Nadya Skylung and the Masked Kidnapper Read online

  “Okay,” Alé says after checking all the buckles on her safety belt. “That does me. Let’s get yours rigged up.”

  I crutch over to her. There’s another zip-line roller on the ground next to her, and she shows me how to get it on the line, then tugs the webbing through a buckle until it’s the right length to clip to my safety belt. The leg loops on the belt ride around my hips, between my thighs and my torso. My crutches I’ll hold against my chest.

  Alé checks a few things and tests out the roller, then grins at me. “All set,” she says. “You ready to fly?”

  I nod, and somewhere under the horde of butterflies in my stomach, I’m a little excited. I’ve seen people zipping all over town on these things, but I’ve never gotten to try one. And they do look like fun, even though it means screaming around at a million miles an hour three hundred feet above the ground.

  “You’ll do great.” She checks her watch and leans over the edge of the building, peering down. “They should be leaving any minute now.”

  The plan to distract the Shadowmen, which is what Rash and Alé call Silvermask’s gang, is complicated. Early this morning, Rash took off in one of his gliders to talk to the Dawnrunners, and they found a girl who looks a lot like me. She and Rash are going to leave the building before Thom and the gang, acting like they’re in a big, scared rush. They’ll race into the street and grab a motorcab, which will take them a few blocks away, where they’ll rendezvous with six other Dawnrunners dressed like me. Then they’ll all split off in different directions and make their way to safe houses the Dawnrunners have set up across the city.

  My stomach flips and flops. That’s a lot of kids I don’t even know taking a huge risk for me. But when I mentioned it to Rash, he shrugged. “They’re excited to try this,” he said. “A lot of these kids have lost friends and family to Silvermask. They want to stick it in his eye however they can.”

  I’m still not totally comfortable with it, but here we are, getting ready to go. We told Thom that I really, really wanted a chance to try the zip lines out with Alé, and I made all kinds of promises about not getting into trouble or going off on my own, and said I’d get back to the Orion before they would. When he still wouldn’t give in, I flashed some pretty good moon eyes and pouted and told him I understood but I just felt so cooped up and Mrs. T always said I should see the world. Eventually he caved.

  It occurs to me that’s exactly the kind of thing that got Alan Salawag kicked off the Orion, and I have second thoughts. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe I should go back down and tell Thom the truth. We can trust him to keep Rash and Alé’s secret, can’t we?

  “There they go,” Alé says.

  Rash and a girl with blond hair run out the front of the building into a black motorcab waiting on the corner. The cab takes off quickly, and sure as spit someone near the door steps into the street and points at it, and then a couple other cars pull out of an alley and follow as it races away.

  My neck gets goose bumps. “It’s real,” I say. “They’re after me.” It’s too late now to change the plan. Rash and the Dawnrunners are already putting themselves in danger. I can’t chicken out.

  “Come on,” Alé says. “We gotta get out of here before they realize what’s up.” She steps onto the roof’s stone railing. “You got your tailhook ready?”

  I look behind me, where there’s a hook on a short rope hanging from the back loop of my safety belt. Its job is to catch a wire as we get close to our landing zone. There’s another wire that catches the roller, but this way, in case it snaps, there’s still something to slow me down. “Yep.”

  “Great,” Alé says. “I’ll go first. It’s real easy. See the signal light?”

  There’s a light at the landing this zip line runs to. If it’s green, the wires are set to catch you and you’re good to slide. If it’s red, you can’t go or else you’ll end up slamming into a crash pad at the landing. Alé says that’s a real nasty way to stop, that at least one kid gets a serious injury from it every year and adults, who are heavier, have died.

  I swallow and nod.

  “Great,” Alé says. “Then all you gotta do is hold the webbing to stay upright and remember not to scream. Just let gravity do the rest. Like so!” Alé sticks out her tongue, grabs her webbing with one hand, and holds up two fingers on her other hand like they’re wolf ears. Then she leans backward until she falls off the building. My heart tries to jump out of my throat and grab her, but the roller and the webbing and the cable catch her and sling her forward, and soon she’s sailing over the street, through an alley that leads to another skyscraper eight blocks away. Before I know it, she’s halfway there.

  “Okay,” I tell myself. “Okay, Nadya, you can do this.”

  I crutch over to the railing, sit on it, and stand up, holding my crutches like they’re a life preserver and grabbing the webbing so hard it makes my fingers hurt. “Okay,” I say again. I can’t see Alé anymore, but the light’s red, so she must’ve hit the wires and arrived. A few seconds later, the light turns green. “Just jump.”

  My leg doesn’t seem to be listening. “Just jump,” I repeat. I look down. It’s a long, long way to the street.

  I shut my eyes, take a deep breath, and jump.

  My stomach leaps like I left it on the building, and I shriek before I remember that Alé told me not to scream. It feels like I drop a hundred feet before the cable catches me, but it’s probably only ten or twelve, and then I’m whizzing forward faster and faster, the wind ripping at my hair and tugging my breath away. I spin around so my shoulder’s in front and I can breathe a little easier, and I open my eyes.

  I’m flying.

  I mean, I’ve been in a lot of flying machines by now, but this is the closest I’ve ever been to really flying, like Rash in his glider. There’s nothing between me and the ground but air and my tailhook dangling behind me. I’m moving as fast as a striking hawk, passing over oilcars and horse cars and steam cars and streetcars and people and shops and food carts and all the packed-in life of Far Agondy. I feel like shouting, but I settle for laughing instead. What a rush!

  The cable levels out, and I just barely see the wires for the roller and tailhook before they snag and slow me down. My safety belt tugs on me, but the system must be designed pretty well, because it doesn’t squeeze too hard. The building rushes toward me slower and slower, and then the wire lets go and I roll gently through a window on the twenty-second floor and bump against a big, thick pad the size and shape of a feather mattress.

  Alé’s standing below it on another pad, already off the wire, her roller clipped to her belt. “Well?” she asks. “How was it?”

  I’m still breathing hard, but I grin. “It was great!” I shout. “You really get to do this every day?”

  “Sure do,” she says, laughing. “Best part of my job, by a hundred miles.”

  There’s an iron platform just the right height for me to stand on next to Alé, close enough to the zip line you can reach it with your foot if you stretch, but far enough that you won’t crash into it by accident. Alé grabs my ankle and guides me toward it.

  And then things start to happen very fast.

  Somebody grabs me. I’m not sure where he comes from, but all of a sudden there’s a man in a long black overcoat with a shadowy face wrestling with Alé over my leg, and I’m spinning toward the other side of the crash pad where he’s standing. His eyes are dark as wet plum pits, like the leviathan’s I saw in the ocean, and I shriek and swing a crutch at him. It smacks him in the jaw, but he just grunts and keeps pulling. Alé loses her grip on my leg, and the guy yanks me toward him. He unsnaps my roller and yanks it off the cable, dropping me onto the crash pad with a thump.

  The guy’s still got my leg, and he pulls me toward him, so I let go of one crutch and hold the other in both hands, slamming it on his fingers, screaming, hoping somebody’s around on this landing
to hear me.

  The man lets go after I hit his hand for the third time and reaches into his pocket. He pulls out a long knife, and I freeze. I feel like I’m back on the Remora staring into the barrel of a gun, except this time I’ve got nothing to fight with and nowhere to go.

  “Crawl back, Nadya!” Alé shouts. “Crawl back!” She jumps onto the pad in front of me, pulls something out of her coat, and gives it a savage flick with her wrist. A long, thin rod slides out of a rubber-coated handle in her hand, and she swishes it toward the shadowy guy’s wrist. It lands with a heavy thwack, and he drops the knife.

  “Get to the next zip line!” Alé points over her shoulder, where another line leaves through an open window about ten feet away. “Hurry! There might be another one coming!” She keeps swishing that rod of hers, and the shadowy guy stumbles back a few steps. She gets him in the leg, then the face, then the leg twice more in the same spot. His knee gives out, and he falls down and lies there staring at her, like he’s not sure what’s happening.

  The crutch I dropped is next to the guy Alé’s fighting, so I leave it behind, snap my roller together, and slide off the crash pad, hopping and stumbling on one crutch toward the next zip line as fast as I can. When I get there, I fiddle with the cable, trying to remember how Alé attached the roller. At first I can’t get it to click back together, but eventually I realize I’ve got it backward. There are now two guys coming toward Alé, and she’s swinging that rod like it’s a sword to keep them back, but they’re starting to surround her and it won’t be long before they have her.

  “Just go!” Alé shouts. “Go! I’ll follow, I promise! But I need you out of the way!”

  I just barely remember to check for a green light before I jump off the platform and let the zip line carry me off. I spin back to see what Alé’s doing, but I’m moving so fast I can’t see her at all, so I turn to see what’s ahead of me instead. I really hope there aren’t any shadowy guys in this building, because I don’t think I could hold them off with my crutch the same way Alé uses that rod.

  A few seconds later, I hit the wires and slow down, and this time when I bump into the crash pad I hit the catch on my roller right away, flop down, and roll off the pad. I end up on my back, looking at the all-clear light.

  It’s still red.

  “Shoot,” I mutter. “Shoot, shoot, shoot!” I scoot off the platform and stand, then search for the mechanism that resets the wire. I don’t even know what it looks like. There’s a couple chairs, a table with some switches by it, a message board . . .

  And there, a winch over by the base of the platform, attached to the safety wires. I crutch over to it, but with how fast those guys were closing in, I think I’m probably going to be too late. I’m trying not to hyperventilate and think about Alé getting kidnapped and me getting lost in the knife-forest maze of Far Agondy’s skyscrapers when I hear someone screaming at the top of their lungs, coming down the zip line toward me.

  “No way,” I whisper, and then Alé comes flying down the cable, not even using a roller, just holding on for dear life to a metal chain she must’ve been keeping in one of those pockets of hers. She zooms in feetfirst, lets go of the chain, and thumps into the crash pad hard enough that it shakes the platform.

  Immediately, she falls back onto the pad. She tries to get up, but her leg buckles. “Mmgh,” she mutters. “Goshend’s stinkin’ fish breath, that hurt. Nadya, close the shutters. See the winch by the window?”

  I follow her eyes and spot another, bigger winch next to a track that looks like it closes two huge shutters over the window we came in through.

  “We close them when big storms come in. Do it now. Just turn it to the left.”

  I crutch over and lean on the winch. It’s heavy, but it’s oiled well, and after a bit of grunting and struggling to get the right leverage, I get it turning. Two enormous iron storm shutters slide along the track and thud together with a thunderous boom.

  “Okay,” Alé says from the platform, sitting up and wincing. “That oughta buy us a little time.” I crutch her way, and she smiles at me weakly. “Think I busted my ankle. The real one. I can’t believe none of us realized they’d be watching the zip lines. Sorry they almost got you.”

  I spend a few seconds staring at the big doors I just closed, breathing hard, letting the fear-octopus crawl back into my stomach as I tell myself that nobody could possibly get through all that metal. Then what Alé said sinks in, and I turn back to her. “‘Sorry’? You were amazing! You saved my life! How’d you learn to fight like that?”

  Alé shrugs. “Just practice with the Dawnrunners, I guess.” She flops onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s not much fun in real life though.”

  We sit quietly for a few seconds. It wasn’t fun for me either.

  Just as my leg tires out and I’m looking for a place to sit down, Alé grunts and rolls onto her side. “We’d better keep moving,” she says. “Any chance we could share that crutch?”

  CHAPTER 11

  IN WHICH NADYA RETURNS TO THE ORION, AND MEETS A SKYLUNG NAMED RAJ.

  The rest of our journey to the Orion isn’t pretty. Alé’s ankle swells up like a puffer fish. She can’t walk on it, so I go first, then slide my remaining crutch across the floor so she can use it, and we rinse and repeat. By the time we get to the docking spire and I can borrow a cart to wheel us home on, using my crutch like a paddle to push it, it’s early afternoon. I’ve totally blown my promise to Thom, and sure enough, Nic is standing on the deck as Alé and I approach, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring.

  For a second I’m sure he’s about to tell me not to bother coming back to the ship, but he must still be his old self somewhere inside, because when he sees that we’re in trouble he thumps up the gangplank to us. “Here,” he says. He offers his arm to Alé as we get off the cart. “What happened?”

  Alé and I talked it over on the way here and figured we didn’t need to lie. We just won’t tell the whole truth. “My name’s Aléjandra Figueroa,” Alé says. “I’m one of Machinist Gossner’s runners.” It’s amazing how different she sounds when she’s talking to an adult. Like she’s grown up three years. Nic nods. “I said I’d show Nadya the zip lines this morning,” Alé continues, “but we got ambushed by kidnappers from one of the gangs in the city. We got away, but I hurt my ankle.” She lifts it up for Nic to see.

  Nic glances at me worriedly and rubs his forehead. “We’ll treat you on board,” he says, “and we’ll send word to Machinist Gossner to have someone come get you. I’m glad you’re both okay.” He turns toward the ship, Alé leaning on him and limping because we have to leave the cart on the dock. I think maybe I’m going to get away without a scolding at all until he looks over his shoulder at me. “This is why I don’t want you out on your own, Nadya, breaking and bending rules.” He sighs. “I won’t question Mr. Abernathy’s decision this morning, but I know you well enough to guess you played on his sympathy.” His eyes narrow. “So, let me be plain: If I suspect again that you’re taking advantage of Mr. Abernathy’s grief over losing Mrs. Trachia, or his feeling of responsibility for you now that she’s gone, I will take drastic measures. This is your last chance. Am I understood?”

  I swallow and look down, gripping my crutch as hard as I can, my gills burning. “Yes, sir,” I whisper.

  “Good,” he says. He stops partway down the gangplank, like maybe he’s going to say something more, maybe apologize, maybe just tell me again that he’s glad I’m okay. But then a spasm of fear crosses his face, and he continues on in silence.

  * * *

  • • •

  I spend the rest of the afternoon up in the cloud balloon with Aaron. Nobody has time to head ashore for more crutches, so I crutch-hop from plant to plant, making sure everybody’s got enough water and checking on the soil. The plants are still struggling, and I look through Mrs. T’s notes for an hour or two trying to figure
out why until I finally get it. I’ve been so worried about doing a good job that I’m overfertilizing the plants. That’s why their lower leaves are turning yellow and some of the roots are getting black. Luckily, if I let off the fertilizer for a while the garden should right itself.

  I lean back and breathe a sigh of relief. That’s one problem solved, even if the rest are stacking up faster than I can count. Everybody on the ship’s wound tight as a watch spring, about ready to pop. Tam and Pep looked sick to their stomachs when I told them what happened. Sal tapped his hands on his legs nervously, and Tian Li seemed about ready to rip something in two from frustration. Thom took it especially hard. He put on his first-mate face, but I’m learning to see through it, and I could tell he blamed himself for letting me go, even though I tricked him into it.

  I keep thinking about Alan Salawag as I work, wondering if I’m really like him, wondering whether Nic’s going to throw me off the ship, and worse—whether he’d be right to.

  Aaron’s up here with me, but we don’t talk much. He seems kind of distracted too, and I don’t want to bug him by asking what’s wrong. I bet he just needs time to work through it.

  Sure enough, partway through the afternoon, I hear his footsteps behind me.

  “Nadya,” he says, “you don’t h-h-h—” He swallows. “You don’t need to try to rescue my sister anymore. It’s okay.”

  He’s standing in the shade of an enormous palm tree, its fronds hanging around his head. His fists are balled up. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want anybody else to get h-h-hurt.” His voice quiets down to a cloud-feather whisper, and he starts to cry. “I just wanted h-h-her back.”