pinnacle of human achievement. Anything else was practically suspected of witchcraft.
Her stomach lifted in a momentary feeling of weightlessness.
“We’re goin’ down,” Lizzie whimpered, hiding her face in Maggie’s shoulder. “I hate airships. It ent gonna be a long, slow glide. We’re gonna fall and die and—”
“Shut up, Liz,” Jake said through his teeth. “Yer makin’ me nervous.”
Andrew glanced over his shoulder, in the direction of the stern. “What’s happening back there? Claire, perhaps you should check on Alice.”
She did not want to check on Alice. She wanted to remain fixed at the window, as if sheer strength of will could bring the ship in for a safe landing.
But that was selfish and pointless. So instead, she ran back to the engine, where an alarming plume of black smoke now trailed in their wake.
“Lady!” Tears were whipped from Tigg’s eyes through the open hatch. “I can’t hold ’er—She’s gonna burn up!”
The ancient engine, which had suffered so many lives, had finalspas, had ly come to its last. “Claire! The kill switch!” Alice shrieked. “Get her stopped!”
Claire reached past Nine, who was standing silently by as if he’d been deactivated, and jerked the engine’s emergency ignition lever down. The engine juddered and shuddered, steam hissing out from among the gears and every possible aperture. The smell of burning intensified.
Even the kill switch had died.
She whirled, scanning the engine room for anything she could use.
There!
She snatched up an iron crowbar that had been flung to the floor. There was no hope for the engine, so this would not hurt any more than the utter destruction it was destined for. “Alice, get out of there!” Alice scrambled up onto the gangway and Claire rammed the crowbar into the seam of the red-hot boiler door and pried it open. With a whoosh of surprise, the door blew off, the contents spilled out into the sky—and the engine gasped and gave up the ghost.
The wind whistled through the sudden silence.
And then the earth, spiny and sharp with trees, leaped up to meet them.
Chapter 2
Claire pulled herself upright with the help of Nine’s metal leg. Having magnetic feet, he had merely stuck fast to a structural support during the long slide of their landing and its abrupt halt in a copse of quivering aspens, golden in their autumn foliage. But other than that, he did not appear much damaged. She hoped that was the case for the other members of the crew.
“Mopsies?” she called anxiously, staggering forward into the gondola.
“’Ere.” The voice was muffled, and a heap of arms and legs and petticoats resolved itself into two girls. “I fink I’m broken.”
Lizzie patted Maggie down, her keen green eyes clouded with worry. “Where does it hurt?”
“In my stomach, where your knee is. Gerroff.”
Andrew groaned. He appeared to have gone right over the tiller headfirst, much in the manner of a horseman on an unbroken mount, and had been bent in half with his feet dangling in midair. Claire assisted him to slide off the wheel to the vertical once again.
“Remind me to get some lessons in steering one of these things the next time we meet your friend Captain Hollys,” he said. “That was a bruiser of a landing.”
“We are bruised, but not dead,” Claire pointed out. “Look on the bright side.” She adjusted his tawny brocade waistcoat so that it sat upon his shoulders again, more as an excuse to touch him and reassure herself that he was whole and undamaged than because she cared tuppence about how he looked.
“Everyone all right?” Alice came in on wobbly legs, Tigg at her heels. She took in the two of them in one glance and Claire stepped away.
Or tried to. The deck was canted several degrees and her graceful, subtle movement turned into a drunken stumble that fetched her up against the bulkhead. “Yes,” she said, trying to recover h> er dignity. “I feared for us all for a moment.”
“You still can,” Alice said grimly. Her curly blond hair had been torn from under her airman’s cap by the wind, and stuck out in a hundred different directions. “Come on. We need to suss out how bad the gondola and fuselages are damaged.”
Getting out of the hatch was not easy—in fact, it was more like climbing out of a window that was tilted toward you. In the end, Andrew and Alice went down on a rope and caught the other four as they slid down one by one.
“It’ll right itself once we fill the starboard fuselage again,” Tigg said