BITING COLD.
Weightlessness.
Clouds.
Full moon staring down at us, huge, blind, and blinding.
Tumbling headfirst toward clouds a thousand feet below us. A large shadow drifting across the clouds below us.
I pushed myself back as we fell.
We slammed into a bulkhead and tumbled onto a cold steel floor in a maintenance corridor somewhere in the lower decks of the airship. Jacob groaned beneath me. I pushed myself up off him. “Are you all right?”
“Few bruised ribs, I’m okay.” He pushed himself up into a sitting position and I watched him wince. “I can’t believe you timed that right.”
Me neither. “That wasn’t my first plan.”
“Oh.” He grabbed a pipe along the bulkhead wall and pulled himself upright. He reached down to help me off my knees. I let him help me up, even though he looked the worse for the fall. “What were you trying to do?”
“The Shadows came from somewhere. I was trying to follow them back.”
Jacob grunted and hugged his side. “I think I prefer Plan B. Plan A sounds a lot more like going from the frying pan into the fire.”
I looked up and down the corridor. “Which way you think is the best way to find someone to raise an alarm?”
“The signs say engine maintenance this way. Should be people there, or at least another intercom.” I followed in the direction he pointed. After going a few dozen feet he asked, “So that wasn’t where the Shadows came from?”
I shook my head, “No, I think it was.”
“What? Nothing there but air, clouds, and a very long fall.”
“And another airship, below us.”
“What?”
“They must have come from that airship, but I waited too long to follow them back. It only matched the course of this airship long enough to let the Shadows come across, then it dropped down below our course to avoid someone like me Walking back on board.”
“That sort of cuts off their retreat, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t think whoever’s behind this looks at the Shadows as soldiers. More like guided missiles.”
“Great. Wonder how long before they strap a bomb to them?”
“Please, don’t give them any ideas.”
Jacob was built for strength, not for speed, and my primary means of keeping in shape was running a few miles every day. So, all things being equal, I should have easily kept up with him, especially since he was grunting and holding the side of his chest with his injured—hopefully only bruised—ribs.
Things weren’t equal. My Disney Princess ball gown was seriously restricting my movement, even after I kicked off the uncomfortable shoes. The skirts tried to tangle my legs and catch on every bit of hardware projecting from the walls. I ended up having to grab the skirts and hike them up like a showgirl just to keep up with Jacob.
We were deep into the corridors, lit only by minimal red-tinted lighting. I had lost much hope of finding anyone down on these decks; there didn’t seem to be anyone working down here. But before I decided to tell Jacob to look for a passage back up into the ship, we finally ran into someone.
It was almost literal, as the guy appeared out of a side passage that was nearly invisible from down the corridor. Jacob stopped short so quickly that he almost fell back into me.
The man was tall and almost as broad as the corridor. He was shiny bald and had a full black beard. He wore boots, overalls, and a white shirt marred by streaks of black grease. He carried a massive wrench, a length of steel about five feet long that looked more like a medieval weapon than something you’d find in a machine shop.
“Anschlag! Keine Eintragung! Wer sind Sie?”
“Okay,” I said, “That’s not French.”
Jacob held up his hands and asked, “Do you speak English?”
“Dieses ist nur ein eingeschränkter Bereich, Mechaniker und Technik. Sind Sie verloren?”
“I’d guess that’s a no,” Jacob said. “Parlez français?”
“No high school German?”
The big guy with the wrench looked at Jacob and said, slowly, “Non laissé. Retournez.”
“I think we’re in a restricted area,” Jacob said.
“I don’t speak a word and I figured that out.”
Jacob grunted and said, “Avertissez.” He spoke slowly, his own accent worse than the German mechanic’s. “Nous sommes attaqués. Avertissez.”
“Attaqués?” The mechanic prodded Jacob’s chest with the end of the wrench, leaving a big greasy smear on his shirt. I saw Jacob wince and lean over in the direction of his injured side. However, he kept his hands up in an attempt to be nonthreatening.
“No, not us. Why would—Damn—Pas nous. Pas nous! Ombres.”
The big man paused, narrowing his eyes at Jacob. “Ombres?”
“Yes! Ombres! Shadows!”
Big guy looked unconvinced.
“Damn, what’s the German word? I’ve seen enough World War II movies. Shatter, Shatner—”
“Ombres?” The guy prodded menacingly with the wrench again.
“Shatten!” Jacob said, and the guy froze. “That’s the word, Shatten.”
“Schatten . . . Angreifen?”
“Attaque d’ombres.”
He shook his head and said, “Nein.” But he lowered the wrench. “Woher würden sie kommen?”
I looked at Jacob, and he sighed. “No clue.”
“Woher kamen Sie?”
Jacob looked at the guy and said, “I’m sorry, my command of German is somewhere between Hogan’s Heroes and Where Eagles Dare. Can you get us to someone who knows English?”
The man pointed down the corridor where we’d come from. “Sie müssen zur—”
His words were cut off by a shrill klaxon. He froze and looked up as if the body of the airship was about to collapse down on him. Quietly, he said, “Nein. Dieses geschieht nicht.”
He was frozen for another moment, but then he moved as if one of the Shadows was already chasing him, running back down the corridor toward where he’d come from.
“I guess they figured it out,” Jacob raised his voice over the klaxon.
“Yes.”
“We should probably lay low and let them handle it.”
I’d already resumed our trek down the corridor.
I heard Jacob behind me. “Where are you going?”
“This is going to keep happening.”
“What?” He shouted over the klaxon.
I turned around. “Someone is sending these things after me. We can’t just let these people handle it!”
“It’s not your fault.”
“If we don’t get the one in charge, whoever’s sending them, whatever these people do about it will be pointless.” I resumed running down the corridor.
Jacob caught up with me. “You don’t know who’s in charge or where they are.”
“I don’t know who, but I’m pretty sure where.” I stopped in front of a cramped-looking staircase spiraling up into the ship. “You saw this thing when we boarded. It has airplanes attached, doesn’t it?”
IT was insane, and Jacob spent a great deal of effort trying to talk me out of it. But I didn’t see that I had much choice. I’d meant everything I’d said. If someone was targeting me, just relying on the local guards to pick off the Shadows wasn’t going to solve the problem. My unknown nemesis had shown little problem in tracking me down, and there was no reason to think they’d stop after this attack.
But I had seen the airship drifting below our position. Whoever had orchestrated this certainly had to be on board. And, if the bad guy was on board, we were still thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a day’s flight from shore; there was nowhere else to go.
I couldn’t not take advantage of that.
If the dress didn’t kill me first.
If you ever get the chance to ascend a cramped spiral staircase in a full ball gown, I’d suggest taking a pass. The skirts were annoying in the corridor. In the cramped space twisting upward, they became actively hostile, snagging on every third step. By the third deck up, there were enough rips in the skirts themselves that I had to start tearing free the petticoats.
The klaxons had died down after the initial alert, and Jacob said from behind me, “I don’t think we’ll be able to just walk into that section of the ship.”
“We’ll worry about that when we get there.” If we get there.
A couple more decks, and we ran out of staircase. I stepped out into a corridor that was clearly in the residential part of the airship, even if the corridors were less ornate than the ones by my cabin. The walls were paneled and bore a fancy wallpaper design, and the floor was carpeted, but anything more elaborate—art, furnishings, tapestries—was missing. I guessed that we were in a servant’s passageway.
Across from the stairs was a white enameled plaque that seemed to show a map of the deck layout. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the cursive French legend, so I waved Jacob over, “Can you make sense of this?”
He walked over and started touching parts of the deck map, “Kitchens . . . Lavatory . . . Dining halls A, B, C . . . Cabins . . . More Cabins . . . Electrical Junction . . . Another Lavatory . . . Janitorial . . . Restricted—”
“Where’s that?”
Jacob studied the map and pointed down the corridor. “That way, then the second corridor to our left.”
I started in that direction. Jacob walked next to me. “‘Restricted’ is a vague term, are you sure that’s what we want?”
“No.”
“As long as we have a plan.”
We kept going through the empty corridor, the muted klaxons almost sounding like the airship’s pulse. Twice, the lights dimmed to a sickly yellow then returned to normal. As we closed on the passage we wanted, the air began to take on the hint of something burning.
“Do you smell a fire?” I asked. I heard the edge of panic in my own voice as visions of the Hindenburg ran through my head.
“Yeah. I hope the fact these guys have control of North America means that they’re using helium.”
We had just reached the passage to the left when a sharp crack echoed through the corridor. Another, more muffled, report followed.
“Gunshots?” It was less a question on my part than an expression of alarm. Beyond the corner, before another shot tore through the air, I heard scraping, shuffling, and something moaning.
I crouched so my head was much lower than eye level.
“Dana—”
I snuck a half-second peek around the corner and pulled back before a gunman could take a bead on me. Turns out that was the least of my worries. The gunmen had other problems.
“—don’t.” Jacob finished.
“Shadows,” I gasped. “Five or six. Two guards pinned against a door.”
“Okay, we should—”
I stood up and started frantically looking around the corridor. “They sense me. Two are headed back toward us.”