by Joel Ross
When Hazel glanced at me, I saw fear in her eyes, and strength, and the furious whirl of her thoughts. Her brain moved at the speed of sunlight. I watched her face as steam hissed from an exhaust vent and—
THUNK! THUNKTHUNK-THUNK!
Four spears jutted through the glide-wing from above, with wicked barbs like metal fangs.
The glider jerked upward, and Loretta sprawled to the deck. I staggered, and Swedish swore, struggling with the wheel. But he’d lost control. We’d been skewered by harpoons shot from a warship hovering above us.
30
I SCRAMBLED TOWARD Bea to protect her from Kodoc’s airsoldiers—then stopped. Because with her head tilted upward and her green eyes wide and shining, she looked thrilled instead of afraid.
“The Night Tide!” she blurted. “I’d know that engine anywhere.”
I exhaled in relief. We’d been fished out of the sky by mutineers. The sssszzzzt of a pulley on a zip line cut through the strain of our engine, then boots slammed down on the glide-wing.
“Captain Vidious.” Hazel swept her braids behind her head. “You came.”
His mouth twisted into a grin. “Of course I did, poppet.”
“But I didn’t even hear you!” Bea said.
“That’s why she’s called the Night Tide.” Vidious raised his head and yelled to his sailors. “All secure! Bring us up!”
Swedish killed the engine. The harpoon lines twanged as the winches lifted the glider toward the Tide.
“You stole the glider—” Vidious told Hazel.
“We stole our glider.”
“—but you got Chess.”
“We got our Chess,” she said.
“Hazel!” he snapped. “Enough!”
She glared at him but fell silent.
“What you did was reckless,” he said, his tone sharp. “And dishonest.”
Hazel chewed on a braid.
“Not to mention disrespectful.” Vidious’s cloak billowed as the harpoon lines lifted us toward his ship’s hull. “Don’t sneak around behind our backs. Without trust, we have nothing. Without trust, we have no chance against the Rooftop.”
“Sorry,” Hazel said, ducking her head like me.
“Running off was stupid,” Vidious told her. “And—”
Hazel’s gaze shifted past him, and she cocked her head. “You towed our ship.” She stared at a raft with three balloons floating beside of the Night Tide, hooked to the hull with long cables. “You brought the Bottom-Feeder.”
“Stupid and reckless,” Vidious continued. “And nobody else could’ve done it.”
For a moment, I didn’t quite understand what he’d said. Neither did Hazel, I thought. Then a smile tugged at her lips. “Not even you?”
“Of course me,” he said. “But that’s it.”
“You knew!” she blurted. “You knew we were going to steal it!”
“Slumkids.” He scowled, but there was a glint of humor in his eyes. “You’ll steal anything that’s not nailed down.”
“And you—you came here to wait for us.” She went still. “But why did you bring the Bottom-Feeder?”
“As insurance, just in case . . .” Vidious turned his scarred face to me. “Did you give Kodoc the map?”
My cheeks burned, and I didn’t answer.
“So he knows where the Compass is,” Vidious said.
“I—” I gulped. “I guess so.”
“I guessed, too.” Vidious stood over me with his cloak billowing. “Kodoc is a persuasive man. Now fix it.”
“How?” I croaked.
Rope ladders fell around us from the open cargo bay of the Night Tide.
“Ask your captain,” Vidious told me, grabbing a ladder. “She knows.”
“He always gets the last word,” I muttered as I climbed toward the Night Tide’s cargo bay.
Hazel shifted the bandage on her forehead. “He brought the Bottom-Feeder because he wants Chess to dive.”
“And it’s got to happen now,” Swedish said, “because Kodoc has the map?
“Yeah, it’s a race,” Loretta said. “Us against Kodoc. Everyone’s trying to reach the Compass first.”
I rubbed my aching head. That almost made sense—but we couldn’t outrun Kodoc in the Bottom-Feeder, not with his armada forty minutes behind. What was I missing?
“Almost everyone,” Hazel said, then disappeared into the bay.
When I followed, Vidious was handing her a scroll. “The cogs compared Chess’s drawing with a hundred old maps,” he said. “They put this chart together.”
Hazel unrolled the scroll. “It shows the way to the Compass?”
“As near as they can tell,” Vidious told her.
“How near is that?” Swedish asked.
“Nobody knows what the Compass is,” Vidious told him. “Forget about where.”
“They know it self-assembles!” Bea said.
Vidious opened a hatch that led onto a narrow deck. “This way, my poppets.”
After we filed through, a boarding plank slid from the deck and stretched to the Bottom-Feeder, floating ten feet away.
“When the nanites build a Compass,” Vidious told us, “that means the Earth is clean and the Fog can leave. So the Compass is a timer, a trigger. The emergence—” He glanced at Bea. “The self-assembly of the Compass tells the Fog that its job is done. And it’s the tool we use to lower the Fog.”
“You think,” Swedish said.
“The cogs think,” Vidious said. “And if anyone would know, it’s them.”
“How’s Chess supposed to find the Compass,” Hazel asked, “without knowing what it looks like?”
“I don’t care.” Vidious escorted her onto the boarding plank. “As long as he does.”
“Great,” I muttered.
“Activate the Compass,” Vidious told me. “Or bring it to the cogs. Or—”
A boom sounded in the night, the crash of a cannon. My heart jumped, Bea yelped, and Loretta groaned.
“That’s my sister,” Vidious said.
“Captain Nisha is here?” Bea asked.
“Flying high,” Vidious told her. “That’s a warning shot, telling us that Kodoc’s getting closer. No time to waste.”
Hazel eyed him from the boarding plank. “We have supplies?”
“Everything you need.”
“Goggles?” I asked. “Tether and harness and hacksaw?”
“And a spare,” he said.
“A bootball for good luck?” Swedish asked.
“Twisty wires?” Bea asked. “A full set of hex wrenches?”
“Of course.”
“Armpoons?” Loretta asked.
Vidious cocked an eyebrow. “Everything you need. I loaded her personally.”
“A boot-sheath and bracers?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said.
I frowned at the Bottom-Feeder. “So we just follow the chart and find the Compass?”
“While you hold Kodoc off?” Hazel added.
“Don’t just ‘find’ the Compass,” Vidious told me. “Trigger it. So if Kodoc hits the Port, people can flee down the mountain onto clear land. Now, is there anything else?”
“No.” Hazel bit her lower lip. “Except . . . stay safe.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Vidious asked, and drew his cutlass.
He twirled the curved blade, then offered the hilt to Hazel. She seemed to hold her breath for a moment, then took the sword. Vidious turned and disappeared inside the cargo bay, and the hatch clanged closed behind him.
“Wait,” Swedish said, looking at the cutlass. “What just happened?”
“We’re racing Kodoc to the Compass,” Hazel told him. “And we’re going to win.”
Twenty minutes after we sped away from the Night Tide, cannons crackled across the night behind us as the mutineers opened fire on Kodoc. That’s what Hazel had meant by “almost everyone”—the mutineers were staying behind to give us a head start.
Loretta and I stared into the distance. We could
n’t see ships in the dark, but the flashes of explosions danced across the Fog like matches flaring. A few seconds after every flash, we’d hear another boom. And as we flew through the night, the flare of cannon fire spread across the horizon.
“The mutineers aren’t engaging in a full-on battle,” Hazel said. “They’re staying between us and Kodoc, hitting and running. Trying to slow him down. A quick shot, then a quick retreat, like a wasp tormenting a bear.”
“You’ve seen a bear?” Loretta asked.
“I’ve seen Swedish,” Hazel told her.
“Hey!” Swedish said.
I smiled weakly. “How long can they hold him off?”
“That depends,” Hazel said, “on how much damage they’re willing to take.”
31
MY HAMMOCK ROCKED with the swaying of the airship, and the balloons above me bobbed in the chilly morning breeze. The Bottom-Feeder looked a lot like our old salvage raft, except better. Reinforced mesh strengthened the gray balloons, and the sails unfurled beautifully in the wind. We even had a little harpoon overhanging the deck, with a barbed arrow peeking from the end of a copper tube.
I rolled over and peered toward the horizon. The orange rays of dawn brushed the peaks of the Fog. Two hawks rode an updraft in the distance, but I didn’t see any airships.
I hoped Vidious and Nisha were okay after fighting Kodoc’s armada. I hoped they weren’t willing to take too much damage.
At the wheel, Loretta yawned and scratched her head. We’d piloted the ship in shifts through the night, keeping her flying straight as Swede dozed beside the cockpit, ready to wake at the first hint of trouble. Bea snored beside me, and Hazel stood in the crow’s nest, her spyglass in one hand. The wind played with her braids and ruffled her skirt.
“What’re you doing awake?” I asked, climbing beside her. “Didn’t you have the shift before Swede?”
She nodded. “Just double-checking our route.”
“For the millionth time.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“That’s not double-checking.”
She stuck out her tongue at me. So even with Vidious’s cutlass at her hip, she was still Hazel.
“Why’d they put a city in the middle of nowhere?” I grumbled.
“It used to be the middle of everything,” she said.
After lunch, Swedish pushed the ship hard, swooping and diving, to see how she handled. When he finally slowed, Loretta threatened to beat him to death with a wooden spoon, and Hazel dragged a box to the deck.
“You’ll never guess what I found,” she said.
“Cucumber juice,” Loretta said. “Please let it be cucumber juice.”
“Even better,” Hazel said, and flipped open the lid.
Inside, I saw bottles of paint. Light yellow, brick red, dark green, and—
“Purple!” Bea squealed when she saw it. “Did Cap’n Vidious leave that? He is such a cuddlebunny.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s exactly how I’d describe him.”
“He gave us paint to keep us busy,” Hazel said, twining a braid around two fingers. “So we don’t get nervous thinking about the dive.”
“Good plan!” Bea said, grabbing a brush.
She climbed the spars and painted smiley faces on the balloons. Loretta added blood splatters until Swedish convinced her to draw racing flames instead.
The next morning, Hazel spent an hour frowning at the scroll and her new navigational devices. She told Swedish a little ahead, a little to the left, past that ridge. Then she said, “Full stop. We’re here. The city is directly beneath us.”
I peered at the misty white waves. “Can you imagine the time before the Fog? There were entire fields of skyscrapers, and forests and farms and amber waves of green.”
“Think of all that room,” Swedish said. “Instead of living squeezed together.”
“Yeah.” Bea paused. “I bet everyone had their own personal mountaintop.”
“They didn’t only live on mountains, Bea,” Hazel said. “They lived everywhere.”
“That’s just weird.” Bea tilted her leather cap back on her head. “Living on the ground.”
“Better than flitting around in airships,” Loretta said.
Hazel turned to me. “You know what to do?”
“Wander around,” I said. “Until I spot a self-assembled whangdoodle from the Foggy depths.”
“The Compass should be on the shore of a lake or ocean,” she told me. “Find the shore and follow it until you see . . .”
“A whangdoodle?” I asked.
“Yeah. The cogs figure you’ll know it when you see it.”
“What if I don’t?”
“Then keep looking.”
“In that case, I’m totally ready,” I said, and we crossed to the diving plank.
Hazel exhaled and said, “The city’s big. You’ve never dived anywhere like this. There’s going to be broken glass, sinkholes, toxic sludge. Poison snakes—”
“Mickey mice,” I said. “Haze rays.”
“It’s a city, Chess,” she said, not smiling. “Driftsharks like cities.”
I nodded. “I’ll be careful.”
“If you start feeling iffy—”
“I know, I know. I’ll run.”
“No,” she told me, her voice soft. “Stay.”
I swallowed. She’d never said that before, but this was one dive I needed to complete. This time, there was no turning back.
“We’re out of time.” She looked northward. “Kodoc’s on the horizon, and we can’t let him get that Compass.”
32
I DOVE OFF the airship. Wind numbed my cheeks and roared in my ears until the whiteness swallowed me. My tether whizzed through the reel on my harness. I fell and fell, then a wall whipped past—a tower of steel and glass, with half the windows shattered.
My breath caught. I’d never seen anything so grand.
When I felt the ground approaching, I slowed, dangling three feet over a smooth black street. Except it wasn’t asphalt beneath me. Ripples spread through the green-black surface, and ferns bent in the swamp-smelling breeze.
What had once been a four-lane street was now a slow-moving river at the base of a skyscraper in the center of a city. Water bugs skated on the current, and mosquitoes buzzed in my ear. A lumpy frog stared at me. Looked like good eating, but I was too amazed to be hungry.
With a steady hand, I squeezed out a message. I’m okay.
The brake twitched in response. Okay okay okay.
I smiled at the relief in all those okays from Hazel, then I sent: Raise me. Slowly.
The tether jerked, and I rose from the river, past mud and rusted pipes to a concrete bank studded with metal posts that Mrs. E called “parking greeters.”
Stop, I told Hazel.
I swung toward the nearest parking greeter and pulled myself onto a cracked sidewalk. Fifteen feet below, blurred in the white, the sluggish, swampy river flowed along the sunken remains of a city street.
I checked my map. A coastline wiggled across the edge of the city, and a few lakes dotted the interior; but the map didn’t have a “You Are Here” label, so I’d mostly use it to keep from walking in circles while I looked for a shoreline.
High above me, Hazel started to fly in a spiral of expanding circles. I trotted along the sidewalk . . . then froze. Something looked wrong. Something felt wrong. I checked for driftsharks—and ticktocks—but nothing moved other than the Fog. Except it seemed thinner, somehow. More transparent.
I was seeing farther than ever before. Not ten feet through the white, not fifteen. Twenty feet—maybe even thirty.
“Whoa!” I said.
A spark of excitement rose in my chest—I could see! All the way to the second floors of the buildings and straight through a shattered window into a Walmart, though I couldn’t see any walls for sale. Plus, the buzz of mosquitoes and the croak of frogs sounded clear and loud.
Then a wave of anxiety dowsed the spark. What was
happening? Had the Fog changed? Had I?
I rubbed my normal eye, wondering if the mist was drifting in it again. I couldn’t tell. I looked toward the airship, out of sight hundreds of yards above, and touched my hand brake nervously. I wanted to signal Hazel to pull me up, but there was no time. Kodoc was flying closer every minute.
“Stop thinking,” I told myself, lowering my hand. “And find this thing.”
I swallowed my nervousness and trotted along the cracked street, scanning the mist for a beach or lake. The city rose around me like a glassteel canyon. Ivy climbed traffic lights, and birds nested in spy-cam housings. Prairie dogs chirped in a “software” store—I poked my head inside but didn’t see anything soft to wear.
Then I heard the chuff-grunt of a boar or a bear and scrambled away.
A few blocks later, my tether jammed on one of the skyscrapers. I worked my hand brake, and Hazel raised me to the ninth or tenth story, where I unwound the cable from a jutting beam. Through a broken window, I saw weeds growing in a layer of windblown dirt beside a collapsed desk.
No Compass, though.
I climbed the outside of the building like a fly on a wall. Birds flapped away, and I almost crushed a sunbathing lizard that was enjoying the warmth that the nanites reflected to the ground. The Fog somehow transferred the sun’s light and heat to the plants and animals that thrived in the mist—it didn’t kill anything except humans.
When I reached the roof, I sniffed for the scent of water. Instead, I smelled epoxy and mildew. Standing there, I suddenly felt exposed, imagining driftsharks gathering at the fringes of my vision. I told Hazel to start circling faster, then hopped and swung from rooftop to rooftop, balancing on narrow edges, hoping to find a shoreline.
After pausing to gaze at the map, I leaped to a roof and landed in the middle of a troop of monkeys—they screamed at me, and a big male showed his teeth. I sprang up in the air, dodged a satellite catcher, and swerved away.
I searched for hours but didn’t find anything resembling a Compass—or a whangdoodle, for that matter. And time kept ticking away.
Finally, the skyscrapers flattened into a plain of lower buildings. Bushes and trees rose from the crumbling pavement, and the streets were lined with the husks of drone-tanks from the wars that had started when the Fog rose. I stopped at a puddle for a drink and saw tracks surrounding it—mostly raccoon, but also what looked like a big cat, probably a mountain lion or jaguar.
