Everfound s-3

by Neal Shusterman

  Johnnie-O was at the helm-not because he could fly the thing, for he had never even been in the control room before, but having been trapped aboard for so long while the airship was adrift, it gave him “squatters rights” to pilot it now. Besides, his large hands appeared very confident on the wheel. King Yax had been with him for most of the trip, because the views from the control room were spectacular, but the king must have lost interest, because Johnnie-O hadn’t seen him for over a day. Instead, Nick, Mikey, and Jix were in the control room with Johnnie, getting their first glimpse of the Trinity vortex ahead, when the mourning pang struck.

  “That was worse than before,” said Jix, understating the obvious, as he recovered.

  “Do you suppose it was Mary who was extinguished?” Nick said, trying to mask his concern.

  “No,” said Mikey with authority. “Remember, she’s my sister and we crossed into Everlost together. If she was extinguished, I’d feel it.”

  None of them wanted to guess who might have been the victim of this extinguishing, for any speculation led them to answers they didn’t want to consider. Then, as if to give weight to their worries, a sudden rainstorm in the living world hid the view before them and penetrated the ship, pouring through their spirits with such severity it made them shiver. And yet, they could also hear the rain on the Ship’s skin.

  “No es possible!” said Jix. “The storm is in both worlds!”

  And the Hindenburg began to violently lurch in the raging wind.

  In the clear eye of that swirling storm, at the southern edge of the deadspot, Mary and her children had all recovered from the mourning pang, but a sense of dread still filled every soul. Although she was far from the cluster of beds where her latest batch of Interlights had been laid, she knew that they had awoken in this second Great Awakening, and she would soon know how many of them were skinjackers.

  The living-world sands just beyond the edge of the deadspot had become inundated so quickly by the rain that it looked like an ocean out there, rather then a desert. Even if they wanted to leave now, they couldn’t, for the living-world sand had become so soft and wet that they would all sink after only a few steps.

  “The storm covers the whole world,” someone said.

  “Nonsense,” said Mary. “It will pass like all storms.”

  The immediate order of business was to locate Allie, but before Mary could organize her Afterlights into a search posse, something within the storm stole their attention. Some children pointed, some even fled, but most took their cues from Mary, and stood their ground as an impossibly huge object emerged out of the blinding sheets of rain, like a planet plunging from the heavens toward them.

  Mary instantly knew it was her airship-and it was coming in too fast and too low. The Hindenburg ’s nose pushed forth into the airspace of the deadspot, then the low-hanging control gondola, and the ship’s entire underbelly, hit the ground hard, scraping along, knocking over everything in its path until finally it came to rest like a massive beached whale.

  When Mary looked into the windows of the passenger compartment, she saw faces-hundreds of faces. All of them angry. All of them foreign. Then, when she lowered her eyes to the windows of the control room, she saw, standing beside the pilot, three spirits she never thought she’d see again.

  Mikey, Jix, and Nick.

  Mary turned to her children, who all looked to her for strength and solace, and she said to them, “Run!”

  CHAPTER 49

  The War of Souls

  N ow, that’s what I call an entrance,” said Johnnie-O. Then, with his flight mission accomplished, he immediately climbed the ladder up from the control room, and into the hull of the ship, to fight his way through the crowds to the gangway. Mikey, Jix, and Nick, however, who were less linear in their thinking, simply jumped out of the control room window, and were the first ones off the ship.

  Everyone expected King Yax to lead the advance against the Eastern Witch, but the king was still nowhere to be found. With so many souls packed within the higher reaches of the airship’s aluminum skeleton, it was very possible that the king was wedged in with all the humanity, and had yet to make his way out. No one knew for sure.

  Without the king to order his subjects about, command of the siege was left to Jix. This was fine with him. While Mikey could play the occasional deity, and Nick could be their conscience, Jix was, and always would be, the hunter. True, he was not a pack hunter, but he did not mind having more than a thousand warriors under his command. Jix had seen fear in Mary Hightower’s eyes when they landed, and for the first time in a long time, he felt the excitement a jaguar feels the moment it smells blood.

  With Mary and her children in full retreat, Jix ordered his warriors to pursue them, subdue them, and force Mary’s surrender. There were several problems, however:

  1) The gangway stairs were designed for the leisurely departure of first-class guests, not for an entire Mayan civilization;

  2) The warriors had to avoid touching the statue of the king on the way out, lest they accidentally make a more permanent exit, and;

  3) The belly-flop nature of their landing left only one of the two gangways in a position to open, forcing the furious fighters to exit single-file.

  Thus, Jix had to wait until he had enough warriors to lead, so it wasn’t exactly like storming the shores of Normandy.

  With Jix in charge of the battle, Mikey’s mission had narrowed to a single objective.

  “Allie!” he called.

  Let the others face his sister. He had motivated the king to bring them here, and he didn’t need a monstrous transformation to frighten Mary’s children, since they were already running away, so Mikey’s job was done.

  “Allie!” He could sense that she was here somewhere, and the feeling was so strong, he knew she must be close! “ALLIE!” But all he heard in response were the war cries of the exiting warriors and the rain and winds of the two-world storm.

  ***

  Allie, it seemed, was destined to be restrained in one way or another. First on the face of a train, then bound to the body of a coyote, then cuffed and gagged by a girl bent on destroying the world. Once she had freed herself from the handcuffs and recognized the sound of the approaching engine, she thought she could guide the Hindenburg in, but the ship came in so fast, no one in the control booth saw her directly in its path.

  Now she was pinned to the ground beneath the airship, and with the clatter of warriors coming down the gangway stairs, and the roar of the storm, and Mikey bellowing her name, her own cries fell on ears deafer than the king’s artists.

  When Nick had seen Mary through the control room window, he felt more himself than he ever had before-but the old feelings surfaced in him in full force. He knew Mary was his weakness, but seeing Mary’s face told him something crucial: He was Mary’s weakness as well.

  Now, as he strode through the piles and random objects filling the Trinity deadspot, he could feel more and more of the chocolate that plagued him flaking away. It was now just bits of a hard shell on the outside, rather than the thick mud that used to fill him. His tie was still caked with the stuff, but his shirt was mostly white now, and his pants mostly gray. His face only had brown patches here and there. He knew that as long as he held on to himself and stayed in the company of those who knew him, he would be fine.

  He once dreamed of reforming Mary-perhaps not in the same way that Mikey had re-formed him from the blob of molten chocolate he had become-but he had hoped to change Mary from the inside out, opening her eyes to a better way of existing. He had wanted to show her a new concept of “right.” Now, however, Nick’s hope was much more humble. He just wanted to stop her, and render her powerless. If he could even just make her doubt herself, it would give them an advantage.

  He wondered what she’d say to him when she finally faced him… . But he was more curious as to what he would say to her. Regardless, he sensed this confrontation would be the last time he would ever face Mary Hightower, whatever t
he outcome.

  Finally Jix and the first wave of warriors-perhaps a hundred or so-went racing past Nick, their weapons raised, and Nick turned to look back at the great airship behind him. Was it his imagination, or had the Hindenburg begun to move?

  Speedo, hiding behind a pile of furniture, was the first to see the Hindenburg unexpectedly start to rise, because he had his eyes trained on it from the moment it landed.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” he shouted, and ran toward it. The Hindenburg was his. He had traded for it fair and square long ago-but like everything else, somehow it became Mary’s and he had become a mere chauffeur, piloting her around. Well, he let his airship go once, he wasn’t going to let it get away again.

  He raced for the gangway stairs as the engines grew louder. Oddly dressed warriors were falling from the gangway, having not expected the ship to suddenly lift off. As the ship rose higher, Speedo climbed on the roof of a Cadillac, and leaped to the gangway stairs, clinging with the tips of his fingers. Speedo was not a particularly strong boy, but in Everlost physical strength is less about physique, and more about determination. He pulled himself up to the bottom step of the gaping gangway, and climbed into the ship. Pushing his way past agitated warriors, he made his way straight to the control room.

  “Get out of my cockpit,” he yelled at a figure adorned in gold, at the ship’s helm.

  Then, when the figure turned to him, Speedo recognized him from his earliest days with Mary, and he stared in disbelief.

  “Vari?”

  “Don’t call me that!” said Vari. “I am His Excellency, the Supreme King of the Middle Realm. Hear my name and revel.”

  Sadly, King Yax K’uk Mo’ was no longer a passenger on the Hindenburg. He had only himself to blame for putting his trust in his power-hungry vizier. Vari knew the jig was up the moment Nick and Mikey arrived. The king was likely to throw him into the Cenote for lying about his connection to “the Eastern Witch.” Vari couldn’t stay under the rule of the king, and didn’t want to go back into the service of Mary, who treated him like the small child that he was, so Vari went into hiding. Then, when the king ordered all his subjects onto the airship, Vari hid in the ship’s air vents, waiting and watching.

  The king spent most of his time in the control room with Johnnie-O, enjoying the view below. When there was no one he had to impress, the king often removed the heavy, restrictive gold adornments he wore, all the way down to the ragged little loincloth he had died in a thousand years ago. Although the huge windows of the control room offered spectacular views, this was not one of them. Johnnie-O’s interest in seeing the king in his underwear was as close to Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, that Johnnie-O ever cared to get, and so he left the airship on autopilot, going off to brief Nick, Mikey, and Jix on their progress, until such time as the king made himself decent again.

  Once Johnnie-O was gone, Vari, who, had been watching from an air vent, made his move.

  As King Yax looked out of the open window, Vari dropped into the control room, catching his former boss off guard.

  “Vizier?” said the king, for King Yax knew no one’s actual name. “What are you doing here?”

  “Saying good-bye,” said Vari. Then he reached down, grabbed the king’s bare feet, and flipped him out of the window, enacting a quick political coup de drop. Once the king had been dispatched, Vari retreated into the air vent again with all the king’s gold, planning to bide his time until he could get Mikey, Nick, and Jix off the airship as well.

  The king was understandably outraged as he fell from the sky, and swore all manner of retribution against his vizier, once he solved the predicament of falling a thousand feet with no deadspot to land on. Although there were many, many things he could unremember to get himself out of this situation, the king was not the brightest bauble in the headdress. He concluded that if there were no such direction as “down,” then he couldn’t possibly fall, could he?

  “I don’t remember there being a ‘down,’” King Yax said. “I don’t remember it whatsoever.”

  The problem with that particular unmemory is that it instantly transported him to the only place on earth where “down” does not exist. Namely, the very center of the earth, where the only direction is “up.”

  Thus, King Yax K’uk Mo’ avoided many long years of sinking, and promptly became the central-most soul in a very different party than he was used to.

  “Mikey! Over here!”

  Mikey heard Allie call out to him the moment the Hindenburg began to rise. The great airship lifted off the ground, and he saw her rising to her feet from beneath it. He ran to her, wrapping his arms around her, and he found himself growing another set of arms, and another and another just to hold her. He could not embrace her enough.

  “I thought you had been extinguished,” Mikey said. “I couldn’t bear the thought of it.”

  “It was Milos,” Allie told him. “Your sister made him do it.”

  Mikey shook his head and said something he’d been feeling for quite a while. “She’s not my sister anymore,” Mikey told her. “Megan McGill’s been gone for a long, long time.”

  Mikey held her in his multiple embrace, and although he wanted to make this moment the only moment that mattered, he knew he couldn’t. So he pulled in his extra sets of limbs, and said, “Nick thinks the first atomic bomb is at the center of the vortex.”

  Allie looked at him, horrified, finally realizing what this place was. “Well, it can’t go off, right?” she said. “I mean, this is Everlost-it can’t be destroyed.”

  “Unless,” he reminded her, “its purpose was to be destroyed…”

  In the Hindenburg control room, Speedo still stared at Vari in a gold skirt, trying to wrap his mind around it. “The Supreme who? The king of what?”

  Then the ship hit the double-world storm, and the Hindenburg ’s nose began to drop. Vari looked at the controls around him, baffled, so he turned to Speedo. “I command you to take me to the City of Souls!”

  “You command squat,” said Speedo, finally sticking up for himself against those who would order him around. “This is my airship, and you are just a passenger. Got it?”

  The nose dipped farther, and Vari nodded nervously.

  Speedo, who had been a true master of the airship’s helm, quickly took the controls, adjusting the elevator wheel until the inclinometers were level and the ship had stabilized. He paused then, but only briefly. He now had his ship back-and although it meant abandoning his claim on the deadspot, he resolved not to return to Mary. Not now, not ever.

  “We need to get more altitude, and we can’t do that in this storm,” Speedo told Vari. “We’ll go back over the deadspot-it’s quiet in the eye. Then, by the time we reach the far side, we’ll be high enough to make it through the storm.”

  Speedo turned the ship around, and it began to rise as it crossed back over the deadspot.

  Jix knew something had gone terribly wrong when he saw the Hindenburg soaring overhead with its gangway still open and the occasional warrior tumbling out. He looked back to take stock of the limited number of warriors with him now. There were thousands upon thousands of souls to fight Mary Hightower, but that meant nothing if they all were aboard an airship that was flying away.

  Now, Mary’s children were coming out of hiding all around Jix, and there were lots of them-many more than the warriors who actually made it out of the airship. It looked like Mary’s children realized that too, because they didn’t seem frightened anymore. In fact, they were closing in.

  Johnnie-O never got to the gangway before the ship took off. He got close, but something along the way stopped him. It was the statue of the king. Johnnie remembered how, when he and Charlie had first flown over the deadspot nearly a month ago, the airship had filled with sparks and silent lightning. Now, however, all the electrical charges seemed to be focused around the statue, creating pleasing patterns of light. Pleasing, at least, to him. Johnnie-O found himself mesmerized, unable to look away, and while the warrior
s had been frightened by it, sticking close to the stairwell wall on their way to the gangway, Johnnie could not stop looking at it.

  Old thoughts began to play in his head. “It’s gotta mean something, don’t it, Charlie? The fact that I’m not a complete blithering idiot like you?” Although Johnnie-O didn’t know what the meaning was, he couldn’t help but think that his destiny, like Charlie’s, was somehow tied up with this statue.

  He was so enthralled by it that he never even felt the ship leave the ground. It wasn’t until he heard a commanding yet whiny voice behind him that he broke out of his trance.

  “Why are you staring at that statue?”

  He turned to see what at first he thought was the king, but quickly he realized it was Vari wearing the king’s clothes.

  “None of your business,” said Johnnie-O. “Get lost.”

  Vari took a step forward, trying to look taller than he was. “I am your king now. All who disrespect me shall be cast down to Xibalba.” Then Vari looked at the statue. “When we return to the City of Souls, we will find your bucket of coins in the forge, and make a new face for the statue. My face.” He paused for a moment, then added, “And as punishment for your disrespect, you will be made to do it, by dipping those big fat hands of yours into the molten metal.”

  That was all Johnnie-O had to hear. Suddenly the sparking statue didn’t look beautiful to him, it looked hideous. “You know what? I got a better idea.” Then he grabbed the statue’s obsidian base with those same big fat hands, and knocked it over.

  “No! What are you doing?”

  Then Johnnie kicked it down the gangway stairs.

  “Stop! I order you to stop!”

  “Sorry. I don’t take orders from obnoxious, snot-nosed twits.”

  Now the statue lay half in and half out of the airship, wedged against the gangway stairs’ support strut. With the airship halfway over the deadspot, and still gaining altitude, that last step off the gangway was a very long one.