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Zeke closed his eyes and he felt them stretching, pushing back in his eye sockets from the pressure of their descent. “I’m going to die here, or I’m going to die down there, on the ground, in an airship. This isn’t what I meant…” he said to himself, for no one else was listening. “This isn’t what I meant to do. Oh, God. ”
The airship’s underside dragged itself along a new surface, one that was rougher and made with bricks, not metal; and the dusty, pebbled sound of stones crushed along the ship and rattled to the ground. “What’d we hit?” Parks asked.
“Wall!”
“City wall?”
“Can’t tell!”
The ship was spinning in an uncontrolled orbit that knocked it against hard things here and sharp things there, but it was slowing and then it was rising—so suddenly that the immediate lift and leap brought more bile into Zeke’s mouth. He spit a little spray against his visor.
Then the ship stopped with a pitiless shrug, like the yank of a dog’s leash.
Zeke fell off the wheel lock and went facedown onto the floor.
“Tethered,” the captain said grimly. “Damn us all, they’ve locked us. ”
Someone stepped on Zeke’s hand and he yelped, but there was no time to complain. A demanding knock was beating a drum-tune against the main portal. It was the sound of someone big and very, very angry. Zeke pulled himself up and scuttled away, back to his cubby by the cargo door. He hunkered there while the captain and his crew pulled out guns and blades.
They abandoned their buckled seats and tried at first to hold the door shut, but it had been damaged before when the Clementine had hit the Smith Tower, and now it was barely affixed to its hinges. Shoulders shoved and feet braced, but whoever was on the other side was heavier or more determined. Inch by inch, the door came peeling away.
Zeke had nowhere to go and nothing to contribute; he watched from the floor as a coal-black arm reached through the opening on one side and a burly white one burst through from the left. The black arm caught Parks by the hair and beat his head against the frame, but Parks used his knife to cut at the hand until it retreated, bleeding—only to swipe inside again a moment later with a blade of its own.
The larger arm on the other side could’ve belonged to a giant, or one of those amazing gorillas Zeke had once seen in a circus. Though it wasn’t covered in hair, it was longer than any arm the boy had ever personally set eyes upon; and he shuddered to consider the man who might wield it.
The white arm dipped down, took hold of the nearest boot, and pulled. Mr. Guise went dropping to the floor, where he kicked against the arm, the door, and everything else. The monstrous hand retreated for less than a second and reappeared holding a revolver, which it fired straight through the bottom of Mr. Guise’s foot.
Up through the boot the bullet blew, not stopping there but searing in a straight line through Guise’s thigh, and up into the soft flesh of his forearm. He howled and fired his own gun at the door, at the arm, at anything moving on the other side.
But the bullets wouldn’t penetrate the plated doors, and the giant hand appeared unharmed.
The door caved in another half a foot, denting beneath the force of the men who pushed against it. The captain left his spot at the door to come to the vault. He kicked Zeke out of the way, bruising the boy’s leg and ribs as he cast him aside and spun the wheel to open the hold.
“Hold that door!” he commanded. His officers were doing their best, but Guise was bleeding and Parks had a nasty smash that looked like the skin of a rotting fruit on his forehead.
The burly Indian brothers braced their backs against the dented door and held their ground against the encroaching raiders.
On the other side of the bridge, an escape hatch opened with the creak of hinges that were not often used. Zeke watched the captain sling himself outside the ship, clinging to it and crawling along it like a spider, until he’d disappeared and the opened door showed nothing but a square of Blight-poisoned sky. He could hear the man’s feet and knees beating against the exterior of the craft as he climbed along it, seeking the hijacking hooks and trying to yank them out by hand.
Zeke couldn’t imagine it, being up above the earth, heaven knew how high, and scaling a ship’s exterior with no harness, no ropes, no guarantee that anything soft was waiting below. But the captain’s handholds and footholds sounded like small gongs across the ceiling and around the back.
Parks hollered, “What’s he doing?” Zeke could scarcely hear him, for his ears were still ringing with the percussion of the shots fired in such a close space.
“Their hooks!” Mr. Guise said, though he was breathless with pain and trying to daub at his wounds while he pressed his back against the door. “He’s freeing them. ”
Zeke wanted to help, but he had no idea how to do so; and he wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go except into the sky and down to the ground, which would surely receive him in pieces.
Beside Mr. Guise, a sharp-pointed bowie knife had fallen out of someone’s reach. Zeke slid a foot across the floor to grab it and pull it close. When no one objected to this action, he pulled it into his hands and clutched it up to his chest.
With a tearing sort of tin-can rip, something came loose and the ship gave a gut-swabbing heave.
The door that stood between the crews of the Clementine and the attacking ship slammed shut, and almost slammed clear out into the sky because there was nothing on its other side; the other craft had rebounded, and they had fallen apart from one another.
“Got it!” Brink shouted, though he could barely be heard inside the belly of the airship.
The other ship’s crewmembers yelped. Someone might have fallen out as the ships swayed apart from one another—Zeke didn’t know, and could not see.
“Get away from that door!” Mr. Guise hollered, and scooted himself away from it, back over to his chair, which he could scarcely pull himself up to reach.
