by Dave Butler
“The ’eck,” Bob muttered.
The three of them hid behind a billboard of schedules to spy out the terrain. “They could just be security for the progress flotilla,” Charlie thought out loud. “Innocent policemen. Or they might be the Iron Cog’s men.”
“That’s right,” Ollie agreed. “But even if they ain’t with the Cog, they won’t be happy about us not having tickets.”
“An’ ’aving swords instead.”
“We’ve got to stop the explosion and save my bap. If there’s no explosion, there’s no distraction, and the plan fails. And if we don’t stop the explosion, my bap dies.”
“Agreed,” Bob said. “We stop the explosion. So ’ow do we get past those blokes an’ get to the London Eye?”
Charlie smiled at the aeronaut. “I can’t believe that you of all people are asking me that, Heaven-Bound Bob. The explosives will be somewhere up in the Eye, off the ground. We’ll need to scout it out—”
“From the air!” Bob finished the sentence and patted the belt of gyroscopes over her shoulder. “An’ the coppers?”
Charlie peeked around the billboard. There was a last trickle of exiting traffic. “Follow me, but not too close. I’ll meet you up at the lockers. Go fast, and be ready to launch.”
Ollie chuckled. “Fast and ready is the only way we know, Charlie.”
Charlie held the cutlass behind him and walked down the platform. He let himself lurch along after a man in a greatcoat and stovepipe hat who was dragging a steamer trunk on a narrow wheeled cart. He looked over his shoulder and saw Bob and Ollie drifting behind him.
When the man was a few steps from the gate and the two police constables, Charlie picked up his pace. He rushed in front of the man, step-lurch, step-lurch, step-lurch, and he saw the surprise on the constables’ faces.
They went for their swords.
Charlie burst into a sprint, throwing himself forward. His pace was still ragged and irregular—
but Charlie discovered that he could run very, very fast.
Just to be sure he had their attention, he attacked the coppers. He knocked one with his shoulder, sending him tumbling against the short rail of the gate and falling to the ground. With his cutlass he chopped at the other constable’s tall blue hat. The lopped-off crown fell to the tiles.
“ ’Ey, you!” the decrowned man yelled through his bushy mustache. “Stop!”
Charlie sprinted. The concourse was busy, but the travelers were not all frock-coated businessmen. The crowd included children now, and women with parasols, and then men who wore lighter, less serious-looking coats. They must be here for the Jubilee, Charlie realized.
Charlie was fast enough to dodge around them all and still keep his pace at a sprint.
“Stop that child!” the policeman yelled. “Stop ’im!”
Charlie looked to make sure they were both following him. Up the moving stairs he ran. At the top another constable loomed, grabbing for Charlie with both his arms.
At Charlie’s speed, the copper seemed to be moving in slow motion.
Charlie ducked—
arms groped over his head and missed—
and he grabbed the constable’s ankle and pulled his foot out from under him.
The man hit the ground, and Charlie kept running.
He glanced down over the railing as he loped. Bobbies streamed from all corners. Some of those men, he knew, were in the service of the Iron Cog. They were criminals and traitors. But others must be innocent people, even good ones. They were men who were doing their job, trying to protect both the day’s festival travelers and the queen.
Charlie couldn’t tell the difference. So he tried not to hurt any of them.
Unnoticed by the bobbies, Bob and Ollie were cutting across traffic. They were almost to the spiral staircases. Charlie wondered how long it would take Bob to assemble the flyer and be ready to go. He needed to buy her time.
He ducked down a passage toward the Sky Trestle platforms. “Stop it!” he heard someone holler behind him. “Stop that thing!”
Charlie clattered down onto a platform and stopped. Behind, booted feet thumped. Ahead, at the end of the platform, another staircase descended. Out of it rushed another mob of men in short blue capes.
“Got him!” yelled the copper at the front of the crowd.
To Charlie’s left was the trench through which ran the Sky Trestle tracks. On the other side, across a gap of ten or twelve feet, was another platform. At the far end of the platform a train rumbled into view.
“Get it!”
Charlie waited. Boots pounded the concrete; the train rumbled closer. A gaslight shone bright in the center of its face, over a wide grille that looked like gnashing teeth.
“There’s the lad!”
Charlie waited. Closer.
“Now!”
Policemen jumped for Charlie from in front of him and from behind. At the last possible moment, he turned sideways, took two steps, and threw himself across the trench and over the tracks—
the train whooshed by, inches behind him—
and Charlie tumbled to the ground on the opposite platform. He managed neither to cut himself nor lose his grip on the cutlass. He wasn’t ready to drop the sword just yet; he might still need it.
Charlie’s jump had only gained him a few moments. There were doors on both sides of each car, so when they opened, the policemen would come charging through. He turned and sprinted back up the stairs.
There were other bobbies blocking his ascent, but in ones and twos, not in a crowd. Charlie ducked around some of them, waved his cutlass to keep others at bay, and kept running.
He was very fast. His body hummed with energy. He felt alive.
Charlie pelted out of the stairs and whipped along the balcony in the direction of the lockers. Travelers stared at him, jerking parasols and newspapers out of his way.
“Bob! Ollie!” he yelled, slowing to a lope as he reached the spiral staircases.
“ ’Ere, Charlie!”
He lurched down a short hallway under a sign that read WAITING ROOM. They were in a high-ceilinged chamber full of leather-cushioned benches. In the corner a drinking spigot gurgled over a brass basin. The far wall was made entirely of glass.
Bob was wearing wings.
They looked like bat’s wings, but they weren’t strapped onto her back. She stood in a harness of leather straps beneath them. The wings were made of fabric, stretched over a spindly metal frame. The Pondicherry Articulated Gyroscopes ranged across the tops of both wings, joining in the center. Bob held cords in her fists that attached to the gyroscopes themselves. She grinned to see Charlie, and brought her elbows down. The wings flapped.
In front of Bob dangled a second harness, and Ollie stood next to it.
“Why aren’t you strapped in?” Charlie asked.
“Because, you idiot, the flyer don’t fit three people. Looks like you get to be the pretty lady on the front.”
“Where did it go?” Charlie heard shouting from the balcony.
“ ’Urry up!” Bob hissed.
Charlie stepped into the shadow of the wings, and Ollie snapped buckles around his waist and shoulders and under his legs. “But what about you, Ollie?” he asked.
“There he is!” “What’s that?” “Get them!” “The queen!”
Bamf! Ollie the boy was gone, and Ollie the Snake slithered up Charlie’s leg and coiled around his neck. Charlie threw aside his cutlass.
Feet pounded on the floor behind them.
“Run with me!” Bob shouted. She and Charlie sprinted together toward the windows.
Crash!
Charlie launched into space through a cloud of glass shards.
London lay beneath him. The whole city stretched in all directions, a dense, sunlit warren around the Thames.
There was nothing between him and the ground, at least a hundred feet down.
“Whoooooooaa!” he shouted.
They fell.
Bob tilted
the flyer’s nose downward, and for a second Charlie rushed face-first toward the cobbled street below. Startled travelers coming in and out of Waterloo Station scattered. A cabbie threw his reins aside and jumped out of his hansom. Horses neighed in fright; Charlie barreled straight at them.
“Aaaaaagh!” he yelled.
Ollie the Snake tightened his grip around Charlie’s neck.
“ ’Aaaang oooon!” Bob shouted, and then the flyer’s nose began to come up.
But slowly.
Charlie held the straps of his harness in clenched fists.
A gold-and-green-painted steam-carriage rushed straight toward him. It was idling, its driver sitting on the high seat in front, reading a newspaper. He must be deaf, Charlie thought. Behind the driver rose the steam-carriage’s smokestack, puffing gently in the bright morning.
The flyer hurtled at the steam-carriage.
Bob pulled the nose up a little higher. “ ’Oooold ooon!” she howled again.
Charlie raised his knees up to his chest.
Dong!
Charlie’s left foot just grazed the top of the smokestack. It smarted. The driver dropped his paper and tumbled out of his seat, and then Charlie lost him from view as the flyer pulled up, away from the ground and into the bright blue sky.
“Can’t beat the Royal Magical Society for weather wizards, innit?” Bob yelled as they climbed. She was cheerful, as if they hadn’t just almost died. “I reckon it’s all the practice they get, what with our bad weather an’ all. To ’ear Ollie talk about it, you’d think it was just talent. Like the French an’ the loups-garou, or the Eye-talian illusionists, or the Russian demolitionists.”
Ollie the Snake hissed.
“Demonologists!” Charlie said.
“That’s what I said, ain’t it?” Bob agreed. “Only it ain’t fair to talk about what Ollie thinks when ’e can’t talk back!” She flapped the wings gleefully, and the flyer climbed.
The sky above the station was thick with airships: globe-shaped montgolfiers full of hot air; elongated zeppelins; cylindrical balloons, both vertical and horizontal; craft with propellers, wings, sails; and things Charlie could barely focus on, much less describe, at the speed at which they were rocketing upward.
The airships circled around the mooring towers, except for a lone bulblike montgolfier that floated away from the rest. It tugged at a long anchor rope above Waterloo Bridge, red and gold. One of the men in its basket made a sign with signal flags, probably to direct the flotilla’s traffic. Charlie saw other airships that were blue and brass, and he wondered if they were police vessels.
The flyer looped up and around Waterloo Station. They dove under some Sky Trestle tracks and sailed above others, and Charlie felt like the eyes of the entire world were on him.
“ ’Ere we go!” The London Eye rolled into view. A crowd wound around its base in a long line, but that wasn’t what caught Charlie’s gaze.
Halfway up one side and rising, there were people on one of the carriages.
“There!” Charlie pointed. “That must be my father!”
Bang!
It was far away and almost disappeared in the wind, but Charlie definitely heard a pistol shot.
He looked over his shoulder at the station. The red-and-gold traffic montgolfier now had a shimmering cloud of confetti streaming beneath it. The airships around the mooring tower nearest to the bridge began to unwind their circle and roll slowly out above the river, toward Whitehall and Buckingham Palace.
“The progress flotilla!” Charlie shouted into the wind. It was as glorious as he’d imagined it would be: a parade of airships that would accompany the queen. Bob had planned to launch her public career as an aeronaut by joining the flotilla uninvited, and now she was trying to rescue Charlie’s bap instead.
If the flotilla was starting, the queen’s carriage must be leaving the station.
Time was short.
The flyer zoomed down toward the Eye, homing in on the occupied carriage. Bob must have heard Charlie point out his bap. Charlie squinted, and he could make out four men in the compartment. The Sinister Man stood apart, pointing a pistol at the floor. Two other men held Charlie’s bap.
“Fly close to the windows!” he called to Bob. He pointed, and he started unbuckling himself from the straps.
Ollie tightened his grip around Charlie’s neck.
The flyer zoomed closer. Charlie opened the last buckle and hung by the strength of his arms. Ollie tightened his grip even more. If Charlie were a breathing boy, he’d have choked to death.
The flyer zoomed closer still. It looked to Charlie like Bob was aiming to slide just over the rooftop.
The Sinister Man raised his pistol and pointed it at Charlie’s bap.
“Pondicherry’s of Whitechapel!” Charlie yelled. He jumped.
For a long second he flew through the air.
Crash!
Charlie smashed through the glass of the carriage feetfirst. He bowled into the Sinister Man and knocked him backward, over a wooden bench and to the floor. The Sinister Man’s pistol went off, shattering another window.
The carriage lurched to one side, and Charlie rolled with it. He and the Sinister Man were tangled up in arms and legs.
Ollie uncoiled from around his neck and slithered at the two men holding Charlie’s bap. Charlie grabbed for the Sinister Man’s gun.
Bang!
The Sinister Man’s bullet hit Charlie in the chest and threw him onto the floor.
“That hurt,” he croaked.
Bang! Bang!
The henchmen fired at Ollie. The snake slithered into the corner of the carriage and curled up, still.
The carriage swung wildly. Charlie struggled to sit up, but the Sinister Man rose first. He wrapped one arm around a railing and pointed his long black pistol at Charlie.
“No!” Charlie’s bap shouted, struggling against the henchmen. His face was bruised and his hair was a mess; his eyes were full of sadness, defiance, and fear.
“You are an irritating piece of junk,” the Sinister Man snarled. “Good-bye.”
Bamf!
The smell of rotten eggs filled the carriage, and Ollie stood up in the corner. He was bleeding. He held a wobbling pistol—Charlie didn’t know where it had come from—pointed at the Sinister Man.
The Sinister Man spun.
Bang!
Ollie shot him. The Sinister Man staggered back, bleeding from one arm.
“You ain’t my dad.” Ollie fell to one knee.
Bang!
Ollie’s second shot went wild, and then he collapsed.
The Sinister Man raised his pistol again.
Charlie’s bap broke free, and he rushed across the carriage. He stepped on a bench and launched himself through the air, grabbing for the Sinister Man and his gun.
The Sinister Man shifted his aim.
Bang! Bang!
“No!” Charlie shouted.
Mr. Pondicherry crashed into the Sinister Man, and they fell together.
They rolled across the swinging floor, punching.
“Stop this!” the Sinister Man shouted.
“Leave my son alone!”
They bounced toward a window. Mr. Pondicherry punched the Sinister Man in the throat and in the face, and in return he got the butt of the pistol hammered onto his forehead. Just as he got his thumbs into the Sinister Man’s nostrils and was pushing his head back—
Bang!
One of the Sinister Man’s henchmen got off a shot, and hit.
Mr. Pondicherry fell back, letting go of his enemy. As he slipped, the floor rolled away under him, and he tumbled, bleeding, toward a gaping window.
“No!” Charlie threw himself after his bap, sliding across the floor and grabbing with both hands—and missed.
His bap tumbled through the open window. Charlie got one last look at his father’s face, surprised and frightened, and then he was gone.
The wind sounded like a hurricane in Charlie’s ears.
> He had failed.
“Enough of this!” The Sinister Man staggered across the carriage and fumbled with something near the door.
Charlie stared at the open window. The gulf beyond it was infinite and cold. When the carriage again reached the extremity of its arc, Charlie saw a ragged dot below in a circle of bare pavement surrounded by a crowd.
That was his bap.
Dead.
Pffft!
Charlie heard and smelled the match being struck, and finally he looked away from his father. The Sinister Man held a bundle of cords in one hand, and they were all burning. He threw the cords out the window and spat on the floor.
“Come on!” shouted one of his thugs. They had the carriage door open, and Charlie saw beyond it a blue-and-brass zeppelin.
It looked like one long balloon, like a floating blue whale. The gondola hanging underneath it had a very wide door and was full of policemen.
Three looped lines stretched from the gondola’s open door into the carriage. The two henchmen stepped into the loops and pulled the ropes up under their shoulders before jumping out of the carriage and disappearing.
The Sinister Man stepped into the third loop and pointed his pistol at Charlie.
Click.
“Sacre bleu!” he shouted. Then he jumped out of the swinging carriage and disappeared.
Charlie lay on the floor.
He wanted to weep for his bap, broken on the ground below.
He wanted to weep for Ollie, crumpled in the corner.
He wanted to weep for himself.
But he couldn’t.
Ollie wasn’t dead, and the queen was still in danger, so Charlie forced himself to go on. He crawled across the floor to the carriage railing and gripped it tightly. The next time the carriage rolled so that the window faced downward, cold fear seized him.
The cords the Sinister Man had lit were fuses. There were dozens of them, winding toward clusters of Extradynamit packed around the hub of the leisure wheel. The fuses were all out of Charlie’s reach, and they were sparkling.
The Eye was going to explode.
And then the Iron Cog would move against the queen.
