CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The spiral staircase was not designed for use during a crash. I grabbed for the railing, pulling myself hand over hand down from the observation deck into the main corridors of the wounded Silverhawk. Demure alarms sounded with British-humor levels of understatement. “Emergency. Alert. Emergency. Impact Imminent,” an automated woman’s calm voice echoed through the ship. “Secure the kettle.”
“Maybe better priorities!” I shouted as we tumbled down the stairs. Chesa moved effortlessly, hopping from step to step, her elven grace on full display. For me and Gregory, the fact that we were in full armor made it more a game of how hard we would fall. Adelaide stayed in front of us, landing on the carpeted main deck and taking off toward the bridge.
“Are there escape pods?” I asked as I ran after her. The airship veered hard to the right and began to corkscrew. It was like being on a Ferris wheel that had come unmoored and was taking a tour of the surrounding countryside. We slammed into first one side of the corridor, then the other, making our unsteady way forward, pinball-style.
“Ida said we wouldn’t need them,” Addie answered.
“Why not?”
“That’s what I’m going to ask, as soon as I find her!” she said, bracing herself against the wall as we lurched once again. As her hand hit the wood paneling, Adelaide screamed in pain.
Her clockwork arm disintegrated, like a statue made of sand and dust in a strong breeze. The gears tumbled free of the mechanism, slipping like loose coins onto the floor to scatter down the hallway. The larger structures, like the pistons that articulated her hand and elbow, collapsed in on themselves. The joint of her elbow and the bones of her fingers flew in all directions as the tension of their springs came unhinged. Addie grabbed at the stump of her arm as the final pieces of the mechanism slipped between the fingers of her flesh-and-blood hand.
“Are you alright?” I shouted.
“No!” she answered. The stump was raw and seeping blood. “I need the Doc!”
“It looks like you’ve lost your connection to the Gestalt,” I said. “Last thing I’d want is that guy sticking needles in me without any magic behind it.”
“Then a real doctor. Damn it!” She shook her fingers, dislodging the last bits of clockwork clinging to the bloody stump. “It stings like a bitch!”
“Let’s head to the bridge,” Chesa said, pulling us both forward. “If we fall out of the sky, that arm will be the least of our problems.”
“Clear the way!” Ida barreled through us, a battering ram of brown curls and bespoke leather. “Need to get to the sponsons!”
“Ida!” Gregory grabbed at her, missing but slowing the engineer down enough to draw a sharp glare. “How are we going to land?”
“Manually operated mundane-integration collapsible airfoil package, port and starboard,” she shouted. When we responded by blinking slowly, she slapped her hands together. “Wings, you idiots! We need to open the wings!”
“We have wings?” Addie asked, still dazed from the loss of her arm.
Ida stared open-mouthed at the gunslinger’s bloody stump, then shook her head. “We’re about to,” Ida said, then pointed at Gregory. “Pretty boy! Go to the starboard sponson and wind the big red spring. The angry one, come with me!”
I turned to Chesa. “You get Adelaide to the bridge and see if you can find the Saint. She might need a miracle.”
“Right. Be safe, John,” Chesa said, squeezing my arm.
“Hey, falling out of the sky. Nothing I haven’t done before.”
Ida and I reached the shattered remains of the port sponson in short order. The horizon dipped in and out of view as the Silverhawk rocked back and forth. The tree line was getting close. In my head, I began to question the wisdom of standing next to a bunch of open windows during a crash. I said as much, in a jumble.
“I’ve already deployed the main sail,” Ida said. “We’re still falling, just not as fast. If we can get the wings out, we should be able to glide the rest of the way. Here it is!”
She threw aside the crushed remnants of a bookcase, revealing a train of wheels and pinions, all attached to a single large, red mainspring. A solitary latch held the spring in place. Ida grabbed the latch and pulled it free.
There was a brief whine of slithering steel. The primary wheel spun, clicked, then settled to a halt. We continued to fall.
“I take it that wasn’t supposed to happen?” I asked.
“The spring must have lost tension somehow. All that time under pressure must have sapped it. Hm.” Ida sat cross-legged in front of the contraption, tapping a small wrench against her cheek. “Neither wing will deploy until both release. Maybe if I had designed an escapement running a timer, so we could know when to wind it back up. I could even link it to a clock, maybe. Intriguing. I would have to redesign—”
“Ida!” I shouted. “Let’s skip to the part where we make this one work.”
“Oh, sure. Probably smart. Uh . . .” She tugged at the device with the wrench, eventually releasing a chain that was attached to the mainspring. “We’ll have to deploy manually. Good thing I ran into you guys!” She handed me the chain. “Start pulling!”
I ran across the broken glass, following my own bloody footsteps toward the hallway. Or at least, I tried to, because after a foot or so the chain pulled tight. My feet slid against the floor. Like a good engineer, Ida monitored the situation from afar.
“You’re going to have to go a lot faster than that,” she called, leaning casually against the window. “The compartment doors haven’t even opened yet. At this rate, you’ll still be pulling when we’re ten feet underground.”
“We’re pulling! Isn’t there something you could be doing? Something useful?” I asked. “Something like—”
“Oh, releasing the chain. Right.” Ida kicked something in the device. I flew across the room at full speed, to land in a jumble against the windows. “There we go!”
I looked up just in time to see the fruits of my labor. A door opened in the side of the airship, and a multi-sparred wing unfurled like a sail. It caught the wind, ribs straining to hold the billowing segments of the airfoil. The sudden drag pressed me hard against the floor. Shouts rose throughout the ship, accompanied by crashing plates and shattering glass. The Silverhawk veered upward, just feet above the grassy expanse of the ground. The wind of our passage flattened the grass in cylindrical whorls that widened in our wake. The wings creaked under the strain.
“You did it! You saved us!” I shouted, getting to my knees. “Way to go, Ida!”
“Thanks. You know, in retrospect I should have included a way to steer,” she said thoughtfully. “That would have been helpful.”
“Steer later! As long as we’re not crashing now!”
“Well . . .” Ida pointed forward.
Barely visible through the curving front of the bay window, a shopping mall loomed in front of us. I had just registered the fact that we must be back in the Mundane when the signpost of a passing Mickey D’s tore through our wing.
We pinwheeled to the ground like a broken kite. There was enough of the wing remaining to slow us down, but not enough to keep us aloft. The Silverhawk lurched to the left as we passed over the mall and into the parking lot beyond. I was just wondering what it would feel like to die of road rash when we reached the drainage pond on the other side of the lot. We hit the water like a wounded duck, sideways, and at great speed. That’s all I remembered for a few minutes.
I came to with Ida sitting on my chest, poking at my face through my open visor. I sat up abruptly, throwing her into the water. Chesa stood in the doorway of the library, up to her knees in murky water.
“He’s up,” Ida said, standing quickly. “You might want to lose the armor. We’re going to have to swim for it.”
“John can’t really swim,” Chesa said. “It’s okay. I think we’ve stopped sinking. We might be able to walk out.”
“Is everyone else okay?” I muttered as I got to my feet. Water poured out of my armor. “Actually, am I okay?”
“You’re fine. Nothing out of place,” Ida said.
“All hands accounted for,” Chesa said. “Addie’s with Saint Matthew now. I’m not sure she’s thrilled with his plans for her arm.”
“She can file a protest with Esther later,” I said, then trudged to the open window. “Let’s get out of here.”
The library sponson was flooded with about two feet of water. Books and broken furniture floated in a sea of muddy brown liquid that sloshed in through the open window. Bits of the wing bobbed on the surface, riding the wake that must have come from our crash landing.
We crawled out the broken window and over the shattered wing. The water didn’t come higher than my armpits, though several inches of soft, mucky sediment coated the pond floor. After a bit, we reached the shallows, battering our way through a section of cattails before reaching dry ground. I looked back at our fallen bird.
Swarms of Pinkertons climbed over the exterior. The other wing had apparently folded over the top of the airship, and the agents were trying to get it cleared off. Tesla and Skyhook stood just above the bridge, hands on hips, watching the work. Tesla waved to us, then climbed back inside. I spotted Gregory and Tembo working their way toward us. Happily, Greg slipped and fell into the drink, coming up a few seconds later, sputtering.
“You really shouldn’t be laughing,” Chesa said. “How would you feel if that were you?”
“Like most days,” I said. “You guys laugh at me a lot.”
“Well, you’re pretty funny. Just not in the ways you mean, sometimes.”
Tesla reappeared, this time with a foldable canoe that he plopped into the water. He paddled past Gregory and Tembo, waving primly, before beaching his craft and climbing up to us.
“I’m glad to see you all survived. Very few injuries, thanks to Ida’s ingenious wing . . . thing . . .” He looked back at the Silverhawk. “Honorius is heartbroken, obviously. But he’ll get over it.”
“Where’s Bethany?” I asked.
“Still on board with Adelaide and the Saint. I think she’s trying to keep them from killing each other,” Tesla said. “He used marble, if you can believe it.”
“For what?” Ida asked.
“Addie’s arm! Looks like a real arm, but it’s ivory. I don’t think she likes it very much.”
“Wait until she punches someone with it,” Chesa said. “She’ll come around.”
“What exactly happened back there?” Tesla asked. “One second we were flying peacefully, holding off the sky pirates . . .”
“Valkryies,” I said.
He shrugged and continued. “. . . . and the next thing you know, we’re falling out of the sky.”
“It was the aethervox,” Chesa said. She and I explained what we had seen, from the Cecilia construct to the portal opening in the screen and the black wave of energy. Tesla let out a low whistle.
“So she can possess makeshift bodies,” Tesla said. “That’s troubling.”
“At first I assumed we were entering your stupid reality,” Ida said, looking around. “But I don’t see a lot of dragons roaming around.”
“Uh, no. This is the real world. I can smell the processed grease from here.” I squinted at the mall. There was a crowd forming in the parking lot. Tembo and Greg completed their exodus and slogged up the hill, dripping wet. “How are we going to explain this?”
“Leave it to mundanity,” Chesa said. “It usually figures something out—weather balloon, or a fraternity prank. Something. The real question is how we get back into the Gestalt.”
“Well, the Silverhawk is grounded. And that crowd is getting closer. Any of you have a portal to the Unreal nearby?” Tesla asked.
“I don’t even know where we are,” I said. “There’s zero chance Esther’s tracked us, is there?”
Tembo, wringing out his robes by hand, shook his head.
“Then we’ll have to figure something out on our own,” Chesa said. “We’ll need to get our gear out of the ship at some point.”
“The Pinkertons can retrieve it. No need to slog back and forth. We have lifeboats,” Tesla said.
“What? You could have mentioned that,” Gregory said, as a young catfish slipped gleaming from his shin guard. “Ugh, I’ll never get the stink out.”
“At least you’ve had a bath now,” Ida said, wrinkling her nose.
True to Tesla’s word, the cargo door on the Silverhawk creaked open, and a small dinghy launched from the interior. Matthew, Addie, and Bethany sat in the front, flanking the isolation chest, while a team of Pinkertons rowed them to shore. Once they beached, we helped drag the trunk through the reeds and onto dry ground.
“Addie! Your hand!” Chesa exclaimed.
“Yeah, yeah.” The gunslinger’s new marble left arm was smooth, with faint seams along her forearm, wrist, and the joints of her hand. As she worked to pull the containment chest out of the boat, her hand clicked like pebbles dropping into a glass jar. “I’ll get used to it.”
“Best I could do on short notice and little Brilliance,” Matthew said. “Once we’re done, I’m sure The Good Doctor can change it back.”
“I retrieved the scarab.” Bethany produced the metallic beetle from one of her many pockets, handing it to Ida. “Thought you might need it.”
“I can probably reconstruct the tracking device,” she said. “Just not in the middle of a parking lot. This place is so mundane it could run for president. We’ll have to get as far away from here as possible. Get somewhere weird.”
“Weird? In a shopping mall?” Chesa asked. “Sounds like your department, Rast.”
“You mean that as an insult, but I assure you, it’s the highest compliment you can possibly give me,” I said. “I’ll have us back into the Unreal in no time.”
“If we’re abandoning the Silverhawk, I’m going to need some supplies from my laboratory,” Nik said. “And I’m sure Ida will as well.”
“Nope.” The young mechanic slapped the extensive toolbelt wrapped around her slim waist. “I’ve got everything I need right here.”
“Well, then. I shall be back in a jiffy,” Tesla said, guiding his canoe through the reeds.
“We should take the opportunity to tap our domains and retrieve our gear,” Tembo said. “I suspect we will not be coming back this way.”
“Gods willing.” Gregory shook his soggy boot. The rest of us collected our magical items from the chest, while nervously watching the ever-growing crowd on the far side of the parking lot. After a few minutes, Tesla emerged from the Silverhawk, heavily burdened.
“Okay, John. What are we doing?” Chesa asked.
“I have what you might call a clever plan.” I pointed to the shopping mall. “Follow me.”