name of peaceful gods for as long as there’ve been gods,” said Vilaris.
“They ought to know we didn’t come here to continue the tradition,” I said.
“Anything on the bluewave?” asked Vilaris. “Maybe you can tell them yourself.”
I looked at the comm. “Not a thing. They didn’t even send us a warning.”
“Uh, are you watching this pressure gauge here?” Blaylocke asked, rising from his seat and tapping the glass.
The needle wiggled. The pressure in the balloon was dropping.
I swore.
“Did we get hit in the bag?” asked Vilaris.
“Don’t know what else it could be, unless a woodpecker got frisky with the ship while we weren’t looking.”
I opened the valves as wide as they could go and rotated the prop engines until they were vertical. We jerked upward, rising like a puff of smoke. I didn’t care if we hit something; I was taking us as high as I could before we lost the ability to rise altogether. The pressure gauge was inching to the left, moving so slow it was hard to tell.
“We gotta find someplace to land this thing,” Vilaris said. “I’m going above to take a look around.”
“Send Blaylocke,” I said. “I’m gonna need you down here in a minute.”
A few seconds passed before I heard Blaylocke’s spyglass whisk open and his boots clunk up the stairs.
“What do you need me for?” asked Vilaris. “It’s not looking too good, is it?” He was shivering. Whether it was from cold or fear, I didn’t know.
“No, it’s not looking good,” I admitted. “Good thing Chaz here is a prodigy. Ain’t it, pal?”
When I glanced over my shoulder, Chaz gave me the response I expected: a warm, vacant smile.
“Find something sharp and start chopping up the floor. We’re building a fire.”
Vilaris frowned. “What?”
“We need wood. Make a pile and I’ll tell you what to do next.”
“I don’t understand…” Vilaris was anxious, on the verge of breaking down.
I wanted to scream at him. I talked fast instead. “These ballast pipes vent through a furnace in the aft cabin of the ship. Build a fire, and the ballonets will fill with hot air instead of cold. It’s gonna be a chore to fly this thing without ballast tanks, but at least we’ll stay afloat if the main bag loses pressure. That enough of an explanation to get you moving?”
Vilaris sprang into action without another word. He snatched up the boarding axe hanging over the doorway and began hacking the planks to splinters. A moment later, Blaylocke stumbled down the steps into the cabin. He saw what Vilaris was doing and gave him a puzzled look.
“There’s a floater up ahead,” Blaylocke said, “about two o’clock. We’re too far down and I can’t see what’s on it. We need to get higher.”
“Doing the best I can,” I said. “Help Vilaris with that firewood.”
“Firewood?”
Vilaris filled him in with a five-second physics lesson.
I sized up the pile of wood he’d gathered. “Okay, that’s plenty. There should be lots of unlit coal in the furnace room. Get a few shovelfuls in there and burn what you can. The wood will start faster and burn quicker until the coals get going. Now move it.”
The two men left the command capsule with their arms full of firewood, leaving me to coax every inch of altitude I could get from the Clarity before it turned to stone. The needle on the pressure gauge was still sinking. Even with the prop engines pushing us vertical, we were creeping upward at a disheartening pace. Chaz was speaking softly to himself, still tied to his chair. I leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the floater Blaylocke had mentioned, but all I could see past the balloon’s bulk were clouds and the open blue of the sky. There were folds and creases inching across the balloon’s surface, visible signs of the loss in pressure.
I should’ve told them to let me know when they got the furnace going, I realized. “How you doing, buddy?” I said, giving Chaz a smile.
He didn’t smile back this time. His brow wrinkled. He licked his lips. “I… I don’t… know,” he said.
“Chaz? Chaz. It’s me, Mull. Do you understand me?”
Silence, and another confused look.
“Chester,” I said. “Chester Wheatley. Is that your name?”
Chaz sighed. His head lolled to one side. He blinked, raised his eyebrows, closed his eyes as if enduring a bad headache. “Without a doubt.”
“Chester,” I repeated, turning to face forward again. “If you can understand what I’m saying, I need you to talk to me. It’s very important.”
“What…” he said, trailing off into another sigh.
I wanted to go to him, but I didn’t dare leave the pilot’s seat now. “You’re tied to your chair. Can you find the knots and start untying yourself?”
Another moment of silence. “I can’t… move my fingers. It feels stiff when I… try to tell my hands what to do.”
“Just a little hiccup in the fine motor skills, pal. Keep trying. You took a hard hit to the dome, but your brain knows what to do. Concentrate.”
The needle on the pressure gauge fell into the red. I pushed the engines past half speed and up to full. The altimeter stopped rising, started falling. So did we. My stomach leapt into my throat, a rush of fear and adrenaline. We were sinking, a slow and continuous descent. All the upward thrust The Secant’s Clarity could muster couldn’t prevent us from falling anymore. Dangit Leridote, if we have to land on that Skytemple of yours, I’m gonna be pissed…
Vilaris came leaping down the steps, hoisting himself by the handrails. “We got the fire going. The air’s warming up, but it’s not hot enough yet.”
“How much longer?” I asked.
“Another minute or two.”
I bounced my knees, drummed on the armrests with my fingers; reached for the valves, took my hands away. “Untie Chaz,” I said after a moment. “He’s doing better. I think he understands it when you talk to him now.”
Vilaris obeyed. “Chester? Do you know who I am?”
Chaz cleared his throat, gulped. “Yes… I can remember. I know you.”
“What do you think?” I interrupted, feeling the ballast pipes for warmth. “Now?”
“I don’t know. Try it,” said Vilaris.
“I can’t try it. If I fill the ballonets before there’s hot air in the pipes, they’ll fill with cold air instead and we’ll drop even faster. Here, take the helm for a minute. I’m gonna go check.”
I leapt over the controls and darted up the steps, taking them two at a time. On the deck, the clouds were rushing by, heading upward too fast now for comfort. I descended into the aft cabin, where Blaylocke sat tending the fire. His face had a dour look, black smudges and fingerprints across his eyes and nose.
“How’s it looking?” I asked, crouching to get a look at the furnace myself.
“Fine.” He was listless, his face a mask of sorrow.
I felt the exhaust pipe and the lines that snaked across the ceiling toward the command capsule. Both were hot to the touch. “We’re going to be alright. Just keep that fire going, and keep it as hot as you can.”
Blaylocke nodded, staring into the flames as though he hadn’t heard me.
“What’s the deal with Blaylocke?” I asked Vilaris when I’d returned to the controls. I was already cranking the valves to start the ballonets filling.
Vilaris gave me a knowing glance. “Is he still looking miserable back there? We couldn’t find kindling to start the fire with, so Gareth had to use parchment paper… including a letter he’d written to his wife. When we started falling, he got pretty upset. He was like, ‘We won’t survive this time. This is it. It’s the end.’”
“How was he planning to mail letters to a hidden city that nobody knows about?”
“He was going to write to her every day, like a journal of sorts, and give her the letters when we got back.”
I shut my mouth. I didn’t know what it was like having a family y
ou wanted to get back to. Not anymore. I’d only been away from my parents for a few weeks, but I could say without reservation that they’d been the best few weeks of my life—torture and other hardships aside. Being on your own was the absolute nuts, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t need anyone, I told myself, unless they had the potential to be of use to me. Blaylocke was weak, and that gave me another reason not to like him.
Soon we stopped sinking and leveled out. After a minute, the ballonets filled up with the warm smoky air from our impromptu fire, and we began to rise again. I rotated the engines to push us forward, knowing I’d have to use engine thrust alone to control our altitude now. We collided with a thick head of clouds and found ourselves engulfed in a pocket of obscuring mist. I sent The Secant’s Clarity rising faster, wanting to escape the feeling of sightlessness before anything else went wrong.
When we cleared the tops of the clouds, they became a carpet below our feet. The airship seemed nothing more than an insect, soaring over the soft white blooms of a cotton field. Grand, stately floaters drifted on skyward currents, massive islands replete with sprawling towns and palatial cities that dotted the blue as far as we could see. Against all odds, we’d reached the stream.
I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. It was Chaz, standing behind me, unsteady on his feet. Vilaris was supporting him on the other side. There were tears in his eyes. “I never imagined it could look like this.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty great, isn’t it,” I said.
“It’s a whole ‘nother world.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” I said. “Especially for you guys.”
Vilaris