“Maybe this is true. But I think he needs to have heroes more than some little boys.”
“’Cause he doesn’t talk, you mean?”
She swiped a raindrop from her cheek with the back of her hand. “I cannot explain it, but he is sad somehow inside. At his house, his family, they love him. But”—she shook her head—“even with them, he is still somehow not with them.”
“Well.” What was he supposed to do with that?
The boy could sure have chosen himself a nice string of heroes better than him. That was certainly what Nan was always implying. Why not Griff? He was here. He obviously knew Walter and liked him. Griff would be a far better kind of man to look up to. Not as exciting, probably, but the kind that’d show you how to be there for people when it counted.
Not much Hitch could say about that, so he changed the subject. “You do realize all this talk of Campbell’s and Livingstone’s—and mine—could be so much hot air? Even with the dirigible marked, we’d have to stumble right onto it to find it. Zlo is still square in control of this game, no question.”
She touched his shoulder again. Her palm warmed him all the way through his jacket. “We will think of something. Tomorrow will be different day.”
*
“Heetch.”
Somebody was saying his name funny. A woman. And she was poking him.
He shifted in his bedroll and eased his head out from under the blanket. The morning light—more gray than golden—zapped his eyelids shut just as fast as he opened them. He probably hadn’t gotten to sleep until past midnight, what with all the to-do of cleaning up the field and trying to plan for tomorrow.
Or today, rather.
“Hitch. I have thought of plan.”
He flipped over onto his back and squinched his eyes open.
Beneath the canopy of his Jenny’s wing, Jael crouched over him, one hand still extended, ready to jab him again.
He groaned. “Oof. A plan. Right. A plan.” The words circled in his brain, trying to find enough space to land.
She stabbed him again with two pointy fingers just under his ribs.
“Ow! Stop with the poking already. Give me a chance to wake up.”
“You are very slow with this waking up. Earl has been awake for many hours.”
“Don’t give him too much credit. He probably rolled over onto his busted arm.”
“No.” She rocked back on her heels. “He has been working on plane, to get it ready for when we need it.”
“By himself? With that arm?” Hitch propped himself on his elbow and craned a look around at the front of the plane.
Where the propeller should have been, the naked shaft glinted.
“Matthew Berringer took him to his house to do this carving,” Jael said.
“And he didn’t wake me?”
She shrugged. “He said he did not need you. And that you are”—she squinted one eye, like she was trying to remember a word—“bear, when you are woken up.”
“But you’re not scared of bears, is that it?”
She scootched back on her heels, and when she was clear of the wing, she stood. “Walter has bear. It is furry and… sweet.”
“Ri-ight.” He pushed back his bedroll and looked around for his boots. “So what’s this plan of yours?”
“I will tell you in car.” She gestured to J.W.’s jalopy. “Should I drive?”
“No. You should not drive.” He laced both boots all the way to the top and knotted them off. Then he raked a hand through his hair, grabbed his jacket, and crawled out from under the wing.
Uniform gray covered the sky, but it wasn’t raining anymore. Along the horizon, the clouds darkened into black streaks that blocked sight of anything past Scotts Bluff.
He turned all the way around until Jael was in view once more. “So we really are blockaded. At least it’s not raining here.” He touched the Jenny’s wing. It was only slightly damp from yesterday’s drizzle. “If it got much wetter, we would’ve had to wait for the spark plugs to dry out before we could take off.” He checked the engine, but Earl had already opened all the compartments to let her dry. “Guess that means the drought’s broken, for what it’s worth.”
“You are very slow this morning,” Jael said. She had rummaged through the grub sack and come out with what was left of Lilla’s biscuits. She held up the plate. “For first meal. Now let us go.”
“All right, all right.” He leaned his neck to first one side and then the other to crack it, then trudged after her.
Today, she hurried to the car with barely a glitch in her stride and climbed into the seat, up and over, without bothering with the door.
He cranked the engine, then slid beneath the wheel. “Guess sleeping cold and damp agrees with your joints after all.”
She grinned. “I thought of something that is very interesting.”
“What?” He turned the jalopy around and bumped across the field toward the road. “That being around Earl is what makes you sore?” Earl would say it was Hitch who had the talent for making people sore.
She bit her lip, still grinning. Her eyes sparkled. All in all, she looked far too pleased with herself. “Not Earl. Schturming.”
“How’s that?”
“Lightning is what made me hurt in beginning, yes?”
“Right. Although you’re lucky to be feeling anything, if you want my opinion.”
“Yes, but how it is hurting does not have sense. One hour it is almost all gone, and then I am hardly able to be walking.”
He turned onto the road, headed toward the lake, and gave the car the gun. “You’re the first person I know who’s stayed around to tell me how it felt after getting that close to a lightning strike. Maybe that’s just how it goes.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so.” She handed him a biscuit. “It is like you said yesterday. The weather makes people’s bones to hurt. Well, Schturming causes weather, yes?”
He bit past the flour powdered on top and into the fluffy—if cold—insides of the biscuit. “And when are you figuring on getting to the plan part? _Schturming_’s making weather all over the place today.”
“But I am not talking about weather, I am talking about dawsedometer. When it is near, I hurt. And since it is inside of Schturming, that is how we find it.”
“That is… interesting, if it’s true. Kind of like barometric pressure—which this dawsedometer thing probably warps like crazy.”
She made a confused face.
“Barometric pressure. I guess you’d say it’s part of what makes weather. At any rate, it can make people’s joints hurt.” He chewed his biscuit. “But even if that’s true, what’s it get us? You just want to drive around until you start hurting?”
She raised both eyebrows, mouth cocked. “You have better idea?”
“Not really.”
“Then we drive.” She settled back in her seat and pulled out another biscuit. “You will find it. You have luck.”
“You can’t trust luck.”
She looked over at him. Her face was clear except for two serious little lines between her eyes. “I trust you.”
“Well…” He dug around for the right thing to say.
What did he want to say anyway? He had wanted her to trust him. He’d wanted her to like him, almost right from the start. Well, now she liked him and trusted him—and he’d gone and kissed her, and who knew exactly how she felt about that now that she’d cooled down. At any rate, she wasn’t too burnt up about it, from the looks of things.