K. Weiland - Storming

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.”