The Fog Diver (2 page)

O
UR SALVAGE RAFT WAS
a hodgepodge of mismatched parts and tattered patches. It floated above the Fog, dangling from three balloons lashed together with fraying ropes. A wicker basket swayed in the tangled rigging beneath the balloons, the “crow's nest” where Hazel usually stood.

Below that, the raft itself was a weather-beaten deck of canvas, wooden floorboards, and copper pipes. The winch for my tether rattled beside my diving plank and, farther back, Swedish spun the ship's wheel and clattered at the steam organ that controlled the rudders and propellers.

Under the deck, Bea tinkered with the clockwork engine that powered the fans and pistons and vents. And hanging below the whole thing, the empty cargo net
swayed in the stiff breeze. It wouldn't be empty for long. That iron gate would cover food for a week or two, even after the bosses took most of the money.

But we still needed a much bigger score to help Mrs. E.

The tether winched me toward the underside of the raft, bringing me close enough to grab the boarding ladder.

“Chess!” Bea called to me, with a smile on her freckled face. “You're okay!”

“Of course!” I struck a pose on the ladder. “For I am Freakula, Lord of the Fog.”

She giggled. “You're a chucklebutt! How come you stayed down so long?”

“I found something,” I told her. “Float a buoy!”

She flashed a salute and disappeared into the gearwork. It was too late to grab that iron gate today, so she'd mark the site with a buoy and we'd return tomorrow, after drifting all night. We couldn't hover in one place overnight, not without a pilot at the wheel, and even Swedish needed to sleep.

I climbed on deck, shoved my goggles to the top of my head, and started unbuckling my harness.

“Next time come up when I tell you to!” Hazel called from the crow's nest. “Look at the sun.”

From above, the Fog usually looked like an endless ocean with motionless white waves. But now, the orange
light of sunset brushed the high crests.

“Sorry,” I said. “I got busy.”

“Doing what?” she asked. “You look messed up.”

“Chess always looks messed up,” Swedish said from the wheel.

“I got into a fight,” I admitted.

Hazel frowned. “Are you okay?”

“Was it wolves?” Swedish asked. “Baboons?”

“Worse,” I told him.

“Not driftsharks,” Hazel said, giving me a worried look.

“Of course not,” I said. “You don't
fight
driftsharks, you just . . . die.”

“Hyenas?” Swedish guessed.

“Um . . .” I didn't want to tell them I'd lost a perfectly tasty goose. “I found an iron gate that's in good shape. And I'm pretty sure I smelled roses nearby.”

“Finally!”
Hazel brightened, forgetting that I looked a mess. “I knew that flying this far would pay off. We'll grab everything in sight, and make enough to help Mrs. E!”

“If the troopers don't arrest us first,” Swedish grumbled.

“Nobody's going to arrest us,” Hazel told him.

“They will if Lord Kodoc hears about Chess.”

I swallowed. Lord Kodoc was more than the tyrant who ruled the Rooftop and commanded the roof-troopers—he was the reason we lived small and quiet in a remote corner of the slum.
Everyone
with half a brain was scared
of Lord Kodoc, but it was different for us. He was the bogeyman Mrs. E had scared us with since we were little. The monster in all our nightmares. She said that if Kodoc found us, he'd tear us apart.

“Yeah,” Hazel said, “but he won't. He doesn't even know Chess exists.”

“Not yet,” Swedish muttered darkly. “You've heard the rumors.”

I ducked my head. Swedish was right. We needed to escape the slum to find a cure for Mrs. E's fogsickness—but also to get far away from Lord Kodoc. He thought I'd died thirteen years ago, after he'd lowered my mother into the Fog. Recently, though, we'd heard terrifying rumors about a kid with a Fog-eye. If Kodoc found out I'd survived, he'd hunt me down. He'd lock me to a tether and dangle me in the white until the Fog killed me.

Hazel shot Swedish a dirty look, then turned back to me. “So what'd you get in a fight with?”

Apparently she
hadn't
forgotten about me looking messed up.

“Here.” I tossed my sack to Swedish. “Dinner.”

He peered inside. “You got in a fight with dandelion greens?”

I sighed. “Fine! It was a goose. I got in a fight with a goose.”

From behind me I heard Bea's familiar giggle, and she teased me while Swedish started dinner. He soaked the
greens in rainwater, tossed the last of our seagull jerky into the broth, and simmered the whole thing over an exhaust vent.

I plopped down under the balloons while the soup cooked, feeling drowsy and content. I'd follow the scent of roses tomorrow, and with any luck I'd find a drawer of silverware or even—in my wildest dreams—a cabinet full of unbroken wineglasses. Rich people on the upper slopes of the Rooftop paid huge for stuff like that.

Hazel sat beside me, gazing at the sunset, her braids falling around her shoulders, as Bea fiddled with a handful of wires. She made figurines out of cables and wire, what she called “twistys,” miniature people, airships, and animals.

She handed me a twisty of a cute little bird. “Here!”

“What's this?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. “A chickadee?”

“A silly goose,” she said. “Like you!”

Swedish poured the soup into bowls and handed them around. “A
rabid
goose. Nothing else could beat Chess.”

“It probably had fangs,” Hazel said. “And glowing red eyes.”

Bea wiped her mouth with her sleeve and asked, “What really happened?”

“She had baby geese with her,” I admitted. “They kept looking at me with their big eyes. I just . . . couldn't.”

“You fog-face,” Swedish grumbled. “We could be eating
roast goose right now.”

“Of course Chess couldn't kill her!” Bea told him. “She's a mother! She had babies.”

Swede grunted. “They're probably all adopted.”

“
We're
all adopted!” Hazel reminded him.

“Sure,” he said. “But we're not delicious.”

N
IGHT FELL, AND
a million stars freckled the dark sky. We climbed into our hammocks to sleep as the engine ticked and the rigging fluttered. When a cool breeze rose, my hammock began swaying.

“In the old days,” I said, pulling my blanket to my chin, “before the Fog came, people used to see shapes in the stars.”

“You already told us that,” Swedish said. “They called them constipations.”

“Constellations,” Hazel said with a soft laugh.

“That's what I said!”

Gazing at the stars, I almost told them the old tale of “Skywalker Trek,” about a space war between the Klingons and the Jedi, set in a future when people lived on
distant planets, and fought Tribbles, Ewoks, and Borgs. I decided to stick with constellations, though, because sometimes my stories got a little garbled.

“They saw archers and bulls and foxes,” I said. “They gave the stars names, like ‘Elvis Parsley' and ‘Greta Garbo' and ‘Michael Jackson.'”

“There's no way anyone was ever named ‘Garbo!'” Bea said in the darkness. “That's too silly, even for the old days.”

“That's what it says in my dad's scrapbook.” When my father died, he'd left me a notebook filled with historical facts he'd pieced together. “Greta Garbo.”

“‘Greta' is nice,” Hazel said after a minute.

“‘Garbo' sounds like the noise you said bullfrogs make,” Swedish told me. “
Gar
bo,
gar
bo.”

“It sounds bossy,” I said. “Like a command. Swab the deck! Garbo the sails!”

I turned toward Hazel's hammock. “That could be your name. Hazel Garbo.”

Bea giggled. “I'm Bea Parsley!”

“Swedish Jackson,” Swede said. “I kind of like that.”

The raft rocked in the breeze, and we fell silent. Snug in our hammocks, safe and together, far from our troubles. The rich green scent of trees and meadows rose through the Fog, so much sweeter and cleaner than the stink of the slum where we lived.

My eyes closed and my mind began to drift—

“I can't sleep!” Bea called out. “Tell me the story again.”

“No!” Hazel and Swedish said at the same time.

“Pretty please?” Bea pleaded. “With pigeon on top?”

“Be quiet,” Swedish grumbled.

“Count the stars, sweetie,” Hazel told her. “Until you fall asleep.”

“Pretty please, with churro on top?” Bea asked. “Pretty please with
cucumber
?”

“Would you tell her already, Chess?” Swedish smacked the bootball he used as a pillow. “I'm getting hungry just listening to her beg.”

I yawned. “You've heard it a hundred times.”

“I don't care,” Bea said. “It's
our
story. Nobody else even knows it, because Mrs. E only told
us
.”

“Some people on the Rooftop know,” Hazel said. “A few of them, at least.”

“You know what I mean! None of the other slumkids. Pretty please, with frog legs on top? Pretty please with—”

“Just tell her,” Swedish grumbled.

“Sure.” I rolled over in my hammock, gathering my thoughts. “Um . . .”

“‘Before the Fog rose . . . ,'” Bea prompted, in a singsong voice.

“Before the Fog rose,” I said, “there was something called the Smog. The Smog covered the whole Earth, like the Fog does now, except it made
everything
sick. Not just people—but also grass and trees, and every animal in the
sky and sea and land. The Smog choked the entire Earth, slowly killing every single living thing.”

“So the gearslingers . . . ,” Bea prompted again.

“They called them engineers back then,” Hazel told her for the hundredth time. “Nanotech engineers. They made tiny machines to clean the Smog. So tiny that a million of them could fit into your smallest freckle. But—”

“It worked!” Bea interrupted. “You can always count on gearslingers.”

“Engineers,” I said. “And yeah, it worked. Sort of. At first. The tiny machines—”

“Nanites,” Swedish grumbled. “She knows they're called nanites—she's heard the story a thousand times.”

“Do you want to tell it?” I asked.

“I want to sleep. Hurry up and finish.”

“Fine,” I said, trying not to smile. Swedish loved to complain, but I could tell that he was listening to the story, too. “The nanites fixed the Smog and healed the Earth. They cleaned the water and the air, they scrubbed the poison and pollution from every crack and crevice. Only there was one problem. . . .”

“They didn't stop cleaning after they finished,” Hazel said, taking over the story. “They were designed to attack any new sources of pollution, and they calculated that because we humans
made
the Smog, they needed to stop us. The nanites turned themselves into the Fog.”

“You mean they
created
the Fog,” Bea said like she always did.

“No, they
became
the Fog. Some of the engineers had been afraid the nanites might go haywire, so they built a ‘command password,' a secret code inside each nanite that automatically killed it after three months.”

“That way,” I said, “if the nanites went loco, the engineers could just shut down the nano factories, and boom. A few months later, no more nanites.”

“What they didn't expect . . . ,” Bea prompted.

“They didn't expect the nanites to build their
own
factories. Nanites started making more nanites. More than humans ever built, zillions of machines so small that they floated like droplets of fog.”

“And we had no way to stop them,” Bea breathed.

“The nanites programmed themselves not to bother animals,” I said after a moment's silence. “They don't block the sunshine—plants grow like crazy in the whiteness—but they keep
us
out. They only target
human
brains. If we enter the Fog, we become blind and deaf. And if we stay too long, we die of fogsickness.”

“But not
you,
” Bea said.

“Not yet,” I said.

Bea shook her head. “You're different.”

“I'm a freak.”

“Yeah,” Swedish said. “You get beat up by birds.”

I went on, ignoring him. “Nobody knows exactly when the Fog started rising. A hundred years ago? Two hundred? We only know that the nanites rose slowly, inch by inch, foot by foot, until they covered the entire Earth in a thick white mist, and nothing remained but a few scattered mountaintops. The Rooftop and Port Oro.”

I fell silent. We lived on the Rooftop—except slumkids weren't allowed on the mountain itself—but we'd never even seen Port Oro. The Rooftop troopers didn't let anyone get that far from home.

We'd heard stories, though, and we knew that on Port Oro we'd find a cure for Mrs. E . . . and would finally be safe from Lord Kodoc. Ever since the mutineers of Port Oro broke away from the Rooftop years ago, airship skirmishes between the two settlements were common, so the Port was the only place where Kodoc couldn't follow us.

“Do you think there are people on other mountaintops?” Bea asked.

“I
know
there are,” Hazel said from her hammock. “Somewhere across the Fog, if you fly for months or years. There must be.”

“If they're too far to reach, it doesn't matter,” Swedish said. “It's like they don't even exist.”

“I wonder,” Hazel said with a wistful tone in her voice, “if they also think they're the last people on Earth.”

I watched the stars through the rigging and imagined distant mountaintops across the Fog. Foreign places
where everything was different, where nobody feared Lord Kodoc.

Although he'd been born into a minor branch of the Five Families, Kodoc became a captain of the roof-troopers at a young age. In those days, the scientists known as the “Subassembly” worked for the Five Families, but Kodoc suspected that they were hoarding information. So he attacked them. He seized their labs and research, he took hostages and lives. And as the tattered remains of the Subassembly fled to Port Oro, Captain Kodoc used his newfound knowledge to become
Lord
Kodoc, head of the Five Families and ruler of the Rooftop.

“Tell the rest of the story, Chess!” Bea demanded. “The part where there's gear inside the Fog that controls the nanites.”

“You just told it,” I said. “The myths talk about ancient machines that can lower the Fog.”

“Do you honestly think they had these machines and didn't use them?” Swedish asked. “They just sat around and watched the Fog rise? That's loco. That's beyond loco.”

“Not if they didn't know about them at first.” I swayed in my hammock. “What if the nanites built them? Either way, Mrs. E says Lord Kodoc is obsessed with finding them. He thinks if he controls the Fog, he controls the world.”

“He's right about that,” Hazel said. “If anyone messed
with him, he'd bury them in Fog. Entire families, whole neighborhoods. All of Port Oro.”

“That's why he'll kidnap Chess if he finds him.” Bea rolled toward me in her hammock. “And force you to search for the machines.”

I swallowed. “Well, yeah. . . .”

“Because nobody dives as well as you.”

“I'm the only freak around.”

“You're not a freak,” Hazel told me. “You're a garbo.”

“He's a total garbo,” Swedish said. “Now go to sleep, Bea, before I toss you overboard.”

“Tell me the story of Robbing Hood first!” she insisted.

She loved the story of the hoodie-wearing thief who lived in Sherlock Forest and stole from the rich. She loved the Hood and his crew: a robot called Made Marian and a monkey named Fryer Tuck. We used to play Robbing Hood when we were little, with Hazel as the Hood, Bea as Made Marian, and me as Fryer Tuck. We'd make Swedish be the evil Sheriff of Nodding Ham, of course.

“Bea, let Chess sleep,” Hazel told her firmly. “He needs to stay sharp for tomorrow. This is our big break.”

“Oh, okay,” Bea said in a small voice. “Sorry.”

“Night, everyone,” I said.

“Night, Chess,” Bea said. “Night, Swede. G'night, Hazy.”

“Good night, honeybee,” Hazel said, a smile in her voice.

I smiled, too, then snuggled under my blanket as the
scent of pine trees washed over the raft. The gyroscope spun, the gears clicked, and I swayed in my hammock and gazed at the sky. So many constellations: archer, crab, Oprah. Was there a constellation for us? For salvage crews and slumkids?

Was there a star for
me
? A tetherboy and a Fog-eyed freak?