The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [37]
“Be careful,” Cal murmured. “I don’t trust these miscreants.”
“You don’t trust your own mother, Cal.” I gave his good foot a nudge. “I’ll be fine.”
Dean was slouched on a bench opposite Cal, and no one else in the crew seemed to be paying attention to me, so I poked at the various supplies slung into cargo nets, and when I’d determined there wasn’t anything more interesting than spare parts and hardtack, went looking for the cockpit. I might never be on an airship—a real airship—again, and I wanted to soak up as much as I could. Girls weren’t allowed to attend the School of Aeronautics. Our changeable nature made us unsuitable for flying or the precision work needed to maintain a machine that was really just a steel box slung under a balloon full of deadly explosive gas.
I didn’t particularly think that a twitchy idiot like Marcos Langostrian and his ilk would be suited either, but no one had asked me my opinion.
I went forward first, and peeped into the fore compartment, trying to stay out of the crew’s way. For all her outward plainness, the Belle’s cockpit was a thing of beauty. The windscreen was divided into four parts like rose petals, each a bubble of solid glass. The flight controls, worked in brass, shimmered under the aether lamps laid into the swooping brass walls, and the knobs and switches for the PA system and pitch controls were ebony inlaid with ivory chevrons, like a V of spirit birds.
Or ravens. I chased the thought away. The ravens hadn’t seen me. As far as the Proctors knew, the worst I was guilty of was being out of bounds after Academy curfew.
Captain Harry came up behind me. “Welcome aboard,” he boomed. “Making yourself right at home, I see.” His voice made me start. I could tell myself we’d escaped the city cleanly all I wanted, but my nerves believed differently.
“I was just looking at the cockpit,” I offered. “I’m sorry—”
“No sorries!” Harry exclaimed. “She’s a magnificent flying machine, ma Belle.” He gestured to the twin pilot’s chairs, crimson thread stitched into oxblood hide, and the two pilots occupying them. “This here’s Jean-Marc and Alouette, the two finest canailles ever to sail the stormy skies.”
Jean-Marc was thin and unremarkable, rather like Mr. Hesse, while Alouette wasn’t much older than Dean, with a round face and blond ringlets like a lanternreel starlet. She had the same cold, calculating look in her blue eyes as one of the femme fatales in the serials Cal loved—that icy cut-glass beauty that belonged to my mother, before sedatives and too much time locked up with her madness dulled it.
“Hello there,” I said. Alouette jerked her chin over my head.
“What did your boyfriend do to his ankle?”
“He’s not …,” I started with a sigh, but she climbed out of her seat, brushed past me and knelt in front of Cal.
“Boy,” she told him crisply, “we don’t take cripples on this boat. You’ll be the first one the Proctors snatch up, we get shot down.”
“I fell,” Cal said. “It’s nothing really. Doesn’t even hurt anymore.” The veins in his neck pulsed as Alouette prodded his ankle. He did a good enough job of hiding his wince when she poked the swollen joint, but I saw it and so did Dean, who gave a snort.
Alouette’s frosty expression changed to a smile as she inspected Cal. “Guess you did bang it up, at that. Once we’re airborne, I’ll dress it. I was a nurse down in Shreveport before I took up flying.”
Dean rolled his eyes behind Alouette’s back, and pulled a harness around himself. “Best to sit down, Miss Aoife,” he told me. “Don’t want you knocking your noggin, and the way these cats drive, you will.”
“Oui, sit,” Captain Harry commanded. “On board this ship, you are citizens of the air, and the air, she has a streak of mischief and malice. You disobey an order,