Everfound (Skinjacker 3)

“Vizier?” said the king, for King Yax knew no one’s actual name. “What are you doing here?”

“Saying good-bye,” said Vari. Then he reached down, grabbed the king’s bare feet, and flipped him out of the window, enacting a quick political coup de drop. Once the king had been dispatched, Vari retreated into the air vent again with all the king’s gold, planning to bide his time until he could get Mikey, Nick, and Jix off the airship as well.

The king was understandably outraged as he fell from the sky, and swore all manner of retribution against his vizier, once he solved the predicament of falling a thousand feet with no deadspot to land on. Although there were many, many things he could unremember to get himself out of this situation, the king was not the brightest bauble in the headdress. He concluded that if there were no such direction as “down,” then he couldn’t possibly fall, could he?

“I don’t remember there being a ‘down,’” King Yax said. “I don’t remember it whatsoever.”

The problem with that particular unmemory is that it instantly transported him to the only place on earth where “down” does not exist. Namely, the very center of the earth, where the only direction is “up.”

Thus, King Yax K’uk Mo’ avoided many long years of sinking, and promptly became the central-most soul in a very different party than he was used to.

“Mikey! Over here!”

Mikey heard Allie call out to him the moment the Hindenburg began to rise. The great airship lifted off the ground, and he saw her rising to her feet from beneath it. He ran to her, wrapping his arms around her, and he found himself growing another set of arms, and another and another just to hold her. He could not embrace her enough.

“I thought you had been extinguished,” Mikey said. “I couldn’t bear the thought of it.”

“It was Milos,” Allie told him. “Your sister made him do it.”

Mikey shook his head and said something he’d been feeling for quite a while. “She’s not my sister anymore,” Mikey told her. “Megan McGill’s been gone for a long, long time.”

Mikey held her in his multiple embrace, and although he wanted to make this moment the only moment that mattered, he knew he couldn’t. So he pulled in his extra sets of limbs, and said, “Nick thinks the first atomic bomb is at the center of the vortex.”

Allie looked at him, horrified, finally realizing what this place was. “Well, it can’t go off, right?” she said. “I mean, this is Everlost—it can’t be destroyed.”

“Unless,” he reminded her, “its purpose was to be destroyed . . .”

In the Hindenburg control room, Speedo still stared at Vari in a gold skirt, trying to wrap his mind around it. “The Supreme who? The king of what?”

Then the ship hit the double-world storm, and the Hindenburg’s nose began to drop. Vari looked at the controls around him, baffled, so he turned to Speedo. “I command you to take me to the City of Souls!”

“You command squat,” said Speedo, finally sticking up for himself against those who would order him around. “This is my airship, and you are just a passenger. Got it?”

The nose dipped farther, and Vari nodded nervously.

Speedo, who had been a true master of the airship’s helm, quickly took the controls, adjusting the elevator wheel until the inclinometers were level and the ship had stabilized. He paused then, but only briefly. He now had his ship back—and although it meant abandoning his claim on the deadspot, he resolved not to return to Mary. Not now, not ever.

“We need to get more altitude, and we can’t do that in this storm,” Speedo told Vari. “We’ll go back over the deadspot—it’s quiet in the eye. Then, by the time we reach the far side, we’ll be high enough to make it through the storm.”

Speedo turned the ship around, and it began to rise as it crossed back over the deadspot.

Jix knew something had gone terribly wrong when he saw the Hindenburg soaring overhead with its gangway still open and the occasional warrior tumbling out. He looked back to take stock of the limited number of warriors with him now. There were thousands upon thousands of souls to fight Mary Hightower, but that meant nothing if they all were aboard an airship that was flying away.

Now, Mary’s children were coming out of hiding all around Jix, and there were lots of them—many more than the warriors who actually made it out of the airship. It looked like Mary’s children realized that too, because they didn’t seem frightened anymore. In fact, they were closing in.

Johnnie-O never got to the gangway before the ship took off. He got close, but something along the way stopped him. It was the statue of the king. Johnnie remembered how, when he and Charlie had first flown over the deadspot nearly a month ago, the airship had filled with sparks and silent lightning. Now, however, all the electrical charges seemed to be focused around the statue, creating pleasing patterns of light. Pleasing, at least, to him. Johnnie-O found himself mesmerized, unable to look away, and while the warriors had been frightened by it, sticking close to the stairwell wall on their way to the gangway, Johnnie could not stop looking at it.

Old thoughts began to play in his head. “It’s gotta mean something, don’t it, Charlie? The fact that I’m not a complete blithering idiot like you?” Although Johnnie-O didn’t know what the meaning was, he couldn’t help but think that his destiny, like Charlie’s, was somehow tied up with this statue.

He was so enthralled by it that he never even felt the ship leave the ground. It wasn’t until he heard a commanding yet whiny voice behind him that he broke out of his trance.

“Why are you staring at that statue?”

He turned to see what at first he thought was the king, but quickly he realized it was Vari wearing the king’s clothes.

“None of your business,” said Johnnie-O. “Get lost.”

Vari took a step forward, trying to look taller than he was. “I am your king now. All who disrespect me shall be cast down to Xibalba.” Then Vari looked at the statue. “When we return to the City of Souls, we will find your bucket of coins in the forge, and make a new face for the statue. My face.” He paused for a moment, then added, “And as punishment for your disrespect, you will be made to do it, by dipping those big fat hands of yours into the molten metal.”