I didn’t particularly think that a twitchy idiot like Marcos Langostrian and his ilk would be suited either, but no one had asked me my opinion.
I went forward first, and peeped into the fore compartment, trying to stay out of the crew’s way. For all her outward plainness, the Belle’s cockpit was a thing of beauty. The windscreen was divided into four parts like rose petals, each a bubble of solid glass. The flight controls, worked in brass, shimmered under the aether lamps laid into the swooping brass walls, and the knobs and switches for the PA system and pitch controls were ebony inlaid with ivory chevrons, like a V of spirit birds.
Or ravens. I chased the thought away. The ravens hadn’t seen me. As far as the Proctors knew, the worst I was guilty of was being out of bounds after Academy curfew.
Captain Harry came up behind me. “Welcome aboard,” he boomed. “Making yourself right at home, I see.” His voice made me start. I could tell myself we’d escaped the city cleanly all I wanted, but my nerves believed differently.
“I was just looking at the cockpit,” I offered. “I’m sorry—”
“No sorries!” Harry exclaimed. “She’s a magnificent flying machine, ma Belle.” He gestured to the twin pilot’s chairs, crimson thread stitched into oxblood hide, and the two pilots occupying them. “This here’s Jean-Marc and Alouette, the two finest canailles ever to sail the stormy skies.”
Jean-Marc was thin and unremarkable, rather like Mr. Hesse, while Alouette wasn’t much older than Dean, with a round face and blond ringlets like a lanternreel starlet. She had the same cold, calculating look in her blue eyes as one of the femme fatales in the serials Cal loved—that icy cut-glass beauty that belonged to my mother, before sedatives and too much time locked up with her madness dulled it.
“Hello there,” I said. Alouette jerked her chin over my head.
“What did your boyfriend do to his ankle?”
“He’s not …,” I started with a sigh, but she climbed out of her seat, brushed past me and knelt in front of Cal.
“Boy,” she told him crisply, “we don’t take cripples on this boat. You’ll be the first one the Proctors snatch up, we get shot down.”
“I fell,” Cal said. “It’s nothing really. Doesn’t even hurt anymore.” The veins in his neck pulsed as Alouette prodded his ankle. He did a good enough job of hiding his wince when she poked the swollen joint, but I saw it and so did Dean, who gave a snort.
Alouette’s frosty expression changed to a smile as she inspected Cal. “Guess you did bang it up, at that. Once we’re airborne, I’ll dress it. I was a nurse down in Shreveport before I took up flying.”
Dean rolled his eyes behind Alouette’s back, and pulled a harness around himself. “Best to sit down, Miss Aoife,” he told me. “Don’t want you knocking your noggin, and the way these cats drive, you will.”
“Oui, sit,” Captain Harry commanded. “On board this ship, you are citizens of the air, and the air, she has a streak of mischief and malice. You disobey an order, you be over the deck rail. Otherwise, you keep quiet and you arrive up Arkham in one piece, oui?”
Cal and I nodded that we understood. There was nothing angry about Harry, but he had an air of command that brooked no argument.
Dean leaned his head back against the hull and shut his eyes, like this was all painfully everyday. I fleetingly wished I were calm. How many times had Dean made this trip? More than I ever would in my life.
“Lift, you bastards!” Captain Harry bellowed. “And if a storm do swallow us, may she spit us back up again!”
There was a jolt as the mooring lines retracted and then, with a dip in my stomach, the Belle sailed aloft, borne on the winter wind.
Once the excitement of liftoff abated, I found myself leaning my head against the hull, feeling the vibration of the wind and the turbines against my skull. Lulled, I felt my eyelids dip and exhaustion wind like wire through every bit of me, twisting and tugging and coaxing me toward sleep.
I decided that sleeping in a shipful of heretics and criminals might not be in my best interest. To keep awake, I focused on Dean. I’d never met a heretic who wasn’t strapped to the castigator or locked in a madhouse, and I wanted to memorize him, because soon enough he’d be gone and I’d be …
I didn’t know. Alone? Searching for Conrad, certainly. Wandering through another person’s delusions, the way I had been since I was a child.
Dean reached up and smoothed back his hair, shiny and black as his leather jacket in the aether glow. He plucked the cigarette from behind his ear and stuck it in his mouth, shutting his eyes and rubbing the back of his neck. I was wondering what the short hairs at the base of his skull would feel like under my hand when Alouette spun around in her pilot’s chair, her eyes wide through the small slice of open hatch I could see. She leaped up, closed the distance across the hold like a swift golden cat, ripped the cigarette away from Dean and threw it across the cabin. I jumped at her sudden movement, and her shouting. “Are you crazy, boy?” she demanded. “We’re floating underneath tons of hydrogen and you want to light up?”
Dean’s lips twitched and his entire body stiffened, like a valve with too much pressure on it. “I’m not an idiot, Allie, but I am bored. Being in this sardine can ain’t my idea of a fun Friday night.”
“You’re welcome to step out any old time,” Alouette flared, flicking her long fall of golden hair in Dean’s face. Dean dropped his eyes and chuckled, taking the Lucky Strikes from his pocket and sticking another cigarette between his lips.
“Don’t tempt me, Allie. You’d drive any sane guy off a ledge.” I watched the two of them stare at each other for a moment, until Dean crossed his ankles and leaned back against the hull, stretching himself out to his full height. “Go back to playing nursemaid. I’ll behave, I promise.”
Alouette threw up her hands and went to Cal, brushing me aside as if I were inconvenient baggage. “Let’s see about that ankle now that we’re up.” She pulled off his oxford and his sock, her mouth quirking at the hole in the toe, and slid his school pants up to the knee, her pale hands brushing his skin. “My, my,” Alouette said, gently wiggling the swollen joint. Cal hissed, his cheeks caving in and his teeth showing. He looked like he wanted to bite Alouette, but he pulled himself together, covering his mouth to hide the feral grimace. I wanted to sit by him and let him squeeze my hand, like I had when he burned himself during our fabricating class, but I had the feeling Alouette might bite me if I did.
“Like I said, miss,” Cal told her. “It’s worse than it looks.”
Alouette fluttered at his words. “Listen to you, ‘miss’ this and ‘miss’ that. It’s Alouette, or Allie.”
Cal swallowed and took his hand away from his face, and he was easygoing Cal again. “All right, mi—Alouette. Sorry I’m not in better humor—it does smart a bit.”
“You did a number on yourself,” Alouette agreed. “Looks like a real war wound.”
“It was my fault he fell,” I said, rather more loudly than I had to. Her hands were still on his leg. “He was trying to help me,” I explained.
Alouette spread a slow smile. “What a gentleman you are.” She whipped his ankle to the left, and Cal let out a yell, going stark white in the face. Alouette giggled at his expression.
“Well, it’s not broken if you felt that. We’ll bandage you up, but no slaying dragons or chasing damsels for a week or so, all right?”