Bram Möller's Arc

Chapter 57 of 63

The funnel spat them out into flat grey air and the bag steadied at a hundred feet above a valley Bram did not recognize. He kept his hand on the vent and squinted west. Cloud sat low on every ridge. He had launched blind off a hard vent, and the funnel had thrown them clear, but he had no fix on which way it had thrown them. The compass in his pocket would give him north. It would not tell him where the harbor was from here. Omondi wiped his glasses on his coat and looked at the fuel gauge. "Half a tank. Maybe a little under." "How long to the next harbor if we're on line?" "Three hours. If we're off line, longer than we have." Bram opened the journal one-handed on the console. He turned to the winter pages until he found the funnel note. Under it, in smaller writing, he had marked the funnel's exit heading two winters back: bears west-southwest, drops you over the pine flat. He looked down. No pine flat. Only broken rock and a frozen stream running the wrong way. "We're off," he said. "South of the line. I don't know how far." Cora came up from the stern with her mechanical owl cradled against her chest. One of its wing joints ticked out of time. She had been the runaway apprentice in his loft a month ago. Now she read a pressure dial faster than Omondi. "Send the owl up?" she said. "It can log the sun through the cloud and give us a bearing off the pin note." "Wing's bad." "It'll hold for one climb." Bram nodded. She wound it and threw. The owl climbed hard, favoring one side, and vanished into the ceiling. They flew west by the compass while they waited. Omondi watched the gauge and said nothing. Bram counted minutes against the fuel. At four minutes the owl came back low and hit the rail hard. Cora caught it. She read the dial on its belly and then read it again. "Sun's off our right shoulder. We're heading west but we should be heading west by north. We're about eight degrees south of the funnel note." "Distance?" She worked it on her fingers against the journal's margin scale. "Twelve miles south of the pine flat. If we correct now, we hit the harbor with a quarter tank. If we don't correct in the next ten minutes, we don't hit it at all." Bram turned the wheel and brought the nose up-right until the compass card settled on the bearing she gave him. The bag came round slow and heavy. The crown seam held. Omondi wrote in the journal. Funnel exit logged. Eight degrees south. Corrected on owl sun-fix. Quarter tank reserve. Bram kept his hand on the vent. He had a heading now. He had fuel for one harbor and no more.