The Fog Diver (15 page)

“S
WEDE
,” I
SHOUTED, TURNING
toward the cockpit. “The engine's dead!”

Trash tumbled along the alleys below us as the slum platform tilted. The slimy river of the Spew changed course, sweeping away a cluster of stalls.

“Crash-land at home,” Hazel bellowed to Swedish.

“Are you peanuts?” Loretta asked. “That whole block's going to ditch!”

“Mrs. E's in there,” I told her.

“Everyone up front!” Hazel yelled, above the sound of the shrieking engine. “Bea, quick!”

With the deck shuddering beneath me, I dragged Loretta to the prow. When Bea arrived a second later, I
swung her between me and Hazel, so we'd cushion her when we crashed.

Plumes of dust rose from collapsing shanties, twenty feet below the thopper.

Ten feet.

Five feet.

When the rooftops were two feet below us, Swedish veered into an alley like it was a landing strip. Trash flew everywhere, shacks started falling like dominos, and we hit the platform so hard that my knees buckled. We slid fifty feet, spun twice, and stopped.

For a long moment, nobody spoke, as the neighborhood shook apart around us.

“That wasn't so bad,” Hazel said.

Bea giggled a little hysterically.

“You all,” Loretta moaned, “are insane.”

“At least the roof-troopers are writing us off as dead,” I said, my voice oddly steady as I watched the guardship returning to the Rooftop.

“Look at that,” Swedish said, swinging to the ground. “Twenty feet from the shack, and she landed sweet as berry pie.”

“Let's go!” Hazel called. “We've got to get to Mrs. E.”

She and Bea hopped down from the thopper, stumbling on the tilting platform.

“C'mon,” I said, giving Loretta my hand.

She swung to the quaking ground, then looked up at my face. “Your eye's not
that
freaky,” she said apologetically.

“Sure,” I said. “Everyone's got one.”

“Those white swirls are kind of neat,” she said as we started trotting toward the shack. “Like, um, snowballs.”

“Snowballs?”

She flashed a gap-toothed smile. “Except totally freaky.”

I gave a huff of laughter; then a wall buckled nearby and we jumped away. Debris tumbled along the tilting platform as we scrambled after Hazel and the others. An avalanche of noise surrounded us—buildings collapsing, metal screaming—and trash battered us until we shoved into the shack.

Swedish staggered from the bedroom with a limp Mrs. E in his arms.

“How is she?” I yelled.

“Sleeping!” he grunted.

She was only half asleep, actually. She peered around the crumbling room and mumbled, “Look at this mess—no dessert for you!” then closed her eyes.

“Well, we're here,” Loretta said as she wiped blood from her split lip. “Now what?”

Swedish plowed toward the entryway. “C'mon!”

“Hurry!” Hazel followed Swedish, struggling uphill as the shack floor tilted. “C'mon!”

“What are we doing?” Loretta asked, grabbing the table for support.

“Going to the thopper,” I said.

“The thopper crashed.”

I pushed her after Hazel. “Not
that
thopper.”

Loretta took off, but I hesitated. I wanted to run into Mrs. E's room and grab my dad's scrapbook from the shelf. I couldn't leave it behind. But the platform jerked so hard that the rain barrel jounced across the room, and I knew I was out of luck—the entire shack was about to collapse. I scrambled after Loretta into the entryway. Plastic jugs and broken crates tumbled everywhere as we helped Swedish lower Mrs. E through the hatch into the workshop under the shaking platform.

The slum gave another sharp shudder and I slammed against the wall, then slid to the ground in a painful daze. Groaning, I crawled back to the hatch and wriggled through, into Bea's workshop. The floor was at a steep diagonal. Tools cascaded off the workbench. The foggium compressor rolled into the hole where the thopper dangled by heavy chains, then disappeared into the Fog below.

A racing thopper didn't have room for passengers, so Swedish was hunched in the cockpit with Bea on his lap and Mrs. E squeezed beside them. Hazel straddled the forward hull, holding the butterfly valve. On the far side
of the thopper, Loretta desperately wound an inner tube around her wrist, strapping herself to a pump vent.

The ticking and whirring of the thopper engine grew louder. The wings spread to catch the wind, and foggium flowed through ignition chambers.

“Chess!” Hazel shouted. “Jump!”

I scrambled toward the hole in the floor—or what
used
to be the floor. I balanced on the edge, aimed for the fattest part of the thopper—

And Hazel screamed, “
Wait!
Stop!”

M
Y ARMS WINDMILLED, AND
I barely caught myself. A shower of tiny springs ricocheted past my head and tumbled through the hole into the Fog.

“The chain!” Hazel pointed to the rear of the thopper. “The chain's stuck!”

Usually Swedish released the support chains from inside the cockpit, but with the platform slanting, the rear chain had snagged in an ugly snarl of metal. And if the thopper was stuck, we'd be ditched into the Fog in just a few seconds.

I blocked out the roar of the demolition and jumped. I caught the chain, slid down, and stomped at the snarl. It unraveled immediately, and I felt a flash of satisfaction. Ha! Can't beat a tetherboy!

Then it hit me: I'd just freed the chain from the thopper, but I was still
hanging from
the chain.

Huh. Maybe I should've thought that through.

Before the chain swung me too far away, I dropped. I hit the thopper near the fantail and couldn't get a grip. Rivets fell from the workshop and jabbed my face as I slid backward, digging my fingernails into a seam in the metal. Just when I started to fall, Swedish rolled the thopper sideways, which lifted me upward until the hull was beneath me.

I grabbed a hitch and tried not to faint as a downpour of trash roared into the Fog a few feet behind me. Bea had designed the thopper for speed and handling, but it was a one-person craft. Weighed down by six of us, it wallowed beneath the wildly tilting platform.

With a grind of protest, the thopper started lumbering forward, and soon we were flying just under the slum, in the fifty-foot gap above the white froth of Fog. Slime dripped from the platforms overhead, and huge fans whirred as I straddled the rear section of the hull. My head throbbed, and my shoulders and hands burned.

A prop crew stopped working as we flew past, and shouted jeers at us. One girl started climbing a ladder—probably to tell the bosses she'd seen us—and fear squeezed my heart like a fist. If we didn't move fast, the bosses would toss nets over the edges of the platforms to trap us. That way they could ditch us personally.

Did the roof-troopers know that the kids from the jewelry store were the same ones who'd swooped over the junkyard? Had Kodoc found out my name yet? Did he know my face and my crew? I could barely breathe until we emerged from the shadow of the junkyard.

Then I slumped in relief—we'd made it! Except for the fact that we were stuck on the Fog, in an overloaded thopper, without anywhere to land.

I looked over my shoulder and watched the slum recede into the distance. The only home I'd ever known had been tossed like garbage into the Fog. My neighborhood was gone forever—the clearing where I'd played bootball, the corner where Mrs. E once kissed my scraped elbow. My bracers were gone, my harness and my bedroll. So was the table where we ate, where we'd laughed and talked and argued. And my father's scrapbook.

Everything was gone. I didn't have a home anymore. None of us did.

“When I was a girl,” Mrs. E said suddenly, “everyone called me Kat. Short for Katherine.”

Hazel leaned toward her. “Yes, Mrs. E?”

“Don't interrupt! Everyone called me Kat, but I also
had
a cat. I called my cat Me.”

I glanced at Bea. We hadn't heard that one before.

“So we were Kat and Me,” Mrs. E said. “Except I was Kat and the cat was Me. Her real name was Meow.”

“That's sweet,” Hazel said. “Now stay still and—”

“Back then,” Mrs. E said, “the Subassembly and the roof-troopers worked together. Not like today.”

“The fogheads worked with the army?” Loretta asked.

“The roof-troopers are more than just an army,” Hazel told her. “They do everything for the Five Families. They're in charge of schools, banks—”

“Some are scientists,” Mrs. E interrupted in a lilting tone that sounded nothing like her normal voice. “Trying to find a way to control the Fog. In the old days, they wanted to harness the power of the Fog into engines and machines.”

“You mean foggium?” Loretta asked.

Mrs. E giggled, which made my stomach sink. I hated when she started acting like a little girl. It felt like the fogsickness was mocking her.

“The Subassembly discovered foggium,” she said, “but the roof-troopers built the refineries. Did I ever tell you about my cat?”

“Her name was Me,” Hazel said.

“Don't be silly!” Mrs. E snapped. “Her name was Petunia. Now stop your chattering. I'm sleepy.”

An uncomfortable silence fell over us. None of us wanted to face the fact that Mrs. E was slipping away. Swedish wiped his eyes, Hazel gazed into the distance, and I clung to the thopper, trying to keep my mind blank as we soared over the Fog, the valves clicking and the wings heaving us through the air.

Heading where? Nowhere.

The thought chilled me. “How much fuel do we have?” I asked.

“An hour's worth,” Hazel told me. “Maybe two, with a tailwind.”

“Shouldn't we head back?” Loretta asked, her face buried in her arms.

“Back to what?”

“The slum?”

“The bosses would kill us.”

Bea bit her lip. “How about the Rooftop? We can find Mr. Turning again.”

“The guardships would kill us.” Hazel rested her palm on Mrs. E's forehead, checking for a fever. “And then Kodoc would kill us all over again.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But if we stay out here, the crash will kill us first.”

N
OBODY SAID ANYTHING FOR
a long time. The quiet felt ominous.

“Okay,” Hazel finally said. “I've got a plan.”

“What kind of plan?” I asked.

“The regular kind.”

“You mean desperate and loco?”

“Not necessarily,” Swedish told me. “She could mean risky and doomed.”

“You're both right!” Hazel said, brushing braids from her face. “This one is desperate
and
risky.”

“In that case,” I said, “I'm in.”

Swedish snorted. “Yeah. What's the worst that could happen?”

“
This
is the worst that could happen.” Loretta raised
her head and looked faintly green behind her tattoos. “I'd sell my nose for a block of solid slum.”

For some reason, her misery cheered me. At least I wasn't turning green. “Maybe not a
whole
block, Loretta—your nose is pretty small.”

She glared at me, then dropped her head again, wrapped in her private despair.

I scooted forward. “What's the plan, Hazel? We all grow wings?”

“We'll be angels soon enough,” Swedish muttered, “once we crash.”

“We're not crashing,” Hazel said. “We're heading for the shipping lanes.”

I steadied myself. “You mean the lanes that Mrs. E always told us to stay away from, because the merchants might report us to Lord Kodoc?”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

“That whole ‘let's grow wings' thing is sounding better and better,” Swedish said.

“Don't worry,” Hazel said. “We'll keep out of sight until we can intercept a merchant ship.”

I gaped at her. “Until we can
what
?”

“Intercept a merchant ship,” she repeated. “We'll offer them the diamond in exchange for passage back to the Rooftop.”

“You want to swoop down on a merchant convoy? And before they open fire, you'll start
haggling
?”

“That's right.”

“Then they'll bring us back to the Rooftop? To find Cog Turning?”

“Yup. And he'll bring us to his coyote friend.”

“Wow,” I said. “There's a word for that.”

“Deranged?” Loretta asked. “Suicidal?”

“Brilliant,” I said, and Hazel's laugh rang out across the Fog.

“I thought you'd like it,” she said.

A gust of wind rocked the thopper, and the gyroscopes whirred. Bea worried that the clockwork sounded draggy, so I held her legs as she dangled overboard, fiddling with the torsion cables and grousing about the dress Hazel had made her wear. The breeze calmed as Swedish angled the thopper around a crooked pillar of Fog and we drifted over a misty white ravine.

“Slow her down, Swede,” Hazel finally said. “This is the shipping lane.”

“How does she know?” Loretta asked me. “Fog all looks the same to me.”

“She knows Fog like you know fighting,” I told her. “If Hazel says we're here, we're here.”

Loretta scratched the scar on her arm. “When do we run out of fuel?”

I shrugged. “Forty minutes? Maybe an hour.”

“That's all we've got?”

“No,” I said. “We've also got Hazel.”

“That's why she's the captain,” Bea told Loretta, clasping my arm and pulling herself upright. “She'll get us out of this.”

Twenty minutes later, though, even Bea looked nervous, scanning a thick cloud bank—of real clouds, not Fog—hoping for a glimpse of a merchant convoy. We drifted in aimless circles, but there were no airships anywhere.

“I wonder what a cucumber tastes like,” I said to break the silence.

“Watermelon rind,” Swedish immediately answered. “Except sour.”

“Nah,” Bea said. “I bet it's more like pigeon.”

“Pigeon?” Loretta asked.

“Sure. Everything tastes like pigeon.”

“But pigeon's a bird, and cucumber's a fruit.”

“Cucumber's not a fruit,” Swedish said. “Now
berry
is a fruit.”

“I'm pretty sure cucumber's a fruit,” Bea said.

“Hey, Swede,” Loretta said. “Have you ever tasted a berry pie?”

“I saw one once,” he told her, “when I was a kid. Some rooftoppers came around with free food. Mostly slop, but right there in the middle . . . a berry pie.”

“You get a taste?”

“Well, the neighborhood boss had sent me begging, y'know? So I grabbed the pie and ran it back to him.”

“Did he give you a bite?”

“Gave me a smack,” Swedish said. “But I still remember how it smelled.”

“There!” Hazel pointed into the thick mist. “A merchant ship!”

A dark speck grew in the cloud bank, then turned into a sweeping airship with a massive cylindrical balloon. Cannons and portholes dotted the hull, nanofiber propellers shone in the sunlight, and two smaller airships prowled alongside—armored gunships with chain guns and flamethrowers.

“That's no merchant ship,” Swedish said. “Check out the diving platform.”

I shaded my eyes and looked closer. Underneath the ship, a dozen tethers and winches were spaced across a massive scaffolding, like hundreds of ladders lashed together.

“That's the ultimate salvage raft,” I said.

“What?” Loretta asked. “I can't see anything.”

“They've got ten or fifteen tetherkids diving at once,” I told her. “Look at all those winches.”

“Diving for salvage?” she asked.

“I guess,” I said. “They must be looking for something
big
.”

“She looks like a Five Family ship,” Hazel said, her voice tight.

“Who cares?” Loretta said. “Either they help us or we crash.”

“At least she's not a warship.” Hazel twisted one of her
braids. “Approach them slowly, Swede. Everyone look desperate and harmless.”

“We
are
desperate and harmless,” I reminded her.

“Then it'll be easy.”

Swedish swung the thopper toward the convoy, and I read the name on the big ship's hull:
Teardrop
.

“Weird name,” I said.

“Maybe they're merchants and that's their motto.” Loretta deepened her voice. “‘On the
Teardrop,
we're crying for a sale.'”

“‘Prices so low,'” I intoned, “‘you'll weep with joy.'”

“Would you two shut up?” Hazel said.

One of the armored gunships swooped forward, and Hazel waved her veil like a white flag and shouted, “We're a salvage crew!”

The gunship heaved to alongside us. Sheets of riveted metal blurred closer, and fumes seeped from brass nozzles. The wind from the gunship's gearwork fans rocked the thopper, and armored panels slid open to reveal airtroopers pointing weapons at us.

“We're a salvage crew,” Hazel repeated. “Don't shoot!”

“That's no salvage raft,” said a grizzled woman in an officer's jacket. She peered closer. “And what're you doing with that old lady?”

“Um, we lost our raft, ma'am, but—”

“On second thought, I don't care about your sad story,” the woman said. “All I care about is that you're interrupting
Lord Kodoc's search.”

My breath caught and my heart clamped tight.
Kodoc
. This was Kodoc's ship.

Darkness crept in at the edges of my vision, and the day turned murky. I felt dizzy and doomed, like in nightmares when I couldn't escape from a monster. Bea whimpered and Hazel went speechless for a long horrifying moment. Even Loretta fell silent.

The grizzled woman didn't seem to notice. “I'll give you thirty seconds to start running. Then we'll open fire.”