by Joel Ross
A faraway smile rose on her face. “Oh, Chess, I still don’t know how I found you in all that Fog.”
I took a deep breath. “But you—you’re dying, Mrs. E. There’s no way to help, at least not on the Rooftop.”
“Shhh,” she said, her eyes closing. “Hush, Chess. . . .”
“We’re not even sure Port Oro can heal you. The fogheads said so, but who knows if they’re lying?”
“On the Port,” she said, her voice faint, “many things are possible.”
She fell asleep before saying more, and I watched her slow, steady breathing. Usually I hated when she slept, because it felt like she was already leaving us, already gone. But this time was different. This time I had hope.
14
TIME LIMPED PAST AS I clung to the rigging beneath the leaking balloon. I drifted in a painful haze until Hazel swung down beside me, tied the main lines together with leather straps, and said, “You can let go now, Chess.”
“Do I have to?” I gasped as I unhooked my bracers and sagged into the rigging. “I was just starting to enjoy myself.”
She flashed an uneasy smile, then scanned the Fog with her spyglass.
I rubbed my aching arms and followed her gaze. Between Bea’s frantic efforts with the engine and my painful grappling with the rigging, the raft could now fly with only two balloons. But not for long—we were still too low, and any strong gust of wind might shove us down into the white.
For hours, I waited for that deadly gust, yet our luck held. I wanted to tell them about the diamond, but Bea was busy with the engine, Swedish with the wheel, and Hazel scanning the Fog, plotting our route to the inch.
I decided to wait until things calmed down a little. And finally, squinting toward the setting sun, I caught a glimpse of the Rooftop, a jagged mountain range with foothill “islands” breaking through the Fog all around. Green fields seemed to glow in the high meadows, and distant waterfalls caught the fading sunlight. Fancy mansions dotted the high peaks, where Mrs. E had lived as a little girl, among the parks and estates of the upper slopes, with lakes full of catfish and forests full of deer. She said that a busy city rose on the third-highest peak, packed with shops selling fresh-baked naan, smoked sausages, and unrotten fruit.
We didn’t completely believe her stories, but Hazel dreamed of flying over the Rooftop for a closer look. She ached to see the elegant clothes, to hear the fancy music, and maybe even to feel solid ground under her feet for the first time in her life. But the roof-troopers didn’t let slum-dwellers onto—or even over—the mountain. Patrolling airships would’ve shot us from the sky.
Below the highest peaks, ramshackle buildings of salvaged alumina and concrete crowded the lower slopes, along with smoldering smokestacks and ratty windmill-blimps. Even lower, the junkyard surrounded the mountain, floating fifty feet above the Fog on dilapidated platforms. Trash and shacks covered every foot, except for a few sparse patches where the junkyard bosses had “ditched” a neighborhood by overturning a platform and dumping everything into the deadly Fog below. That was the punishment for not paying rent.
Still, as the raft spluttered closer to the slum, I felt myself smile. The junkyard was horrible, but it was still home.
“Sight for sore eyes?” Hazel asked.
“Sight for sore everything,” I told her, rubbing my bruises.
She chewed her lower lip. “Do you think this whole thing is a mistake? I mean, trying to sneak onto Port Oro? Nobody ever makes it that far.”
“Nah,” I said. “Port Oro’s going to be great. I hear apples grow on trees.”
“And it rains water!” she said.
I laughed. “I’m just glad we made it back.”
“We haven’t yet,” Swedish grumbled from the wheel. “We’re going to crash and burn.”
“Swede’s right,” Bea called from beside the condenser, a smudge of grease across her nose. “We’re not going to reach our dock, not even close.”
“How about the nearest slipway?” Hazel asked. “Can we reach that?”
Slipways were makeshift ramps with mooring masts and space for undercarriage engines. Not as safe as our dock, and farther from home, but better than dying.
“She might hold together that long.” Bea nibbled her lower lip. “Barely.”
“How barely?” Hazel asked.
“Barely barely,” Bea said. “With only two balloons, she’s flying on dreams and dandelions.”
Hazel set a course, and Swedish threaded the wallowing raft through high crests of Fog, toward the outer edge of the junkyard, a fringe of welded scaffolding, rusty chains, and plastic bags woven into sheets.
“Speaking of dreams,” I said, patting my boot pocket.
Hazel glanced at me, a curious glint in her eyes. “Yeah, what were you doing picking a fight over a flower?”
“Not that it wasn’t a very nice flower,” Bea called from under the raft.
“Probably poisonous,” Swedish muttered, angling the raft toward the slipway.
A clank sounded from below. “It was not!”
“Would you two hush?” Hazel said. “Chess is trying to tell us something.”
“Probably that it’s dangerous to talk to muties about smuggling stuff onto the Rooftop,” Swedish grumbled, adjusting the rudder to catch a breeze. “If the troopers capture them—”
“I found a diamond,” I broke in.
Silence fell, and I laughed at the hope and disbelief flickering on their faces.
Bea popped from the hatch and everyone spoke at once:
“A what?” Hazel asked with a shocked laugh. “Are you sure?”
“A diamond?” Swedish said. “Probably fake. Probably cursed.”
“Oooh,” Bea said. “Can I see? Is it pretty?”
“Chess, if you found a real diamond—”
“Mrs. E says they sparkle like the stars.”
“You know what they do with diamonds?” Swedish demanded. “Why nobody’s allowed to own one?”
“What do they do?” I asked, widening my eyes in fake fascination.
“They are collecting diamonds to build a bomb—a mountain buster big enough to blow the whole Rooftop into gravel.”
“Right,” I scoffed. “Because that’s what the roof-troopers want more than anything. Gravel.”
“A diamond!” Hazel crowed. “You know what this means? We’re halfway to Port Oro already.”
“Let’s see!” Bea said. “I want to see it! A real diam—”
The raft gave a violent shudder, and the engine coughed and spat.
“We’re not home yet!” Hazel yelled. “Bea, keep her in the air. Chess, take the crow’s nest.”
As I climbed the rigging, she shouted, “And don’t drop that rock!”
Hazel leaned over the prow of the raft like a figurehead, ready to call a warning if an outcropping of Fog threatened the engine. As we flew closer, the stink of the junkyard rose in the air and mixed with the sharp tang of the overheated engine.
A crowd watched us wheeze toward the slipway’s mooring mast, a tottering tower of rusty automobile engines and bathroom fixtures. A stringy-haired vendor shouted her prices for rat kabobs, as a frenzy of trading started around her. Almost nobody used coins in the slums. Real money was tucked away for special occasions. Instead, we bartered lengths of wire for plasteel buttons, a bag of potting soil for a bone needle, a skewer of crab apples for some grilled squirrel.
At first, I didn’t understand why they were trading. Then I almost laughed. “They’re gambling,” I called to the others. “They’re betting about us reaching the slipway.”
“Wish I could throw down a little something,” Swedish said.
“Me too!” Bea chirped. “We’re going to get there for sure!”
Hazel grunted. “That’s not how Swedish would bet, Bea.”
“He’d bet against us?” Bea’s voice sharpened. “Swedish, you’re horrible!”
“Listen to the engine,” he said, his fingers dancing over the steam organ
keyboard. “The gears are snapping. There’s no way we’re staying in the air.”
A series of loud pops shook the raft. Gray smoke puffed from an intake valve.
“We will reach that slipway,” Bea said, her green eyes narrowing as she spliced cables together.
A hundred feet from the slipway, sparks started shooting from the propeller. Hazel’s grip tightened on the prow and she leaned forward. “We can’t sink now,” she said. “Think of Port Oro!”
Seventy feet away, the forward balloon began flapping and hissing. “C’mon, c’mon,” Hazel muttered. “Stay in the air.”
At fifty feet, the deck was shaking like a rattlesnake’s tail, and Hazel yelled, “Almost there, Bea! Almost there!”
Forty feet, and I grabbed a mooring strap and raced for the prow. I needed to hitch us to the mooring mast before the engine died.
Hazel shouted commands and Swedish muttered dire predictions. Bea clamped a valve shut with her foot and crooned to the engine, which answered with a screech. Catcalls sounded from the crowd, the odds of our survival falling fast.
Only I remained silent, twirling the mooring strap overhead. Not close enough. Not yet. . . .
“Bea!” Hazel yelled, running toward her. “Abandon ship, abandon ship!”
“No! She needs me!”
Hazel grabbed Bea’s wrist and dragged her forward. “We have to jump! Swedish, run! Throw the strap, Chess.”
“Not yet,” I said.
The rear balloon exploded into scraps, and the deck tilted crazily. “Now!” Hazel shouted. “Now, now!”
“Not yet—”
“Throw it now!” she screamed, and I did.
15
THE STRAP SPUN IN the air, a loop of nylon and wire.
Time slowed, freezing the faces of the shouting crowd, freezing the snarl on Swedish’s lips and Bea’s horrified expression as Hazel shoved her toward the prow.
The mooring mast—the target of my throw—glowed in the light of the setting sun. The loop twirled closer and closer . . . and fell three feet short.
But one thing a tetherboy knew was tethers, and a strap wasn’t all that different. Three feet short? No way.
I whipcracked the strap, and the loop flicked higher. It still missed the mooring hook, but it snagged a fender that jutted just below it. The fender was crimped and rusty, definitely not strong enough to keep the raft in the air. Still, it might hold the weight of the crew, so I screamed—“Grab the strap! Grab the strap!”—as I pulled the hacksaw from my leg sheath.
Ten feet away from landing safely on the slipway, the raft engine died.
The world moved in slow motion. The raft tumbled downward. The rigging snapped, the pistons screamed. The deck angled crazily as I furiously slashed and hacked at the strap.
The raft fell five feet. My breath caught and my boots scrambled for a foothold.
The raft fell ten feet, and fear built in my lungs. In seconds, the weight of the raft would tear that rusty fender from the mooring mast and we’d all die. Swedish, Hazel, Bea—
No. With one final, terrified slash, I sliced the strap from the raft’s deck.
Through fear-widened eyes, I caught a glimpse of Hazel and the others above me clinging to the mooring line—now attached only to the fender, not the raft. The loop tightened around the fender, and they slammed into the mast, bruised and battered but dangling safely below the slipway.
Frantic and trembling, I hitched the line to my tether, and an instant later it jerked at my harness, stopping my fall. I swung like a pendulum and slammed into the slipway.
Ouch.
Below me, the raft dropped into the white and disappeared. No crash sounded, no explosion flashed. The Fog simply swallowed the raft whole.
I dangled there, limp and aching and defeated. We’d come so far. We’d dived in uncharted territory and found a diamond, we’d survived mutineers and reached the junkyard—but we’d lost our raft to the Fog, and that ruined everything.
After a minute, I felt myself being dragged higher, until Swedish pulled me onto the slipway and gave me a fierce back-pounding hug, ignoring the groans of the people who’d wagered against us.
“Too small,” Swedish said gruffly. “I should throw you back.”
I brushed my hair over my freak-eye. “You sound like that mutineer captain.”
“My poor raft,” Bea sniffled.
“We got lucky, Bea!” Swedish said. “We crashed and didn’t die. If Chess hadn’t tossed that line, we’d be lumps of meat right now.”
“We didn’t crash,” Bea said, removing her cap respectfully. “She crashed. The raft gave her life for ours.”
“And I lost my lucky bootball,” Swedish grumbled.
He shouldered through the crowd, leading us toward the slipway owner, a skinny man eating his dinner in a darkened doorway.
“Who’s going to pay for the damage to my slipway?” the slipway owner barked at Swedish, digging in his bowl with chopsticks. “You bottom-feeders dented my mast—and you owe me docking fees. Either you pay, or I take the pretty one as a chambermaid.”
Swedish cracked his knuckles. “Just try.”
I took a breath and stepped beside him. I didn’t like fighting, but I’d lived my whole life in the junkyard—I’d fight if I had to. Then a rough-looking woman in a stained sari appeared behind the owner, cradling a makeshift crossbow. We couldn’t fight that.
“We’ll pay,” Hazel announced, stepping forward. “For the damage, the fees, and for salvage rights to our raft.”
The slipway owner pointed his chopsticks at her. “Your raft is smashed into a thousand pieces.”
“That’s not your problem,” she told him. “We’ll dive from your slipway, salvage the wreckage, and rebuild.”
Bea pulled me closer. “I can’t rebuild the raft, not after that crash.”
I shushed her. I didn’t know what Hazel was doing, but I knew she was doing something. She was always doing something.
“You can’t give this guy money,” Swedish murmured. “We barely have enough for food.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Hazel muttered back. “We crashed the raft, and we don’t own the raft.”
My stomach soured. That was the problem. We’d lost the junkyard bosses’ raft, and they’d make us pay for a new one—with the diamond. Our only way of getting to Port Oro.
“There won’t be much worth salvaging,” Bea said in a small voice. “Not enough to rebuild—”
“Shut your mouth, Bea!” Hazel snarled between clenched teeth. “Do as you’re told.”
Bea’s lips trembled. She pulled a wire from her pocket and started making a twisty—to keep herself from crying.
Hazel and the slipway owner bickered for a while; then she turned to me. “Give him the toilet paper.”
I took the folded stack of “cash” from my pocket. “The thousands are softer than the hundreds,” I told him.
He didn’t seem to care. Maybe he knew it wasn’t true. He kept telling Hazel that he needed more coin, and they haggled and argued until we finally set off for home along a trash-littered road skirting an open sewer.
Swedish scowled at Hazel. “You made Bea cry.”
“I’ll explain when we get home,” she told him. “I wouldn’t talk like that without a good reason.”
Bea peered at her. “You—you didn’t mean it?”
“You know better than that,” Hazel said. I could tell her feelings were a little hurt that they’d thought she’d really lost her temper. “The both of you.”
Swedish shot Hazel an apologetic look, then kicked at an imaginary bootball.
Bea said, “Sorry, Cap’n.”
“Have some faith,” I said, tapping her leather cap.
She wrinkled her nose at me and slipped the twisty she’d just made into her tool belt.
“What’d you make?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“C’mon!” I said. “Let’s see.”
She scuffed her fee
t. “It’s nothing.”
“Hey, I told you about the goose.”
She glared but handed it over. I angled the twisty to catch the moonlight and saw that she’d wrapped the wire into the shape of a sloppy face, with a big, open mouth and snakes instead of hair.
“What is it?” I asked.
Swedish peered closer. “A startled porcupine.”
“Or a really angry mop,” I said.
“It’s Hazel,” Bea said. “Yelling at me.”
Hazel glanced at the twisty. “My hair doesn’t do that.”
“I can’t believe we lost the raft!” Bea blurted. “Well, at least we still have the—”
“Crew,” Hazel interrupted, before Bea could say diamond.
“What?” Bea asked.
“The crew,” Hazel said, nodding toward the hostile faces watching us from shadowy doorways. “At least we have each other.”
“Oh!” Bea flushed. “Right.”
After that, we kept quiet as we headed through darkening passages and garbage-filled clearings. We didn’t normally dock in the slipways, so none of us knew this neighborhood. Strange noises rose in the gloom—the grinding of unseen clockwork, the sickly wheeze of the fans keeping the slum aloft. Rats and roaches scuttled in the corners, and a baby cried out from a shadowy archway.
Then a hoarse voice shouted, “The world didn’t end with a bang! It began with a slow rise of mist! The Fog is the healing breath of the Earth!”
“Fogheads,” Swedish muttered. “They’re all whackadoo.”
“Let’s go around him,” Hazel said.
I pointed toward a detour. “That way.”
Swedish knew that Mrs. E called fogheads the “Subassembly,” and that they’d been scientists working for the Five Families before Kodoc betrayed them and stole their research. But he insisted that they were complete lug nuts, always skulking around and muttering about the Fog.
Before we turned away, the foghead stepped from the shadows, a small man wearing a gray robe. “A thousand ticktocks will rise from the lowest Fog,” he told us, “to cleanse and burn and purify!”
“Let’s go,” Hazel said, and headed off.
“They come not to bury us, but to warn us!” the man yelled, edging closer.
