Nadya Skylung and the Masked Kidnapper Page 14
I jump back on the Panpathia.
Aaron! I shout. I try to follow the strands to him, but they’re all jumbled. Aaron! Maybe I can figure out something that will beat that spider. I have to try.
But all I can find are the cloud gardens of the ships around me. In the distance, the tortured web of Far Agondy’s Panpathia hangs like an enormous, twisted chrysalis of brightness and shadow, fire and cold. There’s no other skylungs. No cloudlings.
The spider and the lion are gone.
CHAPTER 13
IN WHICH NADYA FESSES UP TO NIC, AND A NEW PLAN IS MADE.
It takes them half the night to find me. Nobody thinks to check the net under the ship, so I spend hours down there, getting wetter and colder, occasionally trying to crawl up the net and failing because the slope is too steep and the rope is too slippery. The whole time I know Aaron’s getting farther and farther away, and I lie there, feeling like dirt, until the storm quiets down enough that someone might be able to hear me and I start yelling.
Thom comes down to get me. Apparently Nic’s making a report to the dockmaster at the base of the spire and talking to the Far Agondy police. Tam and Tian Li lower Thom on a harness, and he runs down the rope to me so fast he almost falls.
“Nadya,” he breathes when he gets to me. “Goshend be good. Are you all right?”
I nod, but I hold my stomach and feel like crying and throwing up anyway. “They got Aaron. I couldn’t stop them. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”
Thom scoops me up and hugs me. “That’s not your fault, Nadya,” he says. “And you’re all right. That’s so much better than we thought things were ten minutes ago.”
I blubber and cry a little more, and then Thom says, “Your face is like ice. Let’s get you inside and warm, okay?”
A few minutes later they’ve hoisted me up to the Orion and plunked me on a stool in the kitchen next to the oven, which Thom called a fire spirit into to help me warm up faster. I have a blanket around me and a cup of hot tea, but I’m still shivering, and I feel like I’ve been run over by one of the big steamrollers they use to flatten the streets in this stupid, overgrown, evil city.
Everybody’s gathered around watching except for Sal, who ran to tell Nic that they found me. Pepper’s got her arm in a sling.
“I tried to get one of those guys with my net,” she explains when she sees me looking. “But he jerked it away so hard that it pulled my shoulder out of the socket.” She closes her eyes, and her lip quivers. “Nic says it’ll be fine though.”
I swallow. “I’m sorry,” I say.
There’s a chorus of “Don’t apologize” and “We’re glad you’re safe” and “It’s okay, Nadya,” but Pepper doesn’t join it. She just looks away. I feel like she punched me in the nose, but I don’t blame her.
“You don’t understand,” I say to everyone else. “I didn’t tell Nic and Thom that Silvermask was after me. This is my fault.”
Thom, who’s standing near the edge of the kitchen behind everybody, rubs his temples. “You didn’t tell us what, Nadya?” He looks pretty haggard. He’s been up all night, and I don’t know how hard it was for him fighting those goons but it must’ve been rough.
“Silvermask,” I say. “This gang lord Alé and Rash told us about. He’s after me because of what happened on the Remora. I think he must’ve been the boss of the pirates, or maybe the one buying kids from them. It was his guys who tried to kidnap me this morning, and his guys who attacked us tonight.”
Thom takes a deep breath. “That’s . . .” He grunts, then rubs his eyes. “You, me, and Nic will talk about it later,” he finishes. He shakes his arms out, then heads toward the stove, where I smell coffee brewing. “For now,” he says as he goes, “I’m just glad you’re safe.”
* * *
• • •
Later comes in about two hours, when Nic gets back from talking to the police. He looks even worse than Thom—wet and bedraggled and exhausted, completely at the end of his rope. But he trundles me into his cabin anyway. I’m glad to see that there’s dockyard guards all around the ship when Thom brings me up on deck, but there aren’t any policemen, and that worries me.
“First things first,” Nic says as we sit at his table, “I’m glad you’re okay. The police are looking for Aaron, but the detective I spoke with said there’ve been a lot of these kidnappings, and they’re having a hard time finding the kids. They’ve already put as many people on the case as they can.”
My stomach shrivels. “That’s not enough! They got Aaron! It was my fault!”
Nic sighs. “To them, Aaron’s no more important than any of the other kids who were kidnapped. And I can’t change that, even though I’d like to.”
I shrink back in my chair. The old Nic wouldn’t have given up like this. He’d have found a way.
“So,” he continues, “what haven’t you told us? Start at the beginning.”
I take a deep breath. I see the bags under Nic’s eyes, and how shaggy his eyebrows have gotten. His shirt’s not tucked in and his bed’s not made and papers are scattered over his table. Behind him, Thom sways like he can barely stand, his eyes bloodshot, stubble on his face. They’re under so much stress. I don’t want to make it worse by lying to them.
So I tell them everything. I talk about how I’ve been using the Panpathia and it’s cold and dead here. I tell them about Aaron’s sister and how I promised to rescue her, whether Nic wanted to let me or not. I fess up about Gossner’s workshop and Silvermask, and after swearing them to secrecy, I tell them about the Dawnrunners and how they helped me escape. Then I tell them how hard it’s been to have them come down on me and the rest of the crew, to threaten us with being thrown off the ship.
Through the whole thing, they don’t interrupt me once. Nic doesn’t scold me. Thom doesn’t sigh or put his head in his hands or clear his throat or anything. It’s like old times again.
“Thank you,” Nic says when I’ve finished, and he stands up and faces the windows at the aft of his cabin. The storm has passed, and the city lights are twinkling brightly.
“I’m sorry you’ve been dealing with all that alone, Nadya,” Nic says. “And I’m sorry for my part in it.” He reaches for his glasses, finds his pocket empty, and settles for smoothing his shirt. “This is a difficult time for me and Thom. I have always had . . .” He clears his throat. “A tendency toward too much discipline, I suppose. It comes from my upbringing, which I won’t go into now. Zelda and Thom balanced it. For the record, Thom disagrees with what I’ve been doing lately, but without Zelda here to add her thoughts, well . . .” He finds his glasses on the table and tucks them away. “I’ve been overruling his objections, which I should know better than to do. I owe him an apology as well.”
Thom snorts. “You can deliver it along with a big old bonus next week,” he says, but he winks at me as he does it, and even Nic smiles a little.
“I’m old, Nadya,” Nic continues. He closes his eyes, and his face looks pale and stretched. “Too old to be fighting the Malumbra. I should long ago have retired to someplace warm and safe, where my biggest worries are boredom and the weather.” He lowers himself into his chair gingerly. His forearm, I notice, has the beginnings of an enormous bruise on it. “But the fight isn’t over, and that means my part in it isn’t either.”
He folds his hands in front of him, and I finally see the old Nic in his eyes—warm, kind, and thoughtful, plus smart and strict and disciplined. “Now,” he says, “I have realized—late, as usual—that this has become your fight too. It’s you the Malumbra wants, through this Silvermask who must be its agent. It’s you who’ll be fighting long after I’m gone. So tell me, what would you like to do?”
* * *
• • •
The first thing I do is get everybody else in on the action. We move from Nic’s cabin back down to the galley, where there’s room for all of us to sit. I
ask Nic to catch everybody up and make his apologies while I brew tea in the kitchen. Pepper cries when Nic tells her he’s sorry for being so hard on her, and Tam cries too when he tells Nic how he lied to him to create a diversion for me when he was doing bed checks.
By the time I finish the tea and Tian Li brings it in for me, the crying and apologizing are done. Thom nods at me approvingly, like he’s saying, I don’t know how you did it, but I’m glad he’s back. I smile and shrug, because I don’t know how I did it either, but I’m really, really glad Nic’s back to normal too.
Alé’s still with us, sitting with her leg propped up between Sal and Pepper, which is good because she knows the city better than anybody else here, and she knows the Dawnrunners, who I’m hoping will help us get through this. I’ve got the beginnings of a plan, but I don’t know how to fill in the gaps.
“Okay,” I say when the tea’s all passed around. “So Aaron’s missing. That’s mission number one, the biggest thing we’ve gotta take care of.” The fear-octopus floats around in my chest as I think about that, but the busier I am—the more I’m doing things about what scares me rather than just thinking about them—the less I feel it, so I figure I’ll just keep doing as much as I can. Tian Li and Salyeh nod. Tam frowns. Pepper sips her tea and stares out the window. “To get Aaron back,” I say, “we’ve gotta figure out where Silvermask is taking the kids. Then we’ve gotta get in there and rescue him, and hopefully everybody else too.”
Alé blows the steam off her tea and looks up. “That’s what the Dawnrunners have been trying to do for months.” She tugs at her cuffs. “But all we’ve got is a neighborhood where we think he might be, based on where the kidnappings are happening.”
“Well, let’s start with that,” Tam says. “Where is it?” Nic rummages in a cabinet and pulls out a map of Far Agondy to lay down in front of Alé.
She points to an area of the city called Bleak Forest. “Here,” she says. “Bleak Forest used to be a big-money part of town, back when Far Agondy was a timber port. But around the time the silver mines opened upriver, the forests dried out and the timber barons lost their shirts. So it’s mostly old, dilapidated mansions that nobody lives in anymore. Most of the kidnappings are clustered in and around Bleak Forest, and the farther away from it you get, the fewer of them there are. So we figure Silvermask must be set up in one of these old mansions, but we don’t know which, and we can’t get in there to see for ourselves because the Shadowmen control the whole territory.”
I nod, craning my head to look at the map. Bleak Forest is a big blob the shape of a peanut, just east of the Doubleflow River. “Nic, do you think if we can find the right place, the police will help?”
Nic frowns. He’s put on his glasses to look at the map, and he peers through them owlishly. “I’m not sure. The detective I spoke to seemed . . . demoralized. I think they’ve more or less given up on solving the kidnappings for now. If the kids fell into their laps, I’m sure they’d do something about it, but I’m not sure they’d risk a confrontation with a dangerous gang without clear evidence.”
“Are there skylungs on the force?” Salyeh asks.
Nic puts his glasses back in his pocket. “I suppose there probably are, at least a few in a city this big. Why?”
Sal leans forward on his elbows and raises his eyebrows. “Well, could Nadya find Aaron on the Panpathia, then show the police skylungs the way?”
I shiver, thinking about that giant spider and how it got Aaron, even though he was so good at chasing shadows off the Panpathia. “I could try, but it’s dangerous. Silvermask can do things on the Panpathia I don’t understand—control people, take them over.”
“That’s the Malumbra working through him,” Nic cuts in. “And I’d rather not put Nadya up against the Malumbra, Salyeh. It took down skylungs much more experienced than her at the Roof of the World.” He sighs. “It was a good idea, though.”
I tap my fingers on the table, looking at the map. “Well, is there another way we can track them to their base?”
Pepper straightens in her chair, looks at me, then looks back down. She chews her lip nervously.
“Pep?” I ask. “Have an idea?”
She opens her mouth, closes it again. “I thought . . . it’s dumb. Never mind.”
“Come on, Pep,” Tian Li says. She nudges her with an elbow.
“Well,” Pepper says, and she looks up at me and there’s so much confusion and fear and hurt in her eyes that I remember all of a sudden that she’s still mad at me and I don’t know why. “We know they’re looking for Nadya, right? So what if we use her as bait, and we track one of them down, and we catch him and get him to show us where his hideout is, or we chase him off and follow him home?”
Everybody’s silent. My stomach churns. For just a second as Pep looks away, I wonder whether she only came up with this plan because it might not work and I wouldn’t be around anymore. But she seems so torn up about it I bet that’s not it. She can’t be that mad at me.
I don’t like the plan. Nic and Thom are very clear that they don’t like it either. Everybody else agrees.
But we talk for hours and don’t come up with any better ideas, so eventually that’s what we decide to do.
CHAPTER 14
IN WHICH NADYA TALKS WITH PEPPER, AND TRIES OUT SEVERAL INVENTIONS.
After we all get some sleep, I find Pepper. She’s alone in her room with the door open, throwing clothes into a bag. We figure we might need to hole up for a few days at Gossner’s if things go badly, so everybody’s getting ready.
“Hey,” I say. “How’re you doing?”
Pepper grunts. “I’m okay. I’ve been talking with Thom about how to fight the Shadowmen with fire spirits. He says he thinks it can be done, but I need to learn to make my contracts with the spirits more specific first.”
I imagine Pepper calling up an army of fire spirits the next time we tangle with the Shadowmen. It’s a warm thought. “That’s great. How’s your arm?” It’s not in a sling anymore, but she’s still babying it as she sorts her clothes.
Pep rotates it and grimaces. “It hurts, but not as much as it did before. It’s not as bad as Nic thought.”
“That’s good,” I say. “Can I sit?”
Pep waves at her chair, frowning at a blue shirt and some orange socks. “Sure.”
She seems distracted, but I’m not sure when we’ll get a chance to talk again, so I just dive right in. “Did you get my note?”
The shirt and the socks fly into the bag, and then Pep rolls onto her bed and stares at the ceiling. “Yep.”
I frown. I sorta figured she’d be doing a little more than grunting one word at a time. “And?”
She rubs her knuckles into her eye sockets. “And I’m glad you’re trying to figure it out, but you still don’t get it.” She rolls over to one side. “The suggestion I made today? It’s the first time anybody’s listened to any of my ideas in months.”
I flap my mouth open, but Pep glares at me. “Just lis-ten, Nadya. Stop talking so much.” I shut my mouth, but that stings. I don’t talk that much, do I?
“And it’s a terrible idea,” Pep continues, “and it probably won’t work, and then nobody will trust me for months again. Everybody thinks I’m just your sidekick. I’m the fun one. I’m the easygoing one. Nobody takes me seriously.”
My stomach squirms. “That’s not—” I start, but Pep glares at me again and I remember I’m supposed to be listening.
She pivots around and dangles her feet over the floor. “And you’re always the first to say how bad my ideas are. I say something, and you’re like, ‘No, Pep, blah-blah.’ Or ‘That’s not it, blah-blah-blah.’ And everybody takes your lead. Even Aaron pays more attention to the others than to me.” She kicks up off her bed, grabs her bag, and walks past me toward the hallway. “So if you want to know what’s wrong, that’s it. And since you’re so gre
at, why don’t you see if you can fix it?”
* * *
• • •
Pep’s words sit in my gut like hunks of coal all morning, burning and crackling. She’s got a point, but she’s also being mean in a way she never has before. I’m all worried about whether I talk too much, and whether I don’t take her seriously enough.
I’m so preoccupied I almost bump straight into Sal and Tian Li on my way to the cloud balloon. The two of them are sitting on one of the capstans out on deck, watching the cloudship traffic around the docking spire. They look kind of serious, and I figure I won’t bother them, but I still overhear what they’re talking about as I go by.
“Then Gossner told me what she does with all that money. Helps orphans, sponsors schools and hospitals, that kind of thing. It’s like she’s trying to make up for everything that’s wrong in the city all by herself.”
Salyeh frowns. “Isn’t that a good thing?”
“It’s okay,” Tian Li says. “But it’s not working. The city’s still so messed up. So maybe trying to change things all on my own in T’an Gaban wouldn’t work either.” She scuffs her feet on the deck. “I want to get out and see more of Far Agondy, even the bad parts, figure out what’s wrong and what isn’t.”
Salyeh nods. “Well, maybe if we . . .”
But by then I’m working my way up the ladder and out of earshot, and even though my ears burn and I want to hear the rest, they’re my friends, and I figure I’ll respect their privacy.
* * *
• • •
We pick up new crutches for Ally and me—it’s a huge relief to be on two again—and head back to Gossner’s to hash out the rest of the plan, bold as brass under the late-morning sun, all of us together, Nic and Thom swinging their walking sticks just in case. We don’t spot any Shadowmen, but we’re sure they’re watching. Alé and Rash grudgingly let Gossner in on the Dawnrunners, and she rolls her eyes at them and asks just how dense they think she is. After a quick, awkward conversation, they make up and we get planning.