The Quest to the Uncharted Lands Page 16

  But the woman wearing the green handkerchief was looking at Stella, concern filling her brown eyes. “What makes you say that?” she asked. “The saboteur’s been caught, and the engines are all working fine. We just ran a check on the water levels and safety valves about twenty minutes ago.”

  “That’s not it,” Stella said, shaking her head. She let go of the man in the overalls and turned to the woman. The other engineers closed in, forming a semicircle around them. “The captain caught the wrong person. The real saboteur did something to one of the boilers. It’s going to explode if we don’t fix it fast!”

  “That’s impossible,” said a young man with long, shaggy blond hair pulled back in a horsetail. “I checked each of the boilers myself. If one of them had been damaged, I’d have seen it or there would have been a change in the pressure.”

  “Unless someone tampered with the inside of the boiler shell somehow,” the woman with the green handkerchief said thoughtfully. “If they weakened it enough, the pressure would do the rest, eventually cause it to rupture.” She looked at her colleagues. “The force of the explosion would blow the whole thing out the side of the ship.”

  “You’re not seriously listening to this, are you, Laura?” said the blond man. “The girl’s out of her head.”

  Stella didn’t bother getting angry at him, but she was aware that time was slipping by and needed them to stay with her. The woman, Laura, was listening to her. That was all she cared about it. “Think back,” Stella said. “Do you remember anyone working on any of the engines in the past few days?”

  Laura nodded and pointed behind Stella at one of the massive boilers. “We had the number two engine down for maintenance this past evening,” she said. “Ellis said the gauges weren’t reading right.”

  “I didn’t say that.” The man in the overalls crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Laura indignantly. “I wasn’t even on duty in the evening. I was down with airsickness in my bunk.”

  Despite the heat of the engine room, a chill passed over Stella.

  Laura pursed her lips and shook her head vehemently. “Yes, you were sick in the morning, but then you came in to work later, said you were feeling fine. You recommended we wait several hours before firing up number two. So that’s what we did.”

  The other engineers nodded, confirming Laura’s story. Ellis, the man in the overalls, threw up his hands. “I’m telling you that never happened! What is wrong with you people?”

  “You are both right,” Stella cut in. She grabbed Laura’s arm and dragged her over to the number two engine. “I’ll explain, but you have to shut it down right now.”

  “Here, let me check it again,” the blond man said, and moved toward the gauges.

  No, Stella wanted to scream. There was no time!

  Several pairs of footsteps clanged on the catwalk above them. Stella looked up. It was Cyrus, trailed by a pair of guards and the captain himself.

  “Stella!” Cyrus shouted. “Did you find it?”

  “Hey now,” said the blond man, pointing at Cyrus. “Isn’t that the saboteur?”

  The captain held up a hand for silence. “Check the engines,” he ordered. “They may have been tampered with.”

  Laura nodded and turned to her team. “You heard the captain. Let’s shut down the number two engine, just to be safe. Afterward, we’ll inspect it and sort all this out.” She glanced at Stella. “You keep back—go stand near the stairs.” Then she turned all her attention to the engine and began shouting orders to the rest of the assembled crew.

  Stella ran up the stairs to the catwalk to join Cyrus and the captain. Only then did she notice that he held the Lazuril rod in his hand. It had been deactivated, its metal tip no longer glowing. “What happened to the Faceless man?” she asked.

  “Drea and the captain got him,” Cyrus said. “He tried to change his face to one of the guards, but they saw him use his power.”

  “We’ve finally apprehended the right man,” the captain said, his face tense. “But he wouldn’t tell us what he did to the ship.”

  Cyrus watched the crew running to tend to the engines, checking gauges and pressure. “Maybe I can buy them some more time,” he said.

  He handed Stella the Lazuril rod, which she tucked into the waistband of her trousers. Cyrus raised his hands. Gold light outlined his fingertips as his power surged. “I’ll put a barrier around the engines, something to keep them—”

  But those were the last words he got out before the explosion.

  The shriek of tearing metal pierced Stella’s ears, a second before she was blown completely off her feet. There was an instant of weightlessness, of floating terror, and then she crashed down on the catwalk.

  Pain shot up her side. She might have screamed, but her voice was lost beneath the awful sound of grinding metal.

  The air filled with smoke. From her position on the ground, Stella caught a glimpse of some of the engineering team—the blond man’s horsetail, Laura’s green handkerchief—all lying flat, sprawled across the room. Some of them began to move, but most lay still where they had fallen. There was a chorus of low, painful moans, and neither Cyrus nor the captain were anywhere in sight.

  “Cyrus!” Stella cried. Smoke filled her lungs, and she coughed, the movement sending ripples of pain across her rib cage.

  A flash of light pierced the haze like a sunbeam through a storm cloud. Pulling herself to her knees, Stella crawled toward the glow and found Cyrus. He was on his back a few feet away from her on the floor of the catwalk.

  Gold light poured from his hands and eyes and streamed downward, covering the lower level of the engine room in a bright shimmer like a soap bubble. Inside the bubble, a deadly haze of metal and fire churned.

  Somehow Cyrus had managed to wall off the engines at the moment of the explosion. Swirling inside the barrier was a hailstorm of debris, shards of twisted, burning metal that would have torn them all apart if it had been allowed to break free. If he hadn’t already been in the process of calling on his power when the boiler blew, they would all have been killed instantly. That much Stella knew.

  Stella leaned down to whisper in Cyrus’s ear. “Are you all right?” she asked, her voice quavering. She couldn’t tell if he was injured. The light pouring off his body was so bright it hurt to look at him.

  He reached out a trembling hand to her. “Help me up,” he said weakly. “I have to…see what happened…to the engines.”

  Stella took his hand and pulled them both up off the floor. She gasped at the sudden flood of heat up her arm. This was beyond a fever and much hotter than he’d felt when she touched him that day up in the crow’s nest.

  Are you all right? she wanted to ask again, but the words died in her throat as his thoughts opened to her. She closed her eyes, but the images tore through her mind, too fast for her to see them all clearly. There were a man and a woman Stella had never seen, standing in front of a house with a birch tree growing in the yard. Another man walked up to the couple, a man with dark, graying hair, wearing a long lab coat. Before he could reach them, Stella’s view turned and soared upward, and there were airships streaking through the sky, dozens of them, flying over a city so shining and vast it dizzied her. Then Cyrus let go of her hand, and the pictures vanished, leaving nothing but brief, glowing afterimages.

  The world tilted under Stella’s feet. For a second, she thought it was dizziness, a side effect of being connected to Cyrus’s mind, but he was staggering too. The whole room was shifting. It was the ship. Stella reached out and snagged Cyrus by the belt, grabbing the catwalk railing with her other hand to keep them both on their feet.

  “Oh no!” Cyrus choked.

  “What’s wrong?” Stella had never heard such terror in his voice.

  “The boiler,” Cyrus said, pointing with a hand that still radiated golden light. “I wasn’t fast enough.”

  Stella looked down. Below them, the smoke was clearing, allowing them to see the extent of the damage through Cyrus�
�s bubble.

  What she saw nearly made her lose her grip on Cyrus and the catwalk railing.

  A broken cage of twisted metal bars was all that remained of the boiler. Whatever device the Faceless man had used had ruptured the shell, causing the pressurized steam trapped inside to escape through the opening all at once, with a catastrophic amount of force.

  In the explosion, the boiler had ripped free of its moorings and went in the only direction Cyrus’s barrier hadn’t been able to reach in time.

  It had blown a hole out the side of the Iron Glory.

  Stella had a surreal view of hills and trees wheeling past the gaping tear as the ship spiraled toward the ground. A gust of wind blew through the engine room, stealing the rest of the smoke. The ship listed sharply, turning the level catwalk into a steep, slick ramp. Stella braced her feet and yanked on Cyrus’s belt to keep him from sliding off.

  “The Iron Glory’s going down!” she hollered. “Cyrus, grab the railing! Everyone, hold on to something!”

  The few engineers who could move scrambled to find something sturdy. The rest were unconscious, bleeding from wounds or pinned by debris that had escaped Cyrus’s barrier. He looked around at all the helpless people, his gaze coming to rest on Stella last. The gold light filled his eyes, and his skin was deathly pale. Grief and guilt twisted his face.

  Stella could see that he blamed himself for this, for being too late.

  She wanted to wrap her arms around him and tell him that it wasn’t his fault. But that wasn’t what he needed. Not now. Instead, she stared at him in defiance, the blood thundering in her ears.

  “I’m not giving up!” she shouted. “And neither are you!”

  The golden light flickered, as if a tremor had passed through his body. But then the radiance surged back, and Cyrus’s hands clenched into fists on the railing.

  “You’re right—we’re not going to die,” he said, “not like this!” He turned toward the hole in the ship and said over his shoulder, “Can you anchor me?”

  Stella pulled Cyrus to her and positioned him between her and the catwalk railing. She wrapped her arms around him from behind and gripped the metal bar, trapping him securely. They were as close as they’d been since she was comforting him in his cell. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I’m going to extend the barrier to the whole ship,” he said. “We’ll still crash, but if it stays up, the Iron Glory won’t be destroyed. Hold tight, though, because we’re in for a bumpy ride.” As he spoke, the golden bubble that had contained the explosion grew, and Cyrus swayed on his feet. Stella tightened her grip as the bubble passed through the engine room walls and out of sight.

  “What will this do to you?” Stella said into his ear. “You can barely stand as it is. You’re exhausted from using your power to contain the engines.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he replied, struggling to focus.

  But he wasn’t. With her arms around him, Stella could feel his body trembling, his muscles balled tight under the fabric of his shirt. “Cyrus, you’re too weak. You can’t—”

  He turned and let his head rest briefly against her shoulder. “If I don’t, we’re all going to die,” he said.

  Stella’s insides knotted. She wanted to deny it, but deep down she knew he was right. For herself, her parents, and the rest of the crew, Cyrus’s barrier was their only hope.

  She tightened her grip on the railing. “I’ve got you,” she said in a choked voice. “Do what you have to do. I won’t let you fall.”

  “I know you won’t.” He lifted his head and flashed her one last lopsided grin, and then the golden light exploded in a brilliant nimbus around his body.

  Stella kept a tight grip on Cyrus’s waist, but the light now completely obscured him. It was like holding on to a star. She squeezed her eyes shut against the painful glow. The heat built and built, until Stella’s arms and neck were slick with sweat, the light searing her skin even through the thick fabric of the invisibility suit.

  His mind opened to her again, but this time Stella saw no fleeting images, nothing but a single word Cyrus repeated over and over in his head.

  Please.

  Please.

  Please.

  The ship rocked beneath them. The engineers’ screams tore through the room, and Cyrus’s body convulsed. Stella dug her heels in and pressed her body against his back to hold him steady. The wind blasting through the hole in the ship built to a roar as the Iron Glory picked up speed, gravity pulling them down, spinning them toward the earth.

  Stella didn’t know when she started screaming. Her lungs burned with it, the sound buried in Cyrus’s back. Images flashed in her mind, her own thoughts this time. She saw her parents, smiling and laughing in the lab, her mother hugging her before she boarded the ship. She saw Cyrus rolling his eyes as she tried to guess his real name.

  The catwalk rattled and shook beneath them, as if it was tearing away from its moorings. Stella felt herself slipping to her knees, her strength giving out as the weight of the falling ship pressed her down. She clamped her teeth together and forced herself upright. A thunderous boom split the air, and suddenly the railing tore from Stella’s hands. She opened her eyes and flailed, reaching for Cyrus, letting the light blind her, but her hands grasped only empty air.

  She was floating again.

  This was what it felt like to fall out of the sky.

  But this time, when she hit the ground, the world shattered. Awareness returned in pieces. Stella was lying on her back, with something sharp poking her in the side. She opened her eyes to bright spots of yellow and orange. While she waited for them to clear, she moved her right arm, reaching for whatever was jammed into her side.

  It was the Lazuril rod, still tucked into her waistband beneath the invisibility suit, and thankfully, still deactivated. Stella readjusted it and then tried pushing herself up to a sitting position.

  That was a mistake.

  Pain roared through her left arm, so hot and bright that Stella ground her teeth. The room spun, the spots in her vision turning streaky. Panting, Stella lay still, hoping the pain would pass.

  After several minutes, her vision finally cleared enough for Stella to see that she had landed on the bottom level of the engine room, not far away from the wrecked boiler casing. She lifted her head to see how badly she was hurt.

  Her left wrist was pinched beneath a section of the catwalk. The whole structure had collapsed and broken into three pieces. The smallest of these had trapped her. If it had been one of the bigger sections, it likely would have killed her.

  Careful not to move her arm this time, Stella reached forward with her other hand and pushed the ruined catwalk off her. It gave way and clattered to the floor.

  With the pressure removed, the pain was significantly less, but Stella knew her wrist was badly sprained, if not broken.

  She was lucky, but she wasn’t so sure the same could be said about Cyrus. She had to get to her feet, had to go and find him.

  Sunlight filtered in through the hole in the side of the ship, giving her enough light to see the wreckage around her. The engine room had been torn apart, with debris strewn everywhere. The other engine’s boiler had ruptured sometime during the crash, though its metal cage or Cyrus’s barrier—or both—had managed to keep it inside the engine room. That must have been the last loud boom that had torn up the catwalk, Stella thought.

  Cries echoed through the ship, making her briefly forget her own pain. She stood up, cradling her injured wrist against her stomach as she carefully made her way around the engine room, searching for the others. Three of the crew lay unconscious near the cracked boiler. They might have been trying to stabilize the pressure before the crash, to keep it from rupturing as long as they could. Stella bent down to check for their pulses. A wave of relief left her dizzy again.

  They were alive.

  But where was Cyrus?

  “Cyrus?” Stella moved on and found three more engineers, two of them conscious an
d with only minor scrapes and cuts on their faces.

  “Laura’s trying to get to the medical bay,” one of them said. “The captain went to answer the calls for help from the rest of the ship.”

  For all Stella knew, her parents could be among the wounded. What if the medical bay had been as badly damaged as the engine room in the explosion? They could be…could be…

  Stella forced herself to swallow her panic. She could only focus on one thing at a time, and right now she had to find her friend.

  “Did you see Cyrus?” she asked the engineers. “Does anyone know what happened to him?”

  The blond man had been wiping his face with a rag. He looked up at her. “I saw him,” he said, his voice hushed. “He was standing in the middle of that gold light. I’ve never seen anything like it. When that first boiler blew, he had his arms up like this.” The young man lifted his hands as if he were pushing against a wall. “And this wave of light came out. It passed right through me, and when the boiler went, it threw metal everywhere like a hailstorm. The shards were flying right at me, and I thought for sure I was dead. But that light—it swallowed them all up, slowed them down like they were moving through water. And then they just…stopped. I don’t know how, but that boy saved my life.”

  He saved all our lives, Stella thought.

  And might have traded his own to do it.

  She moved on, her search becoming more frantic as the minutes passed. She hurled debris aside with her good hand, banging and clattering her way through the engine room. Her left wrist throbbed, making her bite the inside of her cheek.

  “Cyrus!” she called desperately. “Cyrus, where are you?”

  And then, in the back corner of the engine room, she heard a soft moan.

  Cyrus was propped up with his back against the wall, eyes half open, head lolling to one side.

  Stella scrambled over to him and dropped to her knees, immediately checking him over for injuries. His head, neck, and torso were all unmarked. Falling in the back corner of the room, he’d escaped the worst of the debris shower.