Boneshaker

Briar retreated to her own bed and unfastened her waist cinch. Her ribs burned without it, suddenly struck by its absence and almost missing the constriction of it. She rubbed at her stomach and said, “That’s a grim way to look at it. How long you think it’ll take before it comes to that?”

“I don’t know. Another hundred years. Another thousand years. There’s no telling. But down here, we’re figuring out how to live with it. It isn’t perfect, but we do all right, don’t we? And one day maybe the rest of the world will need to know how we do it. Even if I’m thinking about it too big — even if it doesn’t come to that — I can promise you this: One day before long the Outskirts are going to be swimming in this mess too. And all those folks outside these walls are going to need to know how to survive.”

Seventeen

The Clementine swooped away from the tower with all the grace of a chick learning to fly, and Zeke’s lurching stomach sent a mouthful of vomit up into his cheeks. He swallowed it back down with an eye-watering gulp and clung to the strap that did nothing except give him something from which to dangle.

He stared at the strap, trying to concentrate on anything but the acid against his teeth and the whirlpool in his belly. It was a belt, he thought. Someone had buckled it and slung it over a brace beam to make a holding spot. The buckle was brass with a lead backing, and on the plate’s front it said CSA.

As the ship dipped, bobbed, and fired off at top speed to a place above the Blight-fogged streets, Zeke thought of Rudy and wondered if he’d deserted from the Union army or not. He thought of a war back east and wondered what a Confederate belt was doing serving as a holding strap in a… and again, the word manifested in his brain… in a warship.

And that gave him something else to consider, apart from the lava-hot taste in his mouth.

Above the console he saw storage panels with hooks that looked like they could hold weapons, and a square drawer that said MUNITIONS on it. Toward the back of the ship, there was a large door with a spi

“Oh God,” he whispered to himself. “Oh God.” He curled himself up as tightly as he could, into the smallest ball of Zeke he could fashion, lodged there in the curve of the ship’s wall.

“Incoming, starboard!” shouted Mr. Guise.

“Evasive maneuvers!” Parks either ordered or declared, though the captain was already on top of it.

Brink tugged violently on an overhead apparatus and a set of levers popped down from the ceiling. He tore at one trapezelike apparatus and the airship’s gas tanks hummed so loudly they nearly shrieked.

“We’re ru

Captain Brink said, “Doesn’t matter!”

Out of the front windows that wrapped halfway around the oval interior, Zeke saw the horrifying specter of another ship — a smaller ship, but still plenty big — barreling down headlong against the Clementine.

“They’ll pull up,” Mr. Guise murmured. “They’ll have to pull up.” Parks yelled, “They aren’t pulling up!”

“We’re out of time!” the captain shouted.

“What about evasive maneuvers? ” Parks asked with a note of mockery.

“I can’t get the goddamned thrusters to—” The captain quit explaining himself and slammed his elbow on a switch as big as his fists.

The Clementine bolted upright like a nervous deer, pitching its contents and crew backward, and sideways, and up; but the impact wasn’t altogether averted. The second ship clipped it soundly, and there was a terrible squeal of metal and ripping fabric as the great machines grazed one another in midair. Zeke thought his teeth were going to vibrate out of his gums, but they miraculously stayed in place. And in a few seconds, the ship righted and seemed on the verge of escape.

“We’re up!” declared the captain. “Up — do you see them? Where’d they go?”

All eyes were plastered on the windshield, scrying every corner for a sign of their attackers. Parks said, “I don’t see them.”

Mr. Guise griped, “Well, we couldn’t have just lost them.”

Parks breathed in slow, steady gulps and said, “It’s a smaller ship they’re chasing us with. Maybe they shouldn’t have hit us. Maybe their boat couldn’t take the damage.”

Zeke’s ice-white knuckles refused to unlock from the belt, but he craned his head to see out the window, and he held his own breath because no amount of calming talk could keep it steady. He’d never been much of a praying kid, and his mother hadn’t been much of a churchgoing woman, but he prayed hard that wherever that other ship had gone, it wasn’t coming back.

But the sound of Parks saying, “No, no, no, no, no !” did not reassure him.

“Where?”

“Down!”

“Where? I don’t see them!” the captain argued.

And then another righteous crash rocked the ship and sent it teetering through the air. Zeke’s belt broke and his body dropped to the floor, then rolled to the wall and back down to the middle of the deck again. He scrambled and struggled to crawl forward. Given the inertia of the ship’s sway, the first thing he could snag was the vault-style wheel on the cargo hold door. He tangled himself in it as deeply as he could.

Somewhere below, a plate of steel was stretching and splitting, and rivets were flying loose as hard and fast as bullets. Somewhere to the side, a thruster was spitting and hissing, making sounds that no working thruster ought to.

Somewhere in front of them, the Blight was smudging the landscape — and it took Zeke a moment to realize that he could see the Blight directly in front of him because the ship was fully facing down, soaring toward a collision with whatever was underneath the pea-soup air. “We’re going to crash!” he shrieked, but no one heard him.

The swelling back-and-forth of the crew’s conversation occupied them all, and not even the boy’s screams could distract them. “Left thruster!”

“Disabled, or stuck, or… I don’t know! I can’t find the stabilizer pad!”

“This idiot bird might not have one. Right thrust, air brakes. Jesus Christ, if we don’t pull up soon, we’re never pulling up at all.”

“They’re coming back for another round!”

“Are they crazy? They’ll kill us all if they drive us to ground!”

“I’m not sure they care—”

“Try that pedal — no, that other one! Kick it, and hold it back—”

“It’s not working!”

“We’re coming up on—”

“Not fast enough!”

Zeke closed his eyes and he felt them stretching, pushing back in his eye sockets from the pressure of their descent. “I’m going to die here, or I’m going to die down there, on the ground, in an airship. This isn’t what I meant…” he said to himself, for no one else was listening. “This isn’t what I meant to do. Oh, God.”

The airship’s underside dragged itself along a new surface, one that was rougher and made with bricks, not metal; and the dusty, pebbled sound of stones crushed along the ship and rattled to the ground. “What’d we hit?” Parks asked.

“Wall!”

“City wall?”

“Can’t tell!”

The ship was spi

Then the ship stopped with a pitiless shrug, like the yank of a dog’s leash.

Zeke fell off the wheel lock and went facedown onto the floor.