Uncrashable Dakota (9 page)

“Right, so we can stay in contact,” Hollis said, as if he’d been close to formulating the perfect plan, and this was the finishing touch he’d been waiting for. “While we—”

“Split up,” Rob finished his thought. “Cover more ground. Every inch of the ship, fine-tooth comb, nose to the floor.”

“That’s pretty much the long and the short of it,” Delia said. “My shift is about to start. That’ll give me a reason to poke around the chambers some more.”

“I’ll see if I can pick up my old man’s trail,” Rob said. “Maybe he’ll know why we turned south.”

“And I’ll do whatever I have to do,” Hollis said. He tried to sound upbeat and hopeful, but the sheer size of the
Wendell Dakota
—miles of corridors, thousands of rooms, acres of deck space—put them at an obvious disadvantage.

“You’ll find your mother,” Rob said.

“I know that.”

“I just want to hear you say it. Brice Blank always sets specific mission objectives.”

Hollis wanted to remind him, in the most forceful way possible, that
this was actually happening
. Both their parents could be shoved into some dank crawl space. Maybe now wasn’t the time to be taking their cues from a funny-book.

These thoughts came out as a mumbled “guess we should get going.”

Rob slapped the satchel. “Stay in touch.”

“We’ll meet up after my shift,” Delia said. “Four o’clock.”

Hollis shouldered his transmitter bag. “I don’t think we should come back here. We should meet somewhere they can’t find us.”

Nobody wondered out loud who, exactly,
they
might be.
They
had turned the ship southward.
They
were taking people away. Maybe
they
were even responsible for the wind that had swirled the dirt back onto the deck at the christening.

“The steerage quarters,” Delia suggested.

Hollis’s heart quickened. He’d never actually been to a steerage-class section on any of his family’s airships and had been sternly instructed never to go there. Unlike the other rules imposed by his mother, which were breakable to varying degrees, the no-steerage rule was an ironclad warning. And unlike the rest of her ironclad warnings, which he had defied, this one had always been sacrosanct.

“What’s wrong with that?” Delia asked, seeing the boys’ expressions.

Rob cleared his throat. “Nothing. Four o’clock’s good. Just zap directions to us if anything changes.”

“I only had the parts for two transmitters.”

“So how will we know where to find you?” Hollis asked. “Isn’t it crowded down there?”

“Get to the message drop in the center of the hold,” Delia said, as if this were everyone’s favorite meeting spot. Hollis felt like he might as well be wearing a monocle and clutching a stylish cane in a white-gloved hand. He tried to shrug casually.

“Steerage it is.”

8

HOLLIS TRAVELED THROUGH
the dormitory, a bundle of exposed nerves, aware of every little twitch in the faces of the beetle keepers. Most were returning from long shifts and didn’t give him a second look. The clothes he’d thrown on in the dark were drab enough not to betray his status at a glance.

He walked briskly up a staircase that led to a gymnasium where medieval-looking exercise equipment was flanked by a pair of mechanical horses (only a penny to ride). A trio of bullish men were lifting dumbbells, their shirts heavy with sweat. He lingered just outside the doorway, tolerating body odor, and tried to recall if the door at the other end of the gym was a storage closet or an exit to the third-class berths. His memory of this part of the ship on the blueprints was sketchy. He decided it was a closet: third-class passengers wouldn’t have access to the gymnasium.

He was headed for the bridge. His paranoia had cooled just a bit. Hollis didn’t really believe that Captain Quincy could be involved. The man who had forsaken the sea would set things right.

The passage beyond the gymnasium brought him to one of the cold-storage lockers. On the other side of the frosty window, great hunks of butchered cattle swung gently back and forth, wreathed in icy mist that was somehow more unsettling than the carcasses. Was his mother in a place like this? He shuddered.

Now he was faced with a choice: up another set of stairs lined with framed covers from
Turbines Illustrated
and
Crossings
, or through a door marked
BINS
. Since he had no idea what
BINS
meant—garbage bins? Laundry bins? Some acronym beginning with the word
beetle
?—he went for the stairs. A lifetime spent aboard airships meant he could improvise a route when the map in his mind failed him. Like any neighborhood in New York or Philadelphia, the
Wendell Dakota
had back alleys and shortcuts. You just had to know where to look.

Hollis pressed against the wall to make way for half a dozen stokers, their sleeveless shirts stained with ash. The words
COAL TOWN
were burned into a piece of cedar and nailed above the archway at the top of the stairs. The men disappeared beneath the sign while Hollis clutched the heavy satchel close to his chest. The heft of Delia’s invention was comforting. It was as if Rob were at his side, the two of them walking together down the corridor between the bunk rooms that housed the furnace men. And yet, Hollis found that he was relieved to be away from the sound of his stepbrother’s voice. In this way, the transmitter was perfect. They could be allies without having to deal with the odd currents of their friendship, which had been ebbing and flowing since before their broken families were joined.

*   *   *

IN NOVEMBER OF 1909
—six months after his visit to the shipyard with his parents—Hollis met Rob at a stuffy aeronautical gala, where the completion of the
Lucy Dakota
’s hull had inspired a record-breaking airship cake. The length of three long tables pushed end to end, the cake was a cross-section cutaway of the ship, a preview of the interior. Each deck was a layer of a different kind: the promenade was dark chocolate; second class was fluffy angel food; lower decks a jumble of red velvet, peanut butter, vanilla. When the cutting began, it was more careful than he’d anticipated; caterers on short ladders, surgically removing perfect little cubes of cake and frosting, working their way down through the first-class decks. They were an efficient crew. Hollis wondered if they’d built a sister cake in their baking headquarters and run strict cutting-and-serving drills. Part of him thought it was a bad idea to build a replica of the ship just to gleefully destroy it.

For most of the evening, Hollis scarcely noticed the people at his table. There was a new face: Jefferson Castor, a rising star in the company who had just been promoted to deputy operating officer. Castor’s son was seated next to Hollis. During the meal, Hollis looked up from his filet mignon and noticed that Rob Castor had eaten the center of his steak while preserving the edges. The empty space was filled with mashed potatoes and topped with a pillar of green beans. Rob was frowning at his sculpture, as if it hadn’t quite come out the way he’d hoped. Hollis, who had very politely and neatly finished his dinner, wiped his mouth, and transferred his refolded napkin from his lap to the table, was waiting for Jefferson Castor to notice. The children of employees were always on their best behavior around Hollis and his parents. But Castor was preoccupied, speaking with Hollis’s father. He was gesturing with his fork, which clicked against his empty plate. It wasn’t until the cake was half carved that Rob said his first words to Hollis.

Chocolate propeller molds.

Excuse me?

You see that giant cake shaped like an airship?

Uh … yes.

The propellers are made out of chocolate, so they must have had to make a mold.

So?

So somebody had to make a chocolate propeller mold. You ever think about how many funny jobs like that there are in the world?

The orchestra launched into a lively piece, with a violinist sawing out a furious solo over the top. This made the cake-cutting take on a madcap feel. Hollis thought about Rob’s question. There
were
a lot of strange jobs in the world, when you took a moment to think about where things actually came from.

A caterer with his back to Hollis sliced into a virgin section of C Deck, almost perfectly amidships, and plopped the luscious red slice onto a plate brandished aloft by an assistant.

*   *   *

ON THE
WENDELL DAKOTA
,
Hollis imagined the silver blade of that caterer’s knife blocking his passage, stabbing through the hull and bisecting the hallway as he moved past the office where the chief steam engineer presided over his schedules. He scurried away from Coal Town by slipping into a closet full of mops and brooms and out the back into one of the crew-only passages. These access hallways were designed to take as little of the ship’s square footage as possible away from the staterooms and restaurants. If he ran into someone traveling in the opposite direction, they would have to turn sideways and slide past each other—if the other person happened to be overweight, one of them would have to back all the way up to the last closet. To avoid a time-wasting detour every time this happened, passing lanes were placed at convenient intervals, bulges in the hallway that provided space for one person to slide into and wait for the other to pass, which Hollis did at the sound of footsteps and the squeak of an ungreased wheel. He pressed himself against the back of the alcove, making way for a steward pushing a cart laden with sandwiches and pickles. The steward moved farther down the hall, whistling tunelessly, and Hollis was about to resume his journey when he realized he was standing among sheaves of discarded papers. He picked one up. It was a notice, neatly typed on Dakota Aeronautics letterhead.

To save herself from painful wrist cramps that contributed to tiger claws, his mother used a special rubber stamp molded into the shape of her signature (stately
L
, looping
D
, scribble in between). This symbol of his mother’s decision to keep the name Dakota instead of adopting Castor—a salacious bit of gossip in the weeks following the wedding—usually gave Hollis a quick jolt of good cheer. But here it only meant that her captors had broken into her office to steal the stamp, or the ship was taking a detour around a genuine Atlantic storm. It was hard not to lean toward the more sinister option.

Hollis was drawn onward by the sound of an exuberant melody from the other side of the wall. A similar tune had provided the backdrop to Rob Castor’s very first ridiculous plan.

*   *   *

THE GALA ORCHESTRA
had pushed the pace of the cake-cutting, encouraging people to dance. Edmund Juniper was swinging his arms like a skier trapped in one spot, two empty glasses in his hands. Rob had turned to Hollis.

I’m going to steal it.

How do you know where they keep the mold?

Forget the mold. I’m talking about the propeller.

You can’t do that!

Why not?

It’s too big.

Okay then, not the main. One of the smaller ones. You in?

Hollis glanced back across the table. His father was scrubbing his spectacles with a linen napkin while Castor bent his ear. His mother appeared to be listening more intently to Castor. Lucy and Wendell Dakota often worked as a secret team at functions like this. Hollis could get his mother’s attention and rat out the chocolate thief to his left. That was the proper way to handle this. He was always very proper. He turned to Rob.

I’m in.

*   *   *

INSIDE A SECOND
janitor’s closet, Hollis listened to the plucking of the violin. He could trace the course of his present life back to those two words. He and Rob were the reason his father and Jefferson Castor became friends rather than business acquaintances; the reason the Castors and the Dakotas spent so much time together both before and after his father’s death. If he could somehow go back in time and unglue the two families, Castor would be just another ambitious company man in a pinstripe suit.

Hollis nudged open the door, letting in a sliver of bright light and amplifying the merry-go-round music. He had reached the Automat, putting him in the middle of the second-class promenade on the starboard side. He was perfectly dressed for a casual morning among moderately well-to-do military officers, bank managers, and theater directors. Devoid of a jacket and tie but not slovenly, Hollis could keep his head down and pass as a doctor’s son, out for a stroll and a bite to eat. He slipped out and joined the throng.

The Automat was a cheerful floor-to-ceiling display case that ran for hundreds of feet along the promenade, sectioned off into panels for hot meals, savory pies, sweet cakes, pastries, and coffee. Each panel consisted of countless windows; behind each window sat a plate; upon each plate was a piece of food that could be claimed by inserting coins into a slot and pushing a button.