The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [43]
Fire crowned the Belle now, and the night before us looked like Dresden rather than Arkham.
We fell. Like a bird with a lead shot in its heart, we fell into the jaws of the waiting earth. Alouette, not strapped down or sitting, conversely flew to the ceiling, lips peeled back, her scream lost in the cacophony of everything else, human and mechanical, on board the Belle.
We fell, and the cruel mistress of the air took sight and sound from me, until all I could feel were Dean’s arms.
I woke hanging in space, my tie-down slicing my shoulders. The groan of rivets and the gentle hiss of hydrogen came in, and then, more slowly, the weight of my own body. It felt as if a giant had picked me up and thrown me far as he could, and I’d landed badly.
“Cal?” I croaked. Talking started a fire under my ribs. “Dean?”
“Cripes.” Dean groaned, swiping blood from his face. “That was a rough reentry, for sure.”
So he was all right. My chest loosened a bit. I swiveled as well as I could, and looked for Cal. He wasn’t there. “Cal! Cal, call out if you can hear me!”
“That …” Cal raised his head from a diaphanous blob of cargo netting and broken tie-down at the top of the cabin, which was now the bottom. He struggled to his feet, jaw muscles jumping when he put weight on his ankle. “That was a lot more … exciting than I expected. Can we please never do it again?”
“Are you all right?” I called to him. He nodded, after a moment of consideration.
“Alive. What matters, right?”
I examined my position. “That and getting out of this blasted harness.”
“No help for it,” Dean said, craning his neck at the wall of the hull. The Belle had shifted onto her side, and we were now strapped to the ceiling. “Gonna have to drop.” He jerked free of his harness and fell, landing and rolling. “Come on, Miss Aoife.” He beckoned. “The gasbag’s ruptured. One spark is going to light us up like Atlantic City.”
The inversion was beginning to dizzy me, squashing the fear I’d otherwise be feeling, and Dean’s face swam in front of my eyes. “If I land on my head, it’s going to be all your fault,” I told him, trying to shake my eyes back into focus.
He smirked, even as he stood on the wall of the crazily tilting Belle. “I’ll take that chance, miss.”
I shut my eyes against vertigo and then jerked on my straps. I didn’t fall straight down, like the graceful swans we girls were supposed to be in Academy dance classes. I tumbled, as Mrs. Fortune would have put it, arse over teakettle.
When I opened my eyes after the inglorious thump of my landing on the cargo nets, I found that I was staring into Alouette’s face.
“All His gears!” I gasped, scrambling away from her.
Alouette was entombed in an avalanche of boxes and netting, the veins in her skin like a road map on old paper. I tugged at her shoulders to free her, to no avail. Getting to my feet and gaining purchase, I yanked again, only to have the hot brand in my chest stab me again. I fell back, panting. “We have to get her out of there.” A few minutes ago I’d wanted to slug Alouette, and now the same impulse caused a fervor in me that made me yank uselessly at her body until my own gave out, bruised and battered as it was. Alouette hadn’t been polite, but no one deserved that plunging, screaming death.
Cal reached down, unzipped Alouette’s high leather collar and pressed his fingers against her neck. “She doesn’t have a pulse.”
“And you’re a surgeon now?” I demanded.
“I never thought I’d be saying this, but the kid’s right,” Dean said. He kicked at the exterior hatch, bowed badly on impact. “You ain’t strapped down, you don’t survive a handshake with the ground.”
“Say.” Cal exhaled a whistle. “She’s got a stigma.”
“What?” Surprised, I leaned over his shoulder and beheld the small white scar on Alouette’s breastbone. Stamped by a hot iron that left an indelible kiss, the puckered spot on her skin made me think of the heretic in Banishment Square.
“I thought only sailors and delinquents got these,” Cal said. He reached out to brush his fingers over the twin wings etched into the scar