Nadya Skylung and the Masked Kidnapper Read online

  “Sorry,” Rash says, bustling back to us. He sucks his teeth and grins. “I forgot to get your names. It’s just so exciting to have Tam back. The Goss is gonna flip when she sees him. She was so sad when he disappeared. Who are the rest of you?”

  “Thom Abernathy,” Thom says, reaching out to shake his hand. “First mate of the cloudship Orion.” He introduces me and Tian Li, then Aaron, “our general hand.” Aaron, who’s been staring openmouthed at all the kids running around this ironwork wonderland, puffs his chest out like a bird who’s found a fat, juicy worm. He must be proud he got included in the list of crewmates.

  “Nice to meet you,” Rash says. He nods at Tian Li, who smiles back. “Navigator, huh? I’d love to pick your brain about a few things. I love maps.” He turns to me. “And a skylung.” He grins. “Wait till I show you what we’ve got on the third floor!”

  Tian Li shrugs nonchalantly. She’s looked a little uncomfortable ever since we got to Gossner’s skyscraper. Rash’s excitement must be catching, though, because after a second she smiles a little and says, “Yeah, sure.”

  I look up toward the third floor, but all I can see there are the catwalks and platforms, except in one corner, where there’s a whole room of iron sealed off from the rest of the workshop. I’m about to ask Rash what it is when all the motion around us stops. The workshop goes silent, and a woman’s booming voice calls out, “Tam Ban, you rascal! I can’t believe you left without saying goodbye! Where in the world have you been?”

  I follow the voice, and at its source I see a woman with a smile like a copper pipe, big and bold and bright. She’s a little taller than Tam and rounder than Nic, and she’s got light brown skin and big brown eyes and long black hair pouring off her head. Her boots clank like they’ve got steel toes, her overalls and the welding apron over them are covered in grease marks and oil stains, and if the way she tosses her gloves down and scoops up Tam and squeezes him is any sign, her heart’s every bit as big as her skyscraper.

  “It’s good to see you,” she says, and she ruffles his hair and puts him down again.

  “Tam has been with us, Machinist Gossner,” Thom says smoothly, “working as our mechanic and a general hand on the cloudship Orion. He told us,” he continues, clearing his throat and raising an eyebrow at Tam, “that he was an orphan and had no place to stay, but that he was good with machines.”

  Tam looks down. “Sorry, Goss,” he whispers. “I just . . . I couldn’t . . .”

  She claps him on the shoulder and pulls his chin up so he looks her in the eye. “You’re a free child, Tam Ban,” she says seriously. “I said that when you joined us here, and it’s never changed. You work for board, you work for training, you work for a bit of wages, and you don’t owe me a thing but your respect and courtesy.” She flicks him in the forehead. “Which, I might add, was seriously lacking in your departure. I expect you’ll make it up to us by joining us for dinner tonight, whatever your current living arrangements are.” She glances up at Thom, as if asking whether that’s okay. He nods.

  “Yes, Goss,” Tam says, still looking down. “I will.”

  “And,” she goes on, “you’ll stop moping and start catching up with the kids here who remember you. You’ve seen a lot, I imagine.”

  Tam looks up. The whole workshop’s staring at him. He stammers, “I . . . but . . .” He looks at Rash, and at the place his arm used to be. “How . . .”

  Gossner’s eyes glint, and she spins and pushes Tam toward Rash, who catches him one-handed. “You can start,” she says mischievously, “by talking with Rashid, who’s always wanted to show you what he did with the machine you left behind.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Tian Li and Aaron and I end up with Tam and Rash, while Thom and Gossner talk about some business of Thom’s that has to do with the World Beyond, where the fire spirits he and Pepper summon come from. Rash races up one of the staircases from the landing where Gossner met us, taking the steps two at a time, grinning wildly. “Wait till you see what I did with the cleaning machine, Tam. I mean, it’s a monster now—it can do practically a whole floor by itself!”

  Tam stops climbing for a second, then runs after Rash. “You mean you didn’t destroy it?”

  Aaron, who’s hanging back with me while Rash and Tam and Tian Li take off on their two good legs apiece, whispers, “What machine, Nadya?”

  I watch the others and feel a little sad, a little left behind. “Tam used to live here,” I explain. I clue Aaron in about Rash losing his arm and Tam running away.

  “Hang on,” Rash says as they get to a landing. He and Tam are warming up to each other as they start talking machines. “Let’s wait for the others.”

  Tian Li, who’s looking at the workshop thoughtfully, raises an eyebrow as I get to the platform. “So Gossner owns this whole place?”

  Rash nods. “Yep! Designed it herself, when she was younger.”

  “Where’d she get the money?” Tian Li asks.

  I frown. Tian Li has a thing about money. Where she comes from, some people have a lot of it and some people have none at all. She told me once she wants to go back and change that, like it’s her personal life quest or something.

  “Um . . . ,” Rash says, scratching his chin. “I dunno, actually. I mean, she makes a lot selling her inventions and doing custom jobs for people and stuff, plus hiring us out as runners and fixers, but I never really thought about how much it must’ve cost to build this place. Maybe she got a loan or something?”

  He shrugs and leads us upward again, like where Gossner got her money’s no business of his. “Sorry about all the steps, Nadya. There are swings and lifts for people with leg problems or who don’t like the stairs, but the swings in this part of the shop are being reconfigured, so you’ll have to crutch it for another few platforms. We change the layout all the time. The Goss says it’s good for us to think creatively in three dimensions. We’ll get the swings set back up before dinner tonight.”

  “No problem,” I say, even though my arms are sore already and my hands are cramping. I stare around at all the machines, the catwalks, the little nooks where kids sleep, and feel a little sad. Pep would’ve loved it here. “So you guys can do whatever you want?”

  Rash nods. “Just about. The Goss tells us to stop doing something or break it down or put it back the way it was every once in a while, but most of the time she just checks to make sure it’s safe, then laughs and tells us to carry on.”

  “And she pays you?” Tian Li asks.

  “Yep,” Rash says. “Pretty much the best gig you can get as a kid in this town, short of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth. We all feel pretty lucky. Me, I might never have figured out I could do all this if the Goss hadn’t showed me. We’re not all geniuses, but you can’t help but learn here.” He gets to a small platform and stops by a sleeping nook. “Okay,” he says, “just a sec. I need to grab my arm for this.”

  He reaches into his blankets and pulls out a prosthetic arm attached to a chest harness. It’s made of black iron and looks—honest to Goshend—like an anatomical drawing of the inside of a biological arm. It’s got a whole bunch of little rods and screws and springs and gears that rotate and compress and stretch out. He shrugs into the harness and takes a minute adjusting the arm. It looks like it has to line up just right. “I’ve figured out how to get a lot of functionality out of this over the years,” he says. “Watch.” He twitches a muscle in his shoulder, and the fingers in the arm close. He twitches another, and they open. Other twitches can make the wrist rotate right to left, or left to right, or the elbow move up and down.

  “I’m pretty lucky,” he says, looking at me more seriously. “Most people who lose a limb don’t have the Goss to help them build prostheses, or a workshop full of smart kids to lend them ideas and extra hands.” For the first time, he looks at my leg, and I realize he’s the only person I’ve se
en so far in Far Agondy who didn’t treat it like the most important thing they saw about me. “You’re lucky too, now that you’re here. Bet Tam’s building you a leg, and you came to get help with it, right?”

  I nod, a bit flummoxed. How’s this kid know so much?

  He grins. “She’ll get it sorted for you. I’ve seen her build legs for money, and she always does a great job. Bet she’ll do one extra special, since you’re a friend of Tam’s.”

  Tam looks down again when he says that. He’s getting embarrassed so easily today. It must really be hitting him hard to be back here.

  “So is this where you sleep, then?” Tian Li asks. She nods at the pile of blankets, the floppy mattress, the tower of books and newspapers, and the pile of gears and rods and half-built gadgets that seems to be the sum of Rash’s worldly possessions.

  “Yep.” Rash spins to face her. “We kinda sort ourselves into families, since there are so many of us. I sleep up here with Alé. We’re best friends. We have a lot in common.” He flexes the arm one more time, then seems satisfied. “Right,” he says. “On to the machine!”

  * * *

  • • •

  Rash shows us a lot more than just the one machine. First he takes us to the expanded version of the cleaner Tam built, while Tam stares at it and breathes hard and looks like he’s trying not to cry. The thing has a driver’s seat now, a steering wheel, and a whole row of brushes and mop heads and dials and gauges. After that Rash brings us to a reclining bicycle he’s working on, with a big basket in the back to help kids haul inventions or repair jobs around the city for Gossner. Then we’re off to the kitchen, where a crew of eight—including his friend Alé—is prepping dinner for what looks like forty people. Finally, he takes us all the way up to the roof.

  We head through a locked door out onto a rooftop terrace as wide as the Orion’s deck six times over. The wind’s pretty fierce, and it takes me by surprise and almost blows me down the stairs, but Rash catches me and holds me up with a smile until I get my balance back. He’s surprisingly strong for a kid his size, but so are Tam and Pepper. It probably comes from working with machines all the time or something.

  The view from the roof is mind-blowing. We can see the whole city, and since the sun’s setting, it looks like the bay is on fire. The electric lights around and inside the buildings turn on like enormous lightning bugs sparking up. The skyscrapers glimmer like fire-kissed stalks of corn covered with morning dew, and the docking spires out in the bay loom like the spines of an enormous leviathan, winking at us with their red and green navigation lights. Launches and boats cross back and forth in the harbor, and cloudships are still coming in and leaving, even this late in the day.

  “Wow,” I say as the sun slips below the horizon and leaves the buildings in twilit shadows. The view sorta reminds me of the night sky, and I almost mention it to Tian Li. She’s looking at the places between the skyscrapers, though, where the buildings are dark and low and smoky, lit only by the reddish glow of the fire spirit under the city. I figure she’s got other things on her mind.

  Rash, however, is beaming. “Isn’t it great?” he says. “But it’s only half of what I brought you guys up here to see.” He walks toward a big tarp with a bunch of lumps underneath it, then whips the tarp off dramatically. Underneath are six machines that look like giant wings with harnesses. I squint, not sure what they’re for.

  “You’re building gliders?” Tam says. He runs his hands over one. “Do they work?”

  “Sure do,” Rash says. “Watch this.” He picks one up one-handed and throws it across his shoulders, buckling it as he goes. “You just have to be careful about knowing what the wind does between the towers, or you can get into trouble pretty fast. I’d offer to take you guys out, but the Goss put the kibosh on that after one of Alé’s friends from across town nearly got turned into a pancake against a building. So I’ll just have to show you instead.”

  He turns to Tian Li. “Hey, double-check my straps, would you? Just make sure there’s no buckle showing.”

  Tian Li looks over the handful of buckles keeping the harness secured to Rash’s chest. “Looks good to me,” she says.

  “Thanks,” Rash says, and then, with a glance at Tam, he runs toward the edge of the balcony.

  I’ve gotta admit, my heart jumps into my throat when he leaps off the building and swan-dives into the air. But the wings on the harness extend and fill with air, and he only falls about six feet before they catch him and he’s flying, gliding in a smooth circle out toward the building across the street. It looks like a blast, and I find myself bouncing up and down, wishing I could join him.

  “He’s losing altitude,” Tam notes with a frown.

  He’s right. Rash drifts toward the street every time he circles. He seems to notice, and he banks suddenly and changes direction, shooting up the street toward an intersection. When he gets over it, he tips his wings again, and smooth as a hawk, he catches some kind of updraft that carries him skyward in slow, lazy circles. He stays in it till he’s maybe thirty feet above us, then wheels gracefully around and starts gliding our way. As he closes in on the terrace, he drops his legs down from the little strap they’ve been resting in and tilts the harness up. The wings flare and set him gently on his feet, right in front of us.

  “Whoa,” Tian Li says.

  Even Tam’s smiling. “That’s incredible!” he adds, running over to Rash, who’s sweating a bit but grinning ear to ear. “What’s the glide ratio? I mean, it looks like you could keep going for a pretty long way, and then when you hit those thermals . . . How’d you get the trusses in the wings to bear the strain? How’d you figure out the steering?”

  Rash laughs and unbuckles the harness. He starts to reply, but he gets cut off by a loud throat-clearing from the stairs back to the workshop.

  “A-hem!” Gossner says. She’s standing on the stairs, arm resting across one knee, shaking her head. “If you’re done showing off, Rashid, everybody else has been waiting for dinner for about ten minutes.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Dinner’s great. I mean really great. There’s a huge buffet line with about eight different dishes. Tam does me a favor and fills my plate, since it’s hard to crutch around and get food at the same time. I take big spoonfuls of this green vegetable­and-cheese glop that Rash suggests, a couple sausages, and green salad to start, and then we go back for baked macaroni and cheese, some sliced ham, and a fruit salad of strawberries, pineapple, mango, blueberries, and melon. I end up sitting with Aaron and Tam on one side of me and Alé and Tian Li on my other. Rash sits next to Tam.

  Tam eats quietly. Some of the other kids ask him questions, and he tries to put on a brave face, but I can tell he’s still not totally comfortable being back here. Must be weird. This used to be his home, his family. Then he ran away, and now we’re his new family and the two are meeting and he’s sorta caught in the middle.

  Thom sits up at the head of the table, having a pretty deep discussion with Gossner. Maybe it has to do with the history Thom was asking about earlier. Looks like they’ve got a lot in common, even though I bet Gossner’s got fifteen years on Thom.

  Kids are just starting to line up for dessert when Aaron speaks for the first time since we sat down. “Do you know anyth-th-thing about kidnappings, Rash?” he asks quietly.

  Rash, who just got up to head for the dessert line, stops and sucks his teeth. He sits back down and sets his plate on the table. “How’d you hear about that?”

  Aaron stares at him blankly. “It h-h-happened to me. Nadya saw it h-happen to my sister too.”

  Rash blinks. All of a sudden the noise and life and smells and great food seem duller, and my fears crawl out of my stomach and wrap their tentacles around my heart like an angry octopus. “We found Aaron in chains on a pirate ship,” I explain. “And on the Panpathia I saw a girl in Far Agondy getting grabbed by a shado
wy man. We think she was his sister.”

  Rash leans back in his chair and taps his fingers on the table. “There’ve been kidnappings,” he says. “The runners all say to be real careful and go in twos and threes over by Bleak Forest and the Silver Stream. I don’t get out much though. Alé, what do you hear about it?”

  Alé has been friendly as a summer breeze all through dinner, blinking behind thick eyebrows, explaining things to me, and asking about the Orion and what we see in the other cities. She’s got skin almost as pale as mine and long, crow-black hair that she likes to tuck behind her ears.

  “Bad things,” she says. “A new gang lord came to town a while back, carved out a territory in Bleak Forest, then expanded into the Silver Stream. The police have been having a nightmare even containing him, let alone getting order back into those parts of the city, and the other gangs have fled. The kidnappings started soon after he had his territory secured. They happen all over the city, always kids, always skylungs or cloudlings.” She looks at me, evaluating, calculating. “You should be careful, Nadya. Don’t go out alone, don’t go out at night, and never go into Bleak Forest or the Silver Stream.”

  I swallow. “Where’re those places?”

  “On the other side of the Doubleflow,” Rash says, “within sight of city hall. It’s been a real embarrassment to the Lord Mayor that she can’t keep order in her own backyard. Apparently she’s furious about it.” He eyes the line behind us, then gets up. “I’m grabbing some cake. You want anything?”