“Never,” I said. “I’m just not sure how much longer I can take this.”
Iron poisoning was insidious—it started small, flickers out of the corner of your eyes, then grew to pain in your joints and skull that progressed until you could no longer tell what was real and what was the iron working on your Fae blood, and you’d do anything to make the pain stop.
Cal closed his hand over mine, surprising me. “You’ll be all right, Aoife,” he said. “You’re the strongest person I know.”
The flight to St. Louis was a little easier—the stewardesses fussed over Cal and served lunch, and the food helped settle my stomach. Once we took off for Las Vegas, I watched the plains ripple and change by the hour to mountains, spiky and so close I felt I could reach out and grab a handful of snow from their caps.
The mountains bled into desert, and I saw the carcass of an airship below, iron bones scattered across the landscape, the track of its crash cutting into the belly of the land, exposing bloodred dirt.
I saw another, and another. “Cal,” I said, and pointed.
“It’s the updrafts,” he said sagely. “Warm air from the desert and cold from the mountains. Turbulence.”
I didn’t bother to ask how he knew—Cal had an answer for almost everything. I guessed it came from being a ghoul, stuck in the sewers with nothing to do except read human books and adventure stories and dream of life above.
The airship bounced, and I gripped the arms of my seat. A woman behind me gave a small cry.
“Ladies and gentlemen”—a smooth voice came out of the trumpet-shaped speaker above my head—“we’ve encountered a little rough air, so we’re going to ask everyone to remain in their seats until further notice.”
I heard the rivets in the hull strain as the airship gained altitude. We bounced again, as if a giant child had us on the end of a string that he tugged mercilessly.
“Jeez,” Cal said, wincing. “I’m going to upchuck if this keeps happening.”
I passed him the empty bowl from my ice cream sundae. “If you throw up on me, I’ll kill you.”
“I can’t help it!” he moaned. “I get a nervous stomach when I eat human food.”
The next jolt knocked bags from their perches and slammed my head against the back of my seat so hard I saw stars. I heard a whine from the back of the airship, and we lurched, losing a hundred feet in the blink of an eye.
“Okay,” Cal said, and screams and shouts went up from the other passengers. “What on the scorched earth is going on?”
“That wasn’t normal,” I agreed, craning a glance out of the bubble-glass window next to our seat. A trail of smoke blossomed against the pale white-blue sky, sprung from a black dot that quickly resolved itself into another airship as it gained on us.
“I don’t think this is a good sign,” I said to Cal. He peered over my shoulder. We both saw the flash, and a second later the impact rocked our ship.
A stewardess clawed her way through our cabin to the cockpit, and I could hear the pilots shouting at one another as she opened the door.
The airship behind us drew closer. Half of its cabin had been blasted away, leaving the batteries and fans exposed to the open air. Noxious-looking smoke filled the rest of the skeletal cabin structure, and I could see tiny figures moving back and forth inside.
“Oh man,” Cal said. “Oh man. What are we going to do, Aoife?”
“I have no idea,” I said as our craft shuddered and I heard the whine of the fans die. “I just hope our pilot stops running before we get shot down.”
The other airship drew alongside us, and I saw the figures inside clearly. They wore masks—that explained how they could stand the high altitude and the thick smoke. Long chains with hooks on the end bit into our hull, closing the distance between the skeletal ship and ours. One shattered the window next to our seats and clasped the sill, and I shrieked as glass spilled into my lap.
Cal put an arm around me as the other ship passed a flexible gangway between the crafts, but I shrugged him off.
“Pirates,” he said, excitement bleeding into his voice. “I never thought I’d actually see pirates.…”
“This is not going to be an adventure,” I said. Inside, I was panicking. I’d heard stories of pirates lighting airships on fire after they’d stripped them, leaving the passengers to burn alive, or breaking into the cockpit and setting the planes to crash to earth.
Worse, I’d heard of passengers being press-ganged into service on the pirate craft, or sold overseas to slavers in countries beyond the reach of the Proctors.
That couldn’t happen to me. I had to get to San Francisco.
I watched as the pirates made their way across the gangplank to our airship, moving slowly and heavily, even considering the equipment that weighed them down.
I grabbed Cal’s arm. “We have to hide,” I hissed. I couldn’t be caught here, not when we were still so far from San Francisco.
“Where?” Cal demanded. “Where are we supposed to go?”
I cast my eye about and saw the door to a water closet at the back of the cabin. “This way,” I said. A clang resounded through the first-class cabin as the hatch blew off its hinges, and people screamed.
I didn’t have any money or jewelry for the pirates, which meant that all they had to take from me was myself. I couldn’t be kidnapped now.
The water closet wasn’t big enough for both of us, really, and the door wouldn’t shut completely. I squeezed in close to Cal, sharing air and heartbeats.
We heard shouting in the cabin, but it was all passengers. None of the usual screams of robbery. I peered through the tiny crack left in the door.
The pirates moved soundlessly and with purpose, snatching jewels off necks, watches off chains and wallets from shaking fingers. I felt my stomach tighten. This was all wrong. They were mechanical. They might have been automatons for all the emotion they showed.
They wore canvas pants and jackets, rusty weapons strapped to their bodies. Gas masks with bulging glass eye sockets and flexible hoses covered their faces explained how they could have survived in their half-ruined ship.
The leader glared at everyone he passed, and I could sense the weight of his gaze even through his mask.
“Something’s wrong,” I whispered to Cal. They didn’t move like men, didn’t speak. It was as if they’d been conjured out of the air and the smoke that surrounded their battered ship.
Cal flared his nostrils and sniffed. “They don’t smell like men,” he murmured. “They smell like dead things.” His face rippled, and I could tell that he was fighting to keep the ghoul inside him under control. I didn’t want to be close to him if it came out, but I’d rather be pressed against Cal as a ghoul than deal with whatever was out there.
“What do we do?” Cal whispered.
I watched as the pirates advanced. “I’m supposed to know?” Why did I always have to be the one with the plan? Why did I always get stuck in these horrible situations?
I thought about what Conrad had said, that creatures were spilling into the Iron Land from everywhere else. Could this be a part of it, these strange, lumbering creatures chasing humans through the sky? Could the airmen out there have risen from the wrecks in the desert below, animated once again to take to the sky and pillage crafts full of the living?
Given what was happening in Arkham, I decided that was as likely as anything else. But reasons didn’t really matter now—what mattered was getting us out of this.
“Here’s the plan,” I whispered. “We stay here, and we don’t move, and we hope they just pass us by.”
“That’s a crappy plan,” Cal whispered back.
I shoved my hand over his mouth as the pirate leader drew within feet of us, head swinging back and forth as if he was sniffing the air.