Coggler's Brood (Work in Progress)

Chapter 3

Inky blackness. Claustrophobic darkness.

Squished into a feto position, I am helpless inside a mail bag. This is how Stan Wellingham is smuggling Jack and I off New Frisco: as last minute cargo for a mail-packet. I concentrate on sitting as still as a stone while the bag is readied for hoisting into the hold of the airship by a pulley system.

To distract myself from the fear and self-loathing at what I have done to Jack's career, I focus on the sounds and snatches of conversation around me.

"Heave away!" Ropes creak as the sack, with me inside, raises into the air.

"Big international operation..."

"Finally rid the world of Annabella Steenkamph..."

But that only reminds me that I'm sat helplessly in the dark with no control over my situation. I hate doing nothing. I hate even more not having any control over my own fate. I try to focus again on my surroundings.

"Slave ring..."

"Sequestria."

The sack hovers briefly in mid-air, my mind trying to connect all the disparate strands of conversation in the darkness. But nothing connects, of course: they are just snatches of different conversations. My mind is like that. If there is nothing to focus on, no obstacle to overcome, no data with which to plot, my mind will just try to tie together any old random thoughts or conversations.

"Look lively—I want to get away from here before the constabulary fleet chokes all the moorings. Lower away!"

I drop unceremoniously into the hold of the mail ship. Air whooshes from my lungs as I land on a heap of musty mail bags, which gives me something else to think about.

Soon, the hold is sealed and the sounds of the dock recede, replaced instead by the creak of ropes and the hum of bio engines: the airship is in flight.

"Nina, are you there?" Jack whispers from somewhere nearby.

"Yes. Sounds like you are on the other side of the hold." I am tempted to slip a knife from its hiding place in my boot and slit open the sack, but we were told to wait for release. "Jack, about your career."

"Don't worry about it."

Which makes me even more fearful. "I'm sure we can figure out a way to buy Wellingham off, or blackmail him into silence."

Jack actually laughs. "Blackmail is a feature of the job, Nina. If it isn't Wallingham threatening to expose our deal, it's my dad piling on the emotional pressure to bend a favor for one of his cronies. You learn to play one off against another and try to do a little good on the way."

What really concerns me is the way I never gave Jack's career a moment's thought before selling him out to Wellingham. "But you're absent without leave, a named fugitive."

"An advantage of having a father who is Mayor, is he can be very forgiving when he needs a rule tweaked in his favor. The important thing, for the moment, is that you are safe."

"Shh, I hear someone coming."

A key rattles in a lock; a door bangs; heavy boots clump on the deck then scrunch over mail sacks.

"You two can be heard from one end of the ship to the other," the new comer growls. "How am I meant to keep the presence of stowaways secret with you two bellowing at each other?"

I'm sure we were just whispering, certainly using less volume than our rescuer.

More scrunching feet on mail bags, then silence, followed by a groan. What has happened to Jack? I reach for the knife in my boot.