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touch of her sent a hot rush through the hidden parts of my body. I stumbled over my words.
    “Keep going,” she said impatiently.
    “Sorry. You just distracted me.”
    “Should I let go?” she whispered.
    “No, I like it.”
    I continued on, and during the most dangerous and exciting bits, I felt her squeeze my hand hard.
    “Gosh,” she said when I’d finished. “How terrible about Mr. Domville.”
    “When I left Ceylon, he was still in the hospital.”
    For a moment she said nothing. “But it’s really up there. The
Hyperion
.”
    “Way up there.”
    She leaned forward. “Do you know what’s aboard?”
    “Gold, they say.”
    “Oh, yes, gold,” she said dismissively. “But do you know what else?”
    “Lots of very frosty corpses.”
    “Possibly. But listen. The
Hyperion
was owned by Theodore Grunel.”
    “The inventor, I know.”
    “Not just any inventor! He built most of the great bridges in the world. Plus the underground railways of Europe. Oh, and the tunnels beneath the Strait of Gibraltar and the English Channel.”
    “The internal combustion engine was his too,” I said.
    “I was just getting to that. It made him immensely wealthy. And after that he invented all sorts of other things. He was brilliant, but very, very odd, by all accounts. Lots of strange habits. Didn’t like people much. He had a son and daughter, and didnget along with them at all, especially the girl. She married someone he didn’t approve of, apparently, and they never spoke again. Cut her off completely. Anyway, that’s not important. When he got older he became more and more reclusive. He would take long mysterious journeys. No onereally knew what he was doing anymore. Then one day he disappeared. He left behind a statement announcing he was leaving Edinburgh and moving to America. Just like that. He’d had his own special ship built in secret, to carry all his belongings. He’d handpicked the captain and all the crew. They say that ship was carrying his entire life, everything he owned!”
    She looked at me triumphantly.
    “So there’s also some very nice furniture aboard,” I said.
    “He wasn’t just an inventor. He was also an avid collector. He had one of the most extensive collections of taxidermy in the world.” She paused, and lowered her voice. “He had specimens he never showed to the public.”
    My skin crawled. “Like what?”
    “No one knows. Some people say he had animals that had been extinct for centuries, or creatures everyone thought were imaginary. And it’s all up there in the
Hyperion
. The entire ship is like a floating zoological museum—a museum that’s never been seen before.”
    “That’s something.”
    “I don’t give two hoots about the gold! But wouldn’t I like to see his bestiary! Why don’t we get her?”
    I gave a laugh. “Just like that?”
    “Why not?”
    “She’s too high. She can’t be reached.”
    “Just because you failed.”
    “If we’d gone any higher, we’d all have died.”
    “Well, there’s got to be some way.”
    Kate was not one to let a little trifle like death stop her. Looking at her eyes, I could tell she was serious, and with some alarm, I started to feel her gravitational pull.
    “She’s drifting at around twenty thousand feet,” I said. “It’s freezing cold up there, and that’s not the worst of it. The air’s too thin to breathe. At that altitude, the gas cells explode and the engines fail.”
    “Because the air pressure’s so low, is that right?”
    I nodded, impressed. “The internal combustion engine wasn’t designed to work at those heights.”
    “What about turbocharging?” she suggested casually.
    I looked at her carefully. “Now you’re scaring me. You’ve been thinking about this already, haven’t you!”
    “A girl’s permitted to think, isn’t she, Mr. Cruse?”
    “Why do I have the terrible feeling you’ve already made plans, and I’m just getting mangled into them?”
    “But it is possible, about the