Nadya Skylung and the Masked Kidnapper Page 4

  My throat closes up. I can’t feel my lips. My fingers tingle. He can’t mean what he just said. Just yesterday he promised he’d help find Mrs. T. He promised!

  But he looks as serious as a hurricane.

  You could cut the silence by breathing on it. Pep gets tears in her eyes. Tian Li’s lips tremble. Sal’s hands shake. Tam’s not showing it, but I’m sure he’s every bit as scared as the rest of us. Aaron looks confused.

  And me?

  I feel like Nic just pulled the ship out from under me, and now I’m falling into the sea. I’m the one who stepped out of line just now. I’m the one he’s looking at. I’m the one who got in trouble, so I must be the one he’s thinking about kicking off the Orion. I could throw up.

  “Well?” he asks.

  “Yes, sir!” Tam shouts, and we echo him in a tumbling shower of mumbles and mealy-mouthed whispers.

  “Yes, sir,” I hack, and I look at Nic and feel like he’s a stranger. Yesterday he was Nic, and he was comforting me. Captain Vega, I’m supposed to think of him as now. Mr. Abernathy, instead of Thom. I feel all dry and crumbly, like clay left out to bake in the desert sun. The wind blows over the bow from Far Agondy, and it stinks of rotten fish and garbage. I wish we’d never come here. I wish the last ten minutes hadn’t happened. I wish the whole last two months hadn’t happened and we’d gone south to T’an Gaban, and somebody else had rescued Aaron from the pirates.

  “Good,” Captain Vega says. He clears his throat and takes a deep breath. “Now, as I was saying, we don’t know what happened to the pirates, but searching for them would be catastrophically unsafe. They could have fallen, but they could be aboard and armed with makeshift weapons from the debris in the brig. The hull may be too damaged to safely support a search team. You could fall. You could be overpowered and thrown from the ship. You could be crushed against the docks. These pirates are not worth risking your lives over.” He stares at me directly, so hard it almost hurts. “Any questions?”

  Pepper sniffles. Everybody stands stock still, frozen.

  Yes, I think, looking at Captain Vega and wondering where Nic went. What about Mrs. T?

  But I don’t answer. We’re not allowed to answer now. We’re just crew. Just here to follow orders and do what we’re told. I want Mrs. T back. She never would’ve let him do this. I almost look up toward Thom—Mr. Abernathy, I remind myself—at the wheel and see what he thinks, but I don’t dare break eye contact with Nic.

  Because whatever else I want—and I want a whole lot—I really, really, really don’t want to lose the Orion.

  “Excellent,” Captain Vega says. “You all know your docking stations. Go to them and await further orders. We will be reaching port shortly. Dismissed.”

  We scatter like a startled flock of birds. Tian Li runs to the port side of the ship’s aft castle to help with the lines. Salyeh bolts toward the forward lines starboard, and Pepper toward the aft starboard. I crutch to my post at the forward part of the ship on the port side, where the pirates are probably hiding, right now, with all their information about where the Remora might have gone with Mrs. T about to slip out from under our noses forever.

  I edge around my cabin and settle on a bench Tam and Thom built for me so I can do my duties sitting down. The crumbliness inside me melts into numbness. My missing leg starts up a symphony of burning pains, and I try to knock it against the deck railing to make it stop and nearly pitch myself off the bench.

  The ship slides into the cold iron arms of the dock. The dockmen shout friendly greetings at me that soon turn into concerned questions about the hole in the ship, what happened to my leg, what in the world we ran into out there. We see them pretty often, and I think they find us interesting—a ship full of kids doing jobs meant for adults.

  “Ask the captain,” I mutter until they stop talking. I do my job like a machine: catch the rope they toss to me, tie it to a notch in the railing. Slide down the bench, catch another rope, tie it up. Slide, catch, tie, slide, catch, tie, until I run out of bench. The dockhands look at me like they want to help, but a whistle calls them away to do something else because they’re just a crew too.

  The engines cut out. The ship slides to a halt, caught in a web of ropes. The stench of Far Agondy wafts over me, and I look forward off the bow, toward the city’s nest of silver towers and cabled zip lines, the billowing clouds of thick gray smoke from the power stations, the trains, the cars, the life of a million buzzing, smelly people. I try not to look at anyone on the dock, try to imagine that the pirates fell into the sea and died. But I still see three people in frayed, dirty coats hurrying into the spire below us, and they look just like the pirates we captured. I call out to Nic, but he stares at me so stonily that my mouth dries up and the words stick in my throat. I don’t want to hear him say it’s just my imagination, so I keep it to myself and slink off back to work instead.

  Usually when we get to port, I feel excited. This time, I just want to curl up in bed and cry.

  CHAPTER 5

  IN WHICH NADYA INVESTIGATES A MYSTERY.

  I’m all done crying by the time someone knocks on my door.

  It’s late—well after turtlehen, most of the way to midnight. I’m in bed staring at the ceiling, trying to wait out a bunch of sparks in my ghost foot so I can fall asleep, but it’s not working very well. All I can think of is Nic telling us that if anybody steps out of line, he’ll kick them off the ship.

  He’s scared. I can see that. The only other times he’s gotten really stern with us, something bad was happening or about to happen—that time we almost got stranded out on the Cloud Sea, or just before the pirates boarded us.

  But I can’t figure out what he’s so afraid of. Far Agondy can be dangerous, sure, but so can everywhere. I don’t know why he’s so much more spooked by it now than he was the last time we were here. Thom mentioned the Malumbra, so maybe that has something to do with it, but if that’s it, why hasn’t Nic said so?

  The knock, when it comes, is timid, like a cat scratching at the door to come in but not sure whether the person inside likes it. Carefully, I crutch to the door, trying to be quiet. We’re all supposed to be asleep except Tian Li, who’s on watch. And with Nic’s new rules, who knows what kind of trouble being up after curfew might get us in?

  I ease open the door to my cabin, wincing when the hinges squeak.

  Outside, Aaron’s fidgeting nervously, trying to stick to one side of the door where it’s darker. Because we’re in the slip, there’s a lot more light around the ship than usual. Most nights we just have the fire spirits dancing on the deck railings, giving off a friendly orange glow but leaving it dark enough to see the stars. Here, the dockyards are lit up with big electric floodlights, to identify thieves and spies. Some of those lights are so bright I have to put two curtains over the windows in my cabin if I want to sleep. The lights are placed between the slips shining up and down, so anything in their way, like the ladder to the cloud balloon or the cables attaching it to the deck, casts a long black shadow.

  I don’t like being out at night in the docks. It looks like Aaron doesn’t either.

  “Can I come in?” he whispers urgently, looking over his shoulder toward the wheel, where Tian Li’s pacing, one hand on the whistle around her neck she’ll use to call for help if she spots an intruder.

  “Sure,” I say. He squeezes into my cabin, and I close the door behind him. “What’s going on? We’re supposed to be asleep.” I wonder what Salyeh said when he snuck out of their room, or whether Aaron was just really quiet about it. At first we gave Aaron Mrs. T’s old room, but he didn’t sleep very well without any company, and Salyeh offered to take him in.

  He goes straight to the curtains over my window—which is open because my room got stuffy in the sun this afternoon—peeks out, then puts them back in place. “I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “Someth-thing’s wrong.”

  There’s a l
ot that’s wrong, with Nic being a tyrant, the hole in the hull, and the missing pirates, but I don’t think he’s talking about anything so obvious. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugs. “Just wh-wh-wh . . .” Sometimes when he gets agitated he has trouble finishing words. I tried to help him once and he quietly asked me not to, so I just wait for him to work through it on his own. “Like I said. Something’s wrong, h-h-here in the city. Can’t you feel it?”

  My skin pricks up in goose bumps, like there’s a spider tickling the hair on my forearms. “No,” I say, but I realize he’s right. There’s a shadow on the Panpathia here. Even staying off the web, I can feel it, sort of like you can tell whether it’s dark or light out even with your eyes closed. The Panpathia feels cold and unfriendly.

  “It’s not always like that here?” I mumble. I’m new to feeling the Panpathia. Last time we were here I didn’t know it existed.

  Aaron shakes his head. “No. It feels like my h-h-hometown did before th-the shadowy men came.”

  The goose bumps run down my spine and back up again in little waves, like ants scrambling toward their nest when there’s a storm about to break. Quiet, I tell my nerves. You’re just getting all spooked over nothing. But it doesn’t really work.

  “Okay,” I say. My leg’s getting tired, so I sit on the edge of my bed. “What does that mean?”

  Aaron shrugs. His attention wanders sometimes. He’s hot and cold—either focused like a hunting hawk or scattered as a foraging squirrel. “I dunno,” he says, and he peeks out the curtain again.

  “What’re you looking for out there?” I ask.

  He lets the curtain fall back. “Anyth-th-thing weird. But it’s all weird. So I guess I dunno about th-that too.” He looks at his feet. “I miss my sister.”

  My stomach knots up like a rope left uncoiled in a corner. Aaron hasn’t seen his sister since he got kidnapped. A group of shadowy men showed up in his village in the middle of the night with torches. They burned the houses and caught everyone they could who came out of them. Only a few cloudlings escaped. Aaron and his sister were two of them, but they got separated trying to get to Far Agondy, and he got nabbed by the pirates.

  “Tell me about her,” I say softly. Maybe it’ll make it easier. I always used to like talking about my parents with Mrs. T when I got sad.

  “Sh-she’s really brave,” he says. “And smart. Sh-she loves the Panpathia, and she always goes farth-ther on it than me. We did contests, to see h-how far we could reach. I wanted to beat her someday.” His chin quivers. “I guess now I never will.”

  “Maybe we can find her in Far Agondy,” I say gently. “What’s she look like?”

  He frowns, like he’s thinking. “A little taller th-than you. Her hair’s really long but she puts it in a bun to make her look older. She has brown eyes and tan skin.” He blinks. “Does that h-h-help?”

  The girl I saw on the Panpathia was a little taller than me, and she had a bun that was getting tugged on by one of the people kidnapping her. My heart speeds up. “Aaron,” I ask slowly, “does she wear any jewelry?” The girl I saw had a metal stud in her nose, which almost nobody our age has.

  “Yeah,” he says, messing absentmindedly with some papers on my desk. “A gold thing in h-h-her nose. She f-fought with Mom for a year to get it.”

  My heart does a backflip and flies into my mouth. “I might’ve seen her on the Panpathia. But she was getting kidnapped.”

  His eyes bug out as I tell him the full story, and he starts bouncing up and down. “It was h-h-her!” he says. “It h-had to be! Can you h-h-h-h-h . . . will you rescue h-h-her?”

  I listen to the ship creak against her moorings, thinking about Nic’s order today. I don’t want to make a promise I can’t keep. Far Agondy’s a big city, and Nic’s not likely to let me run around it looking for a missing girl.

  But this kid’s been through so much. He lost his parents, his hometown. If I can help him get his sister back, don’t I have a duty to try?

  “Okay,” I say. I hold out my hand and we shake on it. “I will.”

  Aaron smiles like I’m the sun coming up after a long, cold night on deck watch. “Th-thanks, Nadya,” he says. He jumps up and hugs me, and I hold on to my headboard with my good arm and wrap my bad one around his shoulders. He’s so brave, so trusting.

  “Come on,” I say. I slide off my bed again and rummage through my drawers for a black sweater, then grab a dark blue one for Aaron and toss it to him. “Put this on.” I hop toward my crutches. “Let’s start by checking out the pirate brig. Those pirates were kidnapping kids, right? Maybe if we can find out where they went, we’ll find your sister there.”

  My leg sparks up again as I open the door to my cabin, but I don’t mind. I’m doing what’s right, no matter what Nic says, and that’s worth missing a night of sleep, risking being kicked off the ship, and a whole lot else too.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few minutes later, Aaron and I are down on the mid-deck, staring at a gaping hole in the Orion’s hull lit from below by the floodlights of the docking slip. It’s misty and damp because the nighttime fog that boils up off the water and mixes with the smoke in the harbor has set in, and with the hole in the hull there’s nothing to stop it getting into the ship.

  The combination of the electric lights and the fog makes it feel like we’ve fallen into the space between worlds. Every time somebody moves down below, it sends shadows skittering over me, and I’m all jumpy because I don’t know what’ll happen if Nic or Thom catches us sneaking around. Thom’s bedroom is just down the hallway, so we have to keep really quiet. I heard him snoring as I went by, which is a good sign, but you never know when he’ll wake up.

  We had to sneak by Tian Li too, which I didn’t like. I doubt she would have ratted us out or anything—heck, she’d probably have helped us if we asked—but I didn’t want her to get in trouble if we got caught. It’s bad enough risking me and Aaron getting kicked off the ship.

  “Wow,” Aaron whispers. He’s holding on to the wreckage of one of the iron bars we used to jail the pirates, leaning into the fog and looking down. “Th-that’s a long way.”

  I pull him back from the edge. “Yep,” I whisper, trying not to think about the time I fell off the ship. I still get a little queasy looking down at big heights. “Stay back. Let’s try to figure out what happened.”

  “Okay,” he says, and he steps into the hallway.

  I keep by the edge and look hard at the hole the explosion caused.

  It’s pretty big, maybe eight or ten feet across, although it’s all jagged because some of the planks in the Orion’s hull held up better than others. Maybe most important, all the splinters are facing inward, and there are little slivers of wood like needles embedded in the walls all through the rest of the room and the hallway.

  “The explosion happened outside the ship,” says someone behind me, and I flinch so hard I bang my knuckles on one of the twisted iron bars of the cage.

  “Mmf!” I mutter, trying to be quiet. “Darn it, Tam!”

  “Sorry,” he whispers, and he sneaks up close to me. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Sure you didn’t.” I bet he did. He loves being dramatic. “Anyway, I figured that part out myself. But there were no other ships around, right? So where’d the explosion come from?”

  “There was one,” says another voice, approaching from the forward part of the hall. “A little tug that helps ships into port. It was below and in front of us.”

  My stomach warms a bit. This voice I recognize right away. “You came too, Sal?”

  Salyeh emerges into the light and smiles sheepishly. He shrugs. “I couldn’t sleep. And I wanted to know what’s going on.”

  “Me too,” says Pepper behind me. She comes in from the hall, and then we’re all standing around the hole in the brig, looking at each other w
hile the misty shadows flicker.

  “Goshend’s teeth,” Tam says. He runs a hand through his hair. “I didn’t think we’d all be this dumb. Nic’ll have a fit if he finds out we’re down here.”

  I frown. “We’re not all here. Tian Li’s up on deck.”

  The grins that were starting up around me fade. We’re supposed to be a team, all five of us—six now with Aaron—working together. That’s how we beat the pirates. “I’ll tell her tomorrow,” I say. “It’ll be fine.”

  “I’m sure she’s guessed it anyway,” Salyeh says, rubbing the back of his neck. “She always knows what I’m about to do before I do it.”

  We chuckle nervously, and then the silence settles in again and we’re back to staring at the hole in the ship.

  “So there was a tug . . . ,” Tam prompts, and Sal continues his story.

  “Right. A Far Agondy customs tug. And it got so close it nearly bumped us, and then it drifted off, and a few minutes later the explosion happened.”

  I scratch my head. “Why would Far Agondy customs help the pirates escape?”

  Pep kneels by the edge of the hole and runs her fingers along the splinters. “Maybe they weren’t helping them. Maybe they tried to blow them up.”

  I shake my head. “No way. They must’ve been helping them. I’m pretty sure I saw the pirates escaping when we docked.”

  Pep glares at me, and I get that stabbed-in-the-gut feeling again and remember she’s mad at me. But all I did was disagree with her. Why would she get mad about that?

  “I agree with Nadya,” Salyeh says. “Look, in one part of the cell there’s no splinters. That bomb was placed where it would leave a space for the pirates to avoid getting hurt. And remember the badge we found?”

  It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about, but I get it eventually. One of the pirates we captured had a Far Agondy customs inspector’s badge with him. Sal found it after we tied them up. The two of us figured that meant the pirates had connections in the customs office. “Goshend’s teeth,” I mutter while Sal explains the badge to the others. “But how’d they know where the pirates were?”