by Joel Ross
Maybe I wasn’t so thirsty. I marked my map and kept moving. A few blocks away, as I was untangling my tether from an ad board selling some kind of space money called “Star Bucks,” the hand brake on my tether jerked.
Hazel sent, Okay?
Okay, I told her.
Okay, she said.
Then I looked at my hand brake and kept walking.
A beaver slapped its tail in a river beside a sparse forest of bamboo. I rushed closer, hoping to find a bigger body of water, but instead the current disappeared into a massive sinkhole. So I followed a collapsed walkway along bullet-pocked walls, chewing a rice biscuit and fretting about the time.
“C’mon,” I told myself. “How hard can it be to find a shore in a city? Ought to be as easy as finding an eagle in a haystack.”
I vaulted a wall, passed a bunch of ruined trucks with trees growing through them, then trotted into a shipyard littered with cargo containers. Heavy chains swaying in a breeze went creak-creak-creak—and I felt a sudden drop in the pressure, like the heaviness in the air before a storm.
Except the pressure was coming toward me. I spun, and a driftshark thickened from the Fog twenty feet away. Ropes of mist formed a bulky head, and feathery tails lashed and writhed.
Panic almost froze me—but I’d felt that shark before I’d seen it. I knew driftsharks now. I changed them; I blunted them. I groped in my mind for the link between the Fog and my freak-eye . . . and I felt the click.
Swirls of mist froze in the air. The breeze died; my heartbeat slowed to a dull thud. The driftshark flashed toward me, and with a flick of my attention, I nudged the Fog. I felt my mind catch on the nanites, like pushing a fingertip through a spiderweb . . . and the shark veered sideways.
Its misty tails streamed past my face, then vanished into the white. The breeze kicked back in, my heart pounded, and I laughed.
“Hey, Loretta!” I shouted at the sky. “Even driftsharks don’t mess with the fog-monster!”
Still grinning, I crossed the shipyard. I’d chased off a driftshark! I’d actually turned it away. Well, either that or driftsharks now thought I belonged in the Fog, because they didn’t see me as human anymore.
My grin faded. “Well, that’s a little creepy.”
I reached for my hand brake to tell Hazel to raise me, because I wanted to talk this through—and to have her check my eyes. Something told me that the Fog was unfurling inside both of them again.
Except Hazel’s words echoed in my brain: If you start feeling iffy . . . stay. And how near was Kodoc? Could she see him through her spyglass? Was he a distant speck, or was she staring down his cannons?
I decided to check my eyes myself. I jangled over a chain-link fence and poked around until I found a pile of broken glass. I grabbed a shard and held it to my face, checking my reflection.
Yeah. Even my normal eye was swirling with Fog. White clouds shifted and flowed across my pupils. That was bad enough, but it also looked like the nanites were swirling between my eyes, like billows of mist drifting inside my head.
“Guh!” I said, flinging the shard of glass away.
That was all I needed, a whole new level of freakishness. I stomped across a weedy field and angrily vaulted a concrete wall, and my boots landed in something soft.
Sand? A beach!
“Ha!” I said, forgetting my eye.
I headed down the sloping shore, sniffing for the scent of water. Instead, I smelled heaps of molding sludge and corroding iPhones. I wrinkled my nose and noticed a black, crunchy film coating the ground. That wasn’t sand, and this wasn’t a beach. It was a whole valley of garbage.
I sighed. If I couldn’t even find a lake, how was I supposed to find the Compass?
“There’s no way,” I grumbled.
I crouched and ran my fingers across the film. It felt brittle and sharp, like the dried crust left by every liquid that had oozed from the city in centuries. Coughing syrup and Pep-C and nano-ink—the oozing remains of a million households.
Gross.
Then a cloud of shiny blue flies bumped against my face. I shuddered and leaped upward, pulling myself higher on my tether. I dangled in midair as trash rolled past in the Fog below. Shredded mattresses, slabs of flooring.
To my right, a herd of deer grazed on a hill covered in strange bushes. To my left, dozens of rotting “car seats” scattered a low mound. Mrs. E once told me that they were portable restraints for little kids, which made me wonder how much rowdier children had been back then. Like knee-high gangsters.
A wall of trash loomed from the Fog in front of me, one side of an immense hill. I kicked off a weird pod-car printed with the word canoe, rising higher on my tether. Slime cascaded downward like a filthy waterfall, and I kicked again and again, breathing through my mouth until I reached the top of the hill.
“Biggest outhouse in the world,” I grumbled, crossing a mound of rotting couches, and tick tock.
Tick tock, tick tock.
My breath stopped. I spun toward the sound—
Bladed pinchers slashed at my stomach through the Fog. Cables groaned and squealed, writhing around the misshapen body of a ticktock that was grinding closer. Repulsive flashes of the monster appeared through the mist. Orange fluid spat from puckered vents, and a gasp wheezed from the hoses that snaked through the air at me.
With a horrified shriek, I jumped straight upward, pulling my knees to my chest. The pinchers missed me by inches. Tick tock. I twisted in the air and landed on a heap of half-melted roofing shingles, panting with terror.
The wheeze of the ticktock sounded faint in the white. Too far to reach me. I needed to—
Another ticktock erupted beneath me, wreathed in a cloak of Fog. Rusty tentacles vacuumed at the air, and a gout of flame erupted from a gearwork valve.
I squeezed my hand brake without thought, just an animal reflex. Up. Up. Up.
The ticktock squealed toward me through the whiteness, and a lumpy chain lashed out. Pain burst in my temple. My vision blurred, blood dripped down my cheek—and my tether yanked me upward.
As I lofted higher, the ticktock shot more feelers into the Fog, like chain-link harpoons. One whipped my calf, and I yelped and jerked away. The others fell harmlessly around me, and a moment later I’d risen too far for the ticktocks to reach.
Safely slumped in my harness, I shuddered in horror.
Instead of the Compass, I’d found ticktocks. They were real. Murderous junkpiles with serrated blades and rusty shells, wrapped in coils of Fog. But why did they want to kill me? Who’d made them?
Well, they’d probably just grown from all that trash, from every substance ever created by human civilization. They built themselves, and—
“Built themselves,” I breathed. “Assembled themselves.”
In a flash of insight, I knew that I’d done it. Forget the shore—I’d found the Compass.
33
WHEN THE FOG dropped away, I spun at the end of my tether and shouted, “I found it! It’s ticktocks! The Compass is ticktocks. They’re assembling in a mountain of junk!”
“Got him!” Hazel’s voice was faint above me, muffled by the engine noise. “Go, Swede, go!”
The winch jerked, and my harness dug into me. “Ow!”
“He’s bleeding,” Loretta called out, peering down from the winch. “He’s hurt.”
“Now!” Hazel yelled.
The Bottom-Feeder shot faster through the air, and I trailed behind, spinning wildly as the winch pulled me upward. Fog, sky, Fog, sky. Every time I twirled, I scanned the horizon, but I didn’t see Kodoc’s armada anywhere.
What were we running from this time?
When I reached the hull, Loretta squeezed her eyes tight and reached for me, afraid of seeing the long drop below. “Grab hold,” she said. “J-just don’t pull me over.”
I ignored her outstretched hand and grabbed the boarding ladder. “What’re we doing?”
“Kodoc,” she said, warily opening one eye.
; “He’s nowhere!”
She pointed almost straight upward. “There.”
“No way,” I said, feeling a stab of fear.
I clambered on deck and shoved my goggles to the top of my head for a better look. Wispy gray clouds stretched across the sky. For a moment, I didn’t see anything. Then I noticed a dot through the clouds. A speck. A grain of sand.
The Predator, insanely high above us.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Getting into position,” Bea told me, furiously splicing cables together.
“Retta!” Hazel shouted. “Stop the bleeding! Swede, open the throttle! Move, move!”
“She can’t go faster!” Swedish told her.
“Then we’ll die!” Hazel yelled, her voice rough with fear.
Swedish hammered on the organ keyboard. The deck shuddered, and the props hummed a shrill note. The Bottom-Feeder zoomed forward. When I stumbled, Loretta grabbed my arm and shoved a cloth against my slashed temple. I howled and swiped at her, but she crammed the cloth in place.
“It hurts,” I gasped.
“I can tell,” she said, “by the blood.”
My head pounded in time with the throbbing of the engines as she twined a bandage around my head. Then at the same time, we both said, “What happened?”
The Bottom-Feeder veered sideways, and Loretta grabbed a rail. “You first. You found the Compass?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get it? What’s it look like?”
“It’s a junk heap the size of a mountain. There’s chemicals in there, smart alloys, quantum chips, everything. Rotting, sparking, mixing together. I think the Fog assembles ticktocks from all that trash.”
“Ticktocks?”
“They’re real.” I touched the bandage. “They did this.” “So . . . a junk heap?” Loretta asked. “The Compass is a junk heap?”
“One that makes ticktocks. Or—or maybe the ticktocks are the Compass, I don’t know.”
“What part of this lowers the Fog?”
“I-I don’t know.”
“Your other eye’s foggy again,” she said, squinting at my left eye.
“Yeah,” I said, and didn’t bother trying to hide it. “Maybe the ticktocks defend the Compass? Maybe that’s why they attacked me.”
“Like they’re guards?”
“Well, maybe.”
“Did you trigger anything?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t know how.”
“Chess!” Hazel called from the crow’s nest. “I need you in the rigging!”
Loretta frowned. “He’s bleeding!”
“He can bleed in the rigging!” Hazel yelled, her skirts snapping around her like even they were angry. “We need the hurricane sails in place, now!”
“The what?” I peered at the calm skies. “There’s no storm in sight, why—”
Hazel shot me a look that singed the air. Yikes. Forget about my pounding head and aching leg—a second later, I was climbing into the rigging to unfurl the hurricane sails.
“We waited as long as we could,” Hazel told me.
“For what?” I asked sharply. We used hurricane sails only when typhoon winds threatened to shake our raft into splinters. “What’s going on?”
“We spotted Kodoc a couple of hours ago, climbing higher and higher.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Didn’t want to distract you,” she said, then screamed at Swedish: “Keep her steady! Three wisps to the left!”
Swede’s angry reply was lost in the lashing wind, but somewhere below our ship, the rudders shifted.
“He’s not trying to catch you, Chess. He knows the Compass is in that city, right?”
“Yeah, but he can’t find it without me.”
“He’s not trying to find it.” Her jaw tightened. “He’s flying super high so the Predator won’t get caught in the blast.”
“The blast? What blast?”
“Remember the trapdoor under that diamond teardrop in the Predator?” Hazel braced herself as the prop whined and the Bottom-Feeder strained forward. “He’s bombing the city. He’s blasting the Compass into ash.”
“No way. It doesn’t make sense. Then he’ll never control the Fog.”
“He’s not trying to use the Compass, Chess,” she said. “He’s trying to destroy it.”
Her words chilled me. Trying to destroy it. Trying to destroy the Compass, humanity’s only hope. My mind blanked with dread, and my stomach burned. I stared at Hazel . . . and saw a flash of horror on her face.
When I followed her gaze, I caught a glimpse of a tiny gem falling from the dark smudge of the Predator. Diamond sunbursts winked, and a glimmering, colorful trail tumbled into the pure white Fog.
“Cut the engine!” Hazel screamed. “Drop the fans, reef those sails!”
Swedish jerked a lever, and the clockworks fell silent. The fans folded against the deck, and Bea lashed them into place. I scrambled across the rigging, raised the hurricane sails, then shaded my eyes and looked behind the raft.
At first nothing happened in the Fog over the city. Nothing, nothing . . . until a massive circle of Fog dipped downward like a whirlpool, miles across and spreading.
The teardrop bomb had exploded in the middle of the city.
“Strap in,” Hazel shouted.
My gaze flicked to Bea—safe inside a hatch—then I ran to Loretta. I checked her straps as Fog exploded from the “whirlpool” behind us. I snapped a repair tether to my harness and watched the shock wave roll toward us. Fog rippled and spat. Bits of charred brick and plasteel exploded into sight, then vanished behind the onrushing wave of Fog. The blast kept spreading toward us, from the trash hill—the Compass—across the plain of low houses to the skyscrapers and beyond.
A “mountain buster,” like Swedish had said. Leveling an entire city.
Then the shock wave hit. An invisible hammerblow batted the Bottom-Feeder across the sky, faster than any airship should move. The deck heaved and the balloons shrieked and Loretta bellowed, “Twinkle twinkle.” In the middle of the maelstrom, I caught a glimpse of Hazel shouting at me and pointing. I struggled across the deck to restrap a torn sail—and then the main blast hit.
The Bottom-Feeder tumbled across the sky. The impact slapped me off the deck into a hurricane, flinging me like a rag doll at the end of my repair tether.
A pulse tore through the whiteness below me. For a handful of seconds, in the wake of that ripple, the mist cleared. I caught a glimpse of the endless sprawl of the ruined city.
Just ahead of the blast, seagulls hopped and soared over a landscape of mounds and ditches, a pack of dogs chewed on a carcass, and ticktocks lurched and crept. I saw them clearly for the first time. They looked like rusty armadillos the size of minivans, with dozens of insectoid feelers and tentacles. In a meadow, five of the gearwork monsters joined together, hoses linked, antennae braided. On a curving black surface, another ticktock slashed at an orange barrel, sucking shreds of plastic into a vent—
The pulse passed, and the Fog billowed back into place. The explosion tossed me like a twig in a waterfall. My vision spun and blurred. The repair tether strained, my harness dug into my chest, and I trailed behind the Bottom-Feeder as she shot madly forward above me.
Swedish surfed the edge of the shock wave. He balanced on the brink of destruction, playing tag with the blast and rocketing away from Kodoc. Nobody else could’ve ridden a hurricane. Nobody else could’ve even stayed in the air.
“And that,” I said, before the howl of the wind stole my breath, “is why he’s called Swedish.”
34
A SOFT PURR surrounded me. Gentle arms rocked me, and a warm blanket snuggled me tight.
I opened one eye and saw a million pinpricks of light. Stars. A cool draft tickled my nose, and the hammock swayed beneath me. Oh. Not arms, then. And the purr didn’t come from a cat but from the raft’s engine. The blanket was a blanket, though.
So, yay. I snuggl
ed underneath and fell back asleep.
The next time I woke, the stars looked dimmer in the glow of dawn—and ticktocks rushed at me from the fragments of a nightmare.
“No!” I gasped, and twisted away.
I got tangled in my hammock and flopped to the deck. A barbed antenna grabbed at my wrist, and I lashed out and heard an ooof.
“It’s me!” Hazel said, her grip tightening on my wrist. “It’s me, sweetie. You’re safe—you passed out in your harness.”
The last flickers of nightmare faded when I heard her voice, and I lay back on the deck and watched the balloons sway overhead, past the now-tattered rigging. The freshly painted designs glowed in the early light—smudged by the storm but still cheerful.
I looked at Hazel and saw her exhausted eyes and unkempt hair. She probably hadn’t slept all night. “Did you just call me ‘sweetie’?” I asked.
She shoved my shoulder. “No.”
“Well, the bad news,” Swedish said from the wheel, “is that Chess still thinks he’s funny.”
“What’s the good news?” Loretta asked, leaning on our little copper-tubed harpoon. “That Kodoc dropped a bomb on the city?”
I frowned as memory returned. The Compass, the ticktocks, the bomb . . .
“What did he do?” I asked, sick with a sudden horror. “He blew up the Compass. He—he lied to me. He never wanted to lower the Fog.”
“Yeah,” Hazel said. “He likes the world exactly how it is.”
I gulped from a canteen that Bea handed me. “But . . . but if he lowered the Fog, he’d expand his turf! He’d control all the new land.”
“Except what if the Fog lowered too much?” Hazel rubbed her tired eyes. “Then people could leave the Rooftop. Imagine if everyone in the junkyard just walked away from Kodoc, into the woods.”
“Sounds like a dream,” Bea said. “Walking away from the slum.”
“The only reason Kodoc is strong,” I said as understanding dawned, “is because there’s so little land.”
