Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century 1)

“Don’t!” he begged. “Don’t! I don’t know where they took it!”

“You were sitting on the crew, weren’t you?”

“No! I was only hitching a ride out of the city! That’s all! Please put me down; put me down inside, I mean. Please! You’re hurting my arm. You’re hurting—you’re hurting me. ”

“Well I ain’t trying to give you a massage,” he said, but his tone had changed. He swung Zeke inside as effortlessly as if he were moving a kitten from basket to basket, and all the while he stared at him strangely.

He pointed a finger as long as a bread knife straight between Zeke’s eyes and said, “Don’t you move, if you know what’s good for you.

“Shoot the little bastard if he won’t talk!” demanded the most irate of the voices in the cabin.

“Put a lid on it, Crog. He’ll tell us something in a few minutes. Right now we’ve got to put this bird down before she falls down. ” He slung the side door shut on its track and reclaimed a very large seat in front of a very large windshield. He looked back at Zeke to say, “I’m not playing with you, boy. I saw you dropped your knife, but you’d better not be hiding anything else, anyplace. I want to talk to you in a few minutes. ”

Zeke crouched on the floor and rubbed at his aching arm and flexed the sore muscles in his neck. He griped, “I don’t know nothing about where they were going with the ship. I only just done got on it, not an hour before. I don’t know nothing. ”

“Nothing? Really?” he said, and Zeke assumed from the largest chair—and from the way the others let him do all the speaking—that he must be this ship’s captain. “Fang, watch him, will you?”

From the shadows, a slender man whom Zeke had not yet seen took a gliding step forward. He was Chinese, with a pilot’s gas mask pulled over a ponytail; and he wore the mandarin jacket that was common to his kind. Zeke swallowed hard, partly out of guilt and partly from abject fear.

“Fang?” he squeaked.

The Chinaman did not nod, or blink, or flinch. Even as the ship swayed unhappily downward, drooping through the sky, he did not stumble. It was as if his feet were rooted to the spot, and he was as level and smooth as water in a tilting vase.

Zeke said, to himself since no one else seemed to be listening, “I was only trying to get out of the city. I was only—”

“Everybody hang on,” the captain suggested, more than ordered. It was a good suggestion, because the ship was beginning to spin slowly in a downward spiral.

“Air brakes malfunctioning,” someone said with forced and deliberate calm.

The captain asked, “Any function at all?”

“Yes, but—”

The ship skimmed a building with a sickening screech of metal against brick. Zeke heard the popping shatter of windows breaking all in a row as the hull dragged itself through their frames on the way down.

“Thruster on, then. ”

“Right one’s being fussy. ”

“Then we’ll screw ourselves into the ground when we land; that’s fine. Just do it. ”

Roaring filled Zeke’s ears. He wished for something to hold, but found nothing. He crouched hard against the floor and spread himself out, trying to grasp or lock his feet around anything he found. In the process he inadvertently kicked Fang, who didn’t appear to care and barely moved.

“Going down, folks,” the captain said calmly.

The dark-skinned man in the blue coat—Crog, Zeke gathered—said, “Two in one day! Goddammit!”

The giant replied, “If I’d known you were so lucky I’d have never given you a lift. ”

The ground was coming up fast. Every time the ship’s semicontrolled orbit swung to a certain point the earth would appear in the window—and it promised a very hard stop at the bottom.

“Where’s the fort?” the captain demanded. For the first time he sounded flustered, maybe even on the edge of afraid.

“Six o’clock. ”

“From which… ? From where… ?”

“Over there. ”