Uncrashable Dakota (19 page)

“We’ll be traveling through several kitchens,” Hollis said.

Chester cracked his knuckles.

20

AFTER THE DARKNESS
of the cent comm shaft, the gloomy vista deck seemed spacious and bright to Delia. The long, windowless compartment (crew members called it the vista deck as a joke), sandwiched between the third-class bunks and second-class staterooms, was used to store goods that American companies were exporting to Europe. It was a peaceful place: livestock traveled in steerage.

Delia mopped her brow with a complimentary Dakota handkerchief. Slicing the wires had been hard work. Climbing those rickety pegs had been scary enough to fuel a lifetime of claustrophobic nightmares. Despite all that, she had done it. Every single line had been severed. She often thought of airships as living creatures—many beetle keepers did—and now she felt a twinge of guilt. She had shut down the nervous system of the
Wendell Dakota
, cutting off its brain from its limbs.

Delia stuffed the soggy handkerchief into her bag and stepped away from the half-size door that led back into the shaft. She squeezed between casks of whiskey-sap piled from floor to ceiling. In small countries like Belgium, whose airship industry consisted solely of sky-canoe tourism, genuine Dakota whiskey-sap was a luxury item.

A few feet in front of her, the row of casks dead-ended at a wall of crates marked
LIGHTBULBS
. Delia pictured each bulb, lovingly swaddled in a nest of straw, and wished she could crawl inside, pull the lid over her head, and take a long nap. Maybe when she woke up, this would all be over. She ran her hand along the knotted wood, resisting the urge to pry it open.

Keep moving, Delia.

Her year at St. Theresa’s Industrial School for Girls had taught her how to confront unpleasant things. It was easy to keep your head down and say your prayers—much more difficult to outsmart a system designed to mold you into an agreeable young woman, to wring the streets of Hell’s Kitchen out of you like dirty dishwater. The rules at St. Theresa’s were easy to remember: don’t talk back to the sisters; recite your assigned Bible passages with enthusiasm; embrace the arts of cooking, cleaning, and respecting a future husband; know your saints. When you ran out of rules to obey or tasks to complete, there was always more atoning to be done for the sin that had landed you in St. Theresa’s: getting pregnant or picking pockets or falling in with the wrong Bowery crowd. Or helping Margaret Keenan’s uncle build homemade explosives.

When her apprenticeship at Dakota Aeronautics began, Delia had been certain that some higher-up would get around to digging into her past and give Chief Owens no choice but to send her back down to earth. Recently, however, she’d finally started to relax: such a massive company could churn along forever, indifferent to the history of one apprentice beetle keeper. But now she would have to make up a story to satisfy Hollis’s curiosity. She’d said it herself: if his last name had been anything but Dakota, she would have simply told him the truth—that Maggie’s uncle was a kind man, generous with his scientific knowledge, who had given her the tools to make a better life for herself. And who would build anything for the right price, no questions asked.

A noise like a tin can hitting the floor—
clinkclankTHUD
—made Delia’s heart leap. Thanks to the arrangement of goods, there was only one way to go: down another aisle, toward the noise. If she retreated, she’d be trapped against the wall, faced with a blind descent down the cent comm shaft. She took a left and stopped—this section of the vista deck was in shambles. All of the neat, orderly rows that separated the storage space into dry goods, machine parts, perishables, and clothing had been destroyed. Her first thought was that an army of raccoons had run roughshod over everything, gnawing open sacks of wheat and barley, tearing into slabs of salted beef, slurping up candies until the air was cloudy with powdered sugar.

From the piles, a voice muttered, “Aww, sassafras.” It sounded like a boy. Ahead and to the right, flimsy boxes marked
MASHED POTATO FLAKES
had been left mostly untouched, so that they formed a little nook. Delia held the hijacker’s fearsome knife out in front of her and slid her feet quietly until she was able to peek around the corner.

The boy was about ten. His overcoat had seen better days, but the crewman’s cap nested in his hair was spotless. He was perched on a stool, pawing through a box. Thin potato flakes covered the floor like snow on a toy train set. Delia revised her theory: the vista deck had definitely been picked clean by looters, but they had walked on two legs rather than four.

“You have to add water to those,” Delia said. The boy froze with his hand in the box. His eyes darted to her, and he relaxed when he saw that he’d been caught by a girl. He tensed up again when he realized that girl was brandishing an eight-inch blade. Slowly, he removed his hand from the box and sat on his stool. Behind him, Delia noticed a rifle leaning against a garishly striped box labeled
PEPPERMINT STICKS
.

“I ain’t got no water,” the boy said cautiously.

“Too bad,” Delia said, wondering what she would do if the boy reached for his gun. “Where’d you get the hat?”

The boy reached up as if to remind himself that he was wearing one. “My pa.”

“Your pa work for Mr. Castor?”

The boy shifted on his stool. “He’s a lieutenant in the New Army of Northern Virginia,” he said proudly.

“So what’s he doing on an airship?”

The boy looked at her skeptically. “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it.”

“It’ll be our little secret.” She stepped forward into the nook.

He eyed the blade. “I ain’t never seen no girl with no big knife before.”

Delia saw herself as the boy saw her, a girl with dirty hands, a smudged dress, and a sweat-smeared face, looking pinched and desperate with her heavy blade. She almost gave in to the urge to touch her headband and display her homemade magnifying glass.
I made this—I’m not what you think!
It had worked with that startled personnel clerk in the Fourteenth Street Dakota Aeronautics office—he’d introduced her to Big Benny Owens, and now, two years later, here she was.

Instead, Delia tightened her grip on the knife and leveled her steeliest gaze at the boy. There were times when growing up with Maggie paid off.

“The New Army of Northern Virginia is known for its bravery and self-sacrifice in defending the Confederate homeland,” the boy said quickly. He was clearly parroting someone, or a recruiting leaflet. “Which is why we been asked to join this glorious battle against the servants of Lincoln.”

“Uh-huh. What else?”

“Ain’t nothing else. We get paid and then we go home to fight the second War of Northern Aggression.”

“When’s that supposed to happen?”

“Could be next week. Could be next year. We’ll be ready.”

Delia’s mind was connecting threads. In order to maintain control over an airship the size of the
Wendell Dakota
, Castor would have to command a considerable force. It made sense that he would use a ready-made militia for muscle—offer a sweet enough chunk of the ransom, and he’d have a temporary army at his disposal. If he could play to their sympathies, all the better for him. He probably got this crew at a discount rate.

“How big is the New Army of Northern Virginia?”

“Eight squads, I reckon. Something like that.”

“So if you had to guess a number…”

The boy’s knee began to bounce up and down. “Numbers ain’t my thing.”

“If everybody who came aboard with you and your pa to help Mr. Castor was all standing in one big room, and you counted all the heads, how many heads do you think there would be?”

“Us and them other folks too?”

“Them other folks, they’re another militia?”

The boy scowled. “Yanks. My pa hates ’em. He says as soon as we get off the ship, he ain’t never so much as lookin’ at one again, ’less it’s down the barrel of his gun.”

Delia lowered her knife. The boy was getting fidgety—saying the word
gun
seemed to remind him that he had one within reach. She smiled. “Yanks really are the worst. I’m from Savannah, myself. Too bad your pa has to work with them.”

“Buncha Yanks and a buncha heathens, too.”

“I can’t stand heathens. Did your pa happen to mention the
kind
of heathens that are aboard?”

The boy’s entire face wrinkled in disgust. “Beetle worshippers.”

For the first time since she’d found the map and the passenger list, Delia’s heart began to race with the excitement of discovery. The problem was, there were more than a dozen active beetle cults, each with its own agenda and rituals. The broadsheet Rob had discovered on her bookshelf only hinted at the cult-related materials—books, pamphlets, the odd totem—she had been collecting under Chief Owens’s supervision. Rob’s voice echoed inside her head:
Delia, tell us the truth—are you in a cult?
She wasn’t, of course, although one of them had tried to recruit a few Dakota Aeronautics employees; she still had the business card given to her by an earnest young man with thick glasses and a cheap suit.

Delia slipped the knife back into the bag—
See? We’re just having a friendly chat
—and made her question as offhand as possible. “Do these beetle worshippers happen to have a name? Any strange tattoos or jewelry you can remember? Funny words they like to say over and over again?”

“You don’t sound like you’re from Savannah.”

A dull book called
Beetle Deification: A Survey
catalogued the groups, and Delia tried to remember the names she’d skimmed in her reading. “Sons of Solomon? Order of the First Beetle? Insect Liberation Front?”

“I ain’t sayin’ another word.”

Delia sensed that she was reaching the limits of this boy’s secondhand knowledge, anyway. “Remember what I said about our talk.”

“What was it again?”

“Our little secret. You didn’t see anybody in here.”

“I didn’t see anybody in here,” he repeated dutifully. As she backed away, his eyes flicked almost imperceptibly to check the location of his rifle. Without another word, she took off sprinting, past wheels of Wisconsin cheese and bottles of California wine. She didn’t waste a second looking over her shoulder; the son of a militiaman was probably a crack shot. She hurdled a pyramid of animal cracker boxes and zigzagged past bundles of patchwork quilts.

The possibility of gunfire seemed to add an urgent dimension to everything the boy had said. Her mind raced. The beetle cults were breeding grounds for conspiracy theorists, disgraced scientists, and aimless loners in search of a home. What could a group of crackpots possibly have to offer a man like Jefferson Castor? They didn’t do anything except preach outlandish “facts” about the holy origins of the beetles and perpetuate wild rumors about Hollis’s grandfather. She doubted if most people at Dakota Aeronautics had ever given them a second thought. Yet Jefferson Castor, the man least likely to tolerate their brand of insanity, had taken them aboard the ship. Why?

Behind her, the boy hadn’t fired a shot. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to draw a bead on a fleeing girl. She almost convinced herself it was okay to go back and ask him a few more questions. Without knowing specifics about the “heathens,” she had little to go on, but at least now she could look beyond a ransom scheme—Castor seemed to have more on his mind than just getting rich.

The ship lurched violently. Delia kept her footing by bracing herself against a pile of olive-drab coats. Straight ahead, directly opposite the place where she’d emerged from the shaft, was a door. She quickened her pace, but the door didn’t get any closer. It was a nightmare hallway.

No: she was running uphill. The ship was tilting. Behind her, the boy’s shouts were drowned out by splintering wood and breaking glass. She thought of the boy’s spilled mashed potato flakes—now the least of his problems—as an avalanche of quilts tumbled toward her. The ones that had torn free of their packaging floated past her head like jellyfish.

Delia thrust her hand forward and lunged for the door. It swung open and she climbed inside. She grabbed hold of a wooden railing with both hands, curling herself around it like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a piece of driftwood.
I did this
, she thought.
I made this happen.
What if she and Hollis managed to put a stop to Castor’s plans, but sacrificed the ship in the process? What if they never saw Rob again?

It was a curious situation. Earlier, she had invented a new way to communicate. Then she had put the ship in grave danger by taking away that very same ability. She wasn’t sure if that was an example of irony or simply a coincidence. The difference was fuzzy. The nuts and bolts of language bored her.

She was supposed to be a scientist.

Panting, clutching the rail, Delia admonished herself as the ship began to level off. She knew better than to make stupid, impulsive decisions. The scientific method was there for a reason. When the ship was steady enough, she forced herself to let go of the railing. There was work to be done. They would only know if the ends justified the means when they actually reached the end.

Reaching for her bracelet, her fingers went to the charm; besides those few old-fashioned picture cards, it was her only keepsake from St. Theresa’s. The face of St. Albert, patron saint of scientists, was imprinted into the cheap metal, but had become nearly unrecognizable since she’d been using it as a screwdriver. Delia thought about the location of the vista deck and the way she’d been moving. The ship hadn’t just listed to one side; the bow had shot upward. Even without a direct line to the bridge and the prop tower, beetle keepers should be able to keep the airship from breaching like a whale—especially with the new automated compartment system.

Stupid!
She had seen the unfamiliar faces. The chambers were full of amateurs. Her place was down there, helping them. So what if they were Castor’s people? Allegiances wouldn’t matter much if the
Wendell Dakota
flipped over. She hoped that Hollis would figure out she wasn’t coming and go on without her.