It took Rémy more than an hour to get back to the airship. Her crew had set her down in a small clearing that housed an ornate ruined temple. Rémy had been reluctant to take the swiftest route in case the tiger followed her, and besides, she hadn’t wanted to return empty-handed. As it was, when she finally walked into the camp, Rémy carried over her shoulder a brace of rabbits — not quite the venison of the chital, it was true, but at least there would be something for the pot that night.
“Rémy!” Dita’s voice danced out of the trees toward her. She looked up, just in time to see the little girl jump down from the lowest branch of the nearest tree. “You’ve been ages! I thought you were lost!”
“Lost? Me? Never!” Rémy told her with a smile. “Just a little waylaid, that’s all.”
“I have been practicing,” Dita said proudly, “while you were gone. I can almost get all the way to the end without falling now.”
Rémy looked at the taut rope that she and Thaddeus had strung between the two sturdiest trees that edged the clearing. It was four feet from the ground and at least eight feet long. “That’s very good indeed,” she said, genuinely impressed, making a mental note to adjust her next few lessons to accommodate Dita’s apparently natural skill on the wire. “Especially since you’ve only been learning for a few weeks.”
“Well, it is wichtig,” said Dita, who still had the habit of peppering her English with words from her native German language. Her face took on a solemn look. “When we return home to Europe, I want a proper circus job.” She wrinkled her nose. “No more sweeping up after the messy elephants. If I can walk a rope, then I can do anything. Like you, ja?”
Rémy grinned, as much at the girl’s enthusiasm as the compliment. “I’m not sure about anything,” she said, pulling her catch from her shoulder and holding it up. “I’m still not too good at cooking.”
“Pfft!” exclaimed Dita, her hands on her hips. “But that is a good thing! It means the boys have to do it. They have to be useful for something!”
Rémy smiled again and then looked around. The clearing was very quiet. “Where are they, anyway?” she asked.
Dita nodded toward the silent airship, at rest between two crumbling yellow walls with its balloon fully inflated, which it hadn’t been when Rémy left. “J, he is hard at work on the ruby mechanism,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “He thinks it is not working quite as smoothly as it should. Honestly, even if there were nothing wrong with it, he would find something to tinker with. Boys with toys, ja?”
“What about Thaddeus?” Rémy asked, walking to the area that had been designated as their “kitchen” and dropping the rabbits in a heap beside the remnants of the previous night’s fire.
“The other side,” Dita said, indicating the airship again. She grinned wickedly. “He is an Englishman, no? He must hide from all this terrible sun!”
Rémy skipped quickly over a pile of fallen yellow wall, retrieved her bag from inside the airship, shouted a hello to the out-of-sight J, and went to find Thaddeus Rec. He was sitting in the dappled shadows cast by the dense forest behind him, a large map spread out over his knees and his old policeman’s notebook and pencil in one hand. His feet were bare; his trousers rolled up to his calves. His white shirt, although clean, was looking somewhat worse for wear after months of travel and was pulled up to the elbows and open at the throat. Rémy paused to watch him for a moment, smiling at the look of utter concentration on his face. Thaddeus’s skin had darkened to a rich bronze tan in the sun that had followed them ever since they had reached the coast of India.
“Afternoon, Monsieur,” Rémy said softly as she approached. She knelt down beside him and kissed him on his cheek, which bore a prickle of dark stubble.
“Good afternoon, Miss Brunel,” said Thaddeus, accepting the kiss with a smile. “I was beginning to wonder whether I should form a search party to come looking for you.”
She shrugged with a grin, leaning against the tree beside him and stretching out her legs beneath the map. “This little bird had an encounter with a big cat.”
Thaddeus raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“A tiger. A big one, too — much bigger than me.”
“A tiger? Good grief — are you all right?” He looked horrified, and she laughed.
“I am fine, as you see. Though tonight I think we should all sleep in the airship and seal the hatch. Just in case.”
Thaddeus touched her cheek and nodded. “Good idea. I want to move on tomorrow, anyway — I don’t like staying in one place for too long. It’s too risky, with the airship.”
Rémy glanced at the craft that had flown them all the way from Europe to the heart of England’s colonial empire. They had been forced to dodge the curiosity of the British army a few times since they’d arrived, but that had mainly been near the coast, where their ships clustered in the teeming ports. Farther inland, beyond the big cities, they had seen fewer colonial uniforms.
“Surely here, in the jungle, it is safe?”
Thaddeus frowned. “Perhaps. But I just have this feeling that it’s better to keep on the move. The airship would be a rich prize for anyone, and without it we would be completely stranded.”
Rémy nodded. “True enough. So, where to next, then?” she asked, indicating the map. “What has it told you, Monsieur Englishman? What are you looking for?”
He sighed. “I know we said we’d steer as clear as we could of the palace J remembers from his visit with Desai last year, but I think we’re going to have to try there next. The trail has led us in that direction anyway. We can’t be more than twenty miles from it now.”
Rémy traced her eyes over the map and his open notebook, which was full of the notes Thaddeus had kept throughout their journey. The airship had been in this clearing for the past three days as her crew tried to work out where to take her next. They had followed every lead they’d been given and it had brought them here, to this lush jungle that reached up from the coast southeast of them to cut a huge swathe through the center of the massive continent of India. Now the trail had run cold.
“Have you asked J what we can expect if we do go there?” she asked. “It would be good if we could prepare a little for what might greet us.”
Thaddeus shook his head. “J says that Desai made the final journey to see the raja himself — he wouldn’t let J or his friend Tommy accompany him.”
Rémy frowned. “Why not?”
“J said Desai didn’t think it would be safe for them.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Not sure I like the sound of that.”
“No, me neither,” agreed Thaddeus. “But what else are we to do? We’ve tried everywhere else.”
“Perhaps we should visit the nearest town with a telegraph?” Rémy suggested. “Send one back to Desai’s men in London, to ask if they can tell us anything else?”
Thaddeus shook his head. “We’re a long way from anywhere big enough for that,” he said, “and besides, I think they’ve told us everything they can. They don’t know where he is any better than we do.” He sighed, leaning back against the tree and shutting his double-colored eyes. “It’d be easier if I could speak some of the languages and dialects, ask people more than just what Satu had me write down. Perhaps we should have prepared better before we came on this trip.”
Rémy rested a hand on his arm. “I do not think so,” she said softly. “After all, we may already be too late. Delaying — that could not be a good thing.”
It had now been some months since either Rémy or Thaddeus had seen their friend Maandhata Desai, who had been such an ally in their strange battle against Lord Abernathy and the war machines he had built beneath England’s capital city. Desai had journeyed back to his homeland, leaving his network of operatives in London under Thaddeus’s command and telling the then-policeman that he was returning to India to deal with something called the Sapphire Cutlass. None of Desai’s people had been able to give Thaddeus any more information about this curious name. Thaddeus, however, had a horrible suspicion that it was linked to the mad mechanical trail that had started in London with Abernathy and continued in France with the Comte de Cantal. While imprisoned in the Comte’s monstrous volcanic dungeons, forced to listen to the man’s ramblings about his power, the young man had seen for himself the peculiar tattoo that graced the Comte’s chest — a short, curved sword with a glittering sapphire imbedded in the hilt: a sapphire cutlass. How could something so strange be a coincidence? Thaddeus — and Rémy too, once he had explained it all — had been worried, not just for their friend, but also for the wider implications. If the Sapphire Cutlass — whatever it was — was behind the mania of the Comte de Cantal, where else did it have influence? The Comte’s insanity had resulted in the destruction of an entire mountain that took with it a whole town, but if both he and Abernathy had had their way, things would have been much, much worse. If there was a driving force behind these desires, stoking them — what was coming next?
The problem was that Desai seemed to have disappeared completely. His men had given Thaddeus as much help as they could via telegram, whizzing typed messages back and forth across the vast distances from London to cities such as Bombay, Madras, and Bangalore. They had suggested towns he might have visited, routes he might have taken, people he might have been to see, but each time the airship had arrived somewhere new, its crew full of expectation, their hopes had been dashed. No one had seen Desai or knew where he was.
Or at least, that was what they said.
Privately, both Rémy and Thaddeus had the sense that at least some, if not all, of the people that they had met along the way were hiding something. None of them wanted to talk about Desai or where he might be, as if they were scared of what might happen if they were overheard. As for the Sapphire Cutlass, well — mention those words and people might as well have turned to stone. Which, as far as the crew of the airship went, made the search even more important. It was unfortunate, then, that they had run out of ideas as to where to go next. India was a big, big place to search, even with the help of a device as miraculous as a ruby-powered airship.
Rémy absently opened her bag and took out her puzzle box, turning it around in her hands as she looked at the haphazard route they had followed to date. The last village they had visited, situated right on the edges of the jungle, had been so small that it had been immediately apparent that it wouldn’t take them long to find out what they needed to know. The place had been made up of fewer than twenty small houses, and as far as Rémy could make out, was mostly populated by the very young and the very old. Perhaps anyone who was able to work was out in the fields, although the crops had seemed sparse and unkept as the shadow of the airship had drifted across them.
The people had been terrified of the airship, which wasn’t surprising. J had landed it a little way away and the group had walked in rather than touching down directly beside the houses. Desai was not there, and according to everyone they had shown Thaddeus’s written questions to — the entire village — he never had been. Polite as they all were, it had been very clear that the people had just wanted them to go.
“So, have you had any more luck with that?”
Thaddeus’s question jolted Rémy out of her thoughts and she found him nodding at the puzzle box.
“No,” Rémy sighed, twisting one of its small outer panels so that a hinge folded in on itself. “Every time I think I have made progress, voila! Another hinge appears that I cannot open without undoing what came before.” She made a sound of annoyance in her throat. “Truly, I am beginning to think that the old woman was just playing with me.”
Thaddeus smiled, his fingers brushing hers as he took the puzzle from her and toyed with it. They had been trying to open it ever since they had left France, tantalized by the thought that whatever was inside might help Rémy locate her fabled lost brother.
“Don’t give up,” he told her. “Not that I think you ever would. Rémy Brunel always sees things through to the end, no matter how difficult the journey.”
Rémy looked at him. Somewhere over the course of the past few months, things had changed between them. Perhaps it was just that she no longer had her opal to tell her his every thought, although Rémy somehow felt it was more than that. Things were easier between them. They were closer — they fit together better. They understood each other, and where they didn’t, they at least tried to.
Maybe this is just what it feels like when you really love someone, she thought. Maybe this is what happens when you find the person you should m—
“What?” Thaddeus asked her with a laugh, as she continued to gaze at him, lost in her thoughts.
Rémy shook her head, a little shocked at where her mind had been leading her.
Thaddeus reached out and stroked his fingers along her jaw. “Come here,” he murmured, pulling her gently toward him.
Her lips had almost touched his when there was a loud bang. A fraction of a second later, something thudded into the tree behind them, just inches above Thaddeus’s head, splinters of sharp bark exploding from the impact.