Nadya Skylung and the Masked Kidnapper Page 10

  A cloud garden, in a skyscraper. There are six kids in here, and four of them shouldn’t be able to breathe the air.

  “Goshend’s tangled beard,” Tian Li says beside me. Her voice sounds all muffled through the mask. “Is this what the Orion’s garden is like?”

  I nod, swallowing. My mouth feels a little dry. I’ve told Pep a hundred times how much I wish I could share the garden with her. So why don’t I like seeing other people here? “Pretty much,” I say. “Except this one’s bigger. And greener.” Maybe that’s it. I’ve been so worried about whether I’m doing a good job with our cloud garden and whether I could ever be as good as Mrs. T, and this garden’s like a big neon sign saying, NOPE, YOU’RE A FAILURE. “Who takes care of this?”

  “Rash and me, mostly,” Alé says. The mask covers her mouth, but I can tell she’s grinning, proud as a cloud bird with a nest of new chicks. “The Goss comes up sometimes too, and there’s a few other kids who help out with the food.”

  “Isn’t it great?” Rash asks. He claps me on the back. “This is one of our biggest successes. Nobody’s ever had a cloud garden without a skylung or a cloudling to run it before!”

  I feel a little woozy. “Yeah,” I say. “Great.” There’s a soft-looking patch of grass a few feet away. “Mind if I sit down?” I crutch over and do it without them answering, trying to work some spit back into my mouth. No skylung. No cloudling. Nobody to talk to the plants and animals. And they’re still doing a better job than me.

  “These masks are incredible,” Tam says behind me. “How do they work? Do you think I could have one? Or make one? I mean, then Nadya and Aaron wouldn’t be stuck doing all the garden work in our balloon. This is amazing!”

  I touch my gills. “It isn’t amazing, Tam!” I snap. “It’s just a stupid box!” I lurch up and crutch into a stand of trees. I feel like crying, and I don’t want to do it in front of anybody else, plus I don’t want to insult Rash and Alé any more than I just did. But I’m so mad and confused I think if I’m around anybody else right now I’ll just keep snapping and snarling.

  I squeeze past the trees into a stand of bushes with bright, speckled flowers shaped like pitchers, brushing tears out of my eyes. I’ve spent my whole life trying to learn how to run a cloud garden. I had Mrs. T to teach me. I thought I was getting really good at it. She said I was getting really good at it. But now she’s gone and my garden’s not as good as this one.

  I can’t do anything right. I can’t take care of a cloud garden, I can’t keep my best friend from being mad at me, and Nic’s worried I’m gonna be a danger to the other kids on the crew. My whole life I’ve told myself I could do anything, but maybe I’ve always been wrong.

  Dumb and lucky, Tam called me once when he was really mad at me, and even though he apologized, it still stings sometimes. Maybe I was never really any good at taking care of the Orion’s cloud garden, and it was always just Mrs. T.

  I throw my crutches at a tree and immediately regret it. The plants here didn’t do anything wrong. They just grew, like they’re supposed to. I reach for it over the Panpathia. Sorry, I whisper. I’m just mad about a bunch of stuff. It’s not your fault. Are you okay?

  The tree stays completely still. In our garden, the plants don’t talk, but they do things like sigh or rustle their leaves or straighten up or slump. I frown. Something’s wrong here. I look around at the other plants and animals on the Panpathia. They’re all bright and golden, just like they should be, with little gold strands linking them.

  A lizard crawls up by my toes, and I try to find its mind. Hello? I ask. How are you?

  The lizard tilts its head and blinks at me, then scuttles off. The plants behind me shiver, but it’s just from the air circulating. Hello? I ask again, louder. Is anybody there?

  Hello . . . , a voice whispers back at last. It sounds like a saw being dragged over a bed of nails, and it feels like a worm wriggling into my ear and biting.

  I shake my head, trying to get rid of the feeling. Hi, I respond. Do you live here? What are you? Where are you? If whatever that voice belongs to lives in this garden, then maybe Rash and Alé aren’t the great caretakers I thought they were. That voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to something healthy.

  Just a friend, the voice whispers, but I don’t believe it. This thing doesn’t have friends, whatever it is. Just victims. I take deep breaths and look around at the trees, the lizards, the birds, trying to figure out what and where this thing is.

  Something dark and shadowy skitters, far off on the Panpathia, and suddenly I remember where I am: in the middle of Far Agondy, not in the Orion’s cloud balloon. It’s not safe here. There are nasty things all over the web in this place.

  The voice chuckles, and even though I know I should leave the Panpathia, I can’t stop listening. It’s like when a mouse stares into the eyes of a snake. Sometimes you just freeze.

  You’re close, the voice says. I can feel it. One of the skyscrapers just down the way. And so strong. You remind me of . . . It couldn’t be. But you are. You ARE! The voice works itself up higher, shouting like a hurricane wind. You’re the one who escaped! The one it wants! It laughs, a whirlwind banging a hundred garbage cans together. Oh, how marvelous. Stay put, will you? Just stick right where you are, and I’ll have someone there to get you very soon. Whatever’s behind the voice smiles, and it sounds like a drawer full of knives being opened. And then we’ll sit down, you and I, and have a long chat about what happened on the cloudship Remora.

  Something grabs hold of my mind and pulls it on the Panpathia. I fly through Rash and Alé’s garden and out over the city, sliding along slick golden strands. A face looms out of the darkness. It’s a silver mask, two big eyes carved wide-open, staring, and a snarling mouth with jagged, sharpened teeth.

  Hello, the voice says. So nice to make your acquaintance . . .

  I finally get my mind in gear and jump off the Panpathia. Goshend be good, there’s nothing keeping me there like there was on the Orion last month.

  “Tam,” I squeak. I open my eyes and I’m still surrounded by the eerie brightness of Rash and Alé’s strange, silent cloud garden. “Tian Li, Aaron, Alé, Rash . . .” I can’t find my voice. The lizard I saw before skitters toward me, and I flinch away and crawl back. Everything in this garden feels wrong, and if I stay put another second, that voice will send something to get me. I have to go. I have to go now.

  I nab my crutches, wobble to my feet, and head for the door as fast as I can.

  “Nadya!” somebody calls, but I don’t care. “Nadya, what’re you doing?”

  I crutch to the door and lean on the wheel, but I can’t get enough weight on it to make it turn with just one foot to brace me. I suck air in and out of my gills faster than I need to. The world spins. My face tingles. I can’t get out. I’m stuck here. Something’s coming for me, and I can’t get out!

  “Come on!” I scream. I jump and use my whole body to get the wheel to turn, and finally it loosens. I fall down, but I pull myself right back up again and start to tug the door open.

  Tam reaches over my shoulder and pushes it shut. “Nadya, what’s going on?”

  I turn to face him and he looks like a monster, the kind of thing that silver-masked creature would send after me. “Let me go!” I shout, and I push him away. “Just let me go!”

  Tam backs off, hands up. “It’s the mask, isn’t it?” he asks. He pulls it up so it’s not covering his face anymore. He stands there, holding his breath, and looks at me, eyes clear and brown and deep. My chest heaves. My head spins.

  But he looks like Tam again, and I start to calm down. I nod and close my eyes. “You can put it back on,” I say. “I’m just not gonna look, okay?”

  I hear Tam fiddling with the mask, and then he takes a few long, deep breaths. “Okay,” he says. “What happened?”

  I keep my eyes shut, but I reach out for him. I need a hug,
and I’m glad he’s there to give one to me. I tell him everything that happened, and he hugs me until I’m done explaining. Then he says Rash and Alé were talking about the kidnappings before and he thinks they might have an idea what’s going on.

  I let go of him and wipe the tears from my eyes. I can still hear that masked man’s voice in my head, nails and saws and wriggling shadowy things. I shudder.

  “You okay, Nadya?” Tam asks.

  I take a deep breath and nod, and then we head off to find the others.

  * * *

  • • •

  I still don’t like looking at the masks. I’ve calmed down, and I sit next to Tam, but mostly I try to focus on Aaron because he looks the way I expect him to. Everybody’s sitting in a circle under one of the sun-in-a-jars, where Rash and Alé have some chairs and benches set up.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to them. “I’m really sorry I called this place a stupid box.” I take a deep breath of warm, moist, plant-scented air, then let it out shakily. “This garden is amazing. It’s just . . . what’s the thing you’ve spent the most time working on, your whole life?”

  Rash scratches his face. “My inventions, I guess,” he says.

  Alé nods. “Me too.”

  “Well, imagine if we invited you over to the Orion, and we were showing you around and all having a great time, and then I took you into a room and there were all your inventions, except I’d done them better, and everybody got all excited and I started telling them how easy it was to invent stuff like this if you just read this one book I had about inventing.”

  Rash grunts. Alé leans back and looks up at the ceiling. “That’d feel pretty bad,” she says after a second.

  I pick at some dirt on my pant legs. My hands feel cold. “The thing I’ve worked on the most in my whole life is learning how to take care of a cloud garden. I thought I was good at it. But when I saw how good you guys were, I got scared that maybe I wasn’t, and then I got mad and took it out on you, and I shouldn’t have done that and I’m sorry.”

  Alé shrugs. “No big deal,” Rash says. “You should hear some of the names Alé calls my inventions.” She socks him in the ribs.

  I take a long, deep breath. There’s more I gotta say. “Okay,” I start. “So, I tried to talk to the plants and animals in here, but they couldn’t talk back—”

  “We know,” Alé interrupts. “We had another skylung over once and he said the same thing. We think it’s because they don’t have anybody around to talk to. We want to get skylungs to come in every once in a while and see if they pick it up.”

  That explains that, at least. “And then I heard this voice,” I continue. “This really awful voice, and it said it was looking for me and it knew who I was and what happened with the pirates last month. When I saw the thing it belonged to, it had this big, nasty silver mask on. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Silvermask,” Rash breathes. Alé whistles.

  “Yeah, a silver mask,” I say. “What’s it mean?”

  “Sorry,” Rash says. “That’s the name of the gang lord we were talking about earlier. The new one behind the kidnappings. They say he’s a skylung, and that’s how he finds his victims.” He puts his head in his hands. “We shoulda told you. Oh, man, we shoulda just told you. I’m sorry, Nadya.”

  The walls of the garden close in, looming over me like the fingers of an enormous, evil hand. “Could he get me here?” I bite my lip to keep it from quivering. If he says yes, I think I’ll probably lose it.

  “No,” Alé says quickly. “Not here. It’s too far out of his territory, and the Goss has the place locked up. He’d need an army to break in, and he doesn’t have one yet.” She stands up and starts pacing, like she’s thinking real hard. “I bet he knows that. I bet he said all that stuff to spook you into running so you’d end up on the streets alone where he could get you.” She tugs at the cuffs of her jacket. “We need to protect you. Rash? Can we?”

  Rash nods and slaps his thigh. “Abso-freakin’-lutely. I’ll get word out to the other Dawnrunners first thing tomorrow.”

  “The what?” Tam asks.

  “That’s what we brought you up here to talk about,” Alé says. “Rash and me put together a group of kids to fight back against Silvermask. We call ourselves the Dawnrunners, but we have to be real careful not to let the Goss know about it or she might stop us. We’re mostly kids who run messages and deliver things and do odd jobs around the city.”

  Rash, who’s sitting underneath a big palm tree, cuts in smoothly. “When the kidnappings started, we needed a way to fight back. The other kids in the network tell us where the abductions are, and we arrange protection for any skylung or cloudling who has to head into dangerous territory. Sometimes we get help from adults or the police, but usually it’s just a gang of five or six kids. Silvermask’s thugs never work in groups of more than two. We don’t know why, but we figure maybe it’s because otherwise they’d be too easy to spot. They kinda . . .”

  He trails off, like he’s not sure how to describe it, and Alé picks up. “They feel wrong, when they get close to you. They act like they don’t have minds of their own, do stuff like walk into garbage cans and knock them over. And they get really spooked by fire. Some of us think they’re like puppets, that Silvermask controls them over the Panpathia somehow.”

  “That’s not how the Panpathia works,” I say, but then I remember the Malumbra making me walk around in my cloud garden when it got its shadow in my mind last month, and I’m not so sure anymore. “Er, maybe. Aaron, does that make sense to you?”

  Aaron’s sitting sort of curled up, with his knees tucked against his chest. He’s focused very hard on the plants behind Alé. “Yes,” he says at last. “It sounds like the people who came to town and took everybody.”

  My stomach sours, and we all sit beneath the silent palms, thinking. “So Silvermask would have Aaron’s sister, then?” I ask eventually.

  Alé tugs her cuffs again. “Best chance, anyway. We don’t think Silvermask takes the kidnapped kids out of the city. We’re not sure what happens to them.” She stops pacing and looks at me, and I flinch. That mask. I really don’t like it. “But how’d he know who you are? How’d he know what happened with you and the pirates?”

  “The ones who escaped the Orion!” Tian Li says. She slaps her hands together and curses colorfully. “He must’ve helped them, or they must’ve gone to him or something.”

  “But how’d they know?” Tam asks.

  I grimace. “We weren’t exactly quiet around them.” I could kick myself for it now. We could’ve been a lot more careful. “They probably pieced together the story from listening to us.” I remember seeing them sleeping sometimes, and I’d just crutch right past, blabbering on about whatever to whoever. Maybe they weren’t really sleeping after all. Maybe they had a plan, and this was it.

  “So does Nadya just stay here, then?” Tam asks.

  “No!” Rash, Alé, and I all say at once. Tam flinches.

  “We can’t risk keeping her here. Silvermask knows where she is, and he’ll start messing with us. He might kidnap other kids, even,” Alé explains. “We can’t protect everyone all the time, and we can’t tell the Goss or your officers what we know because then the Goss would bust us for starting the Dawnrunners.”

  Tam’s face twists, but he doesn’t disagree. He just stares at the ground.

  I swallow and look around. The garden doesn’t seem quite so spooky anymore, but I still don’t like it. “Besides,” I say, “I don’t wanna stay here if he knows where I am. The Orion’s home. If I have to hide anywhere, I want to be there.”

  Everybody goes quiet for a few seconds. “How do we get her outta here, then?” Tian Li asks.

  Alé plops onto the grass, leans back, and yawns. “We wait till morning, after Tam and the Goss get her prosthesis figured out. Silvermask’ll be watching the building,
so we’ll use a decoy through the front and get you out another way.”

  “Like what?” I ask.

  She sits up. I can hear the smile in her voice. “Oh,” she says, “I’ve got something in mind.”

  CHAPTER 10

  IN WHICH NADYA HAS A NARROW ESCAPE.

  The next morning, I’m standing on top of Gossner’s building on the other side of the roof from where Rash’s gliders are, feeling a hot breeze gust up from the street and nervously watching a zip line bounce over my head.

  “Don’t worry,” Alé says, laughing. “I do this all the time. We’ll be totally fine.”

  I gulp, looking at her hair blowing around like the branches of an angry willow and her jacket buttoned up tight with all the pockets zipped shut, and nod. She’s checking a thin metal box that sits on a steel cable. Inside the box are three grooved wheels, with the cable running along the grooves. The whole thing comes apart in two pieces to snap on or off the cable. A short piece of super-tough woven material called webbing runs from the box to a metal clip, and that attaches to a safety belt that goes around your waist and legs, just like the ones we use on the Orion.

  Alé clips the webbing to her belt, then opens the roller and snaps it onto the cable. She gives it a test pull back and forth, and it moves smoothly.

  It looks sturdy enough, but catapulting through the air thirty stories above the street still makes me nervous. “Tam used to do this?” I ask.

  “Yep!” Alé says. “Loved it too.”

  I haven’t seen Tam since we spent a couple hours after breakfast working with Gossner. She took a whole bunch of measurements of my leg, some for the sleeve and some for the cylinder. Then she spent a long time going over the mechanics of the prosthesis so we’ll understand how it’ll work once she’s done modifying it. Not all of it made sense to me, but I figure I’ll sort it out once the leg’s ready. Gossner said it might take a while to make the sleeve and do all the refinements, but she promised to have it before we leave port. Looking at Alé walking around, I can’t wait.