Without looking at Jael, Hitch crawled his hand across the floor until he found her icy fingertips.
She gave him a little squeeze back. But she didn’t look at him either. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “You are here because of me. Both of you.”
“The only way somebody gets someplace, bad or good, is if he takes himself.” He craned his head around to see her face. “I’m here because of me.”
She looked at him for a long moment, her eyes charting his face. Then she smiled, just a smidge. “Thank you. For very little it is worth now, I thank you.”
Hitch looked at their guard and cocked his head toward Jael. “Can’t you get her a chair? You can see she’s hurting.”
The guard glanced uncertainly over his shoulder, then back. “That is not orders—”
“Just get her a chair. What’s it going to harm at this point?”
The guard hesitated, then shuffled across the room, headed for a round-backed chair.
Hitch let him get the chair and he let him come back. But as soon as the guard was in front of him, he drew back a leg and kicked the kid right below the knee, as hard as he could.
The leg buckled.
The guard wailed and staggered forward. He whacked his chin on the chair’s seat, and, for a second, his eyes rolled up into white.
Hitch lunged forward and threw a leg over the guard’s back. He sat, facing the kid’s feet. Swallowing back the pain in his shoulder, he groped until he found hair.
The guard moaned and raised his arms, trying to push himself up.
“Just don’t.” Hitch pulled the guard’s head back by his hair and gave it a good thwack against the floor. And then another for proper measure.
“Oww…”
“Oh, shut up,” Jael said.
“Yeah, please,” Hitch said. “And listen close, because I’m going to tell you how this is going to go.”
Forty-Seven
AS SOON AS Jael and Walter were free, they got Hitch’s shoulder wound packed and bandaged. It hurt like the devil’s ugly face, but it wasn’t bleeding too much and he still had pretty good flexion. At least Zlo had missed hitting anything too important, like arteries and tendons.
As best he could with one and a half arms, he snugged the ropes around the guard’s wrists. Then he gave the kid’s head an extra bonk on the floor—just because. The guard’s eyes rolled white again, and he moaned against the gag—Taos’s gag—stuffed in his mouth.
Schturming fishtailed in the wind, and the floor slanted even more.
Hitch groaned and stood up. “Now let’s get out of here. And I do mean now.” He looked at Jael. “How do we get to the wheelhouse?”
She had buttressed herself with one hand on the chart table and the other on Walter’s shoulder. “It is on next level up. There are stairs in engines room.” She eyed him, her face crimped with pain. “What are you going to do?”
He clamped his bad arm against his stomach and extended the other one, herding her and Walter toward the door. “I’m going to find Zlo. Then I’m going to find his knife. And then I’m going to stick his knife right in his black heart.”
“But ship, it is crashing. We have to exit.”
“Also part of the plan.”
They hustled down the corridors, following Jael’s directions. She kept them mostly to the back routes, clear of the traffic. And there was plenty of traffic.
Every juncture they passed was crowded with men, running and shouting. Heavy boots clomped against the canted floor. Lights flickered through the doorways and cast mutating shadows across the floors. In the distance, a klaxon blared.
A faint breeze blew through the hallways, carrying a whiff of smoke. A fire under a gas bag. Just what they all needed.
“They are evacuating,” Jael whispered. “With elevators.”
Hitch looked down to where he was supporting her in the crook of his good arm. “They’re not even going to try to fix the engines?”
She lifted a shoulder. “We have damaged maybe more than we thought. Or they are too afraid of fire.”
“Well, that’s something.”
Whether it was a good something or a bad something remained to be seen. He firmed his mouth. At least if they all had to die in a fireball, they’d take the infernal ship with them.
Walter trotted along at his side. He peered up at him. “Are we… evacuating?”
“You bet your buttons, kiddo.”
They passed the observation balcony where he and Jael had gotten trapped earlier. At the end of the corridor, he raised the bar from the entrance to the cargo bay, then eased open the door. The room lay in darkness. The big doors to the storm had been closed, and without the propellers thunking away in the engine room beyond, the only sounds filtering in were the muffled shouts of Zlo’s crew.
“All right, c’mon,” he said.
He hauled Jael through the door and halfway across the room, all the way to the Jenny—which Zlo, fortunately, hadn’t had the foresight to chuck overboard. In fact, somebody had cleared the boxes away from it enough to turn it around, and then they’d tied it down so it hadn’t gotten tossed around when the dirigible swerved. Looked like they thought they’d found themselves a prize.
He pushed Jael on ahead. “Go on to the engines. I’ll meet you there.”
She knit her brows, but staggered on anyway.
He turned to Walter and knelt to eye level. “Everybody’s got a part in this plan, you hear me?”
Walter nodded, tight-lipped.
“I need you to keep Taos here while Jael and I take care of a few things. If Jael comes back and tells you to, I want you to help her start up the plane, like I showed you the other day, okay? You remember where all the switches are?”
Walter frowned, but he nodded again.
“Of course you do.” Hitch’s heart bumped up into his throat. He opened his mouth to say more, but there was way yonder too much. He helped Walter into the rear cockpit. Then he directed Taos into the front.
If something went wrong and he couldn’t get back to them before the fire spread too far, Jael would never get the doors open by herself. So he took five precious seconds to heave them open, one-handed. Rain-flecked wind swirled in.
When he turned back, Walter was watching him. The boy had his face all scrunched up and his head cocked to the side, like he used to do when he was trying to ask a question.
Hitch headed for the engine room and reached to touch Walter’s head as he passed.
“Wait.” Walter swiveled in the cockpit. “Aren’t you going to come back?”
Hitch stopped and looked over his shoulder. “You just wait there. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Then he started walking.
This time, the only way to come back was to leave.
Jael had already made it into the engine room. She huddled over the dawsedometer and its steady hum, clicking away at the buttons.
Hitch hustled toward her, looking around as he came. Wonder of wonders, nobody else was here. If she was right about the evacuation, they could be flying an empty ship now, for all they knew.
The ceiling creaked. Footsteps? Or the wind?
She looked up at him, mouth tight. “_Yakor_—my pendant—it is gone. Zlo must have taken it.”
“But you don’t need it to shut it off, right?”
“No.” Still, a muscle in her jaw twitched. She’d fought a long time to keep that thing from Zlo. Had to rankle a little to know he’d gotten it in the end, even if maybe it didn’t matter anymore.
“How long will it take to shut down?” he asked.
“It is all the way on this time. It takes ten minuti, maybe more.”