Hearts of Smoke and Steam (13 page)

From somewhere behind him there was a crash and a thud. A moment later he heard Sarah scream.

“Sarah, you good?” Emilio yelled over his shoulder.

There was no response for a few long seconds, “I'm fine…mostly,” she said, obviously in some kind of discomfort. But even just the sound of her voice brought him a wave of relief. “But I could use your help when you have the chance.”

Le Voyageur had no intention of giving him one, and poked at Emilio with his buzzing stick.

Emilio deflected it with his shield, and as they struck its surface, the spinning blades stopped for a moment. He lifted the shield away, and they started up again the moment they were back in the air. “The power is spring?” Emilio asked.

“What are you saying?” the Frenchman sneered in reply. “I can baw-ely understand your tewwible Engwish.”

“You use a spring?” He spoke slower. He may not like the man, but had to admit that he did have some respect for his skills.

“Oh my boy,” he chuckled in reply, “Ze fawces at work here are quite beyond your imagining.”

As the two of them danced around each other, Emilio discovered that the shield was getting easier for him to maneuver. But if the gyroscopic force of the spinning disc was putting up less of a fight, that also meant it was slowing down.

Feeling both tired and desperate, he intentionally stepped in and lowered his guard, trying to present himself as a target too irresistible for the Frenchman to resist.

The old man took the bait and swiped at him, managing to catch the edge of Emilio's coat and shredding the fabric.

Instead of simply batting away the old man's attack, Emilio turned, bringing the shield straight down onto the cane.
“Sacredieu!”
the Frenchman shouted as it was ripped from his grasp.

The buzzing blades stopped as they hit the floor, and Emilio stamped down onto the cane with the heel of his shoe. The wood shell shattered, freeing the spring inside. The coiled metal wriggled frantically as it unwound like a dying snake, spewing an impressive number of pins, cogs, and a puff of black smoke.

“Cos'è?”
Emilio stared down at the object. In an instant he was so fascinated with the shattered technology that when a shadow rose up over the pieces, his first instinct was to tell whomever it was to get out of his light.

“Watch out!” Sarah screamed, and some instinctual part of Emilio reacted, allowing him to dodge just as the steel spanner came hammering down where his body had been. But he wasn't fast enough: the blow he received was only a glancing one, but the contact of metal against flesh sent a spasm of pain out across his shoulder and back.

Emilio spun with the attack, barely managing to keep his balance, and realized that Francis the engineer had come back from his nearly unconscious state.

There was some blood on the huge man's pants where the falling door had struck his legs, and it was a maddened look that stared out from behind his grizzled beard and bloodshot eyes. Francis was clearly very upset at having had been hurt by Emilio.

When he opened his mouth to try to reason with the man, he heard le Voyageur's voice instead of his own. “Kill him quickly, Fwancis. We have much work to do.”

The engineer nodded and stepped forward with a look of anticipation on his face. There would be no dancing away from this attack. Emilio barely had time to lift up his shield before it caught a blow so furious that it bent one of the metal plates and sent a spasm up his arm. The shield was spinning, but the wobble was clearly worse.

Emilio tried to catch his breath, but another blow came down, then a third and a fourth—each one more impossibly powerful than the last.

Somewhere nearby he heard Sarah yell out. It was a sound born of fury as much as of fear, and the fact that Emilio was torn between saving himself and protecting her meant that he was either more heroic than he realized, or that his feelings for this girl were, against all sense, deeper than he knew. If he could somehow survive the devastating assault he was under, perhaps he would be given a chance to figure it out.

Maneuvering the shield as he went, Emilio took a step backward with each attack. The ceiling was rising out of the edges of his vision—he was getting close to the wall. But running out of room was hardly his only problem. The damaged shield was beginning to disintegrate under the relentless attacks. The spinning mechanism had jammed, and the metal panels were twisting and buckling, barely able to hold together under the stress.

“Stop toying with him, Fwancis.” The old Frenchman's tone made him sound like an angry parent.

“Yes, sir.”

As the next blow came, the burly engineer shifted his motion halfway through the attack, allowing his weapon to come up from underneath just as Emilio lifted up the shield to protect himself. The spanner caught the underside of the platter and tore it to pieces.

Emilio watched in terror as his creation disintegrated, the spinning plates flying apart, violently propelled in different directions by the force of the spring he had used to power the shield.

The plates zipped in all directions around the room, some of them pinging off the floor, the others making loud whispers as they tore through the fabric of the balloon.

Emilio, now defenseless, tensed himself for the final blow, but instead of hitting him, Francis dropped his wrench and grabbed his neck as if he had been stung by something. For a moment, Emilio thought that his opponent had simply been grazed, but then a stream of blood gushed out from the engineer's throat.

Emilio stepped to the side as Francis stumbled towards him, but the engineer managed only a few stumbling steps before he let out a stream of strangled gurgles and crashed to the deck. He kicked only twice, his last breath escaping in a wet hiss.

“Some help, please!” Emilio looked up to see that Sarah had been pinned to the deck by the unconscious Irishman, and that she was desperately trying to struggle free.

Shaking the broken remains of his shield off his arm, he ran to her side. “Get him off me.”

“Yes.” He stuck his hands underneath the Irishman and rolled him away from her. The Bomb Lance tumbled over and let out a moan. That meant he'd be waking up soon, and Emilio didn't want to get caught off guard again.

Reaching out his hand, he pulled Sarah to her feet. “You were amazing!” she said. “But where did you learn how to move like that?”

Emilio was shocked that she would be impressed.
“Il circo.”
If anything, he had moved like a wounded slug, and his lack of confidence had almost allowed the Bomb Lance to kill her.

Sarah looked up at him, and in an instant, Emilio found himself as entranced by her gaze as he would have been by any machine. The world became suddenly silent, and Emilio could feel himself leaning, pushed toward this girl by an instinct he had not felt for a very long time.

Just as his lips were about to reach hers, there was a loud tearing sound. The ship jerked downward, and they stumbled into each other's arms.

“Heure d'aller,”
came a voice from across the room. Emilio looked up to see that the Frenchman had slipped on a leather harness of some kind and was standing near the open stairs. “Good-bye, young lovews. I hope zat you will embwace ze passion of a shared death with the zame enzuziazem you showed fighting me.”

“You're not leaving me here to die with them, you crazy frog!” the Irishman said as he stood up and stumbled across the room.

“Muphee! If you wish to live, grab ze deceleratuer and follow me.” Pulling a pair of goggles down over his face, the Frenchman threw himself out of the ship and vanished into the wind. Murphy pulled another pack off the wall and began to strap it on.

“We need to stop them!” Sarah yelled as the ship lurched again.

The two villains tumbled out of the ship and into the sky.

“Too late,” Emilio said, pulling himself out of Sarah's embrace with no small feeling of regret. “Follow me.”

The two of them ran toward the control platform and sprinted up the ladder.

The view out the thick glass window was not a comforting sight. The ship had already lost a great deal of height, and they were floating somewhere over the unforgiving outline of the city…but where? He looked around desperately for something familiar, and saw the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge standing less than a mile away.

With that landmark to guide him, the buildings underneath him became familiar. If they were in Queens, that meant he could try to take them home.

Emilio looked at the controls and dials, trying to make sense of the forest of brass in front of him. He
had
disabled the engines, but their descent had given them speed, and the propellers could still give them control.

“Hold on!” he yelled at her. An instant later, he could feel her arms wrapping themselves tightly around his waist as he grabbed one of the long levers. It wasn't a random choice exactly—more of an educated guess. He squeezed closed the release, and gave it a pull.

The ship swayed frantically in response, and Emilio felt the floor trying to slide away underneath him.

After a moment, he eased it back. They were heading in the right direction, but the balloon was losing lift too fast. They needed to drop ballast.

His eyes scanned the controls for anything familiar. Near the top was a horizontal lever under a sign that read
“Détachez
.”

“What's in English?” he said to Sarah, pointing at the word.

“Um. Undo! Pull apart!”

He nodded and grabbed the lever. It pulled up halfway, and then stopped. For a desperate moment he didn't know what to do, until Sarah's hand reached out and pushed it sideways.

As it pressed down into position, there was a series of clicks in the room all around them.

For a moment, nothing happened, and then a series of small explosions made both of them jump with shock.

As the booming faded, there was a single instant of silence before the struts began to snap apart, each one breaking with a distinctive “ping” followed by the tearing of fabric.

“Is that good or bad?” Sarah asked. Before he could answer, the bottom of the gondola fell away. Instantly, a cold wind began to roar, although they were still protected by the control panel's window. And the balloon, freed of the gondola, except for the small bit of metal they were standing on, lurched back up into the air.

The only other remaining pieces of the ship were a single bank of propellers and a small engine that poured out greasy black smoke through a pipe. It was clearly meant to allow for some control of the ship in an emergency just such as this. “
Mi dispiace, cittadini
,” he mumbled as he imagined the damage the falling gondola might do to the unsuspecting citizens below.

Turning his attention to the controls, he grabbed the wheel, using it to try to control their progress as they crossed over the city. Then there was another unhappy tearing sound, and they began to fall again.

He looked over the dials, praying that there was something there that would give them what they needed to land safely.

“It's beautiful,” he heard Sarah say from behind him.

“
Cosa?
”

“The city,” she said, pointing her finger to the side of the platform.

Emilio took a moment to look around. The gray clouds had begun to disappear, letting the rays of the setting sun strike their edges and turn the sky into a brilliant palette of ochres, reds, and purples that bathed the city in color. He took it all in, trying for just a single instant to ignore their predicament.

He moved around to face her, keeping one hand firmly on the panel's edge.

Sarah's arms remained wrapped tightly around his waist as he turned. “Very pretty,” he said.

“A Tuscan sunset,” she replied.

He smiled at that. “You've been?” They were both a mess, covered in blood and grease, but she was no less gorgeous than the first moment he had seen her.

“Never,” she replied.

“Ten times more beautiful.”

“I'd want a balloon, it's so quiet up here.” Almost as if in response, one of the propellers made a coughing, sputtering sound, and died.

Sarah crushed her arms around him and pressed her cheek hard against his chest. It was the kind of warm embrace that Emilio hadn't felt in years, and the memories that came with it were overwhelming. He breathed in deeply, trying to control his feelings, but a single tear escaped from his eye and rolled down his cheek.

She looked up at him. “I suppose there's nothing we can do…” There was resignation in her voice, and for a second he believed it, too.

Emilio shook his head, and tried not to look into the eyes of the girl who was holding him. “I try to save us, okay?”

“Look at me,” she said in a soft but demanding tone, “just one more time.”

When he stared into her eyes, he could feel himself getting lost. His sister claimed he was afraid of women, but he'd never had trouble speaking to, or even charming, girls. He simply was a true man of passion. If he did something, he did it fully, and it was far too easy for him to lose his heart. So after he had lost his wife, he avoided women. There was only so much sadness he could take. And now here it was again—love and loss all rolled together into a single instant.

Sarah turned her face upwards and covered the remaining distance between them by standing on her toes. Once again they were kissing on the brink of death, but it was different this time—less electric and more romantic. And it lasted longer.

When he opened his eyes, he could see that they were getting very close to the ground. Spires and rooftops loomed threateningly just below them.

When they broke away, Sarah smiled at him. “All right, Emilio. Maybe we have something to live for. Go save our lives.”

He began to turn, and then felt his confidence melt away. “I don't know…”

“You remind me a little bit of a man I used to know, I think.” Sarah's hands grabbed his waist and began to spin him around the rest of the way. “He was a genius, and I'm guessing you are, too.”

“I try,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. Scanning the board, his eyes fixed on a control labeled
“Quatre.”
He turned it slowly and was rewarded by a blast of flame from the engine that shot up directly into the balloon. Their descent slowed.