“So the thief’s a tricky bastard; we knew that already.”

“Get this ridiculous bird up in the air! Get it up, right this moment! My ship is leaving me moment by moment, and I will not lose it, do you hear me? I will not lose my ship!”

The big man turned his attention from the wriggling boy to say, over his shoulder, “Hainey, you’ve already lost your goddamned ship. We tried, all right? We’ll try again in a bit.”

“We’ll try again now,” insisted a thick voice from deeper within the cabin.

But another voice, higher and almost prissy, argued, “We can’t try again now. We’re hobbling, you big jerk.”

“And we’d better get rising!”

“We’re not rising, we’re sinking.”

Over that same shoulder, shaped like a mountain range, the big man said, “Rodimer’s right. We’re hobbling, and we’re sinking. We’ve got to set down, or we’re going to crash.”

“I want my goddamned ship, Cly!”

“Then you shouldn’t have let somebody steal your goddamned ship, Crog. But I might have a hint about where it’s gone off to.” He looked again at Zeke, still held up over the empty, swirling fog that settled like scum at the bottom of the city below. “Don’t I?”

“No,” Zeke said. It almost sounded like he was sulking, but he was just choking and aching from being held up so oddly and breathing through vomit-clogged filters. “I don’t know where they took the ship.”

“What an unfortunate tune you’re singing,” the man said, fluttering his wrist as if he meant to fling Zeke out into the ether.

“Don’t!” he begged. “Don’t! I don’t know where they took it!”

“You were sitting on the crew, weren’t you?”

“No! I was only hitching a ride out of the city! That’s all! Please put me down; put me down inside, I mean. Please! You’re hurting my arm. You’re hurting—you’re hurting me.”

“Well I ain’t trying to give you a massage,” he said, but his tone had changed. He swung Zeke inside as effortlessly as if he were moving a kitten from basket to basket, and all the while he stared at him strangely.

He pointed a finger as long as a bread knife straight between Zeke’s eyes and said, “Don’t you move, if you know what’s good for you.

“Shoot the little bastard if he won’t talk!” demanded the most irate of the voices in the cabin.

“Put a lid on it, Crog. He’ll tell us something in a few minutes. Right now we’ve got to put this bird down before she falls down.” He slung the side door shut on its track and reclaimed a very large seat in front of a very large windshield. He looked back at Zeke to say, “I’m not playing with you, boy. I saw you dropped your knife, but you’d better not be hiding anything else, anyplace. I want to talk to you in a few minutes.”

Zeke crouched on the floor and rubbed at his aching arm and flexed the sore muscles in his neck. He griped, “I don’t know nothing about where they were going with the ship. I only just done got on it, not an hour before. I don’t know nothing.”

“Nothing? Really?” he said, and Zeke assumed from the largest chair—and from the way the others let him do all the speaking—that he must be this ship’s captain. “Fang, watch him, will you?”

From the shadows, a slender man whom Zeke had not yet seen took a gliding step forward. He was Chinese, with a pilot’s gas mask pulled over a ponytail; and he wore the mandarin jacket that was common to his kind. Zeke swallowed hard, partly out of guilt and partly from abject fear.

“Fang?” he squeaked.

The Chinaman did not nod, or blink, or flinch. Even as the ship swayed unhappily downward, drooping through the sky, he did not stumble. It was as if his feet were rooted to the spot, and he was as level and smooth as water in a tilting vase.

Zeke said, to himself since no one else seemed to be listening, “I was only trying to get out of the city. I was only—”

“Everybody hang on,” the captain suggested, more than ordered. It was a good suggestion, because the ship was beginning to spin slowly in a downward spiral.

“Air brakes malfunctioning,” someone said with forced and deliberate calm.

The captain asked, “Any function at all?”

“Yes, but—”

The ship skimmed a building with a sickening screech of metal against brick. Zeke heard the popping shatter of windows breaking all in a row as the hull dragged itself through their frames on the way down.

“Thruster on, then.”

“Right one’s being fussy.”

“Then we’ll screw ourselves into the ground when we land; that’s fine. Just do it.”

Roaring filled Zeke’s ears. He wished for something to hold, but found nothing. He crouched hard against the floor and spread himself out, trying to grasp or lock his feet around anything he found. In the process he inadvertently kicked Fang, who didn’t appear to care and barely moved.

“Going down, folks,” the captain said calmly.

The dark-skinned man in the blue coat—Crog, Zeke gathered—said, “Two in one day! Goddammit!”

The giant replied, “If I’d known you were so lucky I’d have never given you a lift.”

The ground was coming up fast. Every time the ship’s semicontrolled orbit swung to a certain point the earth would appear in the window—and it promised a very hard stop at the bottom.

“Where’s the fort?” the captain demanded. For the first time he sounded flustered, maybe even on the edge of afraid.

“Six o’clock.”

“From which… ? From where… ?”

“Over there.”

“I see it,” he said suddenly, and yanked at a lever above his head. “I hope nobody’s down there.”

The man in the first mate’s chair said, “If anyone’s there, they’ve heard us coming. If they haven’t got out of the way yet, it’s no one’s fault but their own.” He might have been on the verge of adding more, but that’s when the ship began to stop in earnest, lurching almost belly-up until nothing but sky filled the windows in front of the captain and his crew.

Zeke was certain he was going to vomit again and there would be no stopping it, except that he didn’t have time. The earth caught up to the bottom side of the ship. It landed hard and almost bounced, but instead it got stuck in a groove and started to drag a trench that began at one wall and continued for another fifty yards until the whole contraption was tugged to a stop by the turf inside a compound.

When the world stopped rocking and the ship stopped—almost like it’d been parked on its side—Zeke staggered to his feet and clutched his head.

Something warm filled his glove, and he knew without looking that it was blood. He could feel the slit in his skin, jagged and throbbing. He knew it must look terrible, and perhaps it was terrible. Perhaps he’d killed himself by crashing his skull against the wall, or the door, or whatever he’d hit as the ship had perform its warbling descent. Wouldn’t that be a thing for his mother to hear? That her son had died in an airship crash, somewhere inside the walled city, where he had no business being and no excuse for his carelessness.

He tried to feel resigned about it, but he mustered self-pity and searing pain instead. His feet refused to fasten to the floor underneath him. He staggered, one arm smashed against his bleeding head and one hand held out to steady or ballast himself, or maybe search for an exit.

The ship had landed with a serious list to the left, which had crushed the side entryway through which Zeke had entered. The lot of them were effectively trapped.

Or so he thought, until the ship’s bottom hatch fell open a promising crack.

Eighteen

Lucy’s smile faded into a tight line that had a question to ask. “Let me ask you something, if that’s all right.”

Briar said, “By all means.” She worked her sore hand under dusty covers. They smelled clean, but old—as if they were kept in a cupboard and rarely used. “If I get to ask one next.”

“Absolutely.” Lucy waited for a piercing fuss of steam from the pipes to quiet itself, and then she lined up her words with care. “I don’t know if Jeremiah’s said anything to you about it or not, but there’s a certain man down here. We call him Dr. Minnericht, but I don’t rightly know if that’s his given name or not. He’s the man who made me this arm.”

“Mr. Swakhammer might’ve mentioned him.”

She wormed herself more deeply into her own blanket and said, “Good, good. He’s a scientist, this doctor. An inventor who turned up down here not long after the wall went up. We don’t know where he came from, exactly, and we don’t know what’s wrong with him. He always wears a mask, even in the clean air here underneath, so we don’t know what he looks like. Anyway, he’s real smart. He’s real good with mechanical things like this.” She jiggled her shoulder again.

“And the tracks, and the Daisy.”

“Yes, those things too. He’s quite a fellow. He can make something out of nothing, like nobody I ever heard of before.” She added one more word, a word that strongly pointed at a question Briar had no intention of answering. “Almost.”

Briar turned over on her side and leaned on her elbow. “Where are you going with this, Lucy?”

“Oh come on, now. You’re not dumb. Don’t you wonder?”

“No.”

“Not even a little bit? It’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it? There’s a lot of talk down here that it might be—”

Briar said flatly, “It’s not. I can promise you that.”

And Lucy’s eyes lowered, not with fatigue but with cunning that gave Briar a pang of paranoia. The barkeep said, “That’s a big promise, coming from a woman who’s never even seen our terrible old doctor.”