment. As she gazed at them, trying to get her bearings, a car groaned with the agony of twisting metal and fell on its side with an earth-shaking boom.
Dust sifted into the sky and was carried north by the wind.
Did any remain alive?
Tessie! Tessie Short had been immediately behind her in the sleeping car. There was the caboose, upside down. It must have thrown her as it flipped, for it now lay on its roof, its metal wheels helpless without the track to which they were mated.
There.
Limping, wheezing with the pain, Claire stumbled to what had been the sleeping car. It lay on its side, which meant she had to duck through the twisted door. At any moment it might collapse upon her, but if Tessie was alive, she must get her out.
A shoe, a stocking, a skirt. Tessie lay as though asleep on the partition, her back against the ceiling. She gazed, astonished, at something past Claire’s shoulder, her head tilted at a peculiar angle.
“Tessie? Can you hear me?”
Claire touched her wrist, then her neck.
No pulse.
Her face crumpled, and the tears that had been so close trickled down her cheek. “Oh, Tessie. If it hadn’t been for me, you would have been safe in Santa Fe with your children.” Gently, she closed the open eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
The partition in her own compartment had popped off its moorings and now lay askew and crushed. There was her valise, lying on the window.
Or rather, on the dirt under it, for the window lay in pieces everywhere. She picked it up. She had not unpacked it, since if one planned to escape, one had to be ready to snatch it up and do so at a moment’s notice.
This was not quite the escape she’d had in mind.
She must find out whether any others had lived.
Once again sliding through the sideways door, she set the valise on the ground and approached the other cars. There had been no one in the library, nor the dining room, either. James and Fremont had been in the lounge, and she assumed that aside from Tessie, the other staff had been forward taking their meal.
The lounge car, being immediately behind the tender, had not fared so well as the caboose. Half of it was utterly gone, as was the tender. In fact, the explosion had torn the locomotive to pieces, leaving only the great smokestack and half the cowcatcher in recognizable form, lying on the other side of the track at some distance from the mangled body.
She walked forward, skirting pieces of flung mahogany, now reduced to kindling, in which brass and copper glinted. What could possibly have caused such a disaster?
Clearly it had been centered in the tender. The great furnace full of the carbonated coal would have—
The carbonated coal.
Her mind could not grasp it, but there was the evidence that something very dreadful, very unforeseen, had caused the carbonated coal to explode in the steam engine. She staggered back, unwilling to look on destruction of such magnitude any longer.
The lounge car. Could any have survived?
In the wind, hundreds of Texican bills—dollars, they were called—blew in whirlwinds with the dust, sifting and blowing out of what was left of the end wall of the lounge car. Mr. Fremont, it appeared, had had a safe there. And then she received the dreadful answer to her question, which would repeat itself in her nightmares for many years to come.
She did not know how long it was, but some time later she came to herself, on her hands and knees in the dirt fifty feet from the destruction, retching up the rest of the contents of her stomach.
The pain finally drove her to her feet. Wiping her mouth on her torn and filthy sleeve, she staggered to the caboose, her mind reeling at the possibility that of all the people on Stanford Fremont’s train, she might be the only survivor.
She had been furthest from the destruction, flung through an open door when the brakeman had thrown the switch to slow the train, and thrown out again when the caboose had been wrenched off its couplings.
Pure chance. And luck. And perhaps the grace of God.
The hot wind whistled across the saltpan, pressing her blouse against her back and doing absolutely nothing to cool her burning skin.
Claire walked back to her valise, removing her blouse as she went. The St. Ives pearls still lay under her chemise, the raja’s emerald on her finger—and that only because her fingers were still a little swollen from her ordeal in the velogig. She put on a fresh waist. Then she wrapped the torn blouse over her head like a fieldwoman’s scarf, winding the sleeves about her throat.
As protection from the furnace of the sun, it wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
Feeling hollow, as though her soul had been torn away and twisted like the iron of the train, she forced herself to consider her prospects.
The sun was on its way down, lengthening the shadows of the tumbled train cars like beseeching fingers across the white waste of salt.
The last town she could remember seeing had been some miles before the bear, and that had been on the downhill side of the mountains.
She had no idea where the next town might be. It could be San Francisco, for all she knew, with any number of miles of the Kingdom of Spain to get through before that.
She had no food and no water, for the dining car had been crushed between the library and the exploding lounge.
She did not even have the means to bury the dead, for the saltpan was hard and unyielding, and with her broken rib, she could not dig even if there had been anything but broken spars to use as a shovel.
Tessie. James.
Tears welled in her eyes. She had hated him, yes. She would willingly have gone the rest of her life without seeing him ever again. But to die like this? His body left unclaimed and unmourned, merely unidentified bits and pieces that the vultures even now circling lower and lower would soon discover?
She gave a single sob. She could not even identify enough in the carnage to conceal it from the birds and predators.
She could do nothing.
With what they’re paying me to attend you I can send my kids, Kate and Jeremy, to the city school for a year.
She did not want to go back to the remains of the lounge car. She did not want to look at what lay there. But she owed Tessie a debt, and if she survived, she had only one way to repay it.
When she was finished her sad task, shuddering, she picked up her valise and made her way back to the caboose. Here lay the culprit, the root of all this destruction, smashed and flung out of the broken car. The heavy iron and glass of the chamber was twisted and broken now, the power cell—
The power cell!
It had nearly cost Andrew his life. It had certainly cost James his. But would it take hers, too—or would it mean a new life somewhere if she were able to find her way to civilization before she collapsed?
The cowling was bent, but if she lifted this panel, no, pushed it—tore it off—there. The power cell lay within its housing, its fine brass windings unharmed. The glass globe within was smashed to pieces, but that could be replaced. It was the gears and works that were important.
Working quickly, she released all the cables and hoses that still survived, and pulled the cell from its damaged prison. Dr. Craig had told her this was her inheritance. It was heavy, that was true. But it was also hers, to do with as she would.
She dropped it into the valise, too, fastened it closed, and bent to hook its two leather handles over her shoulders. Her broken rib stabbed, and she gasped in pain as she straightened.
The gleaming ribbon of undamaged track stretched out into the distance, giving her a direction, at least.
Claire set her teeth, hefted the valise on her back, and took in the wreck one last time. It was foolish to hope that something would move. And sure enough, nothing did … except the wind, moaning through the wreckage, humming against the broken metal like a dirge.
She set her face toward the east and gasped in fright.
Something did move. Like a cloud, but not a cloud.
An airship.
A ship with a double fuselage, its gondola hanging between them in the shape of a Y. She had only seen one ship designed like that in all the time she had been in this country.
Her heart lifted, a sob catching in her throat.
Claire began to run.