Nadya Skylung and the Masked Kidnapper Read online

  ALSO BY JEFF SEYMOUR

  Nadya Skylung and the Cloudship Rescue

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  Text copyright © 2019 by Jeff Seymour. Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Brett Helquist.

  Cover art © 2019 by Brett Helquist.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Seymour, Jeff (Fantasy fiction writer), author. | Helquist, Brett, illustrator.

  Title: Nadya Skylung and the masked kidnapper / Jeff Seymour; illustrated by Brett Helquist.

  Description: New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2019]

  Summary: “A gang leader called Silvermask is kidnapping skylung and cloudling children in the port of Far Agondy, and it is up to Nadya and her friends to rescue the missing kids and put a stop to Silvermask once and for all”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018025890 | ISBN 9781524738686 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524738693 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Airships—Fiction. | Kidnapping—Fiction. | Gangs—Fiction. | Orphans—Fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S468 Nam 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025890

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To Cass and Oren, the rock and the sunshine

  CONTENTS

  Also by Jeff Seymour

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  IN WHICH NADYA GOES FISHING, AND CATCHES MORE THAN SHE BARGAINED FOR.

  “Ready, Nadya?”

  My stomach rolls, and I stare at the gently swelling waves of the turquoise ocean. I’m clipped into the back seat of the Flightwing, a pedal-powered flying machine that can hover or rise and fall like a hummingbird, baking in the hot sun with the wind whistling in my ears. In front of me, Tam Ban, the kid who keeps the cloudship Orion fixed up, is squeezed next to Pepper Pott, our fireminder.

  And we’re fishing in dangerous waters.

  My name’s Nadya Skylung, and I keep the Orion afloat—pretty much all by myself now. I tend the garden that keeps her cloud balloon inflated, and without the balloon, the ship wouldn’t fly.

  “Everything okay back there?” Pep asks while she works the Flightwing’s elevation pedals. What she really means is Are you okay back there? I don’t like the Flightwing much anymore. I got hurt on it last month, and riding in it makes me nervous. But our newest crew member, Aaron, asked me to come fishing with the others today. He had a bad feeling about the water and wanted me to make sure they’d be all right.

  “Yeah,” I say, balancing a silver cage on my lap. “Just getting the bait ready.” I smear honey on some stale crackers between the bars. The water seems fine to me—shining in the sunlight, moving gently. The day’s as gorgeous as a postcard portrait, and the Orion’s about four hundred feet above us, hanging in the sky like an eagle watching her chicks learn to fly.

  Pep turns around. A cloud of fire-orange curls floats around her head, sailing every which way in the downdraft from the Flightwing’s main propeller. Her face, which is usually pretty pale, is a little sunburned from spending too much time outside yesterday, just like mine. Next to her, Tam frowns at the Flightwing’s controls. He’s sunburned too, although you can’t really see it on him because his skin’s darker than ours. Both Pepper and Tam have on big tinted goggles to keep them from getting blinded by the sun and crashing us into the water or the Orion or something. I wish I had a pair, but there’s only two of them on the ship.

  The wind shoves the Flightwing around, and my mind races like a frightened rabbit, wondering if Tam’s about to lose control or if a strut will snap and dump me into the ocean. I used to be able to handle a little wind, no problem, but I get scared easy these days. I hate it. I’d give anything to get my nerve back.

  Pep holds the cage steady while I finish the bait, which I appreciate. Last month we had a run-in with some real nasty pirates, and I got shot in the shoulder and the leg. My shoulder’s healing up okay, but it still clicks when I rotate it, and it’s sore as heck, so working with it’s hard.

  My leg’s another story. After I got shot, Nic had to cut off my left leg below the knee to keep an infection in my calf wound from spreading upward. Sometimes I wish he hadn’t and I’d taken my chances with the infection. Sometimes I think my life’s ruined, and I feel like locking my door and never going outside again. But most days I’m glad he did what he did, because if the infection had gotten worse I might’ve died. I can flex my knee and move around pretty good now, and I don’t even have a bandage anymore.

  I’m getting used to my stump, too, which Nic calls my residual limb and I call the Mighty Lady. It’s new and strange, but nobody on the crew has anything like it, and I like my scar, which kinda looks like a smile if I flex my muscles a certain way and kinda looks like a frown if I flex them the other.

  “Any day now, Nadya!” Tam shouts. The Flightwing bounces. Pep faces forward and bites her lip, concentrating. The wind’s getting strong. It must be hard keeping us steady.

  Gingerly, I slide across the seats and push the bait cage to the edge of the Flightwing. The honey crackers hang on hooks inside it, and there’s a one-way gate at the front so fish can swim in and get the bait but can’t swim out again. Tam and Pepper built it to help us catch fish for the baby leviathan we’re delivering, using spare parts for the engines and some kitchen utensils.

  The Flightwing bobs and sways as I move. Partly that’s the breeze, but partly it’s my fault. The Flightwing’s just two aluminum skids on legs welded to an aluminum rowboat with a tail and a couple rotors and seats. It’s really lightweight, which helps it fly, but it’s also easy to push around.

&n
bsp; My shoulder clicks, but I manage to toss the cage overboard and get clear of the rope attached to it. The cage falls for a couple seconds, its rope unspooling, then splashes into the waves. I let it sink to the depth where the schoolers we’re fishing for like to swim, then use a climbing device Tam clipped to the side of the Flightwing to brake the rope and tie it off.

  After that we sit and wait. The Flightwing’s main rotor is so loud we can’t talk much, so I lean back and check on the Orion. Our first mate, Tall Thom, is at her wheel. He’s a fireminder like Pep. Tian Li Chang, our starwinder and navigator, stands next to him, looking down at us. Salyeh Abande—our polymath—and Captain Nic must be in the cabin, figuring out how we’re going to recover from our disaster with the pirates. Aaron’s moving carefully on the catwalks outside our cloud balloon, checking on the plants there. They’ve been churning out a lot of crops, but we’ve eaten almost all the other food, so there probably won’t be enough trade goods to sell to make up our losses on this trip.

  The Mighty Lady barks like somebody stabbed her with a skewer, and I look down at where my calf’s missing and remind myself it’s gone, then rub the muscles in my residual limb until the pain goes away. Every once in a while I get these ghost pains, like my nerves think it’s important to remind me that my leg got hurt.

  I sigh and slump in my seat. I’m starting to sweat, and my sunburn’s probably getting worse by the minute. I want to get back to the Orion, where it’s cool and shady, so I lean over and check the cage, trying to see whether we’ve hooked any schoolers yet. Sure enough, there’s a big cloud of silvery fish clustered around the spot where the rope disappears into the water. Won’t be long now before we have enough fish to get into port.

  The waves churn. The sun glints off them. It’s so bright it makes the water beneath the fish look dark and shadowy, like a cloud’s passing overhead.

  My guts flutter, and I frown and squint, then look up. No cloud. I look back down, and the shadowy spot gets bigger. I remember Aaron’s bad feeling, and then I get an icy chill down the back of my neck and feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach.

  “Pep!” I shriek. “Take us up! Get higher!”

  “What?” she shouts back. She turns around, and the Flightwing swings to the side and drops a few feet lower as she gets distracted from pedaling.

  “Up!” I shout, pointing. “We need to go up!”

  “How come?” Tam yells. “Are the fish not—”

  I unclip my safety harness and throw myself across the bar between our seats. I don’t have room to nudge Pep out of the way, so I dive onto her lap and grab the pedals with my hands. “Something’s coming!”

  Pep jerks her feet away from the pedals, and I crank with my hands as fast as I can. The Flightwing’s main rotor roars louder, and we start to rise. My shoulder grinds and hurts, but I ignore it. I’m staring straight down at the shadowy spot, and it’s getting bigger.

  “Nadya, I can do it!” Pep shouts. She elbows me in the ribs. “I get it! Let me do it!”

  But I’m not willing to stop pedaling to let Pepper take over. The shadow gets as big as the Orion, then even bigger, and then the sea opens up. All the little silvery fish, plus enough water to flood a whole neighborhood, get sucked down with an enormous pop. Glistening teeth the size of people emerge from the water, and I realize I’m staring into the mouth of a full-grown, deep-sea leviathan, a sea serpent big enough to eat a ship without chewing.

  Our little silver cage dangles between its jaws for a second. I crank harder, and Tam curses and pulls a lever. A bunch of machinery clunks into place next to my head, and then he starts pedaling too and the Flightwing shoots up like a cork at the bottom of a bucket of water. The cage clears the leviathan’s teeth just as it gets above the waves and snaps its jaws shut with a resounding boom.

  It keeps rising for another few feet, then twists as it starts to fall back to the ocean. Its eyes meet mine, and my heart tumbles.

  They’re completely black, flecked with little bits of purple, except for a few spots of gold in the corners. It looks sad and lost and lonely—an enormous, ancient creature losing a fight to something awful and shadowy, and terrified of what’s going to happen when it does.

  The leviathan hits the water with a crash so big it vibrates the whole Flightwing. We must be a hundred feet up now, but the spray still soaks me. I stare at the churning, angry water where the leviathan hit. Slowly, its shadow recedes as it dives.

  “Wow,” Tam says, still pedaling to keep us steady, wiping water out of his hair.

  “Yeah. Wow,” Pep echoes.

  I shiver and pull myself out of the footwell where the pedals are, so Pep and I are crammed next to each other in the front seat. She scoots away. “Yeah,” I say. I keep thinking about that glimpse of gold in the leviathan’s eyes, and the sadness there. “Sorry about jumping over you like that.”

  Pep shrugs, but her smile looks like a rope that’s about to snap. “It’s fine,” she says, but her eyes tell me, I’m lying. Let’s talk later, when Tam’s not around.

  Slowly, I climb into the back seat, and Pepper takes over the pedals again. The leviathan’s shadow has gone completely now, and all I see below us are the waves and the little cage, glinting silver and full of fish. My heart’s still thumping, and I watch the water, wondering whether it just went deeper so it could get a bigger start on jumping toward us. “I think we caught everything we need to!” I yell over the rotors. “Ready to go home?”

  “Ready!” Tam says. The Flightwing spins around to face the Orion, which got a little behind us as we blew in the breeze, then starts rising again.

  The pivot faces me east, where I can see the coastline. In a couple days we’ll reach Far Agondy, a city of shadows and silver and smoke. I heard a girl screaming there one night over the telepathic web of the Panpathia, getting kidnapped and calling for help. Nic’s trying to convince me it was a dream, but I know it wasn’t. She was in trouble. Something was hurting her.

  The pirates we fought last month were stealing kids too, skylungs like me and cloudlings like Aaron. Maybe they were working with the people who took that girl I saw. I don’t like all these kidnappings. If nobody puts a stop to them, sooner or later it’ll be me or my friends getting nabbed.

  We have a lot to do in Far Agondy—get the ship fixed up, tell the Cloud Navy about the pirates, deliver the baby leviathan, and more—but I want to help that girl and stop the kidnappers. And I’m going to find a way to do it, even if Nic and my fears and all the leviathans in the world try to stop me.

  CHAPTER 2

  IN WHICH A GAME OF BROOMBALL IS WON, AND A MYSTERY DISCOVERED.

  “Nadya!”

  The stretchy-band fights me, like an eel wrapped around my calf . . .

  “Nadya!”

  The stretchy-band stretches, like an overcooked pork chop . . .

  “Come on, Nadya! Are you ready yet or what?”

  It’s the afternoon after our fishing expedition. The fish and the Flightwing are in the hold, the deck’s been cleared, and I’m trying my hardest to forget about the leviathan that almost gobbled us up, because we’re about to play broomball for the first time in ages. I just have to finish the Mighty Lady’s exercises first. Two more knee bends, and then I pull off the stretchy-band wrapped around my calf, tug it back, and slingshot it across my cabin. “Just a sec!” I shout, and I scoot off my bed and hop across the floor to my desk, where my journal’s open. I dash down a couple of my best lines so I don’t forget them.

  “Nadya, we’ll start without you if we have to!”

  I roll my eyes. If they play without me, the teams won’t be even. “Okay, I’m coming!”

  I shut my journal and hop to the corner of my desk, where my crutches—an old one and one Tam made after I got hurt—are leaning, waiting for me. According to Nic, I’m still supposed to be taking it easy on my leg and shoulder.

 
I grin. Easy, in my book, doesn’t always mean what he thinks it does.

  I crutch to the door and open it. Tian Li’s waiting for me on the other side, her hair waving like black seaweed in the breeze. She smiles. I think she’s looking forward to Far Agondy. Someday she wants to go back to the big city she’s from, T’an Gaban, and change it for the better, and whenever we’re in port she spends a lot of time ashore making notes about how she’s gonna do it. “Ready?” she asks.

  I nod and look over the deck. Salyeh and Tam have cleared away everything but the capstans—two giant winches we use sometimes when we’re in port—and the ladder up to the cloud balloon in the center. Pep and Tian Li have hauled up two desk-sized goals made of spare pipes and netting and set them on opposite sides of the deck. One’s right near my cabin, and the other’s by the doorway to Nic’s cabin all the way down the ship.

  I start sweating, even though we’re in the shadow of the cloud balloon and the breeze hasn’t slacked off. Broomball has always been one of my favorite games, but I haven’t played since I lost my leg.

  The game normally has simple rules: two teams of two, with the fifth kid playing all-time offense. Every player gets a long broom with stiff bristles, and we use the brooms to bat around a heavy inflatable rubber ball the size of my head. We used to have problems losing the ball over the side, but now Tam puts up nets between the cloud balloon cables to keep that from happening. Broomball’s usually a fast-paced game, with the three kids on offense trying to get around the two kids on defense to score a goal, then scrambling back on defense if they lose the ball.

  But now Aaron wants to play too, so we’ve had to change the rules. For starters, we’ll have two teams of three. That might make the deck too cramped, so Tam’s drawn a semicircle in front of each goal, and one player on each team will stay inside it as goalie, trying to keep the ball out of the net with their broom and their body. For this game, one of them’ll be me. Nic said goalie oughta be easier on my leg than jostling around with the others.