Uncrashable Dakota (13 page)

“So … you’re leaving the country? For good?”

Chester snorted. “Seems a genius has wandered into our humble midst.” He nodded at the satchel. “What’s in the bag, genius?”

“I bet it’s his church clothes,” Maggie said.

“Or chocolates,” Chester said hopefully.

“Give it here,” Maggie said, grabbing at the strap. Hollis swatted her wrist. At the same time, silver metal flashed in her hand.
Switchblade
, Hollis thought. She pointed to her half-closed, swollen eye.

“Little keepsake from my last visit to your neck of the ship,” she said, eyes flicking upward as if she could see through the dozens of floors and ceilings between steerage and first class. She held the blade to the side of Hollis’s face. He tilted his head away so it wouldn’t slice his cheek.

“Now, hand over the bag.”

“I can’t do that,” he said, trying to speak without nicking his skin. The thin edge of the blade so close to his face made his body tingle.

“No kidding? Why’s that?”

“Because it doesn’t belong to you, Margaret Keenan,” explained a familiar, matter-of-fact voice. The tension in Hollis’s body gave way to sweet disbelief as Delia’s face appeared behind the would-be muggers.

Without taking her good eye off Hollis or her blade off his cheek, Maggie said, “You’re just in time to help me explain the finer points of the steerage tax.”

Delia laid her hand gently against Chester’s arm, and he dropped it from Hollis’s shoulder. Maggie mumbled a curse.

Hollis shot Delia an astonished glance. “You
know
them?”

She ignored the question and tried the same gentle pressure on Maggie’s arm. “This one doesn’t get taxed. He’s my friend, okay?”

This one?
Hollis thought.

“Not good enough,” Maggie said, but her knife hand wavered. Hollis held his breath.

“Yes,” Delia said, moving shoulder-to-shoulder with Hollis and staring her down. “It is.”

Maggie seethed. Hollis thought she might cut him out of spite. But after a moment, she flicked the blade closed and said, “We won’t forget this.”

Delia reached into her own satchel and pulled out a loaf of bread wrapped in paper stamped with the Dakota insignia.

Maggie shook her head. “Keep your charity. We’re getting along okay.”

Chester muttered something and accepted the loaf. Maggie looked like she was about to hit him, then she turned and stalked away. Chester gave Delia a rueful smile—
here we go again
—and followed Maggie, tearing off a hunk of bread and stuffing it into his mouth.

Hollis watched the untamed frizz of Maggie’s hair disappear behind a long line of passengers jostling and pushing for position around two immense, steaming vats. A queasy feeling rose from his stomach to the back of his throat as two men in filthy smocks spooned shapeless lumps from the vats into bowls clutched in eager hands. Hollis watched a father fill a bowl for his pale son and tried to imagine his own family waiting in an endless line just to eat boiled potatoes and stringy beef. The nagging sense of shame he’d felt inside the old couple’s tent blossomed again. He reminded himself that nobody was forcing these people to be here—they had paid for a steerage-class ticket of their own free will, knowing full well what that entitled them to. Somehow, that made him feel worse. He turned to Delia.

“If you hadn’t come along when you did, I think those urchins would’ve gutted me.”

“Just forget it,” Delia said with a quiet fierceness that took Hollis by surprise.

“Sorry I didn’t quite make it to the message drop. If you want to lead the way, Rob’s probably waiting for us.”

“We’re already here.” She rapped a knuckle against the paper-covered beam.

Hollis ran his eyes across the assemblage of odd scraps. He’d imagined a neat postal window. “Listen, Delia, it wasn’t my fault your friends tried to kill me, okay? How in the blue skies do you know them, anyway?”

Delia shut her eyes and stood very still except for a slight quiver in her shoulder, as if she’d coiled all her energy inside and was struggling to keep it from exploding outward. For a moment, Hollis felt just as alone and scared as he had when the blade was against his cheek. Maybe Delia agreed with Maggie; maybe she thought of him as just another simpering rich kid with no idea of how the world really worked. Either way, he supposed there were more urgent matters.

“Forget it. We’re being hijacked.”

Delia opened her eyes, and the strange tension between them vanished so suddenly, Hollis wondered if he had simply imagined it.

“Figured as much,” she said. “I crept all around the lift chambers and didn’t see Chief Owens. Lots of unfamiliar folks hanging around, though. I did find
this
, in that same little office where we saw Mr. Castor.”

She produced a baton of rolled-up paper that smelled like a musty attic. Together, they unfurled a detailed sky-chart smudged with frantic pencil markings: arrows, loops, and triangles that someone had clearly been drawing, erasing, and redrawing for years. Blue lines—known air currents—curved and swirled like fingerprints. In the center, a thick X had been traced over so many times that crumbs had settled in the grooves.

“The East Coast,” Hollis said, pointing to the legend in the upper left corner. “Airstreams and weather patterns from Maine to Florida.”

“It was in the safe, so I grabbed it.”

“You know how to crack a safe, and you never showed me?”

“It’s boring. Does this map mean anything to you?”

He studied the mess of lines and shapes. “Well, we’re already headed south.” He placed a finger on the X. “Maybe this is where Castor’s taking us.” He shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense—it’s the middle of the sky. It’s nowhere.”

He waited for Delia to offer her opinion, but she was gaping at him in stunned silence. Then she came to life. “Castor’s behind this? As in Jefferson Castor, your stepfather?”

“Soon to be former stepfather, I think. But yes. Him. Rob’s dad.”

“My God.” Her hand worried at the buckle of her satchel. “I’m so sorry, HD.”

“Why? It’s not like he’s my real father. He’s just the guy who’s married to my mother.” He let a sudden wave of despair wash over him. “And I don’t even know where
she
is, after all that sneaking around I did.” He tapped a fingernail on the map. “But you found this. You’re way better than me at this stuff.”
And at everything
, he thought.

“Here, this was in the safe, too,” Delia said, handing him a typewritten list of names.

“Juniper,” he read from the page. “Wellspring. Reynolds. Germain. It’s a list of first-class passengers, followed by…” Next to each typed name was a handwritten number, some as large as eight figures. “Dollar amounts. Which makes sense.” He told Delia about the conversation he’d overheard outside the bridge. “He’s ransoming the richest passengers. People were practically fighting each other to book staterooms on the first flight of the great uncrashable airship. They’re all here. He could get millions from Edmund Juniper’s relatives alone.”

“He doesn’t even have to go to the trouble of kidnapping them,” Delia said. “Once he’s got the ship, where are they gonna go?”

“He just had to get my mother out of the picture first.” Hollis didn’t much like the way this sounded when he said it out loud.

“Don’t look at it that way,” Delia said quickly. “He needs her alive. The company will want to ransom her, too.”

“Jefferson Castor’s not stupid, he’s not going to—”

Suddenly Rob appeared, out of breath, glancing nervously over his shoulder. Hollis stuffed the list into his pocket and let go of his end of the map. It curled back into a baton in Delia’s hand.

“What’d I miss?” Rob panted. “Different world down here, huh?” He eyed the slop buckets and swallowed hard.

Hollis pointed to a greasy blemish that stained Rob’s face around his upper lip and chin. “What happened to you?”

“It’s spirit gum from the fake beard. I couldn’t get it all off.”

“You wore a beard?” Delia asked.

“Yes, I wore a beard,” Rob said. “It’s a basic part of what we call ‘tradecraft’ in the spying profession. Anyway.” He looked hopefully at Hollis. “You were saying something about my father?”

Hollis opened his mouth, but no words came out. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that he’d have to break the news to his stepbrother, and that once he did, things would never be the same between them.
Well
, he thought,
there’s no way around it.
He took a deep breath and gathered his last crumpled reserve of courage.

“Yeah,” he said. “I found him.”

12

“
IS THE OLD MAN
OKAY?”
Rob demanded.

“Well,” Hollis said, “I didn’t exactly get to talk to him. It was kind of…” He couldn’t bring himself to say anything else. Rob scratched the back of his head, sliding the brim of his cap down on his forehead. He turned to Delia.

“What’s his problem?”

Delia shrugged.

“Spit it out, Dakota,” Rob said.

Hollis felt like he was going to be sick. “We’re friends, right, Rob?”

“
What
are you on about?”

“Just answer me.”

“Fine. Yes, we’re the two best friends who ever roamed the skies.”

“And we can tell each other things, right?”

Rob picked at the gummy residue along his jawline. “I’m gonna go ahead and say yes to this.”

“Right. Good answer. Okay. So here’s the thing. We’re being hijacked. I made it to the bridge, I saw it happening.”

Rob put his hands on Hollis’s shoulders. His eyes were wide. “I
knew
it! This is crazy. This is really crazy. It fits with what I saw, though. Some of the crew movements didn’t make any sense. They’re acting more like they’re herding passengers, instead of helping them with things. I mean, they’re hanging around like guards, instead of popping up when they’re needed and then moving on to something else when it’s finished.”

“Our award-winning customer service.”

“So they got
both
our parents. That explains why I couldn’t find my father.”

Hollis let the lively murmur of a hundred nearby arguments and jokes wash over him. Delia coughed and turned away politely.

“That’s the thing I was getting at,” Hollis said. “They didn’t get your old man because he’s sort of the one doing the getting. You see what I mean?
He’s
the
they.
That porter we met in the lift chamber, he’s part of it. He works for your dad, I guess, and there’s a lot more like him. You saw them everywhere—you said so yourself.”

Hollis had to look away from his stepbrother’s face, which was pinched in disbelief. His eyes drifted down to rest on the four tiny stitching holes in Rob’s top shirt button as he related the events on the bridge and the chase across the deck. When he stopped talking and the dull roar of the steerage hold rose up again, Hollis made himself look his stepbrother in the eyes.

Rob seemed to be calm. His face had slackened into a faraway look, as if he’d been listening to Hollis describe one of his dreams—a look that said he was sort of interested, but mostly just waiting patiently for the story to be over. Hollis glanced at Delia and gave her a tiny
what’s next?
shrug.

“Hmm,” Rob said. “Well then, I guess there’s only one thing to do.”

“Sabotage,” Delia and Hollis suggested in unison.

“I was thinking of something more like this,” Rob said, and planted his fist across Hollis’s chin. The punch sent Hollis spinning sideways. He saw the extension of his stepbrother’s skinny arm as his neck whipped around. The noise of the steerage crowd slowed to a smear of sound until his knees hit the wooden slats of the floor. Someone yelled “
fight
,” and people began to gather in a circle around them.

Hollis staggered to his feet and wiped the back of his hand against his mouth. It came away stained with a mix of blood and spit. A ringing was somehow in his ears and his eyes at the same time.

Rob punched me
, he thought.

It didn’t seem any more or less real than all the other strange things that had happened on the
Wendell Dakota.
Delia grabbed Rob from behind in a bear hug. Arms and legs flailed wildly toward Hollis as Delia struggled to hold on. Hollis worked his jaw, which clicked painfully.

“Hey!” Delia said. “Ease it down now, Castor.”

The words echoed inside Hollis’s throbbing head. He saw flashes of the map Delia had found.

“
Low-born lying scum!
” Rob wriggled free of Delia’s grasp, pushing her away. “I’ll knock you outta the sky!”

Hollis stepped forward and stopped a few inches from his stepbrother’s face. His heart was pounding. “Try it.”

Delia squeezed between them, brandishing a strange pistol. Two metal rods ran down the length of the weapon and extended beyond the wooden barrel. She pulled the trigger and the short antennae were suddenly connected by a jagged, sparking burst of electricity that reminded Hollis of the transmitter. When Delia released the trigger, the burst disappeared.

“Take a swing,” she said sternly, “either one of you, and get zapped.”

Hollis and Rob each took a single step back. The crowd, disappointed that the fight had been stopped, milled about uncertainly. Rob’s face twisted into a hateful sneer that Hollis had never seen before.

“I’m sorry,” Hollis said, “but it’s the truth. Why would I lie about something like this?”

“Because crazy runs in your family,” Rob said. He brushed off his sleeves and flicked the top of each hand—a habit passed down from his father.

“You
are
my family, Rob.”

“I’m not even your friend, Dakota.” With that, Rob turned his back and stalked away. Delia mumbled a curse as Hollis’s last name swept through the lingering spectators in a cascade of whispers.

“
Dakota?
”

“
That’s the Dakota kid!
”

Hollis felt the curious gaze of the crowd turn menacing, a change as instant and unwelcome as the gust of wind that had carried the christening dirt back onto the rail. He watched Rob stomp up the stairs to the tent city and wondered when he’d see him again, and if that single punch had wiped out years of skipped classes and shared adventures. But what else was he supposed to do except tell the truth? Why should he feel bad for things he had no control over? It wasn’t his fault that Jefferson Castor had decided to hijack the
Wendell Dakota
, just like it wasn’t his fault that steerage-class passengers had to travel in the crowded hold. So why did he suddenly feel like he was being forced to take responsibility for both? What could he have done differently?