Nadya Skylung and the Cloudship Rescue by Jeff Seymour

Author:Jeff Seymour [Seymour, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

In which Nadya sleeps, then learns something unsettling.

“Nadya, what happened up there? We fell like a stone! Aren’t you supposed—”

I shut Pepper’s door in Tam’s face and lock it behind me.

Pep’s lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Her room’s a small one, but I’ve always liked it. Her bed nestles against the Orion’s hull, and she’s got two portholes to look through. Thom cleaned everything out of here, but it looks like Tam and the gang have moved it all back in for her. A little oil painting of the beach in the Free City of Myrrh hangs over her wardrobe, turquoise water and bright blue sky and swirling, shady buildings kissing white sand. A hand-sized statue of Goshend’s Daughter, a smiling goddess with seaweed hair that reaches down to her ankles that some people from Myrrh ask for favors, is back on her desk. Her seashell box sits on the shelf beneath one of the portholes, and the other shelf’s got her storybooks and engine manuals, all mixed up together. The big mirror she spent a month’s wages on is back in the corner. They even set up the old cargo net she hangs from her ceiling and put her collection of toy seals, dogs, and rats back in it. The room looks like it’s hers again. Maybe that’ll help.

The sky is starting to turn gray outside, so it must be close to sunrise. I pull out my pocket watch to check the time, but it’s not running. I can’t even remember when I wound it last.

My head’s still pounding and my vision’s blurry, but I’m not sure whether it’s from the lack of air in the cloud balloon or just exhaustion. Probably both. It seems like a month ago I got up to fix engine number two.

I sit on the edge of Pep’s bed and hold her hand. Her fingers are a bit warmer than they were right after we pulled her up, but they’re still cold. I touch the back of my hand to her forehead. It feels a little chilly too.

“Pep?” I say.

Her fingers twine themselves in mine.

“It broke,” she whispers. Her voice is smooth but fragile, like the wet wings of a newborn butterfly.

I squeeze her hand. The cuts on her face and arms were too small for bandages, but Tian Li told me she cleaned them with alcohol in the sickroom before putting Pepper to bed. Salyeh heated up some soup using an oil stove, and Tam made Pepper drink a cup of it.

They’re good friends, every one of them. Even Tam, I guess.

“What broke?” I ask.

Pep’s eyes drift down from the ceiling and settle on me. They’re bloodshot, like she got a bunch of smoke in them. “The cable. Rottfeuer was chewing through it, telling me if I ever wanted him to do this again, he’d need a whole barrel of garden air. Then the cable started to pull apart. There was this horrible twang, and then it just snapped, and my face and arms hurt and I was falling.

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