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this.
    A battle cry—it might have been his—and
another long clash of steel answered her. Kali took that to mean
she was on her own.
    She took a deep breath, thumbed the trigger
on the grenade, and watched for the spark. Yes, there it was. She
counted to two and tossed the weapon.
    It sailed through the air, clanked off the
fan casing and dropped. It exploded uselessly a few feet above the
river. A couple of men rowing a fishing boat and gawking up at the
airship screamed and threw themselves into the water.
    “ Not good,” Kali
muttered.
    She had one more grenade, but only one. She
gripped the cold metal, felt the grooves dig into her hand,
imagined the hours she had spent patching the exterior together
from scrap and carefully measuring out gunpowder and even more
carefully building the trigger device…. She resolved not to waste
this one.
    Kali thumbed the trigger, held the grenade
half a second longer than the first, and lofted it toward the
fan.
    This time it clanked into the horizontal
cylinder containing the propeller. Kali held her breath. The
grenade bumped against the inside of the casing and skidded toward
the fan. She cringed at the idea of it sliding past the blades and
falling out on other side.
    Before the grenade came close to that fate,
it exploded with an echoing boom. Orange flashed, gray smoke filled
the air, and shards of metal flew.
    One whistled toward her face, and Kali
ducked, throwing up her free hand. Her other hand slipped, and she
lost her foothold and zipped down the rope. Fire seared her palm,
tearing into her skin, but she growled and forced herself to hold
on. She caught the bottom of the half-destroyed net, but her feet
dangled free, swinging thirty feet above the earth.
    On the hull above, the only thing left of
the fan was a singed stump of metal. Holes and charred wood marked
the hull as well. If it were a sea-going vessel, it’d be leaking
faster than the bilge pumps could bail, but up here, holes just
meant poorer aerodynamics. Already, though, the airship was listing
to one side, heading out over the river. With one working
propeller, it’d simply float around in wide circles until someone
fixed it. That meant they’d have a hard time chasing anybody.
    “ Cedar,” Kali called
again. “It’s time to go!”
    She scanned the countryside below,
ostensibly looking for her bicycle and to see how far upstream they
had floated, but a part of her had to admire the view, a view
usually reserved for the birds. One day, she would sail in the
skies with her own ship.
    A boom sounded above, not rifle fire this
time, but a shell gun or cannon. What in tarnation was Cedar doing
up there?
    Kali was debating whether to climb up and
join him—whatever he was doing, he might be getting himself in
trouble—when a familiar shout pulled her eye to the side.
    “ Man overboard!” It was
Cedar, leaping over the deck railing. He clutched a bag in one hand
and his sword in the other. “Let’s go, Kali!” he added before he
splashed into the river below.
    “ Someone stole that man’s
rudder,” she muttered.
    Above her, a man with a bloody face leaned
out of the trapdoor. From the pained snarl on his lips and the gun
in his hand, Kali decided it was indeed time to go. After a quick
check to make sure she was over water, she released the rope.
    She dropped thirty feet and plunged into
depths so icy they shocked her to the core. The calendar might say
summer, but this water came straight out of mountains still
smothered with snow. Her feet brushed the bottom, and she pushed
off. She popped above the surface and tried to suck in a breath of
air, but her lungs, stunned from the cold, scarcely worked. An icy
wave washed into her eyes.
    A hand gripped Kali’s arm, helping her stay
up.
    “ That was brilliant!”
Cedar exclaimed. The water dripping into his eyes couldn’t dull
their gleam.
    Kali shook her head and swam for the shore
with frenzied strokes, hoping to warm her already-numb limbs.