by Joel Ross
Dedication
For Karen Schwabach and Kevin Morrissey
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
MY NAME IS Chess, and I was raised in a junkyard.
Imagine a slum floating on rickety platforms above the deadly Fog that covers the Earth. Now picture a kid shivering in an alley, terrified of the same Fog swirling inside his right eye.
That was me, before Mrs. E gave me a home.
Then Lord Kodoc found us. He ruled the Rooftop, the mountaintop empire that loomed over the junkyard, and he was obsessed with an ancient machine lost in the ruins. Kodoc needed a tetherkid with a misty eye to get this “Compass,” so he hunted my crew across the sky until he captured me.
There’s only one way off a warship in flight—I leaped overboard in midair.
My crew caught me before I splattered on the ground, and we headed toward the safety of a distant mountaintop called Port Oro. All we want is to heal Mrs. E’s fogsickness and start a new life, but Kodoc isn’t finished with us yet. And neither is the Fog.
1
LORD KODOC’S WARSHIP swooped through the sky like a falcon. Her propellers spun, and her long-range guns swiveled to target us . . . but she didn’t fire.
“We’re out of range,” Hazel said from beside me on the cargo raft. “And Kodoc is out of luck.”
As she spoke, the warship veered away, and I gripped the rigging harder, dizzy with relief and aching from harpoon wounds.
A few minutes earlier, I’d kicked Kodoc in the shin and jumped off the Predator’s main deck. I’d plummeted toward the ground, toward certain death. But a few seconds before impact, I’d caught a tether fired from our cargo raft. Safe at last—except that two of Kodoc’s harpoons had slashed me before the crew towed me away.
“After all that,” I said, “we’re still standing.”
Then my injured leg buckled, and I sprawled across the deck.
“Spoke too soon.” Hazel knelt beside me and frowned at my wound. “Look at that cut.”
I looked at her face instead, watching her braids sway like a beaded curtain. She was a couple of years older than me, and pretty enough that people noticed. But more important, she was the captain: she thought faster, and farther, than anyone I’d ever met.
She pressed a cloth to the harpoon slash on my leg, and a sharp edge of pain clawed at me.
I hissed. “You’re making it worse!”
“It’s not that bad,” she said, wincing.
“It’s a wound,” I told her. “I’m wounded. Like a warrior.”
“That’s you,” she said, tying the bandage tight. “A strong, silent warrior.”
“Ow!” I yelped. “Hazel, ow-ow-ow!”
The clatter of clockwork engines grew louder as two mutineer warships roared closer to our little cargo raft. I almost smiled at the sight of them. The mutineers flew airships from the mountaintop settlement called Port Oro: our goal, our hope, our haven. And their convoy—led by the kind Captain Nisha and her brother, the kind-of-scary Captain Vidious—was the only reason that Kodoc wasn’t chasing us down.
Our raft swayed in the warships’ wake as they sped past. “Why aren’t they stopping for us?” I asked.
“Captain Nisha must’ve told them to chase off Kodoc first.” Hazel’s voice grew softer. “We—we did it, Chess. We reached Port Oro.”
“Of course we did,” I said, like we hadn’t almost died a hundred times. “You’re too stubborn to give up. Now we just need to get Mrs. E healed.”
“That’s first,” she said, her eyes dancing.
“What’s second?”
“Brand-new lives! Not in a slum, working for the junkyard bosses. Not rummaging for trash in the Fog. Real lives. Good lives. Working for ourselves.” She raised her voice. “Swedish! Head for the Anvil Rose!”
“Why?” At the wheel, our pilot, Swedish, jerked his thumb in the other direction. “Port Oro is that way.”
“We need to return the cargo raft to Captain Nisha,” Hazel told him.
“We stole the cargo raft from Nisha.” Swedish gave a lopsided grin. “We should definitely head in the other direction.”
He had a point. Captain Nisha had flown us most of the way to Port Oro, pursued by a murderous Lord Kodoc—until we’d realized that we couldn’t outrun him. That’s when we’d stolen the cargo raft, to buy the Anvil Rose enough time to arrive.
Which had been a terrible idea, except for one thing: it worked.
“We don’t have any time to waste.” Hazel peered at Nisha’s ship, the Anvil Rose. “We need to get Mrs. E and bring her to the Subassembly. They’re the only ones able to heal her.”
Swedish grunted and pulled a lever with one big hand. He was burly and shaggy and, at about sixteen, the oldest member of the crew. “You really think the fogheads will heal her?”
“Not if you keep calling them ‘fogheads,’” Hazel told him as the cargo raft spun in the air. “From now on, they’re ‘Assemblers.’”
“I still say we ought to stay away from them,” Swedish muttered.
I knew what he meant. I’d never trusted the Subassembly either. No slumkid trusted the so-called fogheads. They were different, and when you spent every moment scrambling for survival, different meant “dangerous.” But then we’d met a Subassembly leader and realized that sometimes different just meant “not the same.”
“They got us here in one piece, didn’t they?” Hazel asked.
“Not really,” Loretta said, squatting beside me. “Chess is in three pieces.”
“I’m okay,” I told her.
She squinted at Hazel. “You call that a bandage?”
“What?” Hazel asked her. “The bleeding stopped.”
“Barely. I’ll sew him up proper.”
Hazel eyed her. “You know how to sew?”
“Not dresses and shirts,” Loretta said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “Only knife wounds and ax slashes—you know, the good stuff.”
“The good stuff,” I repeated faintly.
“Hey, I ran with a junkyard gang till last week, remember? Plenty of practice sewing up wounds.”
“More practice making them,” Swedish said.
Loretta’s eyes gleamed. “More fun, too.”
“Let’s wait until we get to the Ass
emblers—” Hazel started.
“Nah,” Loretta said, and ripped the bandage off my leg.
I howled, swiping at her. “Loretta!”
“You missed the cut on his hip,” she told Hazel, batting away my hand. “You know what we need?”
“Painkillers,” I moaned.
“A parade.” Loretta gave a gap-toothed smile. “We got from the Rooftop to Port Oro with evil Kodoc nipping at our butts. We deserve a parade.”
“I’d settle for a nap,” I muttered.
“You sleep and I’ll sew.” She started patting her pockets. “I’ve got a needle and thread somewhere.”
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t stand to watch Loretta stitching me up. To distract myself, I started thinking about my father’s scrapbook, pages of historical facts from the time before the Fog rose.
“In the old days,” I said into the darkness, “they threw a parade every year for a festival called Thanksgiving, where they stuffed turkeys and ate cramberry sauce.”
From beside me, Loretta’s voice said, “What’d they stuff turkeys with?”
“Stuffing.”
“If you don’t know, that’s okay,” she said, sounding cross. “You don’t have to make something up.”
“I do know!” I said. “They stuffed them with stuffing.”
“Sure, and instead of knives, they stabbed people with stabbing.”
“Was cramberry sauce made from actual cramberries?” Swedish asked. “Or was it a bunch of different berries all crammed together?”
“It was a kind of berry, but . . .” I paused, knowing that they weren’t going to believe me. “Uh, they were too sour to eat.”
“That’s the opposite of ‘berry,’” Swedish said.
“You can open your eyes now, you liar,” Loretta told me, tapping my shoulder. “I don’t have a needle. Also, the Anvil Rose is about to run us over.”
My eyes sprang open, and I saw the Rose swooping toward us, propellers whirling and rigging snapping beneath the sleek balloon. Captain Nisha stood at the prow, her yellow hair flying all over the place. Not running us over exactly, but speeding in our general direction.
“Where’s she going?” Loretta asked.
“To help her brother.” Hazel looked across the sky toward the half-broken Night Tide, still smoking from Lord Kodoc’s attack. “So he doesn’t crash before he reaches the Port.”
A hatch clanged open in the center of the cargo raft, and Bea’s head popped through, her leather helmet askew. “The Tide won’t crash!”
“Are you sure?” Hazel asked.
Bea squinted at the Night Tide. She was the youngest member of the crew, and a brilliant gearslinger who spent half her time chatting to machinery. She wrinkled her nose, listening to the distant grind of the Tide’s engines.
“Oh, look at your poor hull,” she muttered to the far-off ship. “And your mizzenmast is all cattywampus.”
“Is that bad?” Loretta asked me. “Cattybombom?”
“Cattywampus,” I corrected her. “It’s only a little bad.”
Bea chewed on her lower lip. “She says her gearwork is strong, though. She’ll be okay for a few hours.”
Bea didn’t only talk to engines; she insisted that they answer.
The Anvil Rose swerved to a halt nearby, her fans blowing hard enough to tilt the cargo raft’s deck. Loretta swore, Swedish goosed the engine to keep us in place, and Captain Nisha swung from the Rose’s crow’s nest to the deck nearest us.
“I need your geargirl!” she yelled to Hazel.
“She says the Night Tide is okay,” Hazel called back. “For a few hours.”
Nisha eyed Bea. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am, Cap’n!” Bea sang out. “As long as she doesn’t get hit again.”
Captain Nisha slumped in relief. She knew Bea was never wrong about mechanical things.
“Come on board, then,” Nisha said, tugging at her beaded necklace. “And give me back my cargo raft!”
2
THE SURGEON ON the Anvil Rose stitched my wounds while Mrs. E slept in the wheeled chair beside me. I hated watching a needle tugging thread through my skin, so I watched Mrs. E instead.
Her wrinkled face was paler than ever. She looked frail and shrunken and weak. I didn’t mind the pain of the stitching so much, but the sight of Mrs. E brought tears to my eyes. When she’d found me in a junkyard alley years earlier, she’d seemed invincible. Tall and straight and sharp, like a spear with gray-streaked hair.
For a long time, I’d thought that the most important thing she’d given me, aside from the crew, was a roof over my head and food in my belly. And sure, you didn’t live long without those. But she’d given me something even more important. When you were scraping for a living in the junkyard, you couldn’t lower your defenses; you couldn’t catch your breath. When Mrs. E adopted me, she’d given me someone to trust, and nothing was more important than that.
Except now, if the Subassembly on Port Oro didn’t know how to cure fogsickness, she wouldn’t last a week. She might not last a day.
After the surgeon finished with my stitches, Swedish tucked a blanket around Mrs. E and we brought her to the quarterdeck. We wanted to share the moment with her, even if she slept through the whole thing. It didn’t make sense, but that didn’t matter.
“Mrs. E, look!” Bea bounded toward the railing. “We’re here; there it is! That’s Port Oro!”
I peered into the distance at the jagged green-and-gold mountain range rising through the Fog. Port Oro. Freedom. Safety. A new start, far from Lord Kodoc and the junkyard bosses of the Rooftop, and the awful slums we’d escaped. We could find a new home and new jobs, and still be the same crew—the same family.
As we flew closer, Port Oro reminded me of the lower slopes of the Rooftop, except with long hills that spread outward, fanning above Fog-filled valleys. Bridges and walkways spanned the ravines, linking neighborhoods, shipyards, and markets. I don’t know what I expected, but everything looked normal . . . except that unlike the Rooftop, there was no junkyard. No floating slum of patched-together platforms where life was cheap and food was scarce.
Bea noticed the same thing and frowned. “Where’s the slum?”
“I guess there isn’t one,” Hazel told her.
“Then where do all the slumkids live?”
“There aren’t any.”
Bea gasped in horror. “What did they do to them?”
As Hazel reassured Bea that they hadn’t done anything to the slumkids—there just wasn’t a slum—the Anvil Rose turned slightly. We were heading toward a skeletal building rising from the Fog, with a long rope bridge connecting it to the mountain.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Probably a prison,” Swedish groused.
“But a Port Oro prison,” Loretta said. “With blankets and one meal every day!”
I borrowed Hazel’s spyglass for a closer look at the skeletal building. Then I fiddled with the focus, hardly able to believe my eyes.
“It—it’s a skyscraper!” I stammered. A building from the time before the Fog, rising above the whiteness into the clear sky. “A real skyscraper.”
“No way!” Bea said. “That is so purple!”
“Down near the Fog it’s just empty girders and beams,” I told her. “Higher up, they built floors and walls and—and I see people! There are people living in a skyscraper.”
“But why are we heading there?” Hazel asked.
I cocked my head. She was right—we weren’t just looking at the skyscraper skeleton, we were flying directly toward it.
“Because that’s where the Assemblers live,” Captain Nisha called from the deck above. “And Mrs. E can’t wait.”
A flock of black birds scattered as the Anvil Rose swooped toward the skyscraper. The ship’s fans tilted, her rudders creaked, and she angled toward a landing pad on the roof.
Keeping my weight off my injured leg, I watched through a vent in the cargo bay. A hundred yards away,
a crowd stared back at us from the skyscraper, their hair whipping in the wind of the warship, their hands shielding their eyes.
Beside me, Loretta scratched her burn-scarred arm. “That’s not a parade.”
“Yeah, what’s the deal, Hazel?” Swedish asked, putting one hand on Mrs. E’s wheeled chair. “You said that every day on Port Oro is a holiday.”
“And every band is a marching band,” I added.
“And instead of rain,” Bea chimed in, “there’s confetti!”
“Just wait,” Hazel said, peering at the skyscraper. “When you’ve got a diamond in your pocket, the whole world is stuffed with stuffing!”
The day before our panicked flight from the junkyard, I’d salvaged the most precious thing we’d ever seen, a diamond, from deep inside the Fog. And unlike “cash” and “credit cards” and “golden arches,” diamonds were still valuable. Only Kodoc and the Five Families were even allowed to own them. Hazel had hatched a plan for us: we’d use the diamond to pay smugglers to sneak us to Port Oro.
That hadn’t worked out the way we’d planned, but here we were anyway. In Port Oro, with the diamond safely tucked in Loretta’s belt. We’d decided that was the best place for it, both because nobody would expect that we’d trust Loretta with a diamond and because she’d fight like a deranged monkey if anyone tried to take it away.
“The Assemblers will heal Mrs. E,” Hazel continued, “we’ll buy a house, and—and everything’s going to turn out okay.”
Swedish and I exchanged a glance. Every slumkid knew that you never, ever expected things to turn out okay. That was just begging for disaster.
So to cover my nervousness I said, “That reminds me of an old saying: ‘The world is our oyster.’”
“I don’t care what your scrapbook says,” Hazel told me. “That was never a saying.”
“It was, too!” I insisted. “It means that great things are possible.”
“What’s an oyster?” Loretta asked.
“A shellfish,” Swedish told her.
“So the world is our shellfish?” Loretta scratched her arm. “How about ‘The world is our pigeon pie?’ That makes more sense.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s not the saying.”
