by Joel Ross
“Hang on,” Hazel called, grabbing a strap behind Swedish. “We’ve got company.”
“C-company?” Loretta gulped.
“A guardship.” Hazel grabbed Swedish’s shoulder. “Swede, they’re behind that rise.”
I scanned the sky and saw a guardship veering toward us, a sleek craft with jointed fins, coming fast. There was nowhere to hide.
“We can’t outrun that,” I said.
31
“HE’S FAST, BUT HE can’t turn,” Swedish told me, yanking a lever. “No rooftop puddle-jumper is keeping me away from Mrs. E.”
He swung the mayfly into the air, rising toward the clouds. As we climbed higher, the guardship drew closer. Loretta moaned while Bea danced around the engine, adjusting gears. Swedish hammered a soundless tune on the steam organ keyboard, his fingers a blur, and Hazel stood behind him, her braids flying.
“The shack’s three wisps to your left, Swede,” she shouted. “The guardship’s five hundred yards and closing.”
“That’s what he thinks,” Swedish said, aiming the thopper higher and higher.
Flying slower and slower as we rose.
“Four hundred yards,” Hazel said, and shot me a look.
Sometimes with Hazel there was no need for words. “Bea!” I yelled. “Fasten down, this is going to get bumpy!”
Loretta looked at me with frightened eyes, so I unspooled a jack line and handed it to her, saying “Wrap this around yourself.”
“Three hundred fifty yards!” Hazel shouted.
“Wh-why?” Loretta asked me.
“Because any second now,” I said, “Swedish is going to start flying this thing.”
“What’s he doing now?” she moaned, and started winding the rope around her arm.
“Three hundred!”
I yanked the rope from Loretta’s hands and strapped her down properly. The wind whipped my hair from my face, and she gasped. “Your eye! It’s full of Fog—and it’s moving. That’s freaky!”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Totally freaky!”
“Yup,” I said.
“Dude,” she said. “You’re a Fog-eye.”
“I know!”
“Wait, you’re the kid Kodoc is looking for! You’re the most wanted person in the entire Rooft—” she shrieked as the mayfly jerked.
“Two hundred yards!” Hazel shouted. “Swede, they’ve got harpoons cocked.”
The deck was almost vertical. I tugged my hair into place, wedged myself against a boiler vent, and watched the guardship climbing after us, my heart thundering.
“One fifty!” Hazel shouted. “Swede, stop showing off!”
Swedish laughed and flicked a valve open.
The engine sputtered, and stalled. Then stopped.
A weightless silence surrounded us. No pistons pumped, no foggium flowed. We hung motionless in the air, aimed almost directly upward.
Then the pneumatic pop-pop of harpoons sounded behind us. Airtroopers shouted, and the mayfly dropped like a stone. The harpoons missed us by five feet. Wind lashed the hulls, and through my fear I felt a tug of excitement: it reminded me of diving into the Fog.
When the guardship roared past, our little mayfly rocked in its wake. In five seconds, the airship was a hundred yards above us, and heading away, while we were still plummeting toward the lower slope.
Swedish wrestled the wheel, and Bea stepped on a hose to adjust the flow of foggium. Loretta screamed, Hazel whooped, and the engine roared to life. The rudders caught the wind and we swooped toward the slum, ten feet over the rooftops. The bridge whirred past, then shacks and alleys blurred beneath us.
“Swedish did that on purpose,” Loretta said, through chattering teeth. “If we live, I’m going to kill him.”
Then a terrible wrenching noise overtook us: the sound of a junkyard neighborhood being ditched. Cracks appeared along the edges of a platform and all the shanties and trash—and Mrs. E, still in her bedroom—started sliding downhill. I leaned forward, urging the mayfly on.
I scanned the slum, my heart clenched in my chest. A hill of garbage sped past beneath us. A flock of startled seagulls screamed around us. I spotted the clearing where we’d stumbled onto gang kids playing bootball—but the cluster of balloons was gone. The bosses weren’t trying to keep this part of the slum aloft, not anymore.
My throat dried and sweat stung my eyes. I saw the water hole, the alley stalls . . . then our half-collapsed block came into view, and the shack was still standing! I exhaled in relief—and saw a shadow flickering on the roofs beneath us.
I glanced over my shoulder and gasped.
The guardship was a hundred yards behind us, closing fast. Two cannon ports slid open along the prow.
“Cannons behind us!” I screamed. “The guardship, they’re firing now!”
Swedish hammered the keyboard and the thopper rolled to the left so hard that a rudder snapped. A second later, the cannons roared like a thunderclap. The barrage slammed into the slum, blasting tents into scraps . . . and one cannonball clipped the mayfly.
Behind me, Bea gave an agonized shout that turned my blood to ice.
Despite the wild wobbling of the deck, I spun and staggered toward her. But she didn’t look hurt. As I got closer, I saw that she hadn’t yelled from pain. She’d yelled because the engine was on fire. Orange flames spewed from a broken hose, and smoke poured behind the mayfly like a black river.
“How bad is it?” I yelled.
“She’s dead!” Bea called back. “We’re going down!”
32
“SWEDE,” I SHOUTED, TURNING toward the cockpit. “The engine’s dead!”
Trash tumbled along the alleys below us as the slum platform tilted. The slimy river of the Spew changed course, sweeping away a cluster of stalls.
“Crash-land at home,” Hazel bellowed to Swedish.
“Are you peanuts?” Loretta asked. “That whole block’s going to ditch!”
“Mrs. E’s in there,” I told her.
“Everyone up front!” Hazel yelled, above the sound of the shrieking engine. “Bea, quick!”
With the deck shuddering beneath me, I dragged Loretta to the prow. When Bea arrived a second later, I swung her between me and Hazel, so we’d cushion her when we crashed.
Plumes of dust rose from collapsing shanties, twenty feet below the thopper.
Ten feet.
Five feet.
When the rooftops were two feet below us, Swedish veered into an alley like it was a landing strip. Trash flew everywhere, shacks started falling like dominos, and we hit the platform so hard that my knees buckled. We slid fifty feet, spun twice, and stopped.
For a long moment, nobody spoke, as the neighborhood shook apart around us.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Hazel said.
Bea giggled a little hysterically.
“You all,” Loretta moaned, “are insane.”
“At least the roof-troopers are writing us off as dead,” I said, my voice oddly steady as I watched the guardship returning to the Rooftop.
“Look at that,” Swedish said, swinging to the ground. “Twenty feet from the shack, and she landed sweet as berry pie.”
“Let’s go!” Hazel called. “We’ve got to get to Mrs. E.”
She and Bea hopped down from the thopper, stumbling on the tilting platform.
“C’mon,” I said, giving Loretta my hand.
She swung to the quaking ground, then looked up at my face. “Your eye’s not that freaky,” she said apologetically.
“Sure,” I said. “Everyone’s got one.”
“Those white swirls are kind of neat,” she said as we started trotting toward the shack. “Like, um, snowballs.”
“Snowballs?”
She flashed a gap-toothed smile. “Except totally freaky.”
I gave a huff of laughter; then a wall buckled nearby and we jumped away. Debris tumbled along the tilting platform as we scrambled after Hazel and the others. An avalanche of noise surro
unded us—buildings collapsing, metal screaming—and trash battered us until we shoved into the shack.
Swedish staggered from the bedroom with a limp Mrs. E in his arms.
“How is she?” I yelled.
“Sleeping!” he grunted.
She was only half asleep, actually. She peered around the crumbling room and mumbled, “Look at this mess—no dessert for you!” then closed her eyes.
“Well, we’re here,” Loretta said as she wiped blood from her split lip. “Now what?”
Swedish plowed toward the entryway. “C’mon!”
“Hurry!” Hazel followed Swedish, struggling uphill as the shack floor tilted. “C’mon!”
“What are we doing?” Loretta asked, grabbing the table for support.
“Going to the thopper,” I said.
“The thopper crashed.”
I pushed her after Hazel. “Not that thopper.”
Loretta took off, but I hesitated. I wanted to run into Mrs. E’s room and grab my dad’s scrapbook from the shelf. I couldn’t leave it behind. But the platform jerked so hard that the rain barrel jounced across the room, and I knew I was out of luck—the entire shack was about to collapse. I scrambled after Loretta into the entryway. Plastic jugs and broken crates tumbled everywhere as we helped Swedish lower Mrs. E through the hatch into the workshop under the shaking platform.
The slum gave another sharp shudder and I slammed against the wall, then slid to the ground in a painful daze. Groaning, I crawled back to the hatch and wriggled through, into Bea’s workshop. The floor was at a steep diagonal. Tools cascaded off the workbench. The foggium compressor rolled into the hole where the thopper dangled by heavy chains, then disappeared into the Fog below.
A racing thopper didn’t have room for passengers, so Swedish was hunched in the cockpit with Bea on his lap and Mrs. E squeezed beside them. Hazel straddled the forward hull, holding the butterfly valve. On the far side of the thopper, Loretta desperately wound an inner tube around her wrist, strapping herself to a pump vent.
The ticking and whirring of the thopper engine grew louder. The wings spread to catch the wind, and foggium flowed through ignition chambers.
“Chess!” Hazel shouted. “Jump!”
I scrambled toward the hole in the floor—or what used to be the floor. I balanced on the edge, aimed for the fattest part of the thopper—
And Hazel screamed, “Wait! Stop!”
33
MY ARMS WINDMILLED, AND I barely caught myself. A shower of tiny springs ricocheted past my head and tumbled through the hole into the Fog.
“The chain!” Hazel pointed to the rear of the thopper. “The chain’s stuck!”
Usually Swedish released the support chains from inside the cockpit, but with the platform slanting, the rear chain had snagged in an ugly snarl of metal. And if the thopper was stuck, we’d be ditched into the Fog in just a few seconds.
I blocked out the roar of the demolition and jumped. I caught the chain, slid down, and stomped at the snarl. It unraveled immediately, and I felt a flash of satisfaction. Ha! Can’t beat a tetherboy!
Then it hit me: I’d just freed the chain from the thopper, but I was still hanging from the chain.
Huh. Maybe I should’ve thought that through.
Before the chain swung me too far away, I dropped. I hit the thopper near the fantail and couldn’t get a grip. Rivets fell from the workshop and jabbed my face as I slid backward, digging my fingernails into a seam in the metal. Just when I started to fall, Swedish rolled the thopper sideways, which lifted me upward until the hull was beneath me.
I grabbed a hitch and tried not to faint as a downpour of trash roared into the Fog a few feet behind me. Bea had designed the thopper for speed and handling, but it was a one-person craft. Weighed down by six of us, it wallowed beneath the wildly tilting platform.
With a grind of protest, the thopper started lumbering forward, and soon we were flying just under the slum, in the fifty-foot gap above the white froth of Fog. Slime dripped from the platforms overhead, and huge fans whirred as I straddled the rear section of the hull. My head throbbed, and my shoulders and hands burned.
A prop crew stopped working as we flew past, and shouted jeers at us. One girl started climbing a ladder—probably to tell the bosses she’d seen us—and fear squeezed my heart like a fist. If we didn’t move fast, the bosses would toss nets over the edges of the platforms to trap us. That way they could ditch us personally.
Did the roof-troopers know that the kids from the jewelry store were the same ones who’d swooped over the junkyard? Had Kodoc found out my name yet? Did he know my face and my crew? I could barely breathe until we emerged from the shadow of the junkyard.
Then I slumped in relief—we’d made it! Except for the fact that we were stuck on the Fog, in an overloaded thopper, without anywhere to land.
I looked over my shoulder and watched the slum recede into the distance. The only home I’d ever known had been tossed like garbage into the Fog. My neighborhood was gone forever—the clearing where I’d played bootball, the corner where Mrs. E once kissed my scraped elbow. My bracers were gone, my harness and my bedroll. So was the table where we ate, where we’d laughed and talked and argued. And my father’s scrapbook.
Everything was gone. I didn’t have a home anymore. None of us did.
“When I was a girl,” Mrs. E said suddenly, “everyone called me Kat. Short for Katherine.”
Hazel leaned toward her. “Yes, Mrs. E?”
“Don’t interrupt! Everyone called me Kat, but I also had a cat. I called my cat Me.”
I glanced at Bea. We hadn’t heard that one before.
“So we were Kat and Me,” Mrs. E said. “Except I was Kat and the cat was Me. Her real name was Meow.”
“That’s sweet,” Hazel said. “Now stay still and—”
“Back then,” Mrs. E said, “the Subassembly and the roof-troopers worked together. Not like today.”
“The fogheads worked with the army?” Loretta asked.
“The roof-troopers are more than just an army,” Hazel told her. “They do everything for the Five Families. They’re in charge of schools, banks—”
“Some are scientists,” Mrs. E interrupted in a lilting tone that sounded nothing like her normal voice. “Trying to find a way to control the Fog. In the old days, they wanted to harness the power of the Fog into engines and machines.”
“You mean foggium?” Loretta asked.
Mrs. E giggled, which made my stomach sink. I hated when she started acting like a little girl. It felt like the fogsickness was mocking her.
“The Subassembly discovered foggium,” she said, “but the roof-troopers built the refineries. Did I ever tell you about my cat?”
“Her name was Me,” Hazel said.
“Don’t be silly!” Mrs. E snapped. “Her name was Petunia. Now stop your chattering. I’m sleepy.”
An uncomfortable silence fell over us. None of us wanted to face the fact that Mrs. E was slipping away. Swedish wiped his eyes, Hazel gazed into the distance, and I clung to the thopper, trying to keep my mind blank as we soared over the Fog, the valves clicking and the wings heaving us through the air.
Heading where? Nowhere.
The thought chilled me. “How much fuel do we have?” I asked.
“An hour’s worth,” Hazel told me. “Maybe two, with a tailwind.”
“Shouldn’t we head back?” Loretta asked, her face buried in her arms.
“Back to what?”
“The slum?”
“The bosses would kill us.”
Bea bit her lip. “How about the Rooftop? We can find Mr. Turning again.”
“The guardships would kill us.” Hazel rested her palm on Mrs. E’s forehead, checking for a fever. “And then Kodoc would kill us all over again.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But if we stay out here, the crash will kill us first.”
34
NOBODY SAID ANYTHING FOR a long time. The quiet felt ominous.
“Okay,” Hazel finally said. “I’ve got a plan.”
“What kind of plan?” I asked.
“The regular kind.”
“You mean desperate and loco?”
“Not necessarily,” Swedish told me. “She could mean risky and doomed.”
“You’re both right!” Hazel said, brushing braids from her face. “This one is desperate and risky.”
“In that case,” I said, “I’m in.”
Swedish snorted. “Yeah. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“This is the worst that could happen.” Loretta raised her head and looked faintly green behind her tattoos. “I’d sell my nose for a block of solid slum.”
For some reason, her misery cheered me. At least I wasn’t turning green. “Maybe not a whole block, Loretta—your nose is pretty small.”
She glared at me, then dropped her head again, wrapped in her private despair.
I scooted forward. “What’s the plan, Hazel? We all grow wings?”
“We’ll be angels soon enough,” Swedish muttered, “once we crash.”
“We’re not crashing,” Hazel said. “We’re heading for the shipping lanes.”
I steadied myself. “You mean the lanes that Mrs. E always told us to stay away from, because the merchants might report us to Lord Kodoc?”
She nodded. “Exactly.”
“That whole ‘let’s grow wings’ thing is sounding better and better,” Swedish said.
“Don’t worry,” Hazel said. “We’ll keep out of sight until we can intercept a merchant ship.”
I gaped at her. “Until we can what?”
“Intercept a merchant ship,” she repeated. “We’ll offer them the diamond in exchange for passage back to the Rooftop.”
“You want to swoop down on a merchant convoy? And before they open fire, you’ll start haggling?”
“That’s right.”
“Then they’ll bring us back to the Rooftop? To find Cog Turning?”
“Yup. And he’ll bring us to his coyote friend.”
“Wow,” I said. “There’s a word for that.”
