Meanwhile, the number of arrests continued to grow. Every outsider, every radical, every dealer in visions and hope—in short, anyone who had ever stood against her in word or deed, or that she suspected of one day doing so—was taken from their homes and family without explanation, and interned in the camp at Scoriae.

The Old Mother was well pleased.

Chapter 43

Dark Waters

THE TASK OF RESCUING the survivors from the turbulent waters around The Great Head had quickly degenerated into chaos, as people struggling in the water converged on The Piper from all directions and attempted to clamber aboard. Within two or three minutes of arriving at the scene The Piper was carrying more than its limit of passengers, and listing badly to starboard.

“We have to get out of here, Candy!” Eddie said. “We’re over the limit for passengers, Candy. They’re going to sink us! Are you listening to me?”

Candy stood frozen in place.

“Okay, fine. Then I’ll just go tell some drowned people we’ll be joining them soon.”

Candy continued staring off into the starless, moonless, cloudless sky, her body convulsed by little spasms.

“Malingo?” Eddie hollered. “I think there’s something wrong with Candy. She’s having a vision or a fit or something! Get over here, will you?” As he yelled he shoved his diminutive foot into the middle of the same brutish face of a man he’d shoved back into the water just a few moments before. “Can’t you take a hint, mate?” he bawled, “There! Is! No! More! Room!” He put all the strength in his body into making sure that this time the man stayed down. “Who’s at the wheel?”

“We are!” came a chorus of Johns from the wheelhouse.

“We have to get out of here!” Eddie yelled.

“He’s right!” Gazza shouted. “Much more of this and we’re going to be flipped over.”

“Just get this crawfiddlin’ thing moving,” Eddie said.

“There’s people in the water right in front of us,” Mischief said.

“They’ll get out of the way when they see us coming!” Eddie yelled back.

“We can’t just—”

“Gazza! Get to the wheelhouse and take over from that gaggle of idiot heads that some gene-deficient woman had the misfortune to carry to the tragedy of birth.”

“You are despicable, you know that?” John Mischief said. “Nobody put you in charge here. You’re just an actor.”

“Oh no, that was just a role I was playing!” Eddie said. “I’m a man of action. I get things done. You and your brothers just talk, talk, talk. All the time. Talk, talk, talk.”

The John Brothers said nothing. Except Serpent, of course, who couldn’t help himself.

“Your time will come,” he murmured to Eddie.

“Well?” Eddie yelled.

“I’m in the wheelhouse,” Gazza hollered. “They gave up the wheel.”

“Good,” Eddie said. “Now get us out of this mess.”

“I’m working on it.”

“How’s Candy doing?” Eddie asked Malingo.

It wasn’t Malingo who replied. It was Candy.

“Lordy Lou. She’s still with me!”

“Who?” said Malingo.

“Boa. Who else?”

“She’s here with you now? In your head?”

“No. But we’re still connected somehow. She just pulled me into her head. I don’t even think she meant to. I saw through her eyes for a moment. She was in some place filled with bones. Then—I don’t know how—we moved on.”

“Who’s we?”

“She has Finnegan,” Candy said. She put her hand up to her head. “I saw him right beside me. No, not me, her. Beside her. I’m all backward.”

“You said they moved on?”

“Yes.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hazard a guess?”

Candy closed her eyes.

“Carrion built her a place to play . . .”

“Play?”

“Magic games. Oh—it’s Huffaker!”

“And you think that’s where she took Finnegan?”

Before Candy could reply The Piper’s engines made a guttural growl, and the boat surged forward perhaps twice its length before the engine made a second sound, far less healthy than the first, and the vessel shuddered to a halt.

“No!” Eddie yelled. “No! No! NO! This is not the place to lose power, Gazza! Get this hog-boned boat moving.”

“Then stop cursing at us,” said John Mischief. “And make yourself useful. There’s nothing wrong at the helm. And the engine’s still going. Something’s jamming the propeller. Gazza, can you find out what it is?”

Gazza gave a quick “Aye, aye, Captain,” and raced toward the propeller. Peering into the water he said, “It’s just some piece of trash wrapped around the propeller. I’ll cut it away and—”

The boat lurched. First to port, then to starboard, then to port again, this time so deeply it took on water. All the desperate creatures they’d tried to leave behind had swum in pursuit of them, and they, plus a hundred others, had grabbed hold of The Piper.

This time there would be no saving the ship. This time she was going down, taking everyone aboard with her to feed the fishes.

Chapter 44

Pariah

THE PIPER HAD PLAYED its last tune. Its boards creaked and cracked as one desperate soul after another sought to save themselves from the seething, bloody waters of the Izabella. They were already littered with the bodies of those who had died in the collapse of The Great Head or had fallen prey to the countless beasts that had risen from the depths with the Requiax. Terror had made them mindless and merciless, clawing at one another as they attempted to clamber up onto the boat, even though it was lurching wildly.

“This is the end,” Malingo said. “Candy, I’m sorry. It shouldn’t have ended like this. What am I saying? It should never have ended. I thought we would go on forever, I really did.”

“It’s not over yet!” Gazza said. “Look up! Look up!”

Everyone did as Gazza instructed. Nine or ten winged constructions that looked like the skeletons of vast birds, were circling high above The Piper. Their broad skulls were crowned with elaborately woven ziggurats of blazing bone, their wings, fully twenty feet wide, gilded by firelight.

And in the many ribbed bodies of these extraordinary mechanisms, lying flat along their midsections, were their pilots. One of which was Geneva.

“Candy! Be ready!”

“Geneva?”

“Of course!”

“It is!”

Candy could scarcely believe what she was seeing, but there she was, Geneva Peachtree, lying in the long cage of the bone-glider’s body.

“I couldn’t leave you to die!” Geneva yelled. “But I needed help!”

“You’d better be quick!” Gazza hollered. “We’re going down fast.”

“Geneva, be careful,” Candy shouted. “Don’t get pulled down! These people—”

“Smallest first!” Geneva ordered. “Malingo, pick up Eddie!”

“Now?”

“Now!”

What happened next was so fast and so extraordinary Candy could scarcely believe it was happening. Two of the fliers swooped down toward The Piper, as Malingo lifted a protesting Eddie up—

“Put me down!”

—first onto his shoulders, and then—

“I don’t need help, geshrat!”

That was all he had time to say. The fliers were carrying between them a hammock, which scooped Eddie up like a fish in a net, lifting him into the air. Their burden was nowhere near heavy enough to prevent them from rising again with their catch.

“You’re next, Candy,” Geneva yelled.

“No, it has to be Gazza! I won’t go until he goes.”

Geneva knew she had no time to argue with the girl, so she didn’t even try.

“Gazza it is!” she said.

“Wait!” Gazza protested. “Don’t I get to have—”

“An opinion?” Geneva yelled.

“Yes!”

“No! You’ve only got one chance at this!”

Two more fliers swooped down, needing to drop lower this time, not only because Gazza wasn’t raised up on Malingo’s shoulders but because in the half minute since Eddie’s rescue, The Piper had sunk significantly lower in the water.