The Star Thief

by Lindsey Becker

“Francis!” she called. “Francis! Are you out there?” Honorine called until her voice went hoarse from shouting and coughing up sand.

  “Are you certain he’s here?” Lux asked as they wandered first in the direction of the dunes and then toward the water. “If we don’t find him soon, we’ll have to head back to the Carina.”

  “He’s here! We just have to look a little further!”

  Suddenly, the wind swept farther back, revealing a tiny figure standing on the flat plain.

  “Francis?” Honorine called out with the last shout she could manage. The figure paused, then began waving frantically in her direction.

  “It’s him!” Honorine croaked. Her hand slipped from Lux’s shoulder, and she was jogging across the sand in an instant.

  “Honorine!” Francis called, waving a hand. “You’re alive!”

  “So are you!” she said as she ran the final few yards toward him. They were both caked in sand and dirt from head to toe, but at least Francis had the sense to wear goggles with black reflective lenses that hid his eyes, which made him look a bit like an insect.

  Before she could catch her breath or spit all the sand from her mouth, Francis lunged forward and threw his arms tightly around her.

  “I didn’t know,” he said, his voice cracking a bit, as if a sob of relief was caught in his throat. He coughed it away, and then pulled off his goggles and wiped his eyes, trying to make it look like he was just rubbing away sand and grit. “We found everyone who was on the Nighthawk when she went down. Everyone except you!”

  Honorine realized that Francis had no way of knowing that she’d been rescued from the cold ocean. For just a moment, she felt the weight that would have hung on to her every moment since the Nighthawk crashed, if Astraea had not told her that Francis had survived.

  “I wish I could have talked to you,” she said. “But look! I’m just fine. Have been the whole time. And I found your note!”

  “I was hoping you would,” he said.

  “I had to try to figure out your bees,” she said.

  “I had to try to find you,” Francis said. “And make sure you were all right.”

  “Well, I had to try to make sure this storm didn’t kill you. You shouldn’t have come out in the desert alone.”

  “Neither should you,” Francis said. “Oh, you didn’t.”

  His face went very long as he stared over Honorine’s shoulder. She looked back to see Lux standing at a slight distance, his yellow eyes locked on Francis.

  “You’re not going to shoot him this time,” Honorine demanded.

  “No, I’m not,” he replied without taking his eyes off Lux. “Tell him I’m sorry, would you?”

  “Tell him yourself,” Honorine said, but when she looked back, Lux had retreated a few paces.

  “We shouldn’t stay out here,” Francis said, pointing at the ball of sand and thunder ahead of them. “When that’s over, things are going to get much worse. Nautilus is planning a full attack on the Mapmaker and everyone who sails with him!”

  “The Mapmaker is planning an attack on Nautilus and everyone who sails with you!”

  They both looked back at the dust storm rolling toward the dunes.

  “We have to get back to the Gaslight,” Honorine said.

  “Is that safe?” Francis asked. “What if Nautilus finds out that you’re, well… You’re a Mordant, aren’t you?”

  Honorine nodded. “I think he already knows. My mother was a Mordant. My father was—is—Nautilus.”

  Francis said nothing for a very long moment.

  “Why didn’t he tell me that?” he asked finally. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I didn’t know,” Honorine said. “I didn’t know about any of this until that night you came back home and shot Lux in the garden. And since then it’s been all kinds of things I thought were impossible or unbelievable. But it turns out that ‘impossible’ is much less likely than I ever would have imagined.”

  “Well, we probably can go back to the Gaslight,” Francis said, but then paused awkwardly. “You and me, I mean. I don’t know if your wolf should come along just yet.”

  Honorine turned back to see Lux, a bit farther still, watching her but slowly building a distance between them. Francis was right. He couldn’t come along now. The next part, she would have to do alone.

  “I’m all right,” she called to him. “Go back to the Carina. Talk to the archer. He’ll tell you the plan, and I’ll meet you again soon!”

  Lux waited a moment, tilting his head slightly. Then he nodded and trotted off toward the Carina and the thunderclouds. Honorine watched him go, realizing for just a second that she might never see him again. But there was no time to linger on the thought.

  “We should hurry,” Honorine said. “The wind seems to be dying down. Without this sandstorm, they’ll surely be able to find us.”

  “Right this way,” Francis said. He jogged toward the ocean, taking a wide path around the storm. Near a worn red rock, partially covered in algae, he had stashed a boat, a curious little thing that looked something like a canoe strapped to a collapsed brass windmill.

  “What on earth is this?” Honorine asked. She had left a magnificent flying forest for a motorized dingy that hardly looked seaworthy.

  “What?” Francis asked, looking slightly offended as he stood before his boat. “I made this. We do a lot of research on traveling with speed. This is the fastest thing anyone in Nautilus’s crew has ever built. Now, come on. Help me launch it.”

  They pushed the boat out as deep as they could manage before climbing in.

  “How did you know I’d be here?” Honorine asked as they settled into their seats. Her head barely cleared the high sides.

  “I didn’t,” Francis said. “But I’ve looked for you everywhere we went since the Nighthawk exploded. I sent notes out every time we landed.”

  Francis fired up the motor, and a great, round fan blade at the back of the boat began to turn. “What have you been doing all this time?” he asked as the boat began to move with speed across the water. “Who was on that ship with you? What are the Mordant doing?”

  “They were just trying to find the last free Mordant before Nautilus could capture them,” Honorine said.

  The boat bounced and hopped as it reached increasingly high speed. But if they ducked their heads below the tall wooden sides, they could speak over the roar of the engine and the howl of the wind.

  Francis was uncomfortably silent for a moment.

  “Nautilus isn’t harming them,” he said. “The Mordant on the Gaslight. You should know that.”

  “But he isn’t letting them go,” Honorine said. “So they’re his prisoners. That’s not just a rotten thing to do—it’s incredibly dangerous. And the Mapmaker is going to find a way to stop Nautilus… for good.”

  “We can’t let them go yet. We need their help to build a defense against the Mapmaker,” Francis said.

  “There’s no need for a defense against the Mapmaker if you just let the Mordant go,” she countered.

  “Is that what he told you?” Francis said. “Because it’s a bit more complicated than that. Just wait until you see what we’re working on here.”

  “Where?” Honorine asked, then turned to see the side of the Gaslight looming above them. They were still approaching at a tremendous speed, and it looked as if they were going to smash right into the side of the ship.

  Francis began to slow the engine, easing it back from full power to a slow idle, eventually pulling up alongside the huge ship and slipping the little boat through a door right at the water’s edge. It led into a chamber that immediately lifted the boat, passengers and all, up to a metal dock inside the ship. From there they climbed a staircase until they reached a narrow door with rounded corners.

  “Welcome aboard,” Francis said as he opened the door and led Honorine out onto a deck that seemed to stretch on forever in both directions. The lights from thousands of gas lamps gave off heat, creating fine steam
that drifted in the damp ocean air. The boards of the deck were warm, and a faint odor of burned chemicals seeped up from below. It rose and spread like a fog, pooling along the rail, corroding everything it touched.

  “Oh, what is that smell?” Honorine said with a cough. She held her sleeve over her nose and mouth, trying to filter out the noxious odor.

  “That’s from the Sidus Apparatus,” replied Francis.

  The machine. The thing even the Mapmaker feared, hidden somewhere inside the massive ship, perhaps right under the very boards beneath her feet.

  Francis tugged her sleeve and waved her toward the enormous crystal dome rising out of the deck. It looked like some manner of spectacular greenhouse, but when Honorine drew closer, she noticed that it seemed to be empty. There was no floor, nothing inside but open space, specks of light, and a great hole opening into the heart of the ship.

  Eerie lights flashed up from below, refracted through the dome’s crystal panels and sprayed across the deck like breaking waves.

  This was what had stolen Leo and Sirona and a hundred others away.

  She hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful.

  “Wait until you see the rest of it,” Francis said. He led her to a corroded metal door surrounded by a strange copper cage.

  He closed the copper gate behind them and then sealed the rust-pocked outer steel door, leaving them in a knot of darkness until he turned on a string of bare round bulbs. They were in a short corridor that ended in another rusty door, this one covered in a net of copper straps lined with flecks of starglass.

  He turned a brass and wooden lever to release the catch, and the door swung toward them, revealing a sparkling room beyond. “This is the bridge, where the ship is steered.”

  The Gaslight’s bridge was a long hall with a floor of dark, polished wood, a ceiling covered in maps and charts of the ocean and sky strung on lines like laundry, and two long walls made almost entirely of clear crystal panels.

  “That’s the front of the ship, and the ocean, of course,” Francis said, pointing out at a view of sprawling decks lined with tiny electric lights and cannons. Down on a landing deck, the airship was lowering toward the main ship.

  “That’s our backup airship, the Black Owl,” Francis said. “Not as big as the Nighthawk was, but it has more guns.”

  “Wonderful,” Honorine said, although Francis didn’t seem to catch her sarcasm.

  Just then, the doors on the far end of the bridge swung open, and in walked Professor du Ciel, led by Nautilus Olyphant in midspeech. He wore his same impeccable suit and piles of silver jewelry, and this time he sported a pair of heavy dark goggles with black lenses hanging around his neck.

  “We almost had him!” he said as he marched up to the crystal windows overlooking the laboratory below. “How did the Mapmaker get here faster? Weren’t you monitoring their ship correctly?”

  “As best we could,” Professor du Ciel said. “As of forty-eight hours ago, they should have been at least another day behind us.”

  “But they weren’t,” Nautilus said with a calm yet infuriated tone. “And now we’ve lost the archer.”

  “I beg your pardon, Captain, but would he have been any help if we had caught him?” Professor du Ciel replied as she studied a collection of papers in her gloved hands. “None of the others have helped. They won’t give up the Mapmaker.”

  “Perhaps not, but he would have been able to defend this ship,” Nautilus said. “And now we must…” He trailed off, suddenly noticing Honorine and Francis.

  “Captain Olyphant,” Francis said, stepping up and standing with a sailor’s attentive posture.

  “Mr. Vidalia,” he replied. “Professor du Ciel informs me that you left your post this morning.”

  “I did,” Francis replied. “I admit it. But I had good reason.”

  “And that was?” Nautilus asked.

  “I went to rescue your daughter, sir,” Francis said.

  Du Ciel nearly spilled her papers to the floor.

  “Daughter?” she asked, but Nautilus stopped her with a short wave of his hand while looking directly at Honorine. She didn’t know what to expect from him. Only now, standing in front of him again, did Honorine realize that she hadn’t thought much about Nautilus himself since they had first met. She hadn’t really prepared, and she braced herself for an awkward reunion, or an angry inquisition.

  “The Mapmaker knows you’re here?” was all he said.

  “I don’t know,” Honorine said. “If the fight is over, he might suspect by now.” She gestured toward the Black Owl on the landing deck outside the window.

  “Did the Mapmaker send you here?” Nautilus asked.

  “No,” Honorine said.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes,” she insisted. “It was my decision. I left the Carina to try to find you.”

  The bridge was completely silent while Nautilus took a moment to consider her. Then he gestured toward Professor du Ciel.

  “You’ve met?” he asked Honorine.

  “Well, not officially,” she said. She held out her hand, which Professor du Ciel shook very lightly and with hesitation.

  “Professor du Ciel,” Nautilus said, “this is my daughter, Honorine Olyphant.”

  Honorine’s entire body seemed to lock into place for a moment. She had never been given a full, proper name. It attached her somehow to Nautilus in an instant, and she found, to her surprise, that she did not like it one bit.

  But she smiled back numbly as the professor said “pleased to meet you,” and mumbled a thank-you as Nautilus placed an unnervingly strong hand on her shoulder.

  “You may go along with Professor du Ciel,” he said, “and take a look at the work she’s doing on this ship.”

  “Are you… sure?” Professor du Ciel replied uncertainly as she shuffled her papers around to get a better grasp.

  “I don’t know,” Nautilus replied. “Am I still captain of this ship?”

  Professor du Ciel nodded an apology. Nautilus turned back to Honorine.

  “Do get a good look at everything we’re doing here,” he continued. “It’s very exciting work.”

  She nodded dutifully and took a step toward Professor du Ciel. Everything about the way he spoke, the way he moved, the way du Ciel reacted to him, though, made Honorine suspicious and uncomfortable. There were no wolves or scorpions or forbidden swamps here, but a gnawing fear told her that this place—even more than any of the others she had been to—was the most dangerous of all.

  Even though she could never forget why she had come, Honorine could not help being completely captivated by the Gaslight. In every hall, in every room, down every corridor, and up every ladder and stairway, she found wonders and excitements and things that made her eyes light up with curiosity.

  Professor du Ciel led her from the bridge through a door of copper and glass and onto a kind of revolving spiral staircase that twisted down into the lower levels of the ship. Francis followed along, lost for a moment somewhere above her as the mechanized stairs spun into a vast open atrium, big enough to house the entire Vidalia Manor.

  “This is the research hall,” Francis called down, leaning over the railing as they moved past stacks of balconies, catwalks, stairways, and brass caged elevators. It all made the atrium look a bit like the back of a dollhouse with the wall removed to reveal the colony of compartments within.

  The hall was lined with tall iron columns, cast in the pattern of tree trunks reaching up and bending gracefully across an arched ceiling. Iron branches ended in thousands of lights in fixtures shaped like blooming flowers on curling vines of copper pipe. The decor created the strange illusion of being outdoors and indoors all at once. The scent of things burning and cooking filled the air, some of them very unpleasant, others less so. Honorine detected a hint of woodsmoke from one corner and witnessed a strange mist wafting from another.

  “What are they working on?” Honorine called back up to Francis, her curiosity a near fever at this poi
nt.

  “Just about everything,” Francis said. “Anything you can think of to study or build, we probably have someone working on it.”

  They reached the ground level, and Honorine stepped onto a wood floor packed with miniature laboratory spaces, some secluded behind panels or curtains, most open to the rest of the room. At one station, she observed rows and columns of plants sprouting from miniature crystal vases arranged on a spiderweb grid of fine wire lines. At another, liquids of various viscosities poured from one decanter into another through a series of measuring devices. At a third, inside a greenhouse of apparently soundproof glass, several researchers sat amid a forest of musical instruments. They were recording notes and chords on wax cylinders and playing them back in the direction of several ceramic plates and vases, which were cracking and disintegrating one at a time.

  “This way,” Professor du Ciel said, leading them through a clear avenue running down the middle of the hall.

  They passed towers of books. Endless collections of elixirs, powders, and compounds arranged in tiny crystal bottles. Mice, lizards, ponies, parrots, even a tortoise the size of a boulder, working on tasks and puzzles of varying complexity, while more men and women in blue coats filled stacks of logbooks with an endless stream of data. Honorine felt like she was seeing artifacts, creatures, plants, and even people from every corner of the globe. But she didn’t see any sign of the Mordant.

  She scoured every partitioned laboratory as they passed, but all the people appeared to be people, and all the animals (she confirmed when a spotted pony lifted its tail and dropped a fragrant pile of manure onto the floor) just regular animals.

  “This is where I work,” Francis said, leading Honorine to an alcove at the farthest end of the research hall.

  An arched entryway built from carved, whitewashed wood and panes of blue and silver glass soared more than a story tall. Through it was a wide room partitioned into several levels connected by a series of open staircases, and a wall of tempered glass with an exterior balcony staring out over the sparkling black sea. Everywhere hung charts and globes and models of islands and continents, along with twirling instruments and maps covered in lightbulbs.