by Marino, Andy
Rob knocked. The door swung open.
“Gosh sakes,” Delia said, making a show of peering out into the empty hall. “You two getting chased by a Sumatran rat?” Her dark hair was swept back beneath a crocheted headband. Instead of the heavy dungarees and work shirt typical of a beetle keeper, Delia wore a blue dress that hung below her knees and curved inward at her calves.
“You live at the absolute”—Hollis paused to catch his breath—“South Pole of the airship.”
“Lucky for you.”
All three of them knew that Delia’s distance from the prying eyes of first class made their friendship possible. After a few days in flight, airships became hermetically sealed gossip factories. It wouldn’t do for the sons of the company’s ruling family to be seen escorting an apprentice beetle keeper around the promenade.
Delia stepped aside to let the boys in and closed the door behind them. Hollis watched her slide a heavy bolt into place, shake her head, slide the bolt back the other way, and rattle the lock’s casing. She paused for a moment, muttering to herself, and raised her wrist to the lock. On her wrist was a bracelet—the only piece of jewelry Hollis had ever seen her wear—and dangling from the bracelet was a coin-sized charm. Her slender fingers fit the edge of the charm into a tiny screw, and she began to tighten the casing.
“Don’t you have a screwdriver?” Hollis asked.
“I do—I just haven’t seen it in a while.”
Delia’s living quarters were cluttered with miniature versions of the machinery that sprawled around the bridge. Her table was a junkyard of dismantled radio parts: coils of thin copper wire, cloth speaker covers, disconnected black and silver dials. The bookshelf sagged under the weight of impossibly thick tomes filled with esoteric drawings and the smallest print known to man. They had titles like A Compendium of Popular Beetle Myths & Legends, The Gentle Keeper’s Guide to Maintaining Cordial Interspecies Relations, and An Occult History of Samuel Dakota. A messy collection of broadsheets and pamphlets were wedged between the books. Rob pulled out a single sheet of paper, dense with badly lettered type.
“This one’s called ‘Ethical Beetle Treatment Now’ exclamation point,” he announced. Clearing his throat, he began to read. “‘It is a national disgrace that nature’s most wondrous and holy creatures are bred for servitude and toil. They must be freed from this cruel bondage to prepare the way for man’s salvation. The soul of the beetle is a blessed and ageless thing.…’” Rob’s eyes scanned the rest of the page. “It just keeps going like that.” He looked up. “You know, I thought this was going to be some boring science report. But it’s actually the rambling of an insane person.”
Hollis shrugged. “It takes all kinds.”
Rob opened his hand and let the paper drift down to the floor. “I guess.”
“That’s actually a direct quote.” Hollis said. “Back when all those new religions started popping up—just crazy people, praying to beetles and making up beetle gods and forming cults and who knows what else—somebody started mailing these funny little wooden beetle statues to the shipyard foremen. A reporter from the Herald interviewed some Dakota people about it, and my father talked about how the cult members were harmless and everybody needed a hobby.” Hollis smiled at the memory. “Anyway. He went on forever, but that was the only thing they printed in the article. ‘It takes all kinds.’”
“Delia,” Rob said gravely, just as she slammed the bolt triumphantly into place and turned to face her visitors, “tell us the truth—are you in a cult?”
She frowned at the discarded broadsheet page. “It’s research.” Hollis picked up the paper and returned it to the shelf. “Chief Owens encourages us to be open-minded.”
Rob pointed at Hollis’s head. “Incoming.”
Hollis ducked to avoid a cigar box as it floated past, thumping along the ceiling.
“Excuse me.” Delia reached up and plucked a single beetle from the underside of the box, which fell into Hollis’s waiting palm. He watched in fascination as Delia began murmuring softly to the smelly little creature, cupping it gently in her hand.
“Right,” Hollis said. “That’s new.”
Quickly, before it could float away, she gripped it between her thumb and forefinger and began to massage its shiny, bulbous abdomen. A stream of liquid the color of a brackish puddle ran down her forearm. Satisfied the beetle had been rendered flightless, Delia placed it in a jar on her table and wiped her hands on a stained rag.
“Huh,” Rob said.
Hollis had heard of beetle keepers using all manner of coercion and trickery to wrangle their charges, but the intimacy of Delia’s process was shocking. It was as if he’d witnessed something deeply private—something vulgar—and he was relieved to see her move on to the next item in her daily menu of projects and experiments. She eyed the leather satchel. “That what I think it is, HD?”
Hollis opened the flap, tossed his schoolbooks on Delia’s cot, and dumped the rest of the contents on a bare patch of table. Silently, she examined each curious little treasure.
“This is exactly what I asked for,” she said at last, as if she’d doubted Hollis’s ability to follow her instructions. “I owe you one.”
“Just tell me what in the blue sky you’re doing with this junk, and we’ll call it even.”
“Oh!” Rob said, reaching inside his suit jacket. “Almost forgot. I got you something too.” He held out a medicine bottle. “Spirit of hartshorn,” he said proudly. “I borrowed it from the infirmary on the Secret Wish and now I’m extending those borrowing privileges to you.”
“Spirit of what?” Hollis asked.
Delia took the bottle and examined the neat block-letter type on the label. “Smelling salts.”
“Strong stuff,” Rob said. “Trust me.”
“I wanted to see what would happen if I interrupted a few of the beetles’ sleep cycles.”
“They sleep?” Rob asked. This had never occurred to Hollis either.
“Sort of,” she said, setting the bottle on the table. “Anyway, HD.” She held up a small black cube with two barrel-shaped silver diodes sticking out of the top like miniature smokestacks. “This is a battery.”
Rob sniffed and slid a finger under his nose, then wiped the finger absently on his pants. “This may surprise you, but we know that.”
Next, Delia presented a metal switching device mounted on a block of wood. “Telegraph key.”
“Uh-huh,” Rob said.
Delia raised an eyebrow at Rob, then gave Hollis a sly grin. Their customary standoff began, with Hollis having no idea what he was supposed to say and Delia acting like what she was doing was the most obvious thing in the world. After a few long seconds of silence, Delia sighed dramatically.
“Doesn’t that fancy Austrian tutor teach you any electrical science?”
Hollis shrugged. “I thought she was Romanian.”
“Our attendance has been kind of poor lately,” Rob said.
“Well, okay, but you’ve seen telephones, right? So what if I told you I had an idea for a telephone that didn’t need a wire? And what if I told you that telephone could transmit from the ship to the sky-dock, or even to the ground as we were in flight?”
“I would say you’ve been breathing the fumes from my grandfather’s moonshine for too long,” Hollis said.
“Beetle Keeper’s Madness,” Rob intoned, crossing his eyes.
Delia slid her headband forward and pressed it on the left side, near her temple. A gold-rimmed magnifying glass slipped down in front of her eye. She examined the battery and wrinkled her nose.
“Here we go,” Hollis said.
Delia turned the battery over in her hand and moved her lips in wordless communication with herself.
“Permission to contact the Republic of Delia,” Hollis said.
Rob fidgeted with a piece of scrap metal on the table, then stepped over to the room’s single window, a porthole the size of a dinner plate. “This is just like the beginning of Brice
Blank and the Lightning Genie. You shouldn’t play around with this kind of energy.” He looked at Hollis for backup. “That’s the moral of the story.”
Hollis ignored his stepbrother. He hadn’t learned anything from that particular tale, because he hadn’t read it. There were hundreds of Brice Blank funny-book adventures—maybe thousands—and unlike Rob, Hollis had only read a few of them. The artwork bothered him. The perspective was just a little off, the faces hasty and underdrawn. He always wanted to give the books a good, hard shake, as if that would knock Brice’s ink-rendered world into a more believable plane of existence.
He raised his voice. “Delia!”
“Hmm?” She looked up absently, then flicked the magnifying lens back up into her headband. “Right. Sorry, HD. What I was saying was that I think it might be possible to transmit signals without a wire. Simple ones, I mean. Mr. Morse’s code at first, like a telegraph, and then maybe someday the human voice. My theory is that if we make the right kind of sparks and tune the receiver to match the frequency … Anyway, that’s why I needed this stuff.”
Rob prodded beneath his cap, scratching his scalp.
“Okay, Delia,” Hollis said, “I’ll bite. Let’s say you manage to actually send a message through the air. How far can it go before it just … um…” Hollis didn’t know how frequencies worked, but he pictured the scattering dirt from the morning’s failed christening. “Disappears?”
“Not far enough,” Delia admitted. “That’s where the beetles come in. It’s a pretty big series of ifs, but I think if we can set up floating relay stations, and if we can—”
A long, deafening CREEAAAAK rattled the floorboards, followed by a sharp, decisive SNAP. The clouds outside the window seemed to swirl into one another like whipping cream as the airship fluttered from port to starboard and back. Rob and Delia managed to grab the edge of the bolted-down table. Hollis’s fingers missed, and he lost his footing.
He had time to think, I hope I land on the bed, before a blinding light popped like a flashbulb behind his eyelids as he slammed against the wall. Gently, he rubbed the back of his head: slight tenderness, no blood. He sat on the floor and endured a woozy spell. A glance up at the window once again revealed steady clouds, blue sky, and natural forward progress.
Rob helped him to his feet. “Should’ve aimed for the bed, Dakota.”
“That was quite the shake-up.”
Rob scoffed. “For you, maybe. First time on an airship?”
Hollis shot his stepbrother a mildly exasperated look and, with a downward glance, drew Rob’s attention to the floor. Or, as he knew Rob would understand, through the floor to the lift chambers that lined the hull.
“Very alarming,” Rob suddenly agreed. “I say we go confirm with Chief Owens that everything’s in proper working order. Since we’re all the way down here, anyway.”
“It was just turbulence,” Delia said. “That’s when the air—”
“We know what it is, Delia,” Hollis groaned. He tamped down a wave of nausea—genuine, despite his impromptu ploy. “But Rob is right. We came all this way. It would be a shame to pass up an opportunity to perform a routine inspection.”
“It’s our responsibility,” Rob agreed.
“No,” Delia said, “it is not your responsibility. You’ve never performed an inspection in your life, either of you.” She crossed her arms. The charm wiggled beneath her wrist. Hollis wondered what someone like Annabel Reynolds would make of an apprentice beetle keeper talking to him this way. “We’re not on some old bucket like the Secret Wish, making its hundredth crossing. I can’t just take you on a grand tour of the lift chambers whenever you feel like it and expect Benny to turn a blind eye. The mood down there is all business on this one.”
If the bridge was Captain Quincy’s exclusive domain, the lift chambers were Benny’s to rule like a petty despot. All nonessential personnel were forbidden—especially Hollis and Rob, whose reputation for being anywhere but the place they were supposed to be seemed to grow with every voyage.
“You don’t have to give us a tour,” Hollis said.
“Hollis’s mom made us memorize the blueprints.” Rob tapped the side of his head. “I could take this ship apart and put it back together. So you just stay here and get on with your science. We’ll show ourselves around.”
“Want to know the quickest way to all eleven of the second-class shoeshine booths?” Hollis said. “Quiz me.”
Delia stepped in front of the door.
“We’re not going to foul anything up,” Rob assured her.
With tingling dread, Hollis thought of his secret smudge of dirt. Rob nibbled at a fingernail and then studied the soggy nail up close.
“Haven’t you already seen the lift chambers?” Delia asked.
“Sure,” Hollis said. “Way back when they were being built. When they were empty.”
“Very boring,” Rob said.
She looked past them, studying something on her bookshelf.
“Republic of Delia,” Hollis whispered.
“All right,” Delia said, her attention snapping back into place. “Fine. But you go where I go and do what I tell you.”
Hollis grinned.
“It’s not funny!”
“No, it’s just that sometimes your accent comes out.”
The single fact that Delia had ever let slip about her past was that she was from Hell’s Kitchen, which made Hollis imagine a pocket of blazing furnace heat that kept a few blocks of Manhattan perpetually scorched, even in the dead of winter.
“You can take a little peek, and then we’re gone. We’re not doing anything to attract the attention of Chief Owens. Getting grounded for good isn’t high on my to-do list.”
“Benny won’t touch your apprenticeship,” Hollis said. “The company’s gonna need you one day. I’ll make sure nothing happens.”
Delia uncrossed her arms and used her thumb and forefinger to worry at her bracelet.
“At thirteen years old,” Rob said, affecting the nasally tone of a radio announcer, “Hollis Dakota became chief personnel manager, operating magically without the approval of any adult in the company.”
“That reminds me,” Hollis said, waving a hand dismissively at his stepbrother. “You’re fired.”
“I rehire myself.”
“You don’t have the authority.”
Delia sighed as a tin of biscuits rose unsteadily off her table and bumped gently against the bookshelf.
5
“MIGHT WANT TO hold your noses,” Delia suggested as they lowered themselves down the ladder.
“Some kind of scented handkerchief would be good,” Hollis said. The dizzying odor of millions of inflated beetles had begun to assault his nostrils. He thought of his grandfather’s famous description of the stench.
“You say that every time, HD.”
“And you always tell us that we can’t come down to the lift chambers, not a chance, and then every time we do.”
“That just proves you should be more prepared.”
Hollis buried his face in the crook of his elbow. Rob struggled to pinch his nose without losing his grip on the smooth metal rungs. “How you beetle keepers stand this is beyond me.”
Delia took a deep breath and let it out with a contented sigh—she always seemed to take perverse pride in her ability to withstand the smell.
The ladder deposited them with three echoing clanks onto a steel catwalk that stretched high above the floor of the lift chamber, a cavernous hollow at the very bottom of the airship, where the pelican’s beak scooped down from the bow, leveled off, then scooped up toward the stern. A sign at the base of the ladder was imprinted with the company insignia, the number 2 painted in red on the beetle’s back. This was the secondary chamber—not a bad place for some incognito tourism, as Big Benny Owens supervised his crew from the primary.
There were sixteen chambers in all. The next-largest airship in the Dakota fleet, the Windy City, had twelve. While the abundance of chamber
s kept the Wendell Dakota aloft, they didn’t make it uncrashable. (That single word, so bound up with his father, always gave Hollis a melancholy shiver.) What made it that way—what they had come here to see—was the revolutionary new system of automation. In the past, beetle keepers obeyed a set of basic, well-worn procedures. They fed whiskey-sap to the insects and applied them to the hull under the guidance of Benny and his officers. But the mechanical chambers on the Wendell Dakota offered a more efficient way to harness the beetles’ abilities, compensate for the natural tilts of an airship in flight, and cut down on the most stubborn of problems—human error.
Hollis went to the rail of the catwalk and peered down through the gloomy space. He caught the vaguest sense of rhythmic, nonhuman movement. “I can’t see anything.”
Rob elbowed up alongside him. “We’re too high.”
The view afforded them nothing but glimpses of the lower catwalks, crisscrossed in such a way that they blocked the floor. Every so often, a pair of keepers or technicians would scurry along one of the walkways, sending a hint of conversation up to their perch at the top of the chamber.
“Listen,” Delia said.
Hollis cupped his hands behind his ears and closed his eyes. Even down here, with miles of oak and carpet between them, Hollis felt the spin of the great propeller in his chest like a heartbeat. But there was another sound, very faint, unique to the chamber: a thousand wooden drawers sliding open and closed in precise time, the cataloging of some infernal librarian. Hollis couldn’t help but picture a giant armor-plated squid wearing thick glasses sorting through a mazelike cabinet, tentacles clanking, steam issuing from its beak. (He’d just seen the cover of Brice Blank and the Aluminum Kraken on Rob’s dresser.)
The look on Rob’s face told Hollis that he’d also heard it. As if to tantalize them further, there was a network of pipes creeping up the side of the chamber, silver vines on a three-story trellis, delivering exhaust to the main funnels. Hollis remembered that five hundred extra tons of coal had been earmarked to produce electricity for the chambers—never before had an airship needed such a resource.
