by M. E. Parker
“No, Myron. You’re what this world needs. You are. You.” She thrust her index finger into his sternum and then pounded on his chest with both hands, her face smeared with tears. “You. You.”
Myron wrapped her up in his arms and held her close until she rested her head at the base of his neck. “I got a look inside Mesa Gap. I saw what’s possible even out here in the Nethers. All those people.” With his arm around her, he turned Sindra toward the giant wall of junk. “On the other side of that glorious salvage pit of a wall is a thriving city where people—families—live and farm and have dogs. They don’t blast each other with shotguns or step on each other’s throats. They don’t have guards that thwack the citizens with rods or drudgers with their finger on the hammer, hoping for a chance to splatter someone with broken glass. They make art. Te Yah—these Gapi people—they’re trying to live, not just survive. Megan took their electricity, but she also took their heart. Te Yah deserves better. They all do.”
Sindra held back her tears.
“What good are dreams if the entire world has gone to the Chasm?” He pointed down the Old Age highway toward Megan’s Point. “That man makes a difference.”
“Okay. I get it. But why not let the Mesa Gap warriors rescue him?”
Myron lowered his eyes. “I don’t think any of them made it back. If Jonesbridge hadn’t seen Megan fleeing with that power source, Mesa Gap would be burning by now.”
“Okay.” She bit her fingernails. “I’m coming with you. We’ll get him back together.”
“No. You have to help Ren build this airship. This time we all make it out of here together.”
“At least take Rounder. You can’t go back there by yourself.”
“I sure ain’t going, so you’re planning on going by yourself? Fightin’ Megan and Jonesbridge at some sort of blood feud.” Rounder sighed and gazed up in the air. “What’d I tell you about this guy? Gotta find Sindra. Gotta get an army. Gotta rescue a baby. Build an airship. Now, he’s found his girl, but he’s heading back into the fires of the Chasm for some old man that don’t think any of us worthy to join his ranks.”
“I’m not going by myself.” Myron motioned for the twins to hop into the rickshaw.
“You’re taking them? What for, bait?”
“’Cause they’re—”
“I don’t know what you have in mind, but you can’t just use these kids for battle fodder.” Rounder grabbed Mah-ré by the arm to pull her out of the rickshaw. “You ever stop to ask them—in their own language—if they want to die?”
“I’m not using them.” The accusation pinched his conscience. “Well, ask them in Gapi. See for yourself,” Myron insisted.
“I will. And I’m telling them what’s in store for them, too.”
Rounder gave his words some thought before launching a diatribe in Gapi that involved wild gesticulations and sound effects that resembled ripping flesh and explosions.
Holding hands in the rickshaw, the twins pointed to the northeast and responded at the same time. “Te Yah.”
Rounder kicked up a cloud of dust. “Fine. Kill yourselves. Get killed for that geezer that don’t give two squats about you.”
“Just help Sindra with that canopy.”
“What for?” Rounder shook his head.
“We’re going to get Sindra’s baby, and then on to Bora Bora.”
“How you gonna get that baby without an army? I thought that was the point.”
“Turns out we don’t need an army, Rounder. They can get Sindra’s baby back.” Myron pointed to the twins.
“Them?”
“Yes. I believe they can.” Myron rode over to the spot where Te Yah’s cane had dropped as he was being taken away, and picked it up. He stood up on the pedals to get a fast start on the rickshaw, never looking back, afraid he would see the worry on Sindra’s face.
Chapter Nineteen
After she and Ren laid out and folded the plastic, according to Myron’s instructions, and prepared to mount it the way he had showed them, Sindra spent the rest of the morning scouring the Mesa Gap wall and Food Court for the white pipes with PVC stamped on them. Most of those she found were broken or had lost the flexibility that Myron described, but she did manage to find twenty-four pipes of the twenty-eight Ren suggested they use. If she found another four while searching for Ren’s long list of needed supplies, she’d bring them, too, but Sindra tended to concentrate on one item at a time.
Returning with as many wire, cable, and cord scraps as she could find, Sindra was so lost in her work that she had forgotten about Nico. Seeing him there, eyes closed, curled into ball, caused her to inspect her own wounds. They had endured the binding together, been rubbed raw, the flesh under the cuffs made damp and soft, the skin around it callused.
Attend to Nico, help Ren, find materials. Sindra’s tasks tugged her in all directions, rendering her unable to do anything except watch Ren turn her wrench on the bolt that held the main gear train on the bus.
“How’s that propeller coming, Sindra?” Ren lay on her back under the bus, removing the drive shaft.
“You’re really going to try to turn this thing into some flying death trap?” Rounder scratched Drillbit behind the ears.
Ren nodded without looking at Rounder.
“Why?”
“That’s what I do. I build things.” Ren rotated the back set of pedals, dislocating the chain from its sprocket. “Never made anything like this before, but—”
“Myron has,” Sindra said.
“Yep. That’s why I’m doing it. I think I can pull it off.”
“Where did you learn…how to make contraptions?”
Ren held out her hand. “Pass me that mallet.”
Sindra dug the mallet from the tool bag. Ren didn’t possess the striking appearance of Megan, or her magnetic command of people, but she exuded confidence, convincing Sindra that, even without Myron here, they stood a chance at building the airship he’d envisioned.
“There’s a man up north.” Ren waved her hand as if to throw the mallet to the northern horizon. “Way up north. Top of the world. He claimed it used to be covered in ice. I don’t know.” Ren went back to work, her eyes concentrating on the sprocket cluster that determined how much work each set of pedals had to produce for one rotation of the axle. “He builds things. He taught me.”
“What kind of things?” Sindra wondered if he knew any Old Age magic.
“Terrible things.” Ren slid out from under the bus and hopped to her feet. “Why are you standing there? I need that propeller. And the rudder. And a lightweight bar. Nuts and bolts. And I don’t have a drill, so don’t bring back anything I can’t punch with an awl.”
“Rounder can get some of it.”
“Hey, you know how hard it was to haul all that coal back here from the highway?” Rounder stepped up to Sindra. “And it wasn’t easy finagling that fresh water from the Gapi, either. Now, they’ve gone and blocked the hole Megan made. No way back in.”
Sindra turned back to Ren. “Terrible things?”
“Mechanical men. Clockworks for guts with faces made from Old Age dolls. And…human skin.” Ren dropped the mallet into the tool bag. “I dream about them sometimes. Walking toward me with outstretched arms.”
“Mechanical men? Do they talk?” Rounder asked.
“Sort of. Not really talk, but they make sounds. They do a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever he tells them. He encodes his instructions. And they do it.”
The only aspect of Ren’s tale that comforted Sindra was the fact that this builder lived way up north on the top of the world, a place she would never go, but with mechanical men marching into her imagination, Sindra longed for more detail. “What does he tell them to do?”
“Tasks. But sometimes they…malfunction.” Ren wedged between Rounder and Sindra. She fiddled through the jumble of wires that Sindra had found. She picked up one of the white PVC pipes and worked a hole near the end w
ith an awl, then doubled, tripled, and quadrupled a strip of wire, slipped it through the hole, and wired it to the bottom frame—another long section of PVC that extended out from the frame of the bus.
“I went to live with him when I was a kid. My grandmother left me there as an apprentice.” Ren walked to the other side of the bus and held out her hands for Rounder to bend the pipe over to meet her, to form a rib like what Myron described. She wired the other side.
“Can you make one?” Rounder reached for another pipe.
“No. It’s very complicated. His workshop has ten thousand clocks and…parts.”
“That sounds crazy.” Rounder helped fasten another structural rib that would form the support for their dirigible. “How many does he have?”
Ren thought about the question and hesitated. “A lot. They wait quietly in a barn.”
The three of them formed an assembly line as they spoke. Ren worked holes in both ends of the pipes. Sindra wired them to the bus, and Rounder used his weight to bend them, breaking two of them, which left only twenty-two, eleven under the plastic and eleven over the top, one set to bear the weight of the airship and one set to hold the plastic in place.
With the airship ribcage constructed, Ren set about removing the wheels, certain that they would weigh them down too much. In their place, she and Sindra attached supports that extended like an upside-down V, shoulder high from the ground to accommodate the propeller.
“There go the wheels. I lose everything and,” Rounder put his hands together as if to pray, “by divine providence, the Great Above goes and drops this fantastic pedal bus. Myron comes along. Yeah, Myron again.” He smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “And now we got what amounts to a bloated boil of Old Age junk that won’t even roll.” He paced around the airship, wagging his finger, inspecting Ren’s progress. “You know, I build things too. That desert glider, the riggings, sail, everything but that pinion steering mech, I put together. So I ain’t some nifty rick that don’t know a cotter pin from an ass hair.”
Rounder slapped the nearest set of pedals, which would now be used to turn a propeller instead of an axle, though Sindra hadn’t found a propeller yet. “As you can see, there ain’t much but a seat and a hand hold. One wrong move. An adjustment. Anything. You’re falling off this thing. And splat.”
“We’ll belt in.” Ren shrugged at Rounder. “So what are you waiting for? Find something to belt us in.” Then she turned to Sindra. “And how about that propeller?” She counted on her fingers. “And we need a flue to divert the heat, so we can come down. You do want to come down at some point, right? Or do you intend to sail right up to the sun? And we need ballast to balance our weight. And bellows to fuel the fire. A stoker. Coal bin.”
Rounder and Sindra split up to find what they needed. She spotted so many things, a smorgasbord of junk, but nothing that would work as a propeller. They searched and worked into the late afternoon. Stragglers and survivors from the Jonesbridge attack on the League trickled into the area around Mesa Gap, disappointed, angry, and confused that Mesa Gap had already reinforced the hole the gate crasher had made and would not allow anyone entrance.
The League refugees wandered Food Court and the area by the shopping center, foraging and asking questions about what Ren was building, forcing Rounder to abandon his search for Ren’s list of parts to stand guard against curious and aggressive Leaguers who’d lost their homes.
When Sindra spotted a bicycle wheel, an idea popped into her head. Sifting through a stack of splintered signs, she selected two railroad crossing signs and uncrossed the Xs to give her four rectangular strips of metal. She placed the strips equal distances apart on the wheel, and attached them at an angle lengthwise to simulate the pitch of a propeller. It was more of a fan blade than a propeller, but it would work.
When Sindra returned, she gave Nico and Drillbit some water and delivered the propeller. While she was gone, Rounder and Ren had managed to situate the plastic over the dirigible ribcage that rose high above the pedal seats. The airship cut a dazzling image against the evening sky, where orange rays from the sun scattered through the plastic sheeting. Though Ren had beaten her at nub, and they’d skirmished over words, the airship before her earned Sindra’s respect.
Ren had balanced the vehicle by moving the rudder levers to the center on a raised seat, giving the pilot a view of where they headed, now in a stable posture. To reduce weight load she’d pulled eight seats and pedal sets off, leaving six—one each for Rounder, Sindra, Myron, the twins, Nico, and herself, six pedalers and one pilot. In place of the removed seats, she’d positioned a crate filled with coal on each side, two more crates for supplies and a barrel for a place to stow Drillbit so she wouldn’t squirm off the airship to her death.
With the light dwindling, they took turns sleeping and keeping watch with a shotgun Rounder had claimed from what remained of the battle. Nico slept more soundly than he had, giving Sindra hope that his fever would break soon, while the breeze rippled across the plastic, producing a sound that resembled an unfurled flag whipping overhead.
The last time Sindra flew had been both the worst day of her life and the best, leaving Myron but escaping Jonesbridge. She eyed the dark landscape, catching shapes moving, Leaguers with no place to go, but they had no appetite for a fight. Those with a spirit for battle had already been defeated or captured. After her shift at watch, she drifted to sleep with the memories of the cold air in the clouds and the dizzying heights of flight that made her stomach flutter. From the moment she’d landed, she’d longed to have another go at it. The thought of having that chance in a matter of hours kept her in a state of half sleep until she awoke to the familiar sound of shoveling coal.
Rounder stood up in the airship, loading coal into the hot stove, working the bellows, stoking, until the tips of the chunks turned white. He had the hot air diverted to the side to avoid lifting off without them. Ren adjusted the rigging where the plastic attached to the frame.
“Sindra.” Ren waved when she saw her. “Let’s get out of here. Something’s not right.”
“What is it?”
Rounder pointed behind her to a ring of people surrounding them. “These Leaguers aim to take our airship, I think.”
“But there are so many of them.”
“It’ll be like rats fussing over scraps if we stay much longer.” Rounder patted the shotgun on his lap and climbed down. “I say we fly over the wall into Mesa Gap.”
“We have to help Myron. We can’t do that from inside Mesa Gap.”
“Sindra, you’ve flown before. You’ll be our pilot.”
“But I—”
“Only pilot we got.”
Rounder hauled Nico up the ladder and tied him to the frame. “Let’s hope he doesn’t fall out.”
“Are we going home?” Nico lifted his head.
“We’re going to get my baby back from Orkin. If you want to stay, that’s your choice.” Sindra climbed into the pilot’s seat. “But you can always come with us to Bora Bora.”
Drillbit barked from the barrel as Rounder diverted the heat into the balloon. For a while, nothing happened. Their flight began with a nudge toward the sky and back down again as Rounder stoked the coals. When the crowd saw that it worked, the Leaguer refugees rushed the airship.
“Take me!”
“Me!”
“Please, over the wall.”
Now shoulder high off the ground, the airship frame was surrounded by hands and arms reaching for it. The extra weight brought them down again. Rounder slammed the butt of his shotgun on knuckles and wrists, across the heads of the grabbing, reaching, climbing horde who’d heckled their airship the night before.
“Pedal!”
Sindra pedaled. The propeller turned. Ren stoked the fire while Rounder fought the Leaguers. They rose. A man leaped for the frame, getting a grip, causing the airship to list to the right, but it continued to rise. When the man let go, the airship straightened and the ground fell away benea
th them.
Chapter Twenty
Myron wondered how the sensation of capture changed for a man without sight, the shocking sensation of running, of being caught, a bag slipped over the head, the impact of a rod at the base of the back, seeing the world cinched up in burlap and the lights turned out as the train car doors closed. Did the act come as a greater surprise, deliver a more powerful jolt to his heart, or had Te Yah’s other senses foretold the episode?
Though Megan didn’t use the same method as Jonesbridge to abduct her thralls, Te Yah’s nose would have detected her stink in time to prepare his body for captivity. He would have heard her drudgers’ breaths, their footsteps and whispers, as they came for him. But what toll would the rigors of bondage take on a man of Te Yah’s age? Myron convinced himself that he would pedal his rickshaw until the wheels wobbled off the frame to reach Te Yah before Megan devised a humiliating and grotesque blood sport for her superior rival.
With a strong wind from the south at his back and Myron pumping the pedals, the rickshaw made good time as it rolled up the Old Age highway, but it would not match the speed of an overloader. The Jonesbridge forces were also in pursuit of Megan and her power source, which complicated Te Yah’s rescue, but Myron’s plan would not work without them.
Myron feared the twins needed water, which he had forgotten to bring. He found it difficult to tell, as their faces always looked pale and gaunt with flaking skin around their mouths and eyes, but their frail appearance betrayed their capabilities. With the sun setting and no time to purify slick, Myron decided to pedal through the night while the twins fell asleep to the rocking motion of the rickshaw, hoping they’d drunk enough at Mesa Gap to last them.
Once the sun dipped below the horizon, fanning streaks of pink and purple across the sky, the air chilled beneath a field of stars, transforming the rock formations into gravestones in an endless dead yard. Nighttime in the Nethers made Myron feel as though he were the only living person on the earth.
