“Hold on!” Alun yelled.
Rose, half in and half out of the basket, facedown to the ground, couldn’t hold on to anything, but Alun Madder’s hands were a vise around her ribs. The basket tumbled, bounced, and then even Alun Madder’s strong hands couldn’t keep ahold of her.
Rose spilled free of the basket and hit the ground so hard, all the air was knocked out of her lungs. It took her a full minute to get air back in her chest and wits back in her head. And when she did, she realized two things.
One, she was on the ground. Scuffed, bruised, and mussed, but by most parts whole and undamaged.
And two, the Madder brothers were all laughing their fool heads off.
She pushed up to sitting, and tried to get her bearings.
Somehow, they kept the basket from breaking apart. Somehow they brought the basket down, close enough, and, more important, slow enough, that when the basket finally struck the earth, they hadn’t all perished falling out of the thing.
The balloon, however, was caught up in the tree branches, and torn open like a child’s wayward kite.
“Fine a landing as ever, brother Bryn,” Alun, who sat no more than a few feet away from Rose, said.
“Thank you, brother Alun.” Bryn chuckled and heaved up to his feet. He swayed a little, then seemed to get his footing and stomped over to the tipped basket. He twisted a valve, and threw open the burner grate. There was not a coal, not a stitch of fuel, left. “Well, she won’t burn the forest down.”
“Looks like a one-way ticket,” Cadoc said from where he was sprawled on the ground, staring up at the tattered balloon in the tree above him thoughtfully. “Pity. I do like air rides.”
“We’ll make you another balloon, Cadoc,” Alun said. “And you can try your hand at flying it.” He slapped at his shoulders and trousers, then stood. “Miss Small, are you in one piece?”
Rose took a deep breath to steady herself. She felt jostled and rattled as if she’d ridden a day in a horse-drawn carriage, as if every inch of the space they had traveled had rumbled beneath her as they passed over it. But that had been flight. Her first. And she had loved it.
She stood. “I’m fine enough, thank you, Mr. Madder.”
“Good,” he said, “that’s good. Thought I might have lost you there at the end, what with you jumping ship.”
“I assure you, I did not jump,” Rose said.
The brothers all laughed again, and went about reclaiming their weapons and supplies.
Rose wanted to know how they had built the ship, wanted to know what the balloon and sails were made of and how the tubes and hoses and steam and glim had powered it, but there was no time.
The thump of steam exhausting a stack rolled through the air from up the track and a long hiss followed. The matic that Shard LeFel rode was somewhere up the rail ahead of them and coming closer, like as not headed to LeFel’s railcars.
“Bring your weapons, lady and gents,” Alun said, jumping free of the basket. “It’s time we see to the end of Mr. Shard LeFel.”
They gathered their gear, and Alun pressed a modified Winchester rifle into Rose’s hands. “As a thank-you. For the use of the glim,” he said.
She nodded and turned to one side to sight the gun.
“You’ll want these.” Bryn pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket—well, more like modified goggles, thin brass out to the edges and wide round lenses, clear, set in permanently, with a tiny brass loupe over the right-hand corner of each lens. A spray of other colored lenses fanned off on one side.
Rose put the goggles on her forehead. “I don’t know that I understand this gun,” she said as they strode up the track. “Or these glasses.”
“Each lens is for a different distance,” Bryn said. “There’s a small tube there by your left ear.”
Rose reached up and touched the side of the goggle.
“There’s a retractable clamp on the barrel. Connect the two, and the brass loupe will show you your target.”
Rose slid the goggles over her eyes and connected the tubes. Nothing seemed to happen.
“It’s powered by pumping in a round,” Bryn said.
Rose stopped, and Bryn stopped with her, though Alun and Cadoc kept walking, their boots crunching in the gravel, their heads turned up to watch the moon more than their feet.
Bryn handed her a box of bullets from his pocket, and she loaded a single shell. The lever load snapped the bullet into place and the brass loupe on the goggles shifted to the lowest corner.
She raised the rifle to her shoulder and looked out along it. The brass loupe shifted smoothly like oil on water to show her exactly where her bullet would strike: rock, tree, leaf.
“Isn’t that glimsweet?” Rose said. She lowered the gun and pulled the goggles back up to her forehead.
“Thank you.”
“Wouldn’t want you injured in this fight, Miss Small. You’re a right special woman to survive traveling twixt-wise as we just did.”
“Survive?” Rose asked, surprised. “Think that would have killed us?”
“There’s not anything in this world without risk,” he said. “Especially untested devices.”
Rose shook her head. “I’m sure I agree with you there, Mr. Madder.” She hefted the gun. “But I enjoyed every second of it.”
A crashing squeal of metal on metal ground into the night behind them, coming up the tracks as if something huge was being dragged. If LeFel’s matic was coming from ahead of them, Rose had no idea what sort of thing was coming up from behind.
“Don’t dally,” Alun yelled back to them, jumping to one side of the track, and still jogging while he navigated a way through the bushes. “Sounds like the fun’s just beginning.”
Bryn turned and jogged to catch up with his brothers, and after a moment’s hesitation, and a moment’s prayer, Rose did the same.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Cedar Hunt stalked the perimeter of the dozen or so tents and cook pits of the workers in Shard LeFel’s employ. Unlike most railmen, who brought a crew of stragglers and ruffians to work the rail, LeFel had only a handful of men he brought along, and had hired up another handful or two of men from the town. For the rest of the rail work, he used his matics and tickers.
The men were sleeping, vulnerable, lying quiet and easy for the kill. The cook fires had gone to ash and smoke. No sentries watched over the rail. Even the matics were powered down, cold, silent, unmoving sculptures of iron and leather and oil made supple by moonlight.
It would be easy to kill the men. But it was not men Cedar hunted. It was the Strange. And the tuning fork that whispered against his heart said the Strange were close.
Cedar had to find Wil, dead or alive. Had to find the boy, Elbert, dead or alive. And he had to kill Mr. Shunt. He may not have been able to save Mae Lindson, a sorrow that made him want to keen, but he had made her promises, and he would see them through.
Mr. Shunt would likely return to the three railcars on the track, down a ways from the men’s tents and matics. Cedar headed that way. He didn’t know why a man like Shard LeFel needed three cars, but he had a suspicion. One car to live in, maybe one car to work in. And likely one car to hold his prisoners in.
Cedar slipped through the darkness to the railcars on the spur off the main rail, staying in shadow, silent as the moonlight.
He crept to the first car and sniffed at the underbody. Death and Strange. There were things, Strange things, in this car just waiting to be killed. But the tuning fork did not hum louder. There might be Strange within the car, but it was not the one Strange who had taken Elbert. And that Strange was the one he would kill. First.
It took everything he had not to give in to the beast’s need to kill. He pulled against the urge, tamped it down, and sniffed at the car again. Something skittered in the three corners of the car, dragging long tails or ropes behind, and then was still. He could not find the boy or his brother’s scent in the death and blood and oil above him.