Bram Möller's Arc

Chapter 24 of 63

The squall climbed off the ridge and rolled down onto them. In ten minutes the spur went from clear rock to a shelf of blown white. Bram could barely see Wendell at arm's length, and Wendell was a wall of pale fur in a red waistcoat. The valley below was gone. The sky above was gone. Somewhere in that grey, a tender was flying toward a mark it could no longer see. Bram pulled the compass from his jacket pocket. The lid mirror was useless now. No sun, no line of sight. He shoved it back and thought. "The pilot will overshoot," Wendell said. His voice was flat. He had flown this range. He knew. "He'll pass us and hit the north wall before he knows he missed." Parisa crouched against the rock, holding her coat closed at the throat. "Then we make noise he can hear through it." "He won't hear us," Bram said. "Not over the engine." He looked at the mechanical owl clipped to his belt. Its brass plates were cold. One wing hinge was bent from the last flight. He unclipped it and set it on the stone. "But he'll see a light." He opened the owl's belly plate. The little firebox still held a red coal from the morning. He fed it a strip torn from his shirt cuff, then a splinter pried from the compass lid's leather backing. The coal took. Smoke curled up, then a small flame. "Hold it high," he told Wendell. "Your arms are longer than mine and steadier than hers." Wendell lifted the owl above his head on one broad hand. The flame guttered, then leaned into the wind and held. A single point of orange in the white. Bram pulled off the flight jacket again. He gave it to Parisa. "Wave it. Slow. Big arcs. Dark against the snow." She stood and swung the jacket over her head. They waited. A minute. Two. The cold reached Bram's bones. An engine note cut through the squall, high and to the west. Too far west. Passing them. Bram cupped his hands. "Higher," he told Wendell. Wendell stretched, and the flame climbed another foot. The engine note shifted. It banked. It came back. The tender broke through the grey fifty yards off the spur, a small dark shape with a single gasbag, sliding sideways against the wind. The pilot saw the flame. Bram saw his face turn. The tender heeled hard and swung toward them, and the mooring line dropped. Wendell caught it in one white fist and pulled. The tender bumped against the rock. Parisa scrambled aboard first. Wendell handed the owl back to Bram, its firebox already going out, and climbed in after her. Bram took hold of the rail. His route was two stops from finished, and the last package was still ahead of him on another ship. He pulled himself up.