CHAPTER 4

IN WHICH NADYA GETS IN DEEP, DEEP TROUBLE.

I crutch out of the balloon as fast as I can. It’s pretty hard cranking the locking wheels in the waiting house open and shut with a bum shoulder while standing on one leg, so Aaron does it for me this time around. Then, after the whirr and pop of the garden air being pumped out and the outside air rushing in, I head for the ladder, working my safety lines with one hand.

Tam’s waiting there, next to a winch and a swing we’ve set up to raise and lower me from the catwalks to the deck when I need to move fast. He’s frowning and fidgeting, bouncing around like a squirrel with a hawk perched above it.

“What happened?” I ask while Aaron heads down the ladder. The rest of the crew’s already on deck. I can see the Orion’s whole topside from bow to stern, and it doesn’t look like anything’s wrong.

Tam takes my crutches and holds the swing steady while I sit and clip it to my harness. “I dunno,” he says, handing my crutches back and heading to the winch. “We were approaching the docks. There was a lot of ship traffic around us. I had my eyes on a big liner just above and to the left of us, but there were a couple other ships around too. Then there was this big boom, and I thought we must’ve crashed into one of them, but I didn’t see anything except smoke under the portside bow. I was still trying to figure out what was happening when Pepper ran out from inside the ship shouting that the pirates were gone, and Nic called everyone on deck.”

Tam starts lowering me. The winch creaks a little, but it’s a smooth ride through cool, salty air as I descend. I look for the smoke he’s talking about, but it’s not there. Whatever caused the problem, it seems like it’s over.

Except that the pirates are gone.

My stomach twists. The pirates were going to be our key piece of evidence that Mrs. T got kidnapped. Our plan was to turn them over to the Cloud Navy, a fleet of armed cloudships maintained by the Six Cities around the edge of the Cloud Sea, and hope that the navy could get them to fess up about where their friends might’ve gone. Then the navy could track the Remora down, stop it from pirating any other ships, and, most important, rescue Mrs. T.

Without them, we can’t do any of that.

As I swing in the breeze, I turn and watch our approach into Far Agondy. Tall Thom’s at the wheel, and the ship’s moving ahead real slow. We’re about two hundred feet above the waves, which are deep blue and dotted with sailing boats and steam-powered coast crawlers that trade up and down the continent in the shallow water where they’re safe from leviathans. Behind them, the city stretches toward cloudy mountains inland like a forest of silver knives.

Far Agondy’s tall, see, like other cities aren’t. It’s built around a dagger-shaped island in the middle of a river, with the point of the dagger stabbing toward the ocean and the harbor. Nic says it got its start as a place for coast crawlers to meet and trade with river runners heading inland to the deep forests and silver mines. It grew bigger and bigger, and now the harbor at the tip of the dagger has slips for eighty water-going ships, and the cloudship spires sticking out of the shallow waters of the bay like needles have room for a hundred flying ones.

We’re cruising toward our usual spot: Slip 6, Spire B. There’s four spires total for cloudships. Each one’s an ironwork column about fifty feet in diameter and thirty stories high, with jetties for ships to dock at sticking out in four directions every five stories. We use a slip that’s owned by a supplier Nic knows. Because we buy so much, they give us a pretty good deal on the fee for tying up.

Slip 6 is on the city side of the spire, so Thom has to bring us around. The cloudship closest to us, on the ocean side of the spire, looks like a deep-sea trawler. Its deck’s covered in nets and cages and has two big winches off either end. Its cloud balloon’s got a design of a school of fish leaping out of the waves in a storm.

I lose sight of the spire as Tam finishes lowering me and I unclip from the swing. Nic’s standing by one of the capstans, staring worriedly at the Orion’s bow. The wind puffs strong scents off the city: motor oil, the hot and sweet stench of garbage, a sort of fishy funk, and—more than anything else—smoke. Far Agondy’s the smokiest place in the Cloud Sea. There’s a giant fire spirit living in a cavern underneath it. It burns trash, coal, oil, and a whole bunch of other stuff that the city government feeds to it in big power stations. All that heat makes steam, which turns turbines, which generate electricity, so on top of being the world’s smokiest city, Far Agondy’s also its most electrified. The trams run on electricity. The elevators in the skyscrapers run on electricity. The lights run on electricity. At night, it’s like a firefly wonderland.

I crutch into line between Pepper and Salyeh, who’s staring forward like Nic. Tian Li frowns next to him.

“What happened?” I whisper to Pep while Aaron, who’s still pretty slow on the ladder, gets down behind us and falls into line. Tam clanks rapidly down the rungs above him.

Pep fidgets and wipes some soot off her nose onto her overalls. “I was keeping an eye on the engine room, making sure the fire spirits didn’t get too rowdy or slack off, and I heard this real light thump from forward, near the pirate brig. I stuck my head out to investigate, and when I did, there was a huge boom, and a cloud of smoke poufed back at me. I grabbed a water bucket and ran forward in case it was a fire, but when I got to the brig there was nothing there—just a hole in the hull where the wall used to be—and no more pirates.”

She looks up worriedly toward Nic, who’s still staring silently forward. We’ve gotten into the flow of traffic around the spires, following a garbage scow. Thom should have us into Slip 6 anytime now, which means whatever Nic’s going to say, it’ll have to be quick. It takes all of us to tie up the ship.

Tam thumps to the deck and runs up, puffing hard. Nic starts talking, right on cue. “I’ll keep this short,” he says. “About fifteen minutes ago, there was an explosion in the room we’ve been using as a brig. By the time I got down to investigate, Pepper and Salyeh were already there, and the pirates were gone.”

My guts churn. Hearing Nic say it makes it seem more real, somehow, and the realer it gets, the less likely it seems we’ll ever get Mrs. T back. “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” I ask. “Gone where?”

Nic sighs. “That, it seems, is the operative question. We’re still two hundred feet off the waves, high enough that if they jumped, they almost certainly perished. We don’t—”

I crutch toward the deck railing over the brig. “They’re still here, then!” I blurt out. “They must be on the lines somewhere! We have to catch—”

“Nadya Skylung, freeze!” Nic shouts.

I stop moving, and a feeling like midwinter snow tumbles down my back and collects in my spine.

“Turn around,” Nic says more softly, but there’s still a nail-sharp edge in his voice. When I do as he says, his nostrils are flared and he’s taking short, fast breaths. His arms are trembling.

“On this ship,” he says, and he says it like he’s talking to all of us, but I know he’s talking to me especially, “we often let discipline slide. We want you to think and act for yourselves, to ask questions, to be independent. I think the benefits of that approach have spoken for themselves over the last month.”

When we were on our own after the pirates kidnapped him, Thom, and Mrs. T, he means.

He takes a deep breath. “But we are nevertheless a crew. I am the captain. You are the hands. When I speak, you listen. When I give orders, you obey.”

I cringe, feeling about as small as a cloud bug that’s just encountered a sparrow. I didn’t mean to disobey any orders. But I thought there was still a chance to catch the pirates.

“All the ports we visit are dangerous, Far Agondy more so than most. And this trip, Far Agondy may be especially dangerous, so I want to be crystal clear: This is an order. From this moment on, you will do nothing without consulting myself or Mr. Abernathy first. You will refer to us properly, by our ranks. You will maintain proper discipline, and you will toe the line, or we will reconsider our crewing arrangements. Have I made myself clear?”

My throat closes up. I can’t feel my lips. My fingers tingle. He can’t mean what he just said. Just yesterday he promised he’d help find Mrs. T. He promised!

But he looks as serious as a hurricane.

You could cut the silence by breathing on it. Pep gets tears in her eyes. Tian Li’s lips tremble. Sal’s hands shake. Tam’s not showing it, but I’m sure he’s every bit as scared as the rest of us. Aaron looks confused.

And me?

I feel like Nic just pulled the ship out from under me, and now I’m falling into the sea. I’m the one who stepped out of line just now. I’m the one he’s looking at. I’m the one who got in trouble, so I must be the one he’s thinking about kicking off the Orion. I could throw up.

“Well?” he asks.

“Yes, sir!” Tam shouts, and we echo him in a tumbling shower of mumbles and mealy-mouthed whispers.

“Yes, sir,” I hack, and I look at Nic and feel like he’s a stranger. Yesterday he was Nic, and he was comforting me. Captain Vega, I’m supposed to think of him as now. Mr. Abernathy, instead of Thom. I feel all dry and crumbly, like clay left out to bake in the desert sun. The wind blows over the bow from Far Agondy, and it stinks of rotten fish and garbage. I wish we’d never come here. I wish the last ten minutes hadn’t happened. I wish the whole last two months hadn’t happened and we’d gone south to T’an Gaban, and somebody else had rescued Aaron from the pirates.

“Good,” Captain Vega says. He clears his throat and takes a deep breath. “Now, as I was saying, we don’t know what happened to the pirates, but searching for them would be catastrophically unsafe. They could have fallen, but they could be aboard and armed with makeshift weapons from the debris in the brig. The hull may be too damaged to safely support a search team. You could fall. You could be overpowered and thrown from the ship. You could be crushed against the docks. These pirates are not worth risking your lives over.” He stares at me directly, so hard it almost hurts. “Any questions?”

Pepper sniffles. Everybody stands stock still, frozen.

Yes, I think, looking at Captain Vega and wondering where Nic went. What about Mrs. T?

But I don’t answer. We’re not allowed to answer now. We’re just crew. Just here to follow orders and do what we’re told. I want Mrs. T back. She never would’ve let him do this. I almost look up toward Thom—Mr. Abernathy, I remind myself—at the wheel and see what he thinks, but I don’t dare break eye contact with Nic.

Because whatever else I want—and I want a whole lot—I really, really, really don’t want to lose the Orion.

“Excellent,” Captain Vega says. “You all know your docking stations. Go to them and await further orders. We will be reaching port shortly. Dismissed.”

We scatter like a startled flock of birds. Tian Li runs to the port side of the ship’s aft castle to help with the lines. Salyeh bolts toward the forward lines starboard, and Pepper toward the aft starboard. I crutch to my post at the forward part of the ship on the port side, where the pirates are probably hiding, right now, with all their information about where the Remora might have gone with Mrs. T about to slip out from under our noses forever.

I edge around my cabin and settle on a bench Tam and Thom built for me so I can do my duties sitting down. The crumbliness inside me melts into numbness. My missing leg starts up a symphony of burning pains, and I try to knock it against the deck railing to make it stop and nearly pitch myself off the bench.

The ship slides into the cold iron arms of the dock. The dockmen shout friendly greetings at me that soon turn into concerned questions about the hole in the ship, what happened to my leg, what in the world we ran into out there. We see them pretty often, and I think they find us interesting—a ship full of kids doing jobs meant for adults.

“Ask the captain,” I mutter until they stop talking. I do my job like a machine: catch the rope they toss to me, tie it to a notch in the railing. Slide down the bench, catch another rope, tie it up. Slide, catch, tie, slide, catch, tie, until I run out of bench. The dockhands look at me like they want to help, but a whistle calls them away to do something else because they’re just a crew too.

The engines cut out. The ship slides to a halt, caught in a web of ropes. The stench of Far Agondy wafts over me, and I look forward off the bow, toward the city’s nest of silver towers and cabled zip lines, the billowing clouds of thick gray smoke from the power stations, the trains, the cars, the life of a million buzzing, smelly people. I try not to look at anyone on the dock, try to imagine that the pirates fell into the sea and died. But I still see three people in frayed, dirty coats hurrying into the spire below us, and they look just like the pirates we captured. I call out to Nic, but he stares at me so stonily that my mouth dries up and the words stick in my throat. I don’t want to hear him say it’s just my imagination, so I keep it to myself and slink off back to work instead.

Usually when we get to port, I feel excited. This time, I just want to curl up in bed and cry.