Diamond jumped back in surprise.
She looked at him. She hadn’t paid attention to him before, but she became curious and then agitated. Surprised by his face, she asked, “Who are you?” Then before he could answer, she said, “You’re too young to be out by yourself.”
“I am,” he agreed.
But one boy was enough of a burden. Tugging on her son, she said, “Come on, nut,” and the two of them took the new walkway in the opposite direction, heading for the green shadows.
Diamond looked for chasing men. There weren’t any. He looked over the edge and saw where Marduk’s old limb had broken away. The ragged wood looked fresh and sappy, and the tip of the branch had tumbled into the canopy, smaller branches and thousands of leaves pulled down by the catastrophe. He was staring down into an enormous hole. It seemed like a new hole, perhaps torn out by the morning rain. The hole’s sides and the bottom were rich green. Holding the railing, Diamond pushed out, staring down into a dense tangle of crisscrossing branches and epiphytes and odd bright birds, and he listened to the white buzz of animals talking, and his thoughts shifted and shifted until he came back to where he began the day.
“Father,” he yelled to the canopy.
For an instant, the buzz diminished. A thousand voices hesitated, and then they started up again, screaming only what mattered to them.
Nissim took Diamond to the toilet.
Waiting as told, Elata sat beside Seldom, touching him and both of them nervous and neither one talking. Elata hated silence. She always had. Odd, awful thoughts kept burrowing into her head, and talking was how she coped whenever bad things were happening. Sitting on her hands was what she did at school when the teachers warned her to be quiet. She sat on her hands now, and Seldom noticed, chewing his bottom lip when she started to shake.
She wanted to jump up and shout at the strange man in front of them, telling him to leave them alone.
Seldom saw her staring at the man. “Don’t,” he whispered.
But she couldn’t just sit and pretend nothing was wrong. The blimp had pulled away from the landing, pushing toward the next stop. Where was the Master? And Diamond? Sitting like a book on a shelf made her crazy, and she was sure that she wouldn’t last another breath. Yet she did, and that surprised her as much as anything.
Seldom told her not to stare, but then he turned, looking at the other two men and making a sorry little sound.
“What?” she asked.
He jerked his head forward again. “They were talking.”
“Talking how?”
“I don’t know . . . but then one of them looked at me.”
She started to turn.
“Don’t,” he said.
But she looked anyway. One man had stood, walking up the aisle now. She and Seldom both sat on their hands. The man passed them and bent low, saying a few words to the man in front—quiet words put inside an ear—and the sitting man shook his head, whispering and flapping his hand in the air.
The standing man nodded and returned to his seat, staring blankly at the children as he passed.
The blimp kept pushing. Elata watched the canopy. A gold-and-blue pashta bird was hovering above a bakebear, stealing ripe fruits with his long tongue. Rail was the next stop, Hanner after that, and what was Master Nissim doing? Was Diamond all right? The worst fear wasn’t the fact that something had gone wrong, which was plainly true, but not knowing what that something was.
“Get up,” she told Seldom.
He didn’t want to move, and he didn’t want to stay. The debate ended when the girl poked him the ribs.
They stood together, and she pushed him to the aisle and into the hallway. Both toilet doors were closed. She looked up into the cockpit, earning a bored glance from the pilot’s assistant. Then with the flat of her hand, she knocked hard on one door, listening to silence and knocking again.
“Occupied,” Nissim said.
Seldom put his face close to the door. “Are you all right, sir?”
There was no answer and no hint of motion, but then the door clicked and opened. Nissim was leaning against the sink. He looked as if he had been standing that way for a very long time. The window was closed but crooked after a rough repair. There was no corner where a second person could hide.
Nissim put three fingers over his mouth, wanting silence.
But Elata couldn’t stop the words. “Where did he—?”
“No.”
She opened the other toilet door. No Diamond.
A grim and peculiar smile filled the old face. The Master winked at them and in a whisper asked, “Where are they?”
Elata risked one hasty look. “In their seats, watching us.”
“I bet they are,” he said. Again he put his fingers to his mouth, a strange, scared expression blooming on his face.
They said nothing after that. They walked back to the open bench, and Elata sat where Diamond had been. She felt the propellers working and the slow swaying of the blimp, and for a few moments she forgot where she was. Suddenly she was a tiny girl, riding beside her dead father, enjoying her very first blimp ride.
The two men behind them were muttering.
Nissim shared the same bench, sitting beside the aisle, his shoulders held high.
One man went to the man sitting in front, and both of them continued into the hallway. Elata couldn’t see them, but she heard one toilet door open, then the other, and never any courteous knock.
She sat like Nissim sat, straight and square.
The men didn’t come back.
“What are they doing?” she asked.
Seldom tipped his head, trying to see.
“Probably talking to the pilot,” Nissim said. “But they won’t learn anything useful.”
The men eventually returned, joining their friend in back. The three of them were muttering and cursing. People turned to watch. Passengers who hadn’t noticed anything before now began to pay close attention.
The third man, the one who always sat in back, said, “Wait here.”
Then he walked up to Master Nissim.
“Move over,” he said.
The Master looked up, making a long odd sound, as if he felt sick. Then he pushed to the right, and Seldom shoved Elata against the window.
The man sat, staring straight ahead. He had a face that probably always looked annoyed. His mouth was tense, the eyes like slivers. A voice came out of someplace deep inside his chest, asking nobody in particular, “What happened to the boy?”
Nissim said nothing.
The man turned to glare at him. Then he stared at Elata and Seldom, measuring them. To Seldom, he said, “Where did your friend go?”
As if lashed by electricity, Seldom flinched and moaned.
“We don’t know the boy,” Nissim said.
“No?”
With that, the Master started telling a story that was much lie as truth. This very smart man, this one-time teacher, often talked about duty and integrity and being relentlessly honest. But he was suddenly weaving an elaborate tale about a strange boy showing up at school this morning. He claimed that he was a naturalist and these children were his students, and the three of them were on their way to the canopy to hunt for a rare species of ant. The strange boy had tagged along, which was a mistake. Master Nissim regretted that and hoped that nobody would get in trouble, particularly him. Then he introduced the children, except he used invented names, and he offered a palm to the annoyed man, claiming that his name was Master Shine.
Elata liked to lie, and she always had the talent. But she couldn’t begin to keep all the details of this story straight.
Nissim was doing a grand job of wasting time, she realized.
Finally the annoyed man said, “Just shut up.”
Nobody spoke.
Glancing over his shoulder, he nodded and one of his partners came forward, bending low while the annoyed man told him, “Search the cargo and search between the bladders. Make sure he’s not onboard.”