The Fog Diver (3 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I walked the plank. The cool air gave me goose bumps, and my boots tingled from the ticking of the engine under the deck. My heart beat even faster than usual before a dive. This time I was searching uncharted Fog, following the scent of roses.

“Settle down, Chess!” Hazel called from the crow's nest. “We're almost there!”

“I am settled,” I yelled back.

“You are not!” she laughed. “Go check your tether.”

I mock saluted her. “Yes,
sir
!”

“That's me!” Hazel gestured with her battered spyglass as her skirt whipped in the wind. “Admiral of the fleet!”

Some fleet. Our rigging looked like tangled ropes, and goofy-looking whales were painted on the bulging
balloons. Still, things worked better when Hazel was in charge, so I stepped off the plank and checked my tether while she scanned for the buoy Bea had floated the night before.

“I don't see it,” Hazel muttered a minute later. “It should be right here.”

At the back of the raft, Swedish spun the ship's wheel a few inches. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“You have a bad feeling about
everything,
” I told him. “If you ever had a good feeling, you'd get a bad feeling about it.”

“Keep laughing,” he grumbled. “That's what
they
want.”

“They who?”

“Them,”
Swedish said ominously.

Swedish was convinced that
they
were watching us—not Kodoc, some other
they
. He'd been paranoid about it for years, though he'd never managed to explain who
they
were or why
they
were so fascinated by a bunch of slumkids.

“You always say
they
're watching,” I told him. “But you never say who
they
are.”

His eyes narrowed cunningly. “If I knew who they were, they wouldn't be
them
.”

Arguing with Swedish always made me dizzy. “So—because you know absolutely nothing about them, you're absolutely sure they exist.”

Swedish nodded. “Now you're getting it.”

“That doesn't make any sense!”

“That's what they
want
you to think,” Swedish said.

“A few wisps to the left, Swede!” Hazel called.

“Can you see the buoy?” I asked her.

“Not yet,” she said. “But it's close.”

I didn't ask how she knew. Hazel charted the Fog better than anyone. Just like Swedish was the best pilot, and Bea kept our raft in the air better than anyone could.

“Close is good,” I said.

I tugged my goggles over my eyes. Bubbles of excitement rose in my chest and I started rolling my shoulders.

“Take a hard left, Swedish,” Hazel said. “And stop fidgeting, Chess!”

“I'm not fidgeting,” I informed her. “I'm limbering.”

“Then stop limbering! You're making me nervous.”

“Why?” I asked innocently. “Because if there isn't great salvage even this far from home, we'll never escape the slum?”

“And you'll never afford those pink boots you want,” Swedish called to Hazel, tapping on the steam organ.

She glared at him. “I don't want pink boots.”

“Yeah, Swede,” I said, crossing to the plank, “she wants
yellow
boots and pink
ribbons
.”

We teased Hazel about ribbons and dresses because she was such a weird combination of “girly” and “commanding.” She wore long, flowing skirts, dreamed of fancy dances, loved pretty sunsets . . . and could bark out
orders faster than the toughest junkyard boss. She was about fifteen, a few years older than me and a dozen times smarter. And pretty, with light brown eyes, dark brown skin, and dozens of silky braids.

I looked like every other tetherkid who ran with a salvage crew. I was compact, wiry, and undersized. My boots were stained and my goggles were scraped, and the leather bracers I wore on my wrists to catch the tether were scarred. The only difference was that I always kept my head down and my hair over my freak-eye.

Swedish looked more like a thug or a bootball player than a raft pilot. He was so burly, shaggy, and bearish that he barely fit in the thoppers—sleek, narrow airships—that he flew in drag races to earn extra money. And Bea was our kid sister, with short red hair, big green eyes, and smears of grease on her face. She didn't dream of roast meat and conspiracies like Swedish, but of gears and pistons and building crazy new thoppers that looked like demented dragonflies and flew like hunting eagles.

“On Port Oro,” Swedish said, trying to mimic Hazel's voice, “everyone wears yellow boots.”

“And there are no junkyard bosses,” I added.

“Pigeons lay scrambled eggs,” Swedish said.

“It rains soup,” I added, “and snows rice!”

“And apples grow on trees!”

I gave him a look. “Um, actually, they kind of do. . . .”

“Oh,” Swedish muttered. “Right.”

“If you two are done,” Hazel said, eyeing us, “can we get back to looking for the buoy?”

I laughed and bounced slightly on the plank. Maybe today we'd finally catch a break. Those roses were a great sign. I started scanning the Fog for the buoy again, and—

A deafening
POP!
shattered the calm morning. It came from beneath the deck, from the engine where Bea was working, adjusting a faulty propeller.

My blood froze. “Bea?” I called. “Are you okay?”

No answer.

“Chess,
go
!” Hazel shouted. “Swedish, cut the engines!”

I dove from the plank, caught a cable with one hand and swung under the deck as a bubble of fear expanded in my chest. What if something had happened to Bea?

I
SCRAMBLED PAST THE
side rudder and the vents, and spotted Bea beside an exhaust pipe.

“Bea!” I said, slumping in relief. “What happened?”

She didn't answer, her usually pale face so dark with soot that she looked like she was wearing a mask. She tapped a bolt with her wrench and told the engine, “Not funny.”

She talked to the machinery, the rotors, cables, and gears. That wasn't so weird, except she was sure that they talked
back
. Of course I couldn't argue with the results. No other gearslinger could've kept this scruffy raft in the air.

When I tapped her shoulder, she jerked in surprise.

“Chess!” she shouted, even though I was only a foot away. “What are you doing down here?”

“We heard a huge pop and—”

“What?” she shouted. “I can't hear you! There was this huge pop!”

I eyed her. “Are you okay?!”

She eyed me back. “Are you okay?”

“Hoo boy,” I muttered. “I'm fine!” I shouted. “Are. You. Okay?”

She gave me a thumbs-up. “No problem! The hydraulic valve's just mad because I didn't adjust him yesterday!”

“Right,” I said.

“Valves are moody,” she explained.

I shot her a dubious look, and she grinned back. She knew we all thought she was whackadoo, but she didn't care.

I tapped her leather cap twice, saying good-bye, then climbed back onto the deck.

“She's fine,” I told Hazel. “Just bickering with the spark plugs.”

Hazel rubbed her face. “Do
other
captains have these problems?”

“Other captains have airships,” Swedish told her. “You have a floating rattrap.”

“That's what I have
for now,
” she said.

Swedish and I shared a bemused look at Hazel and her big dreams.

“But I can't find the buoy,” she continued. “Chess, help me look.”

I shoved my goggles to the top of my head, started to brush my hair away from my freak-eye, then hesitated. Like I was afraid that someone might burst out of the clouds and spot the white wisps drifting across my right eye.

This was the fear that never left me. The clouds of nanites in my eye helped me see farther, hear more, and move faster in the Fog than anyone else, but they also marked me as a freak. As Kodoc's freak. He wasn't just my enemy, he was also my
creator
. Millions of tiny machines swarmed through my brain because of him. Cobblers made shoes and weavers made cloth and Kodoc made me. Like I was nothing more than a tool he'd crafted to help him find those ancient fog-machines—so he could kill his enemies in the silent rise of white.

I'd felt his power every day of my life, before I'd even heard his name. Not just because of the big things, like not having a mother. Kodoc was also the reason I'd worn an eye patch as a little kid. My dad was the one who'd given it to me. He knew I had to hide my eye, but he'd hated how ashamed I felt. So after he died, I vowed that I'd never wear a patch again. And I hadn't: I'd just kept my hair long, my head down, and my mouth shut.

Of course the crew didn't care about my freak-eye, because they were my family. The only family I had left.
So I brushed my hair away and scanned the sky again for the buoy.

“No luck,” I called. “I don't see it anywhere.”

Hazel swung down from the crow's nest. “It's gone.”

I stared at her in disbelief. Buoys didn't just disappear. “What do you mean, it's gone?”

“It should be right there,” she said, pointing to an empty stretch of Fog. “But it's not. Full stop, Swedish.”

Swedish clattered on the organ keyboard, and the raft jerked to a standstill.

I shaded my eyes. “How can it be gone?”

“Only two ways,” Swedish muttered.

Either the buoy malfunctioned or someone messed with it. And if someone messed with it, they might start messing with
us
. A worried silence fell . . . then a hatch slammed open and Bea popped through, her leather cap askew.

“Look at that!” she cried happily. “She still stops on a thumbnail! This raft is purple as a real airship.” For some reason, Bea considered “purple” the highest praise.

Hazel quirked a grin. “I don't know what we'd do without you, Bea.”

“We'd sink,” Swedish muttered. “We probably still will.”

“She
likes
stopping,” Bea said, her soot-smudged face flushing as she looked past us. “Um, guys, where's the buoy?”

“Gone,” Swedish told her.

“Oh.” Bea fiddled with her tool belt. “Where'd he go?”

“Now that,” Hazel told her, “is a good question.”

“I've got a
feeling
about this,” Swedish declared.

“Yeah?” I said. “What
kind
of feeling? Surely not a paranoid, doomed sort of feeling?”

“No,” he said. “A realistic one. Someone stole our buoy.”

“Who'd steal a buoy?”

“Who knows?” Swedish said as he nervously squeezed the bootball he kept beside the wheel. “We're too far from home this time. Probably in mutineer airspace.”

My stomach clenched. Everyone knew that the mutineers sometimes shot trespassers on sight. “Don't even say that!”

Hazel tucked a braid behind her ear. “We're not in mutineer territory. We're in no-man's-land.”

“Oh, that's much better,” Swedish muttered.

“Maybe the buoy just deflated?” I asked.

“It's possible,” Hazel said. “Bea, check it out.”

“Sure thing, Cap'n!” Bea knelt at the bin where we kept the buoys. “Remember that buoy who went out yesterday?” she asked the spare buoys. She “listened” for a moment, then nodded. “That's right, Bumbleboy.”

Hazel and I exchanged a glance. Now Bea was naming them?

“How was he feeling? Hmm? Purple as the day he was
stitched.” Bea frowned, then raised her head to Hazel. “The buoy's fine. I don't know where he is now, but he definitely didn't deflate.”

“So somebody took it,” Swedish said. “We're not alone out here.”

T
HE DAY SUDDENLY FELT
cooler. The raft swayed in the breeze, the rigging creaked under the balloons, and foggium whooshed through the copper pipes.

“You mean mutineers?” Bea finally asked.

“They're not so bad,” Hazel said.

Swedish snorted. “Yeah, they just shoot down any airship that gets too close to Port Oro.”

“They're defending themselves,” Hazel said. “You know why they're called ‘mutineers'?”

“Because they rose up against the Rooftop?” Bea asked. “A long time ago?”

Hazel nodded. “They were ordinary people, like us. Not nobles or merchants. They got fed up with paying the Five Families for the chance to breathe clean air. They
gathered on Port Oro, fought off the Rooftop, and started ruling themselves.”

“Roof-troopers.” Swedish snorted. “They're the worst.”

“They're not as bad as Lord Kodoc,” Bea said, fiddling with her cap.

“Kodoc's not worse than the roof-troopers,” Hazel told her as a breeze rose around us. “He
is
the roof-troopers. They're his private army. Nothing's worse than him.”

“Except driftsharks,” I said. “But they stay in the Fog.”

Swedish tapped the steam organ keyboard to keep the raft in place, but nobody spoke. They knew how much driftsharks scared me, swimming through the air with lashing tails and gaping jaws.

Driftsharks were about the size and shape of real sharks I'd seen in pictures, except they didn't have solid bodies. They were dense swirls in the Fog, with bulky heads, misshapen fins, and wispy tails. They were made of billions of tiny nanites, but they seemed like a single animal, driven to destroy any human in the Fog.

A year earlier, I'd seen a driftshark kill another tetherboy right in front of me. I still heard his screams in my nightmares.

“Um,” Bea said after a second, “now
I'm
getting an itchy feeling.”

“Let's find a different site,” Swedish said. “Something closer to the junkyard.”

The “junkyard” was what everyone called the slum where we lived, because it was a sprawl of floating platforms jam-packed with shacks and trash, held aloft by rusty fans and creaky balloons. It was shaped like a huge, uneven ring and encircled the base of the craggy Rooftop mountains that towered above the Fog.

The Five Families lived high on the rich green peaks of the Rooftop, descendants of the people who'd grabbed the best land when the Fog started rising. The farther down the mountain you lived, the less powerful you were, until you came to the junkyard, where the air stank of garbage. Rats swarmed the streets in the night, at least until someone trapped them for dinner. It was dangerous and dirty, and the only home we'd ever known.

We lived in a run-down shack crammed in among thousands of other run-down shacks. And we didn't even
own
our shack, or the raft. We weren't allowed to. Instead, we rented them from the junkyard bosses, who called us “bottom-feeders” and took all of our best salvage. They answered to Lord Kodoc, and we were lucky if they left us enough salvage to buy a sack of rice every week. Some neighborhoods weren't so bad—like the ones where servants lived, crossing the bridges every day to work on the Rooftop—but most were shaky, violent, and mean.

So, after swallowing my nervousness over the missing buoy, I pleaded my case. “We
need
this. There's an iron
gate waiting, and probably more. We didn't come this far to turn back now.”

“Forget it,” Swedish said. “There's enough salvage near home to buy food, if we look hard.”

“We need more than food,” I said.

“Tell that to my stomach.”

“If we stick close to home, we'll never raise the money to reach Port Oro.”

Swedish snorted. “You really think they can heal Mrs. E?”

“They can!” I said. “I know they can.”

“And there's food in Port Oro, Swedish,” Hazel said. “Enough food that you won't be hungry.”

“We do okay in the slum,” he said stubbornly.

“Enough food,” she said, “that
Bea
won't go hungry.”

Swedish looked at Bea and his expression softened. Ever since she'd joined the family, we'd tried to protect her from the worst of the slum. Maybe we were used to it, but she deserved better.

“There are real houses, instead of living in shacks,” Hazel continued more gently. “Real jobs, instead of dropping Chess into the Fog. And no Lord Kodoc. Port Oro is—”

“It's
paradise,
” Swedish scoffed, tossing his bootball from hand to hand. “They'll heal Mrs. E and we'll live on a cloud. You keep saying that, but you don't know what it's like there. Nobody does. All we know is that the mutineers will blow us from the sky if we get too close.”

I started to answer, then hesitated. He was right. Port Oro reminded me of a magical island in one of Hazel's storybooks, a golden land of fruit trees and freshwater springs . . . guarded by a ferocious sea serpent. Maybe the island was great, but the serpent would eat you before you even saw the beach. And it didn't help that the roof-troopers arrested anyone who tried to move to the Port. They didn't care if you lived or died, but they'd be damned if they'd let you join the enemy.

Still, we needed to try. For Bea. For Mrs. E. For all of us.

“I'm diving.” I grabbed my harness. “What's the worst that could happen?”

“You could slice yourself on broken glass and bleed gallons,” Swedish said. “Again.”

“That was a scratch!”

“Hazel gave you twenty stitches,” Bea reminded me. “And I heard alligators are coming back.”

“You don't even know what alligators are,” I said.

“Like snapping turtles,” she said. “Only bigger.”

“And what are snapping turtles?”

“Turtles,” she said. “That snap.”

“It's not animals I'm worried about,” Swedish said. “Someone's out here. They're probably watching us right now.”

I didn't bother answering. I just turned to Hazel and waited.

She tapped her spyglass against her leg, her forehead furrowing. I knew she was thinking that we needed a big find, to save Mrs. E—and ourselves. But she also worried that we couldn't afford to take stupid chances, and that every day I spent in the Fog, I came closer to losing my strength and my mind.

“That missing buoy means trouble.” Hazel rubbed her nose. “Are you sure this is a good site?”

“Well, nobody's scavenged here in forever,” I told her.

“Nobody else is dumb enough to dive in the middle of nowhere,” Swedish grumbled.

“Plus, I smelled roses,” I said.

“What does that mean?” Bea asked.

“They used to plant flowers around fancy houses, so it means this is a good site.” I looked to Hazel. “There are roses on the Rooftop, right? On the upper slopes, near the fancy houses?”

“Red and white and pink,” she said with a wistful smile.

“How would you know?” Swedish growled at her. “You've never been to the Rooftop. Born and raised in the junkyard. If it weren't for Mrs. E, we'd all be working in a refinery for a bowl of gruel and a beating.”

“I know,” Hazel told him, “because I
read
.”

Swedish cracked his knuckles. “You can't believe those stories.
They
control the books.”

“
They
don't control my dad's scrapbook,” I told him.

“That's just odds and ends from before the Fog.”

“It's history,” I said a little defensively, because the scrapbook was my only connection to my father. “How else would we know about the weird animals that used to exist? Spelling bees? Hello Kitties?”

“How
did
kitties say hello?” Bea asked.

“The same way bees spelled, I guess,” I said.

“Someone took the buoy,” Swedish said. “And even if the roses—”

“I'm diving,” I interrupted. “This site is special.”

Hazel took a breath. “Promise you'll run like a cockroach at the first sign of trouble?”

“With all six legs,” I told her.

“And hope you don't get squashed,” Swedish muttered.

“You know me,” I told him, crossing toward the diving plank. “I'm unsquashable.”

Swedish jostled me as he headed for the wheel. “Just watch out for geese, okay?”

I strapped my harness around my chest and attached my tether to the winch on the deck. Bea checked my buckles; then I stepped onto the diving plank, my heart beating fast and hard.

“Goggles down,” Hazel called from the winch.

I lowered my goggles. “Goggles down!”

“Tether free?”

I checked my tether. “Tether free!”

“Dive at will, Chess, and—” Hazel paused. “Come back safe.”

“Every time,” I told her.

Behind me, Bea asked, “What do roses smell like?”

“Like a full belly and a warm bed,” I said, and dove into the Fog below.