Read Chapter 15: The Engine's Grief

The mountain mining colony was a scar on the sky’s face—a brutal gash of iron scaffolding, belching smokestacks, and cable-drawn platforms bolted to the summit of a rock that had no business being so high. Elias throttled the Vagabond’s engines down to a whine as he brought her in low over the ridge, the ship’s patched envelope groaning with every shift of wind.

“There,” René said, pointing through the forward glass. He’d traded his French uniform for a stained canvas coat and a scarf that hid half his face. “The Meridian’s old landing logs marked this as a supplier. Chromium-cobalt ore. Rare as a loyal heart in Paris.”

Elias squinted. Beyond the scaffolding, past the ore-crushers and the single crooked tower that served as the colony’s heart, plumes of black smoke rose in ugly columns. Not from furnace stacks. From burning structures.

“Those aren’t mining fires,” MacReady said from the gunner’s perch. The old engineer’s voice carried the weight of a man who’d seen enough fires to know the difference. “Those are cannon strikes.”

Elias didn’t answer. He shoved the throttle forward, sending the Vagabond through a bank of cloud that scraped her keel with damp fingertips. The colony came into full view: a dozen huddled buildings, a landing platform half-cratered, and on the far side, three French military skiffs hovering like wasps over a dropped sugar cube, their gunports flashing orange as they raked the miners’ barricades.

“René, tell me those aren’t your countrymen.”

René’s jaw tightened. “They’re not mine. Not anymore.”

Men on the ground—miners in leather aprons and soot-blackened faces—were firing up from behind overturned ore carts with rifles that looked older than the rocks they dug. They were holding, barely. One skiff turned, presenting its broadside, and a second volley of shells tore through a bunkhouse, sending timbers screaming into the air.

Elias made his decision in the half-second it took the debris to fall.

“MacReady, man the bow gun. René, you’re on the starboard repeater. Pip’s not here, so you’re my eyes and ears until the girl comes back.” He didn’t let the ache in his chest slow his hands on the wheel. “We go in fast, we go in low, we hit the one on the left first. It’s got its guns trained ground-side, so it’s blind to us until it’s too late.”

“Captain,” René said, his voice low with the particular gravity of a man who knew the price of an unsanctioned attack, “we’re flying a half-patched British sky-sloop into a French military action. If they identify the ship—”

“They already know the ship,” Elias cut him off. “Roux burned her. Whatever they see now is a ghost. Let’s make sure they believe it.”

The Vagabond dropped like a stone through the last veil of cloud, engines cutting to near-silence so the wind whistling through her rigging was the only sound. Elias held her steady, fingers white on the wheel, as the French skiff filled the frame of the forward glass. A sailor on the skiff’s deck turned, eyes going wide as the ghost ship materialized above him.

MacReady didn’t give him time to scream. The bow gun stuttered, spitting lead across the skiff’s deck, and the French vessel lurched as her helm went down. Elias pulled hard on the wheel, sending the Vagabond into a banking turn that scraped her hull against the skiff’s rising gasbag. The impact ripped a shriek from the envelope—a sound that was almost grief.

“Hold her together, old girl,” Elias muttered to the ship, to the engine beneath his feet. “Just a little longer.”

The second skiff swung around, guns tracking, but René’s repeater opened up before its crew could find their range. The shots walked across the skiff’s envelope, punching holes that sent hydrogen venting in white screams. The skiff sagged, tilting nose-down, and its captain had enough sense to abandon the engagement, clawing for altitude and escape over the far ridge.

The third skiff turned to run. Elias let it.

On the ground, the miners’ fire had gone quiet, replaced by a ragged cheer that carried up through the thin mountain air. Elias brought the Vagabond down on the intact half of the landing platform, her landing gear groaning as she settled. He killed the engines. For a moment, the silence was so complete he could hear his own heartbeat.

Then MacReady was beside him, hand on Elias’s shoulder. “That mineral we need,” he said, voice low. “We better pray these folk are grateful.”

They were. The miners’ foreman, a woman with arms like hawsers and a scar that ran from her ear to the corner of her mouth, met Elias at the foot of the ramp. She didn’t offer a handshake. She offered a rifle.

“Name’s Cora,” she said. “You just bought yourself a debt. What do you want for it?”

“Chromium-cobalt ore,” Elias said. “Enough to forge a new engine core.”

Cora’s eyes flicked to René, then to the Vagabond’s wounded flanks. “That’s a French ship’s worth of damage. The ore’s in the deep seams. Takes a week to pull what you need.”

“We don’t have a week.”

“Then you take what we’ve got stockpiled,” she said, jerking her thumb toward a tarpaulin-covered mound at the edge of the platform. “It’s meant for the monthly shipment, but the sky-road’s been closed since the French started their little war on our doorstep. Take it. Take it and go.”

MacReady was already moving toward the stockpile, pulling back the tarpaulin to reveal a stack of dark, glittering ingots. He let out a breath that sounded almost reverent. “This’ll do. This’ll do nicely.”

Elias turned to Cora. “You said the sky-road’s closed. You know another way through the mountain passes?”

Cora studied him with an appraising squint. “There’s always another way. But it’s not on any chart. It’s a route the old ore-runners used, before the war made maps into lies.” She spat on the ground. “I’ll show you. For the ore’s price. And a share of whatever you’re hauling that’s worth the French burning my home for.”

Elias opened his mouth to argue, but René caught his eye and gave a small, sharp shake of his head. *Don’t.* Elias closed his mouth. He looked at Cora, at the scar on her face, at the miners gathering behind her with rifles and soot and the kind of hard-won trust that only came from fighting the same enemy in the same dust.

“Deal,” he said. “But if you’re coming aboard, you follow my orders. I don’t have time for a second mutiny.”

Cora’s grin was a slash of white in the grime. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Captain. Wouldn’t dream.”

Later, when the ore was stowed and the engines hummed with a new, stronger pulse, Cora stood at the rail beside Elias, watching the colony dwindle into a dark speck against the mountain’s shoulder. She pointed west, toward a gap in the peaks that looked like nothing but shadow and wind.

“That’s the old way,” she said. “It’ll take you through the deep lanes. The low roads. The places the Navy charts say don’t exist.”

Elias felt something cold settle in his chest. “The deep lanes.”

“Aye.” Cora glanced at him. “You know them?”

He didn’t answer. He pulled Amelia’s torn map from his coat and smoothed it against the rail. The faint lines she’d drawn—the converging arcs that hinted at something fragmented, scattered, hidden beneath the sky’s surface—matched the gap in the mountains with a precision that made his breath catch.

Amelia had known this route. She’d marked it on a map no one else could read. And she’d hidden it somewhere the French and British both had looked and failed to find.

“Cora,” Elias said slowly. “You said this route isn’t on any chart. How do you know it so well?”

Cora was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was oddly distant. “Because I ran it once. For a woman who paid in gold and asked too many questions about the weather.”

Elias’s hands tightened on the rail. “What did she look like?”

“Dark hair. Brown eyes. A smile like she knew secrets that could sink the whole damn sky.” Cora looked at him, and something flickered behind her gaze. “You knew her.”

Elias didn’t trust his voice. He only nodded.

Cora turned back toward the gap in the peaks. “She was looking for something that wasn’t meant to be found,” she said. “And she was afraid of the man who was looking for her.”

“Who?” Elias asked.

Cora’s jaw tightened. “A scarred man. With a laugh like a broken bell.”

The wind howled through the Vagabond’s rigging. Elias felt the cold move deeper into his bones. Cora had run from LaRoche. The sky-routes, the deep lanes, the hidden ways—Amelia had threaded through them all to escape him. And now Elias was following the same thread, straight into the same darkness.

“How long,” he said, “until we reach the end of that route?”

Cora met his eyes. “Two days. If we don’t run into what’s waiting for us at the other end.”

“And what’s that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But whatever it was, it made the woman who paid me look like she was already dead and just hadn’t told her body yet.”

Elias looked out at the gap in the peaks, at the dark throat of the deep lanes swallowing the last light of the sinking sun. He thought of Amelia. He thought of LaRoche’s scarred face and broken-bell laugh. He thought of the chronometer spinning wildly, pointing at something beneath the sky, something the whole world was willing to burn for.

“Good,” he said. “That’s exactly where I need to be.”