Wet, wounded, out of the bottom of hell’s well. Low on fuel, heavy on passengers, with airships scouting for their smoke.
Some days there wasn’t enough glim in the sky to make this job easy.
“Inside,” Hink yelled to Cedar and the wolf. “We’ll be launching as soon as Molly can give us steam.”
Cedar Hunt took the goat from the wolf and shouldered it as he strode to the ship, the wolf loping at an easy pace by his side. In the shuttered light, Cedar looked taller, inhuman, like a hunter out of legend, or some kind of warrior of old come to put the land right.
It was just a moment, a flicker of a thought. Then Hink shook his head. Those kinds of fool thoughts were the imaginings that had sent him down a life path even his soiled-dove mama hadn’t approved.
With wild thoughts, and wilder blood, Hink had been a terror growing up. Some days he wasn’t even sure there was enough sky and earth together to give him room to shout.
“Stop dreaming,” Seldom said as he slapped Hink on the back. Hard. “You’re all wet.”
“Wasn’t dreaming,” Hink said, following his second into the ship. “Was figuring how much money I’m about to lose getting us out of this knothole.”
“Money?” Guffin called from up near the navigation. “Whose money are you spilling, Captain?”
“There’s only one way she’ll fly,” Hink said. “Steam and gears alone won’t do it down this hellhole. No wind, no launch point. No luck. Nothing but glim.”
“We’re gonna glim-lift,” Guffin grumbled. “There goes a season’s profit.”
“I appreciate your practical concerns, Mr. Guffin, but the only men glim won’t profit are dead men. And I refuse to die in this pit. Mr. Hunt, Mrs. Lindson, and Miss Small, be sure that you’re seated on the floor, back against the wall, and buckled tight. Mr. Seldom, see that our passengers are safely secured and have a breathing mask to share.”
Hink strode to the rear of the ship to check Molly and the boilers. He braced himself for the heat as he spun the lock and stepped through the metal door. The slap of heat against his skin was thick as in a Sunday bathhouse.
It always surprised him how compact the Swift’s boilers were compared to those of other ships. Even so, the engine took up most all of the stern of the ship, making this space a collection of brass and copper, tubes, valves, iron, and rivets. In the right light—hell, in every light—the engine looked like a jewel cut and cast to sit a king’s crown.
“How’s our fuel, Molly?” Hink asked.
Molly closed the fire box door and stepped back to get a better look at a valve near the steam stack. “You taking her to Old Jack’s?”
“Thinking on it.” Hink leaned against the corner of the toolbox, and folded his arms over his chest, watching her work the drafts.
“How fast and how high?” she asked.
“I was thinking low and slow.”
“Fuel lasts longer the higher we go,” she said. “Some reason we need to creep?”
“Think the Saginaw’s out there still looking for us. You have any idea why he’s on our tail?”
She wiped her forearm over her forehead, slicking away sweat. “Last I heard, Captain Smith had gone up north toward the Big Horn Mountains to winter. I have no idea why he’s back this way. You tell Mr. Hunt you’re a U.S. Marshal yet?”
“Who says I’m gonna?”
“Why wouldn’t you? You trust the man, don’t you?”
“Not sure that I do.”
Molly hooked the wrench off her tool belt and turned to give him a full consideration. “You don’t distrust the man. Seldom told me you let him man the cannon.”
“Seldom talks too much,” Hink grumbled.
“If my kinsman thought highly enough of Mr. Hunt to give him his seal, then I say he’s trustworthy.”
“Rings can be stolen, lost in a game of cards, swallowed by a fish.…”
Molly stuck her fist on her hip and waved the wrench close enough to his nose that he had to pull his head back a bit to keep from getting hit with it.
“What is it in that head of yours, Lee?” she asked. “You trust the man, maybe even like him to a degree, but you won’t cotton to it? Don’t you think he’s looking after the best interests of those two women he hauled up out of that…that nightmare town?”
“There’s something about him don’t sit right with me is all,” he said. “The way he treats Miss Small doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Miss Small?” Molly pursed her lips and shook her head. “I didn’t say nothing about Miss Small in particular, now did I? How did Mr. Hunt treat Miss Small? You mean when he gave her the tea to ease her pain after you’d gone over there and made a damn fool of yourself?”
“I was trying to make her rest more comfortable,” he started, his voice rising. “And don’t put words on my tongue. This doesn’t have anything to do about how he treated Miss Small. I don’t care how he treats her, or how much she likes him.”
“You’re sweet on her!” she said, surprised.
“Take that back, Molly Gregor,” he warned.
Molly hung the wrench back on her belt, laughing. “I haven’t heard that tone out of you since Sally Winkle.”
“What tone?”
“The one that says you don’t know how hard you’ve already fallen for a woman.” Molly pulled her gloves out of the pocket of her overalls and put them on, her expression daring him to tell her she was wrong.
“I think you might have boiled your brains sitting back here so long,” he grumbled. “I have barely spoken to the woman. For Pete’s sake, she’s barely been conscious. For all I know, she can’t tell the difference between me and a fence post.”
“Tell yourself whatever you like, Paisley Cage. But that Miss Small is thrumming in your blood, and you won’t be quit of her in any easy way.”
“I can be quit of any woman I choose. I’ve proved that often enough.”
“Sure you have. The women you’ve caroused with. But not the few you’ve loved. Why, you pined for more than a year when Sally turned you down for that city-slicker lawyer.”
Hink opened his mouth, then closed it on a scowl. “I came back here asking you to give me fire to fly, Molly Gregor,” he said with as much calm as he had in him, “not to waste my time with crazy talk.”
She gauged his mood. Read him as easy as one of her dials needling to red. He didn’t know why he was always so see-through to the woman. It was a curse.
“You’ll have the fire you need,” she said. “Which you can thank two women for. Me, and Miss Small.”
“What’s Miss Small got to do with the fire in my engine?”
Molly’s mouth quirked up. “Fire in your engine, Captain? Thought I just made it clear why she’s got you het up. You like the woman. As for the Swift’s engine, you can thank Miss Small for spotting a leak I’ve been trying to chase down since we were stuck in Texas. She’s a fine hand at tinkering. Wants to be a boilerman someday, and I think she’d be damn fine at it.”
“Because you put nonsense in her head,” he groused.
“No. Because she loves steam and loves the sky, glim help her. I want you to promise me you’ll tell Mr. Hunt and Miss Small you’re a marshal once we hit Old Jack’s. I don’t like lying to good folk. It’s not the Gregor way.”
“This ship flies my way, not the Gregor way.” Hink tugged a pouch out of the inside of his shirt. He slipped free a small glass vial with the cork tamped tight and waxed. The eerie, beautiful green mist light of glim shone out from the glass. “We’ve got less than an eighth of the vial,” he said. “Make it count.” Then he pushed off the toolbox and headed for the door, ducking one of the lower steam pipes.
“Tell them,” she said. “Or I will.”
“Just give me an engine,” Hink said. “And if you can spare some heat to the cabin, I’m sure our passengers—all of them—would appreciate it.”
Hink shut the door behind him. Seldom leaned just a ways from the door on the other side, a rope in one hand, tied to nothing.