The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [40]
I shivered. “The sooner, the better. I don’t think I like being this far off the ground after all.” Truly, I didn’t like being shown as the scared schoolgirl next to Alouette and her crew. I already had enough presumptions to deal with back home. To be looked down on by heretics and shoved aside by Cal at the slightest hint of attention was entirely too much.
“I like it.” Dean shoved his hands into his armpits for warmth. “It’s free air up here. Nobody pointing and saying who’s a heretic and who’s a Rationalist. No Proctors. Just flying.”
I turned to go inside. “I’d better go check on Cal. Make sure he hasn’t agreed to run off and marry Alouette.”
“She has that effect on a man, sure.” Dean whistled. “Poor old Cal has no chance.”
“He’s never even had the opportunity before now,” I grumbled. Dean searched out a comb in his pockets and fixed his hair against the wind.
“I deduced.” He followed me through the hatch and shut it behind him. “Come on. You want to see the rest of the Belle? Take your mind off Cal?”
I nodded. If Cal was going to behave like a dolt, I didn’t need to concern myself. And who knew when I’d be on an airship again? I should make it count. “Very much so.”
Dean led me back inside, through the hold and down a narrow corridor to the aft, where the whirring of the turbine blades vibrated my back teeth. “Bunk room.” He pointed out a chrome door with an empty brass nameplate, the slot for a card held in the talons of a rigid-winged eagle.
I ran my hand down the chevron wings stamped under the nameplate, the scarred spot where a ship’s name and operating number had been burned off with a torch. “This ship was someone else before it was the Belle?”
Dean nodded. “She was an enemy rig in the war,” he offered. “Officer transport, from what Harry told me. He and his navy boys crashed outside of Bern in ’forty-four and hijacked it from a squad of enemy officers and their necrodemons.”
I jerked my hand back to my side.
Dean examined me, leaning in a bit. “You look a little green, kiddo,” he said. “Sure you’re not airsick?”
“Necrodemons …,” I murmured. “Not very pleasant …”
“Yep,” Dean said, shaking his head. “But they’re long gone, miss. Not going to jump out and bite you.” He twisted the eagle insignia upside down and chuckled.
“It’s not that,” I whispered. “I mean, I’m not afraid of necrodemons.” I could become a necrodemon, if the virus took hold of me. I could be worse than anything that had flown over Europe in the ship that would become the Belle. “It’s just a bit close to home,” I told Dean, and cut him off by pointing at a shut hatch. “Show me something else. I don’t want to talk about the necrovirus any longer.”
Dean opened his mouth like he wanted to pry, but then shut it again and flipped a hand. “That’s the aether room. Where they do communications and nav and the like. Just a bunch of tubes and instruments. Snoresville.”
I bit my lip. Anything to take my mind off thoughts of my infection. “I’d still like to see.”
“Suit yourself.” Dean shrugged. He opened the hatch to a much smaller space, and I gasped at the tangle of wires and shattered aether tubes, the burnt-parchment scent rolling out to smother my senses.
“Is it …” I coughed and pulled out my handkerchief to hold over my face as noxious blue-white smoke blanketed us. “Is it supposed to …” The aethervox that Harry no doubt used for ship-to-ship was smashed beyond repair, just a slag heap of no use to anyone. Wires and char marks were flung to the four corners of the room, and the recorder roll, the drum covered in thin brass coating that recorded messages sent across the aether, had rolled away and bumped against my feet as the Belle banked. “This can’t be an accident.”
Dean spun away from the hatch and ran for the cockpit. “Sure isn’t. That’s sabotage.”
Jean-Marc let the shredded wires from the vox run through his fingers as if he were holding the last scraps of a broken treasure. “Fire ax, capitaine. They chewed it up and spat