Boneshaker

“There’s a tree in the yard — a big old oak. It’s dead now, I’m sure, but it should hold you steady for a few minutes.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said. He looked her up and down, and looked Zeke over as well before saying, “We can take off as soon as you like.”

“Whenever you’re ready, Captain,” Zeke said. He leaned back and put an arm around his mother, which startled and charmed her.

It pleased Briar even as it made her feel a little sad. She’d always known he’d grow up someday, but she hadn’t quite expected it so soon, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it now.

She was hopelessly tired, and her eyes ached in her skull from the days of too little sleep and too much worry, not to mention the odd blow to the head. She leaned into the boy, and if she hadn’t been wearing her father’s old hat, she might’ve put her head on his shoulder.

Cly checked over his shoulder, and seeing that the workmen had finished with the last of the tools, he asked Fang, “Did we get Rodimer back on board?”

Fang nodded.

“Oh, yes, Rodimer,” Briar said. “I remember him. I’m a little surprised he’s not been out here chatting.”

Without any ceremony, Cly said, “He’s dead. When we crashed down, he broke something — inside, you know what I mean. He was all right for a bit, and then he wasn’t. And now, I don’t know. Now I guess we’ll take him home. Let his sister decide what to do with him.”

“I’m so sorry,” Briar said. “I rather liked him.”

“So did I,” he admitted. “But there’s nothing to be done about it now. Come on, let’s get out of this place. I’m sick of this mask. I’m sick of this air. I want to get out, and get moving. Come on,” Cly said. “It’s time to go home.”

And in less than half an hour, the Naamah Darling was airborne.

It lifted with caution as the captain tested its thrusters, its tanks, and its steering. It rose up lightly for such an enormous craft, and soon it was high above the fort.

Croggon Hainey took Rodimer’s seat and grumpily performed the services of a first mate. Fang strapped himself in and performed his navigational duties in silence, by hand signs and head movements. Briar and Zeke hunkered together by the farthest edge of the slightly cracked windshield corner and looked out over the city.

Cly said, “We’re going to stay within the Blight for now. If we go up any higher, we’ll meet crosswinds, and I want to baby this bird until I’m sure she’s working right. Look down and to the left. You see the station?”

“I see it,” Briar said.

She saw the crosswalks that interlaced like helpful, fingers, giving pedestrians a way in, out, and around the quarter where the half-built station stood against the mudflats at the edge of Seattle’s great wall. The fires below showed her plenty, and the men who tended them looked like mice.

The Naamah Darling drifted past the station’s clock tower a little too close for comfort. The blank face of a clock as big as a bedroom stared dully back at them, no mechanisms to make it keep the time and no hands to display it. It was a ghost of something that had never happened.

Over the streets the airship flew, and the rotters were filling the roads beneath it. They moved in pockets and clusters, bumping mindlessly from wall to wall like marbles spilled from a bucket. Briar felt a great swell of pity for them, and she wished with all her heart that maybe someday someone would put them all down — every one of them. They had been people once, and they deserved better. Didn’t they?

As the craft drifted higher, along the slope of the city’s sharpest hill, Briar thought of Mi

And she looked at her son beside her. He stared out the same window, and down at the same shipwreck of a city. He smiled at it, not because it was beautiful, but because he’d beaten it after all — and now he would get the only reward he’d ever wanted. Briar watched him smile. She peeked at him, trying not to catch his attention by staring. She wanted him to smile, and she wondered how long that smile would survive.

“Miss Wilkes, I’m going to need some directions,” Captain Cly a

“That way,” she pointed. “Along De

It rose up out of the bleak, smeared stretch of low-lying gas like a tiny castle — gray and sharp edged, and clinging to the side of the very steep hill like a barnacle on a boat. She could just see its flat tower and widow’s walk, and the gingerbread frosting that banded the gutters. What colors remained from the lovely old house were just light enough to show it in the darkness.

The exterior had once been painted a pale gray shade of lavender, because it was her favorite color. She’d even confessed, to Levi and no one else, that she’d always liked the name “Heather” and she wished her parents had thought of it. But Levi had said her home could be the color of heather; and maybe, should they ever have a daughter, Briar could name her whatever she wanted.

The conversation haunted her. It was sharp and hard, as if the memory had frozen and stuck in her throat.

She looked again at Zeke, from the corner of her eye. She hadn’t known about him at the time. So much had happened before he’d ever been thought of — and by the time she’d figured out why she felt so ill, and why she was hungry for such strange things… she was in the Outskirts, having buried her father for the second time. She was living on the silverware she’d taken from Levi’s house, selling it a piece at a time to survive while the walls went up around the city she’d called home.

“What?” Zeke caught her looking. “What is it?”

She made a nervous laugh so small that it might’ve been mistaken for a sob. “I was just thinking. If you’d been a girl, we were going to call you Heather.” Then she said to Cly, “There’s the tree. Do you see it?”

“I see it,” he said. “Fang, get one of the rope hooks, will you?” Fang disappeared into the cargo hold.

Beneath it, a panel retreated and a weighted grappling rope was pitched into the top of the long-dead tree. Briar could see it from the window, how just below her the branches snapped and fractured; but when the rope was yanked and wiggled it stayed. The Naamah Darling drifted, and caught, and hovered.

Beside the tree, a rope ladder unrolled and dropped to within a few feet of the ground.

Fang returned to the ship’s bridge.

Cly said, “That won’t hold us too terribly long, but for a few minutes it’ll be all right.”

Captain Hainey, now reluctantly serving as first mate, asked, “Do you need any help?”

Briar understood what he really wanted, and she said, “Could you let us have just a few minutes alone? Then come on inside, and I’ll help you find the gold that’s left. You too, Captain Cly. I owe you plenty, and anything you find is yours to carry home.”

“How many minutes?” Hainey asked.

Briar said, “Maybe ten? I want to find a few personal items, that’s all.”

“Take fifteen,” Cly told her. “I’ll restrain him if I have to,” he added.

Hainey said, “I’d like to see you try it.”

And Cly replied, “I know you would. But for now, let’s give the lady the time she’s asking for, all right? Go on now, before the rotters get wise that all the action isn’t down there at the station and make for the hills again.”

Zeke didn’t need to hear it twice. He dashed for the hold, and the rope ladder, and before Briar could catch up Cly was out of his seat. He caught her gently by the arm and said, “Are your filters all right?”

“They’re fine, yes.”

“Is there something…? Is there anything…?” Whatever he wanted to ask, Briar didn’t have time for it and she told him so. “Let me go after him, will you?”