Uncrashable Dakota (16 page)

“You know what happened at the launch?” Hollis asked as he wiped away the last of the blood. “I did the christening, with the dirt and everything.”

Delia shook her head. “I was already belowdecks.”

“Yeah, well, I screwed up.”

Delia laughed. “Doesn’t matter. It’s just a dumb ceremony.”

“But what if it
does
matter?” Hollis asked. “What if I caused all this?” As crazy as it sounded when he said it out loud, it felt good to tell someone. Maybe that was the true nature of a curse: secrecy gave it power.

“There’s nothing you can do about it now,” Delia said, “except try to put it right, which is what we’re doing anyway. But listen, about setting you up like that…” She hesitated.

Hollis’s eyes went to a dark knot in the board over Delia’s shoulder. “I get why you wanted me to see it down here. I do. It’s not lost on me, okay?” He wasn’t ready for a face-to-face conversation about something he would need a long time to sort out. “But I can’t do anything about it at the moment.”

“Please look at me. I’m trying to apologize.”

“I accept your apology. I just don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“You’re going to run things someday, HD.”

She was using her logical problem-solving voice. Its matter-of-fact tone made Hollis want to scream.

“Delia,” he said as calmly as possible, finally meeting her eyes, “if Jefferson Castor goes through with this, if we let him
take the ship
, there will be nothing left for me to run. No steerage-class accommodations for me to improve. Surely the smartest girl at St. Theresa’s Industrial School can grasp that.”

Her stone-faced gaze was fixed on Hollis.

“I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I didn’t mean to say that. What
is
an industrial school, anyway?”

“We should get going.”

“Is that where you learned electronics?” She didn’t answer. “So what, then? What happened to you that you can’t talk about?” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I didn’t mean that, either. I don’t know what’s wrong with me right now.”

Delia spoke as if she were gradually easing her thoughts into words and didn’t want to get them wrong. “If you were anybody else … I mean, if you were still
you
, still
Hollis
, but just not Hollis
Dakota
 … well. Dakota Aeronautics is you, and you’re Dakota Aeronautics, and there’s no way around it. It’s all tied up together. Like I said, you’re going to run this place one day. You’ll be my
boss
.”

“Why don’t you just come out and say that you don’t trust me?”

“Why don’t you take me to Sunday dinner at Il Bambino’s? Why haven’t you ever had me over for tea in your stateroom? Because there are parts of your life that can’t involve me. I accept that. And I’m just asking you to understand that it works both ways.”

It occurred to Hollis that he already had what he needed: the name of her old school. When this was all over, he could make inquiries and find out everything he wanted to know. He was sure that Delia had already realized this. Maybe this was her way of asking him not to do it.

“You know,” he said, “I could bring you something from Il Bambino’s if you want to try it. I don’t recommend the rabbit.”

Delia rolled her eyes. “Come on, Hollis.” She grabbed his arm and began pulling him into the dark passageway beyond the hole in the wall.

“Okay, okay, just promise me one thing,” Hollis said, thinking of Rob’s parting words and nearly losing his grip on whatever emotional blockade was holding back a flood of tears. “Promise me we’ll stay friends, whatever happens.”

She let go of his arm briefly, but only so she could take his hand and give it a squeeze. He swallowed hard and felt the stinging ache from his throat to his nasal cavity that meant the dam was as good as broken. He distracted himself with a quick mental list of things he would rather do than cry in front of Delia, like eat a bowl of minced glass or hammer his front teeth out. Then tears leaked out anyway. There was nothing he could do about it. He let her lead him through the passage.

Once they rounded a bend and the hole in the wall finally disappeared behind them, Hollis lost track of his own feet. Delia didn’t try to say anything to make him feel better, and for that he was grateful. When he’d recovered enough to speak, he kept his voice to a whisper.

“You got a lantern in that bag?”

“I got the second Cosgrove Immobilizer, the sky map, some linseed oil, a few pencils, Rob’s smelling salts, and a little bit of salted pork jerky. And some other stuff, probably.”

Hollis’s mouth watered at the thought of spicy, smoked meat. “I wouldn’t say no to a piece of that jerky.”

A thumping noise up ahead made him hush. Together they waited, silent and still, listening to muffled voices in the dark.

Eventually they crept forward on tiptoe, feeling their way along the unsanded wall with their fingertips, barely skimming the surface of the wood to avoid getting handfuls of splinters. The passageway turned sharply and ended at the bottom of a crude staircase. Dim light floated down from the top, along with the voices. Hollis nudged Delia and held up two fingers that were barely visible in the gloom.

Delia listened for a moment, then shook her head and held up three fingers: three men at the top of the stairs. She reached into her bag and pulled out the second immobilizer and the bag of salted pork. Then she rummaged quietly at the very bottom of the bag where the odds and ends lived, producing a novelty three-dollar bill, a metal ring overcrowded with keys, and a bag of marbles. Hollis motioned for the marbles and very gently took them from her hand. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do next—maybe fling them up at the men to create a distraction? Then Delia leaned so close that her mouth brushed against his ear. With a whisper as soft as a shallow breath, she told him to set them along the bottom steps and get out of the way. Hollis got to work. Delia brandished the immobilizer and melted into the shadows alongside the staircase. Marbles in place, Hollis cupped his hands around the sides of his mouth and made a loud, ghostly
W
O
O
OOHO
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
. It sounded exactly like an invitation to a ridiculous trap. He winced.

Someone muttered, “Damn steerage rats,” before heavy feet clomped down the stairs. Hollis pressed back against the wall opposite Delia and waited, heart pounding. The first man fell sideways as marbles skittered everywhere, sounding like a thousand rather than the handful Hollis had placed. The second man pitched forward, tripped by his companion. Before either man could right himself, Delia sprang from the shadows and gave them both a jolt of jagged lightning. They lay crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the steps while Hollis and Delia, breathing hard, glanced nervously at each other.

Where was the third man? The marbles had scattered to new places and stopped. The passage was silent once again. Hollis and Delia climbed over their unconscious victims and hurried up the stairs, which brightened as they ascended. At the top, a flickering lantern hung on the wall next to a door marked
CENT COMM.
The air was thick with the smell of lamp oil and sawdust.

“See?” Hollis pointed to the sign. “I knew exactly where we were going.”

He pushed open the door, and the fine hairs on the back of his neck started to prickle. He turned in time to see a squat, bullet-headed man lock a meaty forearm around Delia’s neck and lift her up off her feet.

“Oopsy-daisy,” the big man said.

Delia let out a strangled yelp as he tightened his chokehold.

16

THE ELEVATOR
to the command post at the top of the main prop tower was a rattling metal box. There was barely enough room for Rob and his three escorts, and they stood silently, pressed against each other like toy soldiers in a tin. The limited air was humid with whiskey breath and sweat.

“If you’re lying—” warned one of the men.

“I’m not lying, you dunce,” Rob said for the hundredth time. His captors were reluctant to bother Jefferson Castor with the ravings of a crazy—though remarkably well dressed—third-class kid. But they seemed at least a tiny bit scared that he might be telling the truth, which was enough for them to escort him to his father, who was supervising something in the prop tower. What, his captors wouldn’t say. They were also frustratingly mum on the subject of who they were and why they were on the ship, despite being half drunk and annoyingly forthcoming about Alabama women and a host of other subjects.

The elevator bumped to an abrupt halt. A guard with a pockmarked face pulled a lever. The door slid open to reveal a metal grate. He pulled another lever, the grate clattered up, and the men pushed Rob out into the command post. The air wasn’t exactly clean, but the metallic tang of combustion was preferable to the gamy stink of the guards. In the hollow of the tower beneath his feet, the great motor churned, spinning the main propeller with the kind of turbine-driven force that disintegrated unlucky birds on impact and dragged the enormous airship through the sky. Rob was no math genius, but he figured this propeller to be roughly a gazillion times the size of the chocolate replica he’d been solely blamed for stealing (despite the abundance of melted evidence on Hollis’s face and clothing). Here in the command post, cutting-edge soundproofing dampened the operational noise. Only the dense baritone
whoosh
of the rotation vibrated through the steel-reinforced walls.

In front of him, the room was sectioned off like a chessboard with a walkway down the middle. Blond squares of polished floorboards alternated with dark, fenced-off holes that provided access to the engine room below. Steam escaped from the holes and drifted lazily along the floor like poured molasses. Rob watched as six technicians were ordered down into one by a spry old man with a rifle. The technician in front opened a gate in the fence with a trembling hand and began climbing down a metal ladder. The man watched with fierce concentration until all six had vanished, then he walked over to Rob and his escort.

“Who’s the kid?” he asked from the left side of his mouth while the right side clamped down on an unlit cigar.

“He’s goin’ on about bein’ Mr. Castor’s son.”

“Well, Mr. Castor’s lookin’ for his son.”

“This ain’t him, is it?”

The old man shrugged. “
You
wanna bother Castor about it, be my guest.”

As the men talked it over, Rob stepped aside to give himself a clear line of sight. At the far end of the command post, a long oval window appeared to be painted a single shade of drab institutional gray. Beneath the window, a row of dials set into thick pipes poking up from the engine room displayed the ship’s airspeed, the primary concern of any prop tower crew. To the right and left of the speed gauges, crewmen spoke into telephones while others routed calls, trading cords between two switchboards with practiced ease.

A sharp
crack
, barely audible above the rumbling, brought all activity to an abrupt halt. As the guards turned to look toward the window, Rob thought of how Brice Blank was always getting a “sense of foreboding” before massive life-changing events started to pile up around the middle of every issue. In his own drawings, he made sure that Atticus Hunter was blindsided by the twists in the story. Rob had always considered that to be the more realistic approach. How much foreboding could one person possibly handle? And what was that “sense” supposed to feel like, exactly?

But now Rob felt it acutely: the dread of something inevitable and out of his control that was going to send him reeling. Each freight-train blade swinging past the command post was suddenly loud and distracting.

SHWOOMP. SHWOOMP. SHWOOMP.

The second
crack
brought everything speeding back into focus. The guards herded Rob up the walkway as they ran to investigate, their footsteps displacing steam in puffs of clarity. The men at the machines turned back to their work as if nothing had happened. Rob began to feel ill. He wondered what Hollis and Delia were doing.

Closer to the oval window, what had looked like a solid sheet of gray became a roiling storm cloud with several shades of darkness blossoming within. From this vantage point, high above the main deck, Rob should have been able to see the bow of the ship. But the whole sky was the sightless void of the cloud.

“Everything okay, sir?”

Rob turned toward the voice and felt a simultaneous flood of relief and terror. The “sir” was his father. He was holstering a pistol.

“It is now,” his father said. Then his eyes found Rob, and he froze like he had on the catwalk of the lift chamber. The body of a large man was sprawled facedown at his feet. One arm extended straight out toward Rob. On the man’s hairy-knuckled finger was a gold ring in the shape of a puffed-up, gaseous beetle.

Chief Owens.

Rob’s mouth was too dry to speak. He swallowed gummy saliva-paste and managed a whispered “
Dad?
”

His father thought for a moment. “How’d you like to see the bridge?”

17

KICKING AND FLAILING,
Delia forced her attacker to press his back against the wall to leverage his chokehold, and he narrowly sidestepped a neck-breaking tumble down the stairs. The uneven wooden slats of the floor creaked in protest, and Hollis had a horrible split-second vision of the center shaft popping out of the ship like a cork, spilling the three of them into the empty sky. A backhanded fist glanced across his forehead; that swinging anvil of a hand was keeping Hollis at bay, and his loafers offered little traction. Changing tactics, he darted forward, staying low, and reached into the bag pulled tight across Delia’s chest. When his fingers closed around the immobilizer, he yanked it free. Delia’s body drooped as she gasped for air. Hollis pulled the trigger and slammed the jagged lightning-burst into the man’s exposed forearm, right next to a tattoo of the name
Beatrice
scribbled inside a heart.