‘I was starting to worry,’ he said.
‘I had to run an errand for a friend.’
They boarded the airship with fifty or so other passengers, a mixture of the living and the dead, and stood in the observation gondola as London disappeared into a haze and the steel-grey Atlantic emerged below.
‘I cannot believe you never took me flying before,’ Rachel said.
‘I suppose we never found the right destination.’
The sea was smooth as a sheet as the sun began to set, and it was easy to imagine that the world had turned upside down and below them was another sky.
The next morning, Rachel woke up early in their small cabin. She pulled a blanket over Joe’s sleeping form and hunched next to the small round window, waiting for dawn and the first glimpse of the land where it was always summer.
The first light appeared, turning the night sky from deep indigo into red and gold. It fell onto the birdcage.
The female woke up and made a tee-tee sound. Accompanied by a noise like a bouncing spring, filling the cabin with a flowing, whistling song, the male Gouldian began to dance.