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I was dozing when Jack burst into our room, slamming the door behind him and leaning against it like someone was after him.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded.
Jack panted, looking at me with panic written all over his face.
I didn’t want to know what could rattle him this badly. Getting thrown into the middle of nowhere with no supplies didn’t shake him, and learning some crazy doctor was after us didn’t even warrant this much open fear. What was worse than no food and someone trying to kill you?
“We’re on a chimers’ ship,” he hissed.
I blinked. The news did not exactly surprise me, not with what he said before about the crates of rifles, and Captain Ryan had agreed to ferry us home too easily. Still, they were taking us home. Whatever secret reason they had couldn’t be that bad, and we could handle it when we got there.
“Okay?”
He dug his hands into his hair and paced the small floor of the cabin. “We’re on a chimers’ ship,” he repeated. “And they want to attack the palace.”
That got my attention. Now his panic made more sense. “What the hell?”
He laughed, a little hysterically. “They’re planning to tie me to the mast so the palace knows I’m on board, so they won’t fight back. They’ll decimate the palace and everyone inside it, and then probably kill me so they can take over unopposed.”
Well, that sounded terrible. “King’s beard.” Was that really their plan? What about Petra and Sammy? Was Captain Ryan really willing to risk starting a battle with his family on board?
He nodded. “What do we do? We can’t let them open fire on the palace, there are too many innocent people there, our parents are there.”
Now wasn’t the time to correct him about the ‘our parents’ thing, but I did flinch at the mention. He didn’t notice.
“What can we do?” I asked. “We can’t take down a whole ship full of people.”
He tugged at his hair. “I don’t know. I don’t know. The two of us can’t launch a mutiny, and neither of us know how to fly an airship anyway.”
“Do we need to know how? Crashing seems just as effective at stopping them.”
“We’re still on board,” he hissed.
I shrugged. “We can use your teleport thing right before we crash. Ship goes down, never makes it to the capitol, and we end up somewhere else in the kingdom, no worse off than we are now.”
He checked his pocket watch. “We could just teleport right now, without doing anything to the ship.”
“That works, too.” It made no difference to me if we decided to leave before wrecking anything or after.
He nodded. The panic on his face had been replaced with consideration, and he continued pacing. “We could make a clean getaway right now. But.” He bit his lip and turned to me, finally standing still. “I don’t want this ship anywhere near the capital. They have so many rifles on board, I’m worried they’ll attack anyway even if we’re not here.”
“Okay, then we bring the ship down.” I hoped we found a way to do it with minimal casualties. I would hate if Sammy or Petra got hurt because of this.
He took a deep breath. “Yeah. We’ll bring the ship down. How exactly do we do that?”
I laughed and unclipped my wrench from my pants. “Are you kidding? Crashing a ship is the easy part. Just break stuff.”
He eyed my wrench. “Without getting caught?”
I grinned. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
He didn’t look convinced. “I want to get up to the helm and steer the ship off course, maybe try and get us away from any towns.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. Bad enough we might accidentally kill some of the crewmen, I really didn’t want to kill any innocent townspeople below us.
“Okay.” He shook his hands out. “Give me ten minutes to get the ship off course, and then...break stuff, I guess.”
I twirled the wrench. It was a shame Malik wasn’t here, he lived for this kind of stuff.
Jack hesitated at the door. “I can do this. I can do this.”
“You’ll be fine,” I told him. “But we’re running out of time, so you better get going.”
He took one more deep breath and then slipped out the door.
I waited about ten minutes, and then I did the same. I couldn’t tell if the ship had turned at all; the constant rocking all felt the same to me, so I hoped I’d given Jack enough time.
Sneaking down to the boiler room was easy. A few guys were working down there, but I crept around them and started twisting every gear I could find.
Steam hissed out, and the pipes rattled.
The men came running, and I made myself scarce. While they fixed my first mess, I got to work wrecking everything else. I unbolted a pipe altogether, scalding my hands when I didn’t pull them back in time and the steam billowed out.
The ship groaned and shuddered. The floor tilted under me, and an alarm started ringing. I ducked out of sight as more people came running down to the boiler room, and then I crept out into the hall again. Most mechanics were probably helping in the boiler room, which left me free to start destroying the pipes in the halls.
Steam quickly filled the air, and the ship pitched violently. I scrambled to climb back up to the stairs and get myself on deck.
Men ran back and forth up there, which seemed normal to me, until I realized they weren’t running to the rigging or anything, they were chasing Jack.
“Oh, king’s beard,” I muttered, watching him duck under one guy’s arms and dance around someone else. He did better than I would have thought, but he couldn’t keep this up forever. There were too many crewmen after him.
There was a crash behind me, and the ship lurched to the side. Everyone lost their balance and went sprawling on their hands and knees.
We were losing altitude, fast.
What have Jack and I done? This was a terrible plan; we should have just left when we had the chance.
“Jack!” I yelled, struggling to reach him.
He whipped his head around to find me and scrambled to meet me halfway. At this point, all the crewmen gave up on catching him and were more concerned with saving themselves. Someone was at the helm, desperately trying to right the ship.
Jack’s hand found mine, and then the nauseating sensation that accompanied this horrible spell overtook me.
When it ended, we were still falling. We were at the kind of height where you have time to realize you’re falling, but not enough time to do anything about it. We landed hard in the middle of a cobblestone street.
Steamcars hummed over us, and pilots swore at us to get out of the road.
Either they hadn’t seen us appear out of nowhere, or they decided that wasn’t their problem and didn’t care.
Jack groaned and cradled his head.
I grabbed his arm and forced him to his feet, dragging him to the sidewalk so we wouldn’t get flown over. He leaned against a shop window and pulled his hand away from his head, wincing at the bright crimson on his palm.
“Great,” he muttered. “Where are we?”
“Don’t know,” I said.
“The airship?”
“No idea.”
Sammy’s face flashed in my mind. She better survive that crash, or I’ll throw myself in the nearest river and drown.
He prodded his head, pulling faces at the bump. “Guess we need to figure out where we are and how to get to Chiari from here.”
“Yeah,” I said, glancing up at the sky. The shadows were getting pretty long, which meant night would fall soon. “Food first, unless you want to skip dinner tonight.”
He sighed. “Not particularly. You’re going to steal it, aren’t you?”
“Do you have money on you?”
“No,” he pouted.
“Then yes, I’ll be stealing.” We had to find a place to shelter for the night, too. I didn’t want to sleep, but Jack looked like he needed some time to rest, and I didn’t like the idea of wandering an unfamiliar city in the dark.
I looked up and down the street, weighing our options. This whole time, I’d been off balance in the woods and on an airship, but this time, we were in a city.
This was my kind of place.