Airborn (14 page)

It was a tinted picture of the little red snake that had sent us running through the forest.

“Perfectly harmless,” she said, smiling, as she read the description. “Apparently it jumps like that to frighten off predators. It’s not at all poisonous.”

“Cheeky devil,” I said, pouring some water from the decanter into Kate’s glass.

“I’m very grateful to the little fellow. If it weren’t for him, we might not have found the skeleton.”

“Maybe you’d like one as a pet?”

“Well, at least we know it’s not poisonous. So when we go back, no worries.”

Going back I looked over to the captain, seated at the head table with his officers and a number of passengers.

“Would you like the fish or the suckling pig tonight, Miss de Vries?” I asked with professional courtesy as Baz swirled close by with three plates balanced in his hands.

“The fish, of course. I could smell it baking for the last hour.”

“Very good, miss.”

“We’ll talk later,” she said, eyes twinkling as I moved away.

We didn’t get the chance to talk again until much later. Dinner had been served and eagerly devoured. The dessert trolleys had made their rounds; the men had retreated to the smoking room, the women left behind in the starboard lounge to await their partners’ smoggy return. People headed off to bed earlier than usual, no doubt exhausted by watching the crew work all day. I tended bar. Kate stayed behind, reading. One by one, the passengers left, until it was just Kate sitting there. I started wiping down tables. I wasn’t sure I was ready for Kate just now.

“Aren’t you going to do this one?” she asked when I’d cleaned every table but hers. “You’re not avoiding me, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“When do you get off duty?”

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea, going back.”

“Of course it’s a good idea. We need to take pictures and gather up the bones.”

“The captain asked you to stay near the ship.”

“Yes, but I’m under no obligation to obey him. I gave no promise.”

“Well, he had a word with me afterward.”

“Did he forbid you from leaving the ship?”

“Not exactly.” I recited our brief conversation to her.

“Well, I don’t see what the problem is,” she said. “You wouldn’t be disobeying a direct order. He just wants you to be safe. He doesn’t want you to be late again. You won’t be.”

She was just shaping things the way she wanted, I knew that.

I said nothing. Her voice was low and urgent when she next spoke.

“Matt, you promised.”

“I know.”

“This is something the world has never seen. We can’t just leave it here. We’ve discovered something amazing, you and I!”

I liked the “you and I” part. I felt tugged in all different directions.

“I want to help you,” I said miserably. “I want to get the bones, I do. But the captain wants me with
the ship.” It wasn’t just disobeying orders; I couldn’t help feeling that if I left the
Aurora
, some disaster would befall the ship. It would be tempting fate. “Don’t ask me to choose, please. It’s not fair. You or the captain. You or the ship.”

“It doesn’t seem a very difficult choice to me,” Kate said, her nostrils narrowing. “Anyway, I don’t see what the ship’s got to do with this.”

“It’s my home.”

“It’s not your home,” she said impatiently. “It’s where you work, that’s all.”

I looked at her, not trusting myself to speak. She didn’t understand anything.

“Fine,” she said. “I don’t want to force you. I can ask Mr. Lunardi.”

“Mr. Lunardi!”

“Yes, I’m sure he’d be delighted to accompany me.”

“You don’t mind sharing your little secret, then?” Our secret. My heart was beating slow and hard and angry.

“I’m sure he can keep a secret. He seems a perfect gentleman.”

“A much better bet than a cabin boy, you’re quite right. I’m sure you’ll be much more comfortable with Mr. Lunardi. Good night, miss.”

I turned and walked away, trembling inside with rage. I’d been useful to her, that was all. That was the only reason she had been friendly to me.

“Matt,” she said, when I was near the door. I stopped. “I’m not going to ask Mr. Lunardi. You know I wouldn’t do that. You’re the only one I trust.”

I gave a hollow laugh, unconvinced. “And what if I say no?”

“I suppose I’ll just have to go by myself.”

She would too. I almost smiled, half in vexation, half in admiration of her pigheaded willfulness. She’d go and get lost, and then I’d feel it was somehow my fault. There’d be a big search party, and that would waste even more of the ship’s time. And she might get hurt. I sighed. If I went with her, it would only take a few hours.

“I’m not on duty again till noon,” I said, without turning to face her. “We can leave at first light. We’ll have to be quick, though.”

“Thank you,” she said, walking over. “Thank you so much, Matt. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. I didn’t mean to imply that Mr. Lunardi was—”

“—any better than me? Well he is, isn’t he? Let’s not pretend. He’s wealthy, he’s older, he’s handsome, he’s a junior officer…”

“Is he?”

“Of course he is,” I fairly shouted. “Assistant sailmaker. Didn’t you notice the insignia on his collar?”

“I didn’t, no.”

“The golden wheels? Blazing like little suns?”

She shook her head. “All those insignia look the same to me. Everyone seems to have them.”

“Not me,” I said hotly.

“And I don’t find him handsome, by the way.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t,” she said firmly. “His type of looks are not at all to my liking. You know, the only problem with first thing in the morning is the light might not be at its best in the forest.”

“Take it or leave it,” I said. “There might not be another chance before we take off.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ve got a flash anyway.”

“What about Miss Simpkins?” I asked.

“Oh, she’ll be bedridden.” Kate said it without a trace of sympathy. “I know all about her headaches. Half the time they’re just to get off work.”

“Well, her work is particularly horrible,” I said.

She looked put out for a moment before she realized I was joking.

“Marjorie won’t even know I’ve left the ship,” she said. “I’ll leave her a note telling her I’ll be at
breakfast and then reading in the lounge so I won’t disturb her rest. So that’s all taken care of.”

It was a bad decision I was making, I knew that. But I couldn’t have her cavorting alone in the forest. Besides, I did want to see the bones again, and I wanted her to have them. It made me feel good to help her.

“About six-thirty, then,” I said. “Meet me at the base of the grand staircase.”

I was exhausted, and I should have fallen asleep the moment my cheek touched the pillow. But I could not. I tried to lull myself to sleep with images of flight. I imagined the
Aurora
lifting off into a cloudless sky, imagined myself at her controls, flying her. But every time I almost dozed off, some part of my mind would start to panic and jerk me away from sleep, and my heart would race. It was just like being back in the cramped, low-ceilinged apartment in Lionsgate City.

I hated it, feeling this way about my beloved cabin. It was small, but that didn’t matter: when the
Aurora
was aloft the cabin was as big as the sky, and in a single night gave me a sleep as wide as continents and deep as oceans.

Now it was a cell.

It was four in the morning before my body could finally endure no more, and despite the turbulence in my brain, I slept—

—and dreamed I was running along the beach. The skeleton was bounding after me, its bony wings flared, its legs stretching long as it soared weightlessly over the sand. Its jaws gaped.

I was so slow, so weak. I could barely lift my feet from the sand to take a stride. Why couldn’t I go faster? It would be upon me in a moment. What was wrong with me? I should have been able to fly free, but I could not leave the earth.

I tore at the vines hanging down around the branch, trying to let more light in. I felt strange doing it and kept glancing over at the skeleton, half expecting it to shift, angry at having its long, sheltered slumber disturbed. It seemed smaller somehow, once the view around it opened up and the morning sun bathed its dry bones. It looked dejected, no longer so ready to pounce, slumped and crumpled along the broad branch.

“That’s brilliant, much better,” said Kate from the ground. I moved back against the trunk, and she took a photograph from down there. She said it was important to give a sense of exactly where the specimen was found. She was using a smaller camera than the one I’d seen in her stateroom. This one was a compact box with a large mirrored bowl lamp mounted on the front. When she took the picture it gave a mighty flash, stunning the bugs of the forest
into a momentary silence.

The camera and flash had fit snugly inside a leather case with a molded interior. Kate had carried it slung over her shoulder as we’d worked our way up through the forest in the early morning light. I’d offered to carry it for a while, for it did look cumbersome, but she kept saying she was fine, that it was her gear and she would manage it, which quite impressed me. She did let me take the carpetbag, though. She’d insisted on bringing it, to carry back the bones. I felt absurd hiking through the ferns and foliage hefting a carpetbag with a rose pattern on the outside. “I’ve left quite a lot of clothing in there,” she’d told me, “for padding. Bones are fragile things.” She didn’t want them getting scraped or cracked. It had taken us more than an hour to reach the tree.

“Can you stand close to it?” she called up to me now. “Without touching it, of course.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Scale.”

I still felt uncomfortable being near the skeleton, but I reluctantly crouched beside it and stared at the camera’s big dark eye. Flash!

“Terrific,” she said. “I’m coming up.”

She passed the camera up to me first, and then I
helped pull her to the first branch. She wore a white cotton tennis dress, and the skirt was daringly short, just below the knees, but it wasn’t always getting underfoot, and she could get around the tree much more easily. On her feet she wore flat-soled sandals with good grips. Her legs were bare—earlier, when I’d first noticed, my cheeks flushed. It was most unconventional, even in the tropical heat, for a young lady to go bare legged. I was trying to keep my eyes off them. They were very pale and bruised purple in places from all our running and tree climbing the day before.

Before she started taking pictures, she first measured the skeleton with a cloth measuring tape. She took the length and width and height and a bunch of other measurements that seemed quite unnecessary to me, and wrote them all down. She was using her grandfather’s journal, continuing the work he’d started last year. I liked watching her hands as she wrote, the way her fingers held the pencil. She had lovely long fingers, but they looked strong too. Probably got lots of exercise turning the pages of books.

Then it was on to the photographs. Kate wanted close-ups from every possible angle, so she’d have no trouble reassembling the bones once she got them
home. It was quite a job, maneuvering around the skeleton. She clambered about on all the nearby branches to get the views that pleased her best, and I followed after her anxiously, holding the camera until she was ready, and grabbing hold of her whenever she was about to teeter off the tree altogether.

“How do we know they don’t live on land?” It had been bothering me all morning. If there was one here, there could be others, alive this time, teeth and all.

“My grandfather said they never landed. Anyway, he saw them head south, remember? They just feed around here. They are not land animals, Matt. Take a look at the legs and arms. They can’t walk. They don’t want to be on land.”

“Right.” I wanted to be reassured. “So this one must’ve just died in flight.”

I looked up through the tree. I supposed it was possible. Directly overhead I could see a patch of clear sky. He died in the air, spiraled earthward like a dry leaf, just happened to thunk down all neat and tidy on this branch. A bit far-fetched maybe but…No. Impossible. His claws were locked into the bark. He’d been alive when he landed. I tried to imagine it. He was too weak or ill to keep flying, and had started to drop, leaving behind his home, his sky, every foot
lower a foot he would never regain. By chance the island was below him and into the trees he went, clutching at things with weak claws until he crumpled against this big old branch. He dug in, hunching down as death took him. No bird dared come near the body: they’d never seen such a thing. Only the bugs, after a time, went to work on the carcass.

Kate fired off another blinding photo.

“Surely you have enough now,” I said, conscious of the time and wondering how long it would take to label and wrench apart all the bones.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I have enough.”

She hung her camera carefully by its strap from an overhanging branch. Then we brought up her carpetbag. The branch was broad enough for us to crouch side by side, with the carpetbag behind us. Kate produced a special wax pencil, which she said she never traveled without.

“I suppose you never know when you might stumble on some ancient relic or skull and need to label it right away,” I said.

“Quite,” she replied. “Really, it would have been more useful to label the bones first, then take the pictures, then take the skeleton apart,” she said. “Never mind. Gosh, there really are a lot of bones, aren’t there?”

“Lots of bones,” I agreed.

“I’ve never done anything like this before, you know,” she told me gravely.

“Really?” I said. “You amaze me.”

“Oh, be quiet,” she said, smiling a little. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll label the bones, and then you start taking them apart and packing them into the bag.”

“It’s what I’ve trained to do all my life,” I said. “It’s my heart’s desire.”

“No need to be sarcastic, Mr. Cruse.”

She started with the skull, which was closest after all, and worked her way down the vertebrae. I took a deep breath and grasped the skull on either side. I joggled it gently.

“You’re being careful, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“These are delicate things.”

“Would you rather do it?”

“No, no, I trust you. Just be gentle.”

With a snap the skull came free from the spine, and I was suddenly holding it in my hands. It was incredibly light. The lower jaw dropped off its hinges, and I nearly lost it altogether.

“That was close,” said Kate.

“Stop watching me,” I told her. “I’m absolutely fine.”

A few teeth fell out, and I caught them in my hand at the last moment. I gingerly lifted it all over to the bag and put it inside.

On we worked, Kate labeling, me dismantling. I was wrapping bones up in handkerchiefs and knickers and stockings and bits of ladies’ clothing I’d never seen before and certainly never handled. And then I realized they were Kate’s things, and my cheeks started to burn and I felt most improper. I got back to work on the vertebrae, fiddly little things, but they popped out fairly easily.

Kate looked over and gave a snort, and at first I thought I was doing something wrong.

“I wish we had some proper packing materials,” she said.

“I’m surprised you didn’t think to bring some.”

She smiled. “We’ll just have to do the best we can. Given the circumstances, I think we’re managing rather well.”

“Those wing bones aren’t going to make it,” I said, nodding at the whippy bones at the end of the creature’s arms.

She grimaced. “I know. They’re bound to break. Just do the best you can wrapping them up.”

We worked on in silence. I still didn’t like being in the forest much, still felt it pressing in on me. The
air was thickening as the sun climbed. Every one of the creature’s bones passed through my hands, and I marveled at their lightness; it was as if they were filled with hydrium and only wanted to be released from my grip to fly. Lighter than air. I smiled to myself.

“Amazing creature,” Kate kept muttering as she worked her way down the skeleton with her wax crayon. “Amazing. I was reading about pterosaurs—do you know what they are?”

“No.”

“Winged lizards. Or at least that’s what is thought. Lizards that died out eighty million years ago. But not everyone agrees. Maybe they weren’t reptiles at all. Perhaps they were mammals, or they developed into mammals…”

I knew nothing of the matter, so said nothing. It made me feel rather downcast, all this knowledge locked away in books that I didn’t know and likely never would. I loved books, but they were expensive and heavy and reading them took time I rarely had. It seemed Kate had read practically everything.

“Imagine how many animals used to exist,” she was saying. “All the ones that are extinct now. Not just the dinosaurs, but all the other animals that
must have once flown and crawled and walked and hopped across the earth. Maybe this is one that’s managed to live on in secret. Don’t you love the idea of it?”

“I love how it never has to land,” I said.

“You would,” she said with a laugh, then looked at me quite seriously. “Born in the air, just like you. I’d never thought of that.”

I hadn’t either.

“You two have a lot in common.”

“I’m not quite as bony,” I said.

Kate contentedly went back to her labeling. I went back to packing bones in her undergarments.

“When I write my scholarly articles,” Kate was saying now, “I’ll mention that you and I discovered the bones together, and that you were instrumental in their preservation.”

“Thank you, that’s very kind of you.”

“Fair’s fair,” she said, “and if you ever decide to go to university, it’ll stand you in good stead.”

“I’ve never had any desire to go to university.”

“No? Well, what do you wish for, then?”

“I want to fly airships.”

“I suppose you’re already well on your way.”

“Not really,” I said, and I told her. I probably shouldn’t have, but I told her how I’d been expecting
to be made assistant sailmaker at the end of the voyage, and how Bruce Lunardi had taken my position because of his rotten father. So I was still stuck as cabin boy.

“That’s really terribly unfair!” she said indignantly. “I like that Lunardi fellow even less now.”

I couldn’t help smiling. I couldn’t have asked for a more satisfying reaction.

“I shall write a letter!” Kate said, still fuming.

“No, please don’t,” I said.

“I hate it when things are unfair,” she muttered. “You must go to this Air Academy too, when you’re older.”

“It’s not quite as easy as that,” I said.

“Why isn’t it?”

“It costs money, and I haven’t much of that. None, in fact.”

“Surely there are scholarships for promising students.”

I nodded, saying nothing.

“You must get a scholarship,” said Kate, solving all my problems for me. “And after your training you can proceed to sailmaker, and then on to officer and then captain. It would be such a terrible shame if someone of your obvious ability didn’t succeed.”

I didn’t feel like talking about it anymore. Even
if I won a scholarship, the Academy training was at least two years—two years during which I would be making no money to send back to my mother and sisters. They relied on me. Even if the Academy offered me a place, I’d not be able to take it. But somehow I couldn’t tell Kate this. I felt ashamed. Around her and all her wealth, the very idea of being poor seemed ridiculous. Impossible. She meant well, but I doubted she had any notion of what the world was like outside her moneyed bubble.

I looked up at the sky, noted the sun’s angle, and sighed.

“We would’ve been approaching Sydney Harbor by now,” I said.

She turned to me. “What happens when we don’t arrive?”

It seemed to be the first time she’d given it any thought. I’d been dreading it, forcing it from my mind. Up till now, my mother and Isabel and Sylvia hadn’t known anything was wrong. They hadn’t worried. That would all change—if not today, then soon. I wondered if my mother could bear it, after what happened to my father.

“We’ll be reported missing. Everyone will assume we’ve crashed into the ocean and drowned.”

“Gosh,” she said.

“Your parents will be worried sick.”

She went back to the skeleton. “Well, they’ll put on a good show anyway.”

I stared at the back of her head, not quite sure I understood.

“They’ll call all the important people they know,” Kate went on, “and demand updates and answers, and an extensive search.”

“Well, that’s something,” I said.

“Mmmmm.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” I asked. “Or did you eat them all?”

“I think one child was all my parents could endure.”

“Well, you are quite willful,” I said.

Her head whirled round, and she fixed me with those eyes of hers. Then her face softened. “Yes, I suppose I am. I rather like the sound of it, though. Doesn’t it sound intriguing and exciting? The willful Kate de Vries!”

“I’m starting to feel rather sorry for your parents,” I said.

“You needn’t,” she said. “They don’t have to deal with my willfulness much. There’s Miss Simpkins, and before her there were all sorts of nannies. None of them stayed on very long, now that I think of it.
My mother is wildly busy fluttering about in high society, and my father manages things.”

“What exactly does he manage?”

“Other people’s money mostly. It seems to take a great deal of his time and energy.”

“Ah.”

“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with them,” she said. “They’re perfectly normal, I suppose. Crushingly normal. They wouldn’t let me go with Grandpa on his balloon trip.”

“Was your grandfather actually willing to take you?” I asked.

“Well, no, he wasn’t. But even if he was, my parents wouldn’t have allowed it. They certainly don’t want me to study at university. All they want me to do is dress and behave appropriately and not embarrass them. My interests seem to embarrass them. And my talking. I’m always being told I’m saying the wrong thing, or at the wrong time, or too boldly. ‘Kate, you are too bold,’ my mother always says. She hates being embarrassed. She’d rather have the Black Death than be embarrassed. Though I suppose having the Black Death would be rather embarrassing in high society. The coughing and drooling and so on.”