Thistle in the Sky | #NONC2022 | ✔

Chapter Seventeen

The reel of the floor lasted only a dozen ticks, though to Farah, it felt like an hour. When she could move again, she rolled onto her elbows and retched on the cargo-hold floor. Nothing came up. She hadn't eaten or drunk anything since last night, but that did not stop the waves of nausea from crashing over her. She needed to stop connecting to minds before they died.

The Ariomma lurched downwards. As the world stopped spinning, reality and the danger they faced crashed back with the force of one of those tentacles. Farah felt around in the darkness for Kaz. The lights in the cargo hold had gone out—no doubt with the rest of the ship's electricity—and the walls of the hold were reinforced to the point where no light leaked in. Farah found her brother where she'd left him. He squeezed her hand weakly when she located his.

There were waist-high crates in the hold here that might offer them some shelter. Farah crawled until she met one, and stood to fumble back its latches and lift its lid. Canvas bags met her fingertips. Dried lentils and beans. Farah hauled out the first one and dumped it on the floor beside the crate. She immediately realized its protective potential. In moments, she was building the bags into a buffer on the crate's outside. She flinched as something smacked the wall of the hold. No tentacle came through. The monster must have started at the top of the ship with the intent to work its way down.

Farah had to climb into the crate by the time the last bag tumbled over its side minutes later. She scrambled out again and ducked under Kaz's arm. He was conscious enough to help her lift him into the crate, where she settled him in one corner with a bag to lean against. He made a sound of protest as Farah then closed the lid without joining him.

"I'll be back," she said, lifting it again a crack. "I promise."

She shut the lid, drew her knife, and faced down the cargo-hold door. Gemi was still alive somewhere in the ship. So was Baskoro, if he hadn't been taken already. She had to reach one without facing the other. Farah approached the keel catwalk with a guarded mind. She could only faintly tell which direction Gemi's prison lay, but there weren't many storerooms in that part of the ship. Just before she reached the door, a wall cracked on the far side of the cargo hold. Farah leaped up the stairs and flattened herself on the catwalk outside. She heard the tentacle slither over the hold's floor, then withdraw. It had not tried to puncture any crates.

Whatever sense it used to detect its prey must not work through wood. Struck by an idea, Farah crept to the backup control room first. She paused outside to listen for tentacles, then moved swiftly to the overturned desk she and Kaz had sheltered under. She wrenched off half its shattered backboard. A few quick knife turns was enough to unscrew the handle from a nearby desk drawer and screw it onto her makeshift shield. Armed with a way to deflect tentacles, Farah slunk back towards the ship's interior.

The catwalks were eerily silent. Farah tuned into the motion of the ship instead, and her stomach clenched. The Ariomma had stopped in the sky, but it kept shuddering. Even as Farah watched, the other end of the axial catwalk twitched from side to side. The monster was probing the front of the ship. With nobody in telepathic range, Farah couldn't tell who it was hunting, but the only options left were Gemi or Baskoro.

Farah crept down the catwalk. When she reached the entrance of the cargo hold again, though, her feet stopped her of their own accord. She could just walk down there and hide with Kaz. If the Verulux was to judge, the monster would leave once it believed the ship was empty. When it left, Farah could reemerge and rescue Gemi.

If Gemi wasn't found first.

Farah clenched her jaw as her memories of the ravaged ship returned to haunt her. The holes there had penetrated right through to its interior. The Ariomma was bigger, but its storeroom walls were made of the same thin, lightweight material that the tentacles punctured so easily. Gemi wasn't safe.

The monster was also distracted right now. With the cold reassurance of that state of affairs, Farah broke from her paralysis and stalked down the catwalk again. Gemi's mind faded into range. She was still alive and no more terrified than she'd been before, which meant the monster's target was Baskoro. Farah took another step and froze. She could hear him now. He was down in the gondola, sheltering beneath a desk the way Farah and Kaz had, with a chair pulled up in front of him like some kind of shield. He was trying to reach the ship's controls. Even as Farah focused on him, another tentacle plunged through the window, spraying glass everywhere.

Farah cut the connection.

Gemi was ahead. Farah pressed towards her, fighting every survival instinct that told her to run the other way. She could hear her own breathing. She reached the back of the decks and stopped with one hand over the door handle. Venturing down here would put her life on the line, all for someone who might well try to betray her later. But she had to try.

Farah pulled the door open and crept down the stairs into the decks. Gemi's mind was close now. Farah approached the first door along the hallway and knocked softly. No response. She moved to the next and knocked here, too. This time, Gemi's thoughts startled violently. A vivid fear of Mega, Cahya, and Baskoro flooded her as Farah slid back the bolt and cracked open the door.

The room was pitch-black. Farah swallowed hard, then whispered, "The cargo hold is safe. Hurry."

She braced for the scathing, painful distrust that would follow. Back when the crew was alive, more than half of them would sooner have flung themselves off the ship in the company of a cloudhopper than trust the word of a thistle. Gemi's mind, though, had seized. She turned the words over and over, stuck in a loop like an old-fashioned motion picture device. Then something touched Farah's arm. She leaped in her skin and nearly tripped back along the catwalk as Gemi panicked again.

The hand was hers. Farah had been so focused on thoughts that she hadn't heard Gemi get up and approach. Now the young woman stood shaking just inside the storeroom, curly hair disheveled, eyes huge behind her glasses, and hand pulled up protectively against her chest.

"Sorry," she whispered. Then, after a pause, "Can you take me there?"

It took Farah several ticks to realize it wasn't the rebuke she had anticipated. She nodded, and beckoned Gemi after her. They mounted the stairs and stepped out onto the keel catwalk—just as the ship gave a mighty heave, and the whole roof caved in. 

Light flooded down from above. Layers of goldbeater's skin collapsed in on themselves under the ragged shreds of the airship's outer layer. A whole ring of its skeleton crumpled inwards. Tentacles thicker than tree branches looped over them, no longer subject to the weightlessness of the Tideless. Farah stared in horror at what lay overhead.

It was a jellyfish. A sky-blue, translucent leviathan of a jellyfish with a bell almost as wide as the Ariomma was long, and a central frill that cascaded over the edge of the rend in the envelope like a waterfall. The tentacles trailed from the edge of its bell. They draped over the ship like locks of hair, some idle, but some still waving where they disappeared from view.

Farah looked back to find Gemi giving her the same look Kaz had: fear, and pleading. She didn't know how to get out of this, and now they couldn't reach the cargo hold without taking the long way around. Swallowing back her own helplessness, Farah pulled out the tracking card and passed it to Gemi. This was the only thing she needed to do before they all died, if they wanted a hope of survival.

"The Nectamia left this," she said. "It's tracking us right now. Do you think you can use the signal to call for help?"

Gemi turned the card over with unsteady hands. The tips of her fingers sparked faintly, an effect Farah was sure would not have been visible if not for the gloom of the catwalk.

"I can," said Gemi. "But I'll need to connect it to something. I need my transmitter from the radio room."