An Airship Named Desire (Take to the Skies Book 1) (22 page)

“The ship careened and tossed us around.” Jack stood with one leg rested on the bench as he threw his hands in that motion. “But from the crow’s nest you can see the entire ship, and the whole crew was scrabbling over the deck like ants. Byron, you hid below during that maelstrom, but you should have seen it. Our ship handled that storm like a pro with Captain Morris, Geoff, and Spade at the helm while Bea singlehandedly pulled the sails to steady her. The cracks of lightning that ripped through the sky? I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

I grinned, remembering our last storm not so long ago. Whole years passed with less commotion than the previous couple months.

“That was quite the gale.” Isabella turned to Adelle. “From below deck, the bucking almost drove us all sick. I was sitting there trying to rest while the beds started moving back and forth. The least they could do was to try and steady her so us patients would be a bit more comfortable. And Edwin ran about the infirmary with his hands over his head, screaming about the end of days.”

“I did not.” He sniffed. “I merely held some concern for our immediate safety.” Adelle wiped away the remaining tears and let out a watery laugh. I brought my dirty plate over to the galley, pausing at the doorframe.

In the back, Jack still told his story to some of the new deckhands, and the old ones leaned against the wall with their arms crossed. Isabella kept her hand on Adelle’s hunched shoulders while the two of them chuckled at Edwin’s indignance. Seth hunched over the table, watching the whole thing with an amused smirk riding his face, and Mordecai interjected with an occasional comment as smooth as his silken voice. I clutched the frame and bit my lip. We hadn’t eaten as a crew in some time, and I missed that togetherness. No matter what happened, I’d protect them.

Before I left, Seth caught my eye and approached. I cocked my head to the side.

“Bea, I need to speak with you. In private.” He glanced back over towards Mordecai and signaled for him to join us. Both men were discreet, so no one paid much attention when we exited the room.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Down to the engine room.” Seth lowered his voice, “It’s about the box.”

Chapter Twenty Two

As we descended the steps to the engine room, my heart sped up in my chest. Did Seth crack the code to open the thing? The mystery of what the box held ticked inside my mind like the sound of the rusted clock on my dresser. Tufts of steam drifted from the entrance in hazy clouds, threading the air with a thick humidity. 

“Did you ever find out what the inscription meant?” I tried to not specify what we were talking about since Mordecai joined us. Seth nodded and jerked a thumb at the Shadow Ward.

“He’ll recognize it. Anyone from Old Germany would. The inscription is the ancient military mantra, “no German boots on foreign soil”.” Pulsing aether tubes greeted us the moment we walked into the engine room as the green liquid flowed up and down with a rhythmic chug.

“They changed that around the time of the Great European War,” Mordecai spoke up. “A warrior death over a cowardly life.” Our engine dominated the right side of the room, cased in a large steel cylinder to keep the internal parts from damage, and I knew every last detail from the camshaft to the piston. Seth directed us to a circular table away from the heavy machinery. A light bulb dangled from overhead, lighting the oil-stained tabletop.

“This was the old mantra, from before the war. Someone’s had this box for a long time.” Seth pulled the cargo from the locker he’d kept it in and then moved his wrenches and hacksaw onto the shelving against the wall. He brushed metal clippings and dust onto the floor, placing the box square in the middle of the table. “Here it is Captain, safe like you asked. I’ve been trying numbers, but no luck yet.”

“Well, we already knew it had to do with old Germany.” The box mocked us, as impenetrable as before. My shoulders sunk as I sighed, and Mordecai clapped a hand on my back.

“Don’t look defeated. You have a veteran from the Great European War, a lockpicking gypsy who spent a long time in old Germany, and a lovely mind like your own. Between the three of us, we can figure out how to open this thing.” We pulled folding chairs around, and for five minutes, the three of us sat, staring at it in silence. Tension crawled around the room like a living beast, and drops of sweat pricked the back of my neck, causing impatience to flush through me like spicy cinnamon.

“Let’s heave the damned thing overboard.”

“Focus on the numbers,” Mordecai said. “I can pick that lock with no problem. The mechanism has to be disabled first though, so all we need are three numbers.”

“Oh, three numbers, that’s not hard,” I muttered. “Let’s go over every past event in German history and pick the most important ones.”

Mordecai raised his eyebrows. “That’s not a terrible idea. This is the ancient mantra, so it spanned from the Second World War to the Great European War around 2030. Someone clinging onto an old motto like that is similar to someone clinging onto the past.” We lapsed into silence again and pondered it over. Well, Mordecai and Seth did. I hadn’t a clue about old German history.

“So it obviously wouldn’t be Surrender day since it ended the Great European War,” I started off the conversation.

“What about the Berlin Wall falling back in the 1990s? Maybe that was a big step for them at the time?” Mordecai proposed. Heat crawled through the engine room, coloring our cheeks.

“Oh yeah, wasn’t Germany split up for a time?” I brought up. “Granted, that was over half a century ago.” 

Seth shook his head ‘no.’ “Has nothing to do with a war, and that’s why the motto came around.” We all lapsed into a resigned silence again. 

“V-E Day, way back when,” Seth broke our quiet. “May 8, 1945, was the first marked German surrender to the Brits.” He rapped his fist against the table. “But those are too many numbers, and we’re looking for three.”

“I may not be a gypsy level pickpocket, but I’ve been on enough jobs where we crack codes,” I said. “Year’s not important. We’ve got the first two numbers, five and eight.” I spread my palms against the table and stared hard at the inscriptions on the box. People used a million different devices to pick those last numbers. The final one was where someone would try to get tricky by using their age or the number of letters in their name. My eyes darted to the inscription on the box, and a smile breached my face. I fought to keep the corners of my grin down. “The ancient mantra was six words, and the second one was seven.”

“So which one is it?” Mordecai glanced at me. Close scrutiny and analyzing always failed me on a job, but my gut instinct never let me down. I stared at the box, and a drop of sweat tickled as it inched down the side of my face. I clenched my jaw and trusted myself.

“Seven. The geared mechanism’s newer and would have been installed around the time the new mantra was around. Try five, eight then seven.”

Mordecai crouched before the box with the pins laced between his fingers on standby. He cycled through the three numbers, and all of us waited around the table, holding our breath. We watched as the gears whirred and clicked on the mechanism, and the little cogs turned until the side lock released with a tinny click.

Jitters of anticipation trembled through my veins. Some sort of treasure had to be inside this thing—a cursed ruby or an ancient weapon.

Mordecai paused and cast a longing glance at the box.

“Old Germany, eh?” He inserted his pins, jimmying with the lock. “She was stunning back in her day. My camp lived right by the river as we had for a good number of years. I was young then, and we all helped out wherever we could, as one big extended family.” I bit my lip as I watched him work. His eyes stayed on task, but he continued. “Even though I grew up without a father, my mother made up for that, the sort of woman who worked just as hard as the men. Her baking inspired legends along the Ruhr, and people from villages away travelled down for a single loaf of her cinnamon bread.”

“Madeline?” Seth spoke up. Mordecai glanced up from his work right as the lock clicked.

“How’d you know her name?”

“I’m from the Ruhr. I’d heard of her famous bread.” Seth let a small smile loose in remembrance of his home. I took a deep breath as Mordecai pushed the top of the box, but it didn’t budge, so he went back to work.

“That all changed on Surrender Day,” he continued. Seth nodded and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “The British soldiers swarmed our lands. They stormed the villages and forced people from their homes on the death march to the Stuttgart line.”

I glanced over at Seth whose eyes bored into the box with the distinct look of someone trying to repress a memory. Bubbles in the aether tubules pulsed up and down with a rhythmic regularity as Mordecai let out a deep exhale. “My mother fell during that march.” His jaw tensed, and the lock clicked again. “I’d give anything to return to old Germany by an open fire with a glass of fresh milk and a slice of my mother’s cinnamon bread.”

We all sat in pregnant silence except for the hiss of the engine as it released more steam. My hand clenched and unclenched, but it didn’t quell the buzzing in my brain. Mordecai stood from the box with his hand on the lid, and my chest squeezed out shallow breaths. I had to stop myself from reaching past him and smacking the top open. He lifted the lid, revealing the contents inside.

A pile of papers.

My nose wrinkled in distaste, and I kicked the leg of the chair.

“Really? After all this chaos, all this hell, we’ve been carting around a couple of papers that someone forgot to shred? No jewels, no coin, and no fortune—this thing is worthless.”

Seth still hadn’t said a word, and Mordecai’s jaw dropped as they both hovered over the box. Neither man spoke.

“What are you gawking at? Waiting for them to talk back?” My temper flared. “My captain was murdered by one of my best friends over some stupid papers? What is it? Tax evasion documents on some millionaire? Everyone knows paper documents don’t hold up any more.” I gritted my teeth and stepped next to them to view the useless cargo that hordes of enemies pursued us for.

“Oh look, it has a golden seal. Maybe we can pawn that for money,” I muttered, reading from the first paper. “Provision for the Surrender of Germany to the British Repu—” I paused and caught a better glimpse of the papers. I gingerly picked up the ancient documents and scanned over the illegible text. Not tearing my eyes away, I took a seat.

Amidst the political mumbo jumbo were the agreements of the papers that signed away most of Old Germany. All the treaty had granted them was a country the size of Slovakia, but this document was off. I passed the first couple of sheets over for Mordecai and Seth to read. The Stuttgart line drew the border for the remaining land of Germany, a small Southern sliver near the Danube River.

However, that’s not what this document stated. This document gave them from Dresden to Cologne, at least three times the current amount of land. I passed the remaining papers over to the boys.

“I knew it,” Seth spat on the floor. “Our leader would have never signed off on that much land, unless manipulated and coerced into the situation. We all knew it, and this proves it.”

“Proves what?” I asked, still unsure of what this meant.

“This is our official seal.” Seth jabbed a finger at the paper. “These were the documents our leader signed before the British took him into custody. He signed on more land. They must have forged that treaty after they took him away. Our homes destroyed by their military and our lands stolen while we had to stand by and watch, all because the dividing line was down South.”

“I grew up in Frankfurt.” Mordecai’s jaw tightened. “We could have stayed. My mother—she might have...” He stopped, unable to process the rest.

Seth faced me, and his dark eyes glinted. “We have to deliver this to the authorities in Germany. They have a right to know what’s theirs.”

I glanced at the papers again—this was serious. If this buried political secret surfaced, the situation would get ugly.

“Seth. If your people knew what had happened, what would they do? Would they fight?”

“Yes.” His eyes burned. “Down to the last child we would.”

“They’d all be slaughtered. Germany’s army is pitiful, regulated, and still recovering. You throw them against a superpower like Britain, and they’ll all die.” I placed a hand on his shoulder, meeting his gaze. “Captain was a nationalist, and you are too, I know that, but he wouldn’t throw away hundreds of lives. Think about the situation, smart-like. We have to deliver this to the United Front since they’re the ones who handle debates between countries now.”

Seth let out a deep sigh. His finger pressed hard against the wrench in his pocket, but he didn’t argue with me. Mordecai slumped against the table with his head resting on his hands. I placed the papers back into the box before snapping the lock shut. “One thing is for sure. None of our enemies can get their hands on this thing. We’ll talk about our plans tomorrow morning.” I left Seth and Mordecai sitting at the table and took the cargo with me.

The captain’s room hadn’t been touched since I last cleaned it up, and my stomach churned from the faint smell of blood still lingering throughout the chambers. I plucked the old candle from my room and lit it in this one—after all, I couldn’t sleep here while that scent resurrected all those horrible memories. My candle flickered, dispensing loose wafts of tobacco and vanilla. I darted out again, returning to the first mate cabin to collect my belongings.

The handles of my leather trunk creaked from disuse, but I stuffed my loose clothing inside and clamped the top shut. My trunk rumbled along the wooden floor as I dragged it down the hall, kicking it into the bedchambers. With each consecutive trip, the tinny scent of blood dissipated. Plus, once I placed my clothes, gun collection, and lucky cameos inside the captain’s quarters, the less I’d stomp in on sanctified ground.

I switched on the captain’s aether lamps, which caused the emerald liquid to flow up and down the tubes, illuminating my cameos scattered over his desk and my guns cluttering the shelving. The heat from mid-afternoon filtered into the room, since I’d been hard at work for the last several hours.

At this point, the first mate cabin was nearly empty, and the dresser lay barren aside from the choking dust I’d unsettled. Though my bed still had the same sheets, I held no attachments there. I scanned the floor and the corners of the room, but even with so many little knick knacks, I’d managed to corral them all. I stubbed my toe on a flat little box, forcing me to squat down and pick it up, dusting off the piece. The brass latch came undone, and the top swung open.

My first compass lay nestled inside. The brass contraption was a sundial compass combination that Captain Morris gave me when I became his first mate. He said if I was going to stand at his side, I’d have to know a thing or two about navigating. A snort flew from my lips, and I sat down on the bed with the box. The metal glistened against its black velvet, and the arrow on the compass steadied towards North with a delicate circle of a sundial surrounding the top. I swung my legs back and forth at the edge of the bed.

The day Morris gave the compass to me, I’d run straight to Geoff for help. I hadn’t a clue how to use one despite being on the ship for five years, but I sure as hell wouldn’t ask Captain Morris. It was a pride thing. I stifled a watery laugh and gripped the worn sheets on my bed. Geoff had tried many times to explain his magical juju to me and go over navigational techniques like the use of an astrolabe, but I only grasped North, South, East, and West. I always trusted that he’d always be there to take care of the ship. Like I believed the captain would always be by my side. I ran my thumb down the smooth sides of the wooden box, taking in a deep breath.