Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (10 page)

No
.

I dug my fingers into my temples, determined to stop the clawing and whispering of the iron poisoning that tried to seduce me into the frantic, illogical thoughts of end-stage madness.

“Is there another way off?” I demanded of Dean. He nodded.

“There’s emergency craft for the crew and the security force. The last ones off the boat.”

“Good,” I said, already moving. “Let’s get there before somebody else has the same great idea.”

“I don’t know if they’re anything you want to try to escape a hail of gunfire in,” Dean said. “Took one out once when I was a kid and damn near pasted myself against a mountain.”

I kept moving. “We don’t have a choice.” We could either
risk dying while getting off the ship or be condemned to something worse when Draven caught us. In my mind, the course was obvious, no matter how slim the chance we’d all survive in one piece might be.

“Agreed,” Conrad said. “We have to run. However we can. If we stay here we’re dead for sure.”

“Okay.” Dean nodded. “Better than no damn plan at all. Come with me.”

Cal grabbed Bethina’s hand, and Conrad brought up the rear. I followed Dean, and we made our way back toward the top of Windhaven so we could fall toward the ground, and freedom.

Through the Mist Gate

B
EFORE LONG, WE
ran into clots of Erlkin in the corridors, and Dean cursed. “We can’t get down to the bay.”

“Where is it?” I said. Dean pointed his finger at the floor.

“Below the pilothouse,” he said. “They can reach it by evacuation tube.”

I bit my lip. The idea that sprang to mind just then was insane, but it was less of a danger than passively waiting for Draven to catch us again.

“Come with me,” I said, hoping the others wouldn’t ask too many questions, because I didn’t have a lot of answers. That was the problem with on-the-fly plans—sometimes you fell. I turned and started toward the room where Shard had kept me, hoping now wouldn’t be one of those times.

Dean shook his head as I crossed the room and opened the porthole. “Oh, no, Aoife,” he said, realizing what I had in mind.

“We’re not moving,” I said. “We can make it.”

“Yeah, and the next time we take a direct hit we’re going to get shaken off like so many pieces of dust,” Cal said, gesturing at the porthole and the ledge beyond. “This is crazy, Aoife.”

“You of all people have something real to lose when Draven boards us,” I told him, giving him a cutting look. Bethina glanced between us.

“What’s she mean?”

“Nothing,” Cal snarled. “Nothing.”

Above us, I heard the whirr of powerful turbines and a knocking against the hull.

“Boarding ladders,” Dean said. “The Proctors are coming onto Windhaven. We don’t have any more time.”

I levered my leg out the porthole. “I’m going.”

“Me too,” Bethina said, squaring her shoulders. “It couldn’t be any worse than here.”

Clinging to the metal skin of a vessel floating in midair was not my idea of a pleasant experience. I reached out and grabbed the nearest rudder, and for a breathless moment before my foot found the ledge, I swung free.

Dean followed, then Cal. He helped Bethina, and Conrad came last. I allowed myself a small moment of relief that everyone had gone along with me with minimal arguing. We might have a chance after all.

“I changed my mind!” Bethina shrieked above the wind howling around us. “I want to go back!”

“No!” Cal shouted. “No going back now! I’m right behind you.”

I crawled down the side of Windhaven, gripping the rudders and the rungs of a maintenance ladder, feeling
the shudders of Draven’s boarding under my hands. But as the bottom hull curved, holding on became harder, gravity pulling my weight away from the hand- and footholds.

“You okay?” Dean grunted as we climbed.

“No,” I gritted out. I couldn’t see him where he hung above me, just heard his ragged breathing. “Okay is not what I am at the moment.”

“Hang on, princess,” he said. “This is nothing. This is a walk in the park.”

“You have a very strange idea of a park,” I panted. Two plump blue balloons were tethered at the bottom of Windhaven’s hull. I reached the first and risked taking one hand off the hull to open the basket door. My hands and arms were on fire, and I could feel tremors starting in my shoulder and working down to my fingers.

“Go on,” Dean said. “Start untethering this thing and I’ll help the others.”

To get into the basket, I had to turn myself around and crawl in upside down and practically headfirst. Spinning with vertigo, I let go and dropped onto the wire mesh. I pulled myself to my feet and went to the balloon’s tether, a flexible metal arm that was attached to the evacuation tube above us.

Dean landed on the mesh next to me, then stood and pulled Cal into the basket after him. He reached out for Bethina, who shook her head, copper curls hanging free in space. “I can’t let go!”

“Foul the gears, Bethina!” Dean shouted. “You can’t stay plastered to the bloody hull for the rest of your life!”

“If I let go, I’ll fall!” Bethina cried. Tears were streaming down her face, streaking like rain in the wind.

“You won’t fall, doll,” Dean promised, his voice changing to a soothing tone. “I’ve got strong arms. I’ll catch you.”

“Go!”
Conrad snarled at her from where he clung to the ladder behind her. “I could have climbed up and down this ship twice in the time it’s taking you.”

“Conrad!” I snapped, horrified at how he could be so insensitive at a time like this. “That is really not helping!”

Bethina extended one trembling hand to Dean, and he caught her and hauled her aboard. When she stood up, shaking, she cast Conrad a look that could have stopped traffic. Cal wrapped his arms around her, and she buried her face against his collar. I almost wished she’d just slapped Conrad. Maybe then he would have learned that he couldn’t say whatever he wanted whenever he wanted to whoever was within earshot.

I finished untethering the balloon and the craft floated upward, bumping gently against the underside of Windhaven.

“At last,” Conrad breathed, and moved to close the gap and jump aboard from where he hung.

But before he could, Windhaven groaned, the propeller blades spinning to life high above us, and the floating city listed sharply to one side.

Conrad missed the balloon cage and lost his grip on the hull, pitching off the edge of the cage. He caught the mesh with two of his fingers, slipping down toward the nothing of the mist below.

“Conrad!” I shrieked, diving across space and catching his hand. He flailed and latched onto my sleeve, and with horror I felt myself sliding out of the balloon cage. Bethina screamed, sounding very far away, and Dean shouted something
at Cal, but all I could see was the fear in Conrad’s eyes as he hung over the gently roiling cauldron of fog. Everything else was sucked away; there was only the knowledge that I had to save him, and the resolute stone in my stomach saying it wouldn’t end this way. Not after everything we’d been through.

I scrabbled for hold and grabbed the bar at the foot of the balloon’s door, hanging on with all my strength. Conrad grappled for purchase on my other arm. The pain was worse than anything I’d ever felt, and it radiated through me. But I couldn’t let go—I wouldn’t. Conrad’s fingers found my skin, digging furrows in my wrist.

“Aoife!” Dean shouted, dropping to his stomach as the balloon swayed wildly, free of its restraints. He grabbed me by the wrist with one hand and the shoulder of my jacket by the other, trying to haul me back into the basket. “Cal, get over here!” he bellowed. Cal left the rudder of the balloon waving wildly and joined Dean, reaching out his lanky arm and catching Conrad’s free hand. With heaving and straining and a lot of swearing, they finally hauled us back in.

Conrad collapsed, shaking, and I lay perfectly still, unable to move. My right arm, the one Conrad had grabbed, felt boneless and disconnected from the rest of my body. I could feel blood from scrapes dribbling across my skin, turning cold against the air. My forehead had begun bleeding again, sending stinging red spots into my vision. All of it was from far away, though, as if I were attached to my body by nothing more than the air we were floating in.

Dean’s face drifted into my tunneled vision. “You all right?” he said. “Let me get a look at you, princess.”

Cal helped Conrad to a place in the corner of the basket while Dean turned my head from side to side. “Don’t check out on me,” he murmured. “You’re fine. We’re all fine.”

“We might not be!” Cal shouted, pointing ahead of us. The balloon was trapped beneath Windhaven’s hull like a butterfly beneath a glass bulb. The brass finial at the top of the harness holding the balloon’s gas bag in place squealed along the underside of the floating city, trying desperately to gain altitude.

I followed the sight line of Cal’s finger along our route and felt panic rise in my chest, unfreezing my body from the shock of finding myself still alive.

The great propeller fan on the rear of Windhaven pulled us closer and closer as it sucked air into its blades, turning the city at a bank so steep that metal screeched and rivets popped and flew like bullets around us. One punctured the silk of the balloon, but we didn’t drop clear of the fan.

“We’re going to get chopped up!” Cal shouted. “We need to lose altitude!”

“And how exactly do you propose we do that?” Dean asked him.

“Steer us out of here, then!” Cal cried as the balloon bounced harder. Conrad twined his fingers in the mesh of the passenger cage. Bethina grabbed me around the shoulders and held me still so that I wouldn’t get thrown around in my fragile state.

Dean snatched the rudder, straining so hard the cords of muscle in his neck stood out like the cables of a suspension bridge.

“It’s too strong,” he panted. “I can’t turn it.” Conrad got
up shakily and tried to help him, but even their combined efforts weren’t moving us quickly enough.

I crawled to the front of the passenger cage, curling my fingers in the mesh and using it to pull myself to my knees.

I focused my senses on the fan. It was the largest thing in my mind, a great mechanism of gears and blades, harnessing power from the wind and using it to hold up a device that was never supposed to fly.

My Weird wanted to touch the fan, wanted to connect with it, like reaching into a flame because it burns so brightly you have to feel it against your flesh even though you know it will sear your skin.

I pushed, with all my strength, pushed against the fan, willed it to reverse its direction and allow us to escape Draven.

My head throbbed, heat blossoming across my skin as if my blood were molten in my veins. Then the wind changed direction, blew so hard that it knocked me backward, and I lost my grip on my Weird, falling out of touch with my body and into the dark of unconsciousness.

I came to on a bed of moss that was the delicate blue color of a summer sky. I inhaled its dry, earthy scent and waited for my eyes to focus. There was a bit of dried blood crusted in the corner of my eye, and I swiped at it as I took in my surroundings. We were in a dead forest, gray spindly trees reaching twisted, bare branches into fog. Everything was gray and blue and white, as if we had fallen into a world with all other color leached out.

I rolled onto my other side and caught a more vivid slash of blue: the balloon, deflated. The cage was half sunk in the black muck of a swamp, and nobody was inside.

I sat up, alone for a moment in the drifting grayness, and called out. “Dean? Conrad?” My voice didn’t actually form words, just came out in a croak. What if something had happened? What if I was the only one left? My stomach clenched.

“Miss?” Bethina materialized from the fog, and I collapsed back onto the moss in relief. I wasn’t alone.

“Oh, stones! She’s awake!” Bethina called back into the nothingness. The others came running, and Dean crouched beside me.

“Easy,” he said. “You’ve been out for a while.”

Conrad crouched on my other side and pulled my chin so I was facing him. “Pupils are the same size,” he announced. “The bump on the head is superficial. We can move her.”

“I’ve got it under control,” Dean snapped. “Aoife isn’t going anywhere if she’s not in shape to walk.”

“Excuse me, but you’re not in charge here,” Conrad said. “Nor are you my sister’s keeper. I took care of her for fifteen years, I think I know when she’s fit to walk.”

“You call leaving her all by herself taking care of her?” Dean snorted. “Attacking her, putting a mark on her she can never wash off? Please. Aoife’s better off with me.”

“Listen, Erlkin,” Conrad snarled. “I know exactly what your idea of
taking care
of my sister entails, and that’s gonna stop right now. She’s a good girl and she doesn’t need your paws all over—”

“Stop it!” I shouted, and every one of my injuries throbbed, but I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself
from flinching. “You are both,” I enunciated carefully, so there would be no mistake, “behaving like complete idiots.”

I stretched out my hand to Cal. “Can you please help me up? We should get moving before Draven sends out men on the ground to track us.”