K. Weiland - Storming

She opened her mouth, hesitated, then nodded.

“Doggone it, Hitch!” Earl hollered. “I’m going to have to carve a whole new propeller. I’d like to know how I’m supposed to do that with one arm!”

“Quit about the plane, will you? Get over here and let me set that arm of yours before it swells up bigger’n Rick’s head.” He looked around at Jael. “Whose car is that?”

“J.W.’s.”

“Well, see if you can’t find something in there to use as a splint.” He tromped across the field and practically dragged Earl back. “Sit down and quit carping. Pretend you’re the plane and I’m the mechanic.”

Earl grunted in pain. “I wouldn’t let you be mechanic on a Sopwith LRT.”

Jael surfaced from the backseat with a couple plaid shirts and an old buck-bow handsaw.

Earl huffed through his clenched teeth. “Amputation’s a little drastic, don’t you think?”

Hitch ignored him. “That’ll work. Tear up one of those shirts.” He took the saw and stomped it apart. The crosspiece would be about the right length to support Earl’s forearm. He shot Jael a sideways glance. “Tell me what happened up there. What is that thing?”

“You sure you can doctor and think at the same time?” Earl said.

“You, shut up.” Hitch pulled his knife from the sheath in his boot and slit Earl’s jumpsuit sleeve.

The arm was already swelling around a crooked bump halfway between the wrist and elbow. Definitely broken, but it looked pretty clean. He would immobilize it now, then let the doc in town set it.

Jael handed him the saw’s crosspiece. “ Schturming is… I don’t know where to be starting.”

“Who built it?”

“The _glavni_—the leaders.” With both hands, she steadied the crosspiece against Earl’s arm. “They made it and they launched it in year of one thousand eight hundred sixty.”

“Explains the elderly cannon. How come you never updated it?”

She shrugged. “I have told you. My people they are not trusting your technologicals.”

“We haven’t got anything as technological as a flying weather machine.”

“I think maybe they are afraid of that even. They see its power, and they do not trust even ourselves with it.”

“When did you get on board?” Earl asked.

Realization hit Hitch between the eyes. “You were born there, weren’t you? So was Zlo.”

“Yes. All of us there now. It has never landed since one thousand eight hundred sixty.”

Isolation. That explained things, partly—like why she thought of Groundspeople as practically another race, and maybe even why the descendants of the machine’s inventors had ended up scared of the thing.

“How’s that work?” Earl gritted out. “You gotta eat, you gotta fuel the thing.”

“We send down what you called the elevators—so we can gain what we need.”

“But why?” Hitch started winding the longest strip of torn shirt around Earl’s arm. He overlapped the wraps and kept the cloth snug. “I don’t get it. Why’s it up there at all? It was an early army airship or something?”

“No.” She frowned with her eyebrows. “ Schturming was not made for war. It is for nauka_—for science. The makers—they were men of studies. They made _Schturming and took their families, so they could fly all across world and study weather. And I think, too, they wanted to protect their families from Groundsworld. They tell us all our lives that Groundspeople are ignorant, greedy, and having no responsibility.” She shot a glance at both of them. “But in this I am seeing now they were wrong.”

Hitch tightened the wrap over Earl’s break. “You’ve been flying around up there for sixty years. How many people are up there now?”

“Hundred, more maybe.”

Earl winced. “All up there in that flying sardine barrel?”

He had a point. It was a big ship, but not that big.

“That is being part of why Zlo has taken over it.” She spoke in a low, even voice, as if she had to control each word. “Even in engines, I am hearing that changes are happening. People want to come to ground, and other people are thinking that is wrong and dangerous.”

“And what’d Zlo want?” Hitch asked.

She snorted. “Zlo wants everyone else to go to ground, so he can be glavni of Schturming and gain for himself fame and richness. Once, I heard him tell Nestor that he is hating our leaders—even the first ones—for making us stay in Schturming . He was Forager. He saw your world. I think… I think he thought Schturming was like prison to him.” She looked up at Hitch. “When Nestor let him see dawsedometer , he knew what he could do with it.”

Hitch stopped wrapping. “That was your original mandate, then? Study and learn how to control the weather with the dawsedometer ?”

He’d heard of such things before. During one of the bad droughts when he was a kid, some of the farmers had hired a quack out of Omaha to use his weather machine to bring rain. The whole thing had been hush-hush. Nobody had actually seen the machine: the guy had kept it barricaded inside a wooden tower. A few days later, when it rained in Morrill County to the east, he’d taken credit for it.

But for somebody to have come up with something like that in 1860—and something that worked , no less—that was more than a bit remarkable. Actually, the whole thing was jaw-droppingly impressive. Nobody’d ever heard of a dirigible of that size and power before the turn of the century. The Huns, with all the hullabaloo about their Zeppelins, had been decades behind the ball. And this one had held up for sixty years without ever touching ground.

“Weather is always controlling us,” Jael said. “So now we could be controlling it instead.” She gestured to the brown hay field. “There would be rain when growers needed it. It was never meant to do what Zlo is doing with it.”

Hitch knotted off the last of the bandages and eased the arm back to Earl’s chest. “So what happens now?”

Jael looked at the sky. “I think he is wanting to take from your world what he thinks he deserves because he has never had it. I think he is making prison of your valley.”

“A barricade? With the storm clouds?”

Hard to see what was going on from down here, but it did kind of seem like the dark gray of the clouds was closing in from every direction. At least the clouds were drifting high enough that the visibility wasn’t too bad yet. So far, the rain was only a spattery drizzle.

“What about your pendant?” Hitch asked. “If you don’t have it, then there’s nothing keeping him right here.”

She handed him the other shirt. “That is maybe bad. Because he has no knowledge of that. If he has belief he cannot use dawsedometer anyplace but here, he will not stop harming your town.”

Hitch slipped the shirt under Earl’s arm and tied the sleeves around his neck.

Earl settled his arm into the makeshift sling and grunted. “I thought you dropped the pendant.”

“I think it caught on bottom of korabl .”

Hitch met her look. “Maybe it did.” He helped Earl scoot back into the passenger seat. “C’mon, let’s get you to a doctor.”

“And then what are you going to do?” Earl asked. “I reckon Livingstone’s competition is over now. If we’re going to try to fly through that storm to get out of town, we better do it sooner than later.”

“I’m not getting out. I’m staying.”

Earl raised both eyebrows. “You kidding me? Just like that?”

Hitch shrugged. It was hard to explain. There weren’t even really words for how he felt. He’d left before because it had been the best thing for everybody. But this time he might actually be able to do more good for Griff and Nan if he stayed. This time, he couldn’t just skip out. For once, maybe the skills of a wandering pilot might make the difference here.