Storming

Twenty-Two

THERE MAY NOT have been a storm when they left Scottsbluff, but by the time they finished unloading the crate at the Cheyenne airport, where it would supposedly wait to be picked up by the governor’s people, the wind had started to blow pinpricks of rain.

Hitch pulled Jael’s elbow. “This ain’t good. We need to get out of here before the turbulence gets too bad.”

Halfway back to the plane, something else gusted over. Maybe only fifty feet off the ground, it thundered above their heads like a train with a wide-open throttle. The waning moon, still fat and looking like a smashed headlight, blinked into darkness for five full seconds. A huge shadow blanketed the ground.

Hitch stopped short and craned his head. “What the sam hill was that?”

She clutched at his sleeve. “Eto bil Schturming! It worked! The yakor has been working.”

“How can you tell?” Dumb question.

She took off running toward the plane. “Come! We can catch it!”

His heart sped up and he broke into a jog. “We need to push the plane around!” There was plenty of field in every direction, and he needed to take off with his nose to the wind if he didn’t want the Jenny bucking into a ground loop.

Jael shoved hard, then clambered into the front cockpit while he heaved the propeller.

They took off into the wind, then circled around. With the wind at her tail, the Jenny and her Hisso engine careened through the air.

This was crazy, of course. More than crazy: plumb crazy. He leaned forward and squinted, trying to see through the darkness. Night flying was dangerous enough even when you had the whole sky to yourself. If that thing was still out there, they were likely to plow right into it before he even so much as saw it.

In front of him, the dark blob of Jael’s head swiveled above the rim of the cockpit. The wing over her head blocked the sky from her view, but she leaned forward, neck craned.

He kept his own head rotating. The Hisso roared in front of him, and the wind slapped his head, front and back.

Fat chance of hearing the thing. It was either see it or nothing.

They flew for a good ten minutes.

In the dark, ten minutes was more’n enough to get lost in. He stopped craning his neck and dug his flashlight and compass out of his jacket pocket.

Below, the headlight of a train snaked through the hazy darkness. That at least meant they were close on target. The tracks would take him almost all the way back to the airfield.

He pocketed the compass and pointed the flashlight’s beam skyward. Darkness swallowed the weak light a couple feet above his head. He clicked off the light and tucked it under his thigh.

To the right of the Jenny’s nose, a great wall of white rose through the darkness.

A cloud.

But this wasn’t like any cloud he’d ever seen. It was too dense, and in the darkness it was too white. Over the sound of the Jenny’s engine, the thwack-thwack-thwack of a huge propeller thundered.

Oh, gravy. He hauled back on the stick and kicked the rudder pedal.

The Jenny roared into a climbing turn. The wind and the sound of something else—the thrum of tight canvas maybe?—tore through his hearing.

His airspeed was quicker than this thing, but it was climbing faster. He would run into it before he could get above it. Either that, or stall out trying.

He stepped on the rudder pedal and forced the Jenny sideways in a sloppy wingover. The good Lord willing, Jael’d had sense enough to buckle her safety belt.

By the time he leveled the plane back out, now heading in the opposite direction, Jael had shot up in her seat. If she’d had her belt on before, she sure didn’t now. She turned around and leaned over the turtleback between their cockpits. The moon splashed her face. She opened her mouth wide, hollering something he couldn’t hear.

He shook his head.

Frustration crinkled her face before the shadows engulfed it once more.

And then she was at it again—crawling out of the cockpit and leaning across the turtleback, her face jutting over his windshield. Her voice drifted to him, wordless.

“Get back, you little fool!” He leaned forward to be heard and ended up bonking his forehead against hers. “Get back, you hear me!”

“Turn around!” The wind strained her scream to a shrill whisper. “Fly underneath!” She raised one hand from its grip on the windshield. Brass glinted between her fingers: the pendant.

She obviously had something in mind. Something that hopefully didn’t involve lightning—or her trying to climb on board that thing. But whatever else Jael was, she wasn’t stupid. If she wanted to try something, he’d give her credit enough to try it.

He nodded. “All right!”

She slithered into her seat, and he eased the Jenny back around. The wind buffeted them from the right, and they slideslipped a good twenty yards or more. But the air was dry. No more rain, at least.

Two hundred feet below, the North Platte River glinted in the patchy moonlight. At least they had plenty of room to maneuver without ramming into the ground. The trick was not to hit anything up here in the sky. Just to be safe, he took the Jenny down fifty feet more before opening the throttle.

The plane chewed through a mile or two, and then the clouds opened and the moon lit up the night. Ahead, the huge not-cloud exploded into view. As big as a thunderhead—maybe a couple hundred feet long and almost as high—it coasted through the night sky.

Jael whipped around to look back at him, her face glaring white in the moonlight. She brandished both arms, waving toward the beast in the sky. Her mouth moved. Telling him to get under it again, no doubt.

If that’s what the lady wanted, then that’s what the lady would get.

He dropped the Jenny into an angled dive and swooped under the not-cloud. Jael motioned with her hand: lower.

He increased the dive. Just in time too. Right above his top wing, something whooshed past. Too dark to see much, but it was easily as tall as J.W.’s house. His heart hammered his ribcage.

He straightened out the Jenny and then risked a look up at—nothing. But something was up there, because his vision had gone black as oil. No moon, no stars.

In the dark, Schturming was featureless.

Motion flickered in front of him. Jael was standing up. Still facing forward, she scootched rearwards to sit on the turtleback.

He groaned. This girl was going to kill herself one day, that was all there was to it.

She reached up to feel for the cutaway in the top of the wing, then levered one leg back until her foot was on the turtleback. Ever so slowly, she raised the other leg, then pushed herself up to stand.

He held both his breath and the plane as steady as he could.

Only her white blouse was visible in the dark.

He eased the plane down another couple feet. The last thing he needed was that black expanse up there taking her head off.

She lifted an arm, and, in her hand, the tiniest wink of brass showed the pendant.

She’d said one of the things the pendant functioned as was a kind of master key—but what sort of door was she thinking she could reach from here?

Her whole body flinched. And then she shrieked, the sound audible even above the double engine roar.

She’d touched the thing? His heart tumbled over itself. Schturming and the Jenny were matching speeds, which should have kept her from losing any fingers, but should haves didn’t always work like they were supposed to. He ducked down another ten feet.

She stretched her arm all the way up, reaching for the sky, for Schturming, for something. Then as the plane dropped away, she started scrabbling for a grip farther up the top wing. She stood on tiptoe and then raised one foot from the turtleback.

He released the stick long enough to lean forward and snag her waistband. Before she could haul herself up onto the wing, he pulled her back and dumped her in the front cockpit.

“And for the love of Mike, stay there!” he shouted into the wind.

Whether she heard him or not, she huddled in the cockpit.

He poured on the coal, ducking low to follow the river until he could locate the railroad tracks again.

Behind, the not-cloud drifted higher and higher into the sky. Then it winked out in the darkness.

He landed back at the airfield, navigating by the light of the campfires. That kind of landing was always tricky, but he managed this one without as much as a bobble. His heart was pounding so hard it felt about ready to crack ribs. He cut the engine and swung a leg out of the cockpit before the propeller stopped puttering. When his feet hit the ground, his knees went all airy and tried to bend under him. He gripped the cracked leather pad that edged his cockpit and filled his lungs as full as they would go three times.

Then he stepped up onto the wing and practically dragged Jael out of the cockpit.

“Do you have to go and scare the living wits out of me every time I take you up? What on God’s green earth was that thing? I about plowed into it twice! You and me and Jenny, we could be lying in a hundred pieces between here and Cheyenne right now!”

The firelight turned her face into a grim map of hollows and ridges. She was gasping harder than he was. “Yakor… I have lost yakor.”

“What?”

She cradled her right hand against her stomach. A dark streak ran down the front of her blouse.

He reached for her hand. “Did you get hurt?”

On the far side of the fire, Earl propped himself on an elbow. “Now what?” Sleep clogged his voice. “If it’s revenuers, I’m going back to sleep, and you’re on your own ’til morning.”

Blood covered the back of Jael’s hand.

Visions of torn-off fingers skidded through Hitch’s brain. “Get up and find some bandages.”

Earl reared up a little farther on his elbow. “What’s the matter?”

Hitch finished counting: all the fingers were there, even down to the fingernails. “She’s bleeding.”

Earl threw back his bedroll and scrambled to pull on his shoes and hook his suspenders over his short-sleeved undershirt.

Hitch guided Jael to sit beside the fire. Beneath his hand, her arm trembled.

“I… it pulled from my hand. I was holding it, and then it was becoming caught on something. The chain… it caught on bottom of korabl. There was door there—door in… floor. I could have been unlocking it, I could have…” She slumped on top of an upturned galvanized bucket. “I have lost yakor.”

“I’m sorry. Anyway, it must not work the way we thought it did. No lightning, at any rate.” And thank God for that, considering how things had turned out.

He dug out his own bedroll and crouched beside her to drape it over her shoulders. He had to guide her good hand—such as it was, since it was the one he’d bandaged the other day—around to hold the blanket shut against her throat.

Then he reached for her other hand and tilted it to the firelight. Blood streaked all the way down her fingers, but there wasn’t as much of it as he’d first feared. Most of it seemed to be coming from her knuckles. With any luck, they’d just be scraped.

“Can you flex that for me?”

The hand stayed limp in his, so he bent her fingers under. She didn’t so much as flinch. Then he prodded at each of the knuckles. She winced, but the bones all felt solid enough.

He breathed out. “Just a scratch, I think. What happened?”

Earl returned with an armful of ripped linen. “Had to get our supplies back from Lilla. She took them all with her when she jumped ship.” He dumped the load at Hitch’s feet and squatted to squint into Jael’s face. “You look plenty shook up, girlie. What you need is a snort.” He looked at Hitch. “Don’t suppose you saved one of those bottles of Campbell’s, did you?”

Hitch shook his head.

Earl pushed himself up. “All right, well, I’ll run back over and see if I can rustle up what’s left of ours. I expect Rick took that with him when he left.”

Kneeling in front of her, Hitch dunked Jael’s hand in their water bucket. He scrubbed off the dried blood and hopefully some of the grease, then wrapped it up in a strip of linen. It’d be sore tomorrow, but, once the blood was cleaned away, it didn’t look bad at all. Better than what it could have been, that was for sure.

“Did you touch that thing?” he asked.

She stared at the white bandage and nodded.

“You’re lucky you didn’t rip off your hand, you know that, right?”

She kept staring.

He rolled up the rest of the bandages, watching her the whole time. In the last week, she’d fallen out of the sky, caught her dress and her hair on fire, barely avoided getting nailed by lightning, and then stood up on the top wing of a Jenny. None of that had so much as fazed her. Now, she looked like she needed smelling salts.

“I’m sorry about the pendant,” he said.

She drew a shuddery breath. “You were not wrong about what you are thinking of yakor. I wanted to use yakor to bring Zlo back to here. So I could be stopping him from using the dawsedometer for his wrong purposes.”

“_Dawsedometer_—what’s that?”

“It is why Schturming is—why it was created long ago. It is how it is controlling storms.” She shrugged. “I do not have knowledge really—even though I am worker in engines. Most of my people are not being allowed to know these things because maybe there is danger in it.”

He chewed on that. “So something up there did make that big storm?”

“Yes. But yakor is there to hold it back. I think it was made in caution of someone like Zlo being strong enough to take Schturming from our leaders. That is why he wanted it. They would not allow him to be Forager anymore, because he is not following laws about staying away from Groundsmen.” She bit her lip. “So he was coming to work for Nestor in engines.”

“Your boss who died?” More than a boss, judging from her tone. A sort of adopted father maybe.

“Dawsedometer too was belonging to Nestor’s charge—and yakor. Zlo wanted it. Because of its power.”

“Because it can make these storms—and the lightning?”

She nodded. “He needed yakor. That is why he jumped after me on night when I fell in front of your plane.”

“But what’s the pendant do exactly?”

“It is like… anchor. Dawsedometer can have no power without it. When it is more than fifty mili away from it, there can be no storms. Without dawsedometer, Schturming can have no purpose for Zlo.” She drew her knees up to her chin. She sat on top of the upturned pail, his blanket around her like she was a sad old Indian. “There was—what you would call—mutiny.”

“You mean Zlo took control? So you grabbed the pendant before he could get it. And then you both parachuted out?”

“Yes.”

“Let me get this straight. Zlo’s in charge now. He’s killed the only person up there you really care about. And now there’s no way he’s getting his hands on the yakor because it’s who knows where. What possible reason do you have for still going back?”

“He still has dawsedometer. He could cause much trouble.”

“But he doesn’t have the pendant—which I thought you said he needed to make the thing work?”

She shrugged. “He does not need yakor to turn it on. He needs it only when he is ready to move away from here.”

He thought back to approximately where Jael had lost the pendant. It was definitely within fifty miles of Scottsbluff, probably closer to twenty. So… that put a new light on things.

Between them, the fire clicked and popped. Sparks bounced high and winked out. Across the field, a guitar strummed faintly. Nearer, Earl’s and Rick’s voices grumbled, as they argued over the bottle of gin. A coyote yipped up by the river, and another wailed a long answer.

“It’ll be all right,” Hitch said at last. He looked over at her. Sitting on the bucket as she was, her face was a little higher than his and he had to tilt his head to look up at her. “We’ll figure out a way to keep Zlo from causing trouble. I promised you that.”

“Maybe there is no way.” She turned to him, her chin cradled against her shoulder. “But I thank you.”

He inhaled deep—wood smoke and gasoline fumes—then out again. Right now, all these ground smells were downright reassuring.

“Thank me when I’ve done something.” He pushed to his feet. “Maybe I better go help Earl talk to Rick. You should get some sleep. The competition starts bright and early tomorrow. If your hands are up to it, we’ll need you.”

“Then you will have me.” She tilted her head back to look at him. “And I thank you because you have already done something. I have no knowledge what would have happened to me if you had not helped.”

Of course, he had almost not helped her—several times.

In the firelight, her eyes were soft and big. “You are good man, Hitch Hitchcock.”

It’d been a long, long time since anyone had said that to him.