For breakfast they had microwave sausage and microwave pancakes. The ship’s captain even lent them some of his syrup. Everyone ate looking out over the landscape.
They had just passed to the north of Mount Minquadale. Now they were flying over huge gouges in the hills, and gray, smoldering slag heaps. There were cranes on the roads, and the rivers ran black.
Lily had the same feeling she’d had when she saw the people struggling up to the lower city of Elsmere from their rice paddies: the feeling that not everything was wonderful in this mythical country.
“What is all that down there?” she asked.
“The Brandywine Hills,” said Brother Grzo sadly. “It is one of the most beautiful places in all of Delaware. Ah, that is to say, it was. (Sorrow take me.) Once, it was beautiful. Lakes and forests. The little towns of Arden and Claymont. Bobcats and pheasants. But now the lakes are thick with brown grime and the forests are chopped down to stumps and the hills are stripped for mining.”
“By who?” asked Katie, aghast.
“The Governing Committee of Wilmington. They rule all you see beneath us. They are powerful men and women, friends and business partners of the Autarch. They make their fortunes by plundering the hills. They serve the Autarch. They do not care if this land is despoiled. They never leave Wilmington Castle. There they sit, reaping the profit of this smoky harvest.”
“That’s awful,” said Lily.
“Alas, who are we to complain?” Grzo mused. “We too wish to have our roads, our van, our metal beds and lamps and flying ships. Where shall these metals come from, or the timbers for our houses?” He gestured with his hand to the rubble of the hills below them. “What we ask for must come from places like this.”
“It is true about us wanting our flying ships,” said Jasper ruefully. “Flying ships are extremely keen.”
Columns of smoke rose past the windows.
After breakfast, they all went down to the freighter’s hold, where they spray-painted the van red. It was extremely satisfying. Lily loved watching the white disappear in stripes and strokes. Katie, Drgnan, and Jasper loved threatening to color each other’s hair. Katie shrieked and ducked. Drgnan pointed out that he didn’t have any hair. Jasper said he’d paint some in, and Katie said she’d give him a center part.
Lily wondered why she was always too timid to join in when the others knocked each other around. It looked fun. But she felt more like someone who watched than someone who joined in.
By the time they had finished with the first coat of paint and gone above-decks for lunch, the airship had reached the outskirts of Wilmington. Its factories and housing blocks lay as far as the eye could see. Trains moved sluggishly on tracks.
Very little of the old city of Wilmington survived. Though there were a few enclaves where the houses were made of stone and the streets were quaint and narrow, most of the city was now a great industrial center. The most prominent reminder of the city’s past, that age of fable when the purple-sailed ships of Wilmington plied all the trade routes of Delaware Bay, their navy bringing fear even to the savage barbarians of Broadkill, Slaughter Beach, and Hazzard Landing, was the castle that still stood on a rocky hill above the city, commanding a view of all the tenements, mills, and chemical vats for miles around.
Jasper, Katie, Lily, and Drgnan looked down at Wilmington Castle. Immediately they hated it. Its battlements and conical roofs were black with soot. Something about its jagged turrets spelled doom.
If only they had known what dire interrogations were about to happen there.