Now let’s find out if I’m right.
She felt the propeller crank up. That meant they had one Pickleman and half a dozen sooties working the auxiliary propulsion boilers. It also meant they were now high enough up to start the guidance system.
Sophronia dove into a classroom and out onto a balcony to see. Somehow she wasn’t surprised to find they were heading toward London. And they weren’t doing so under steam cover. The Picklemen didn’t care that they would be seen by every small town they floated over. The secret of Mademoiselle Geraldine’s airship school wasn’t going to be a secret much longer.
If the Picklemen had any major cargo, it would be stashed in the hold with the glass elevator. Sophronia decided to check that first. She nipped around the dumbwaiters and down the access stairs. At the door, she put her ear to the jamb and heard minor thudding. She pushed it open a crack.
The hold was full of mechanimals. Bumbersnoot, passive until that moment, began upticking his tail in interest. His alarm did not sound, and he showed no particular eagerness to be put down to go to his compatriots. But he certainly was aware of them.
Sophronia’s stomach sank and her cheeks tingled. These were no small dachshund-shaped creatures. These were huge monsters, similar to the massive mechanimal she had encountered in her mother’s gazebo the night of Petunia’s ball. They bore little resemblance to any specific creature, looking more like wingless gargoyles. The hold was crammed with them. One squatted, as though waiting, on the glass lift. They did not move, but they looked like they could at any moment.
There was something terrifying about a mechanical construct that did not need a track. Sophronia had not realized that until she saw them all assembled before her. With the most prevalent mechanimal in her life being Bumbersnoot, she hadn’t thought the law making them illegal at all sensible. Now she understood. In that hold squatted a small but mighty army.
Shaken, Sophronia closed the door and continued with her assessment of the school.
She moved toward engineering, which, combined with the boiler room, took up the two lower levels of the front of the airship. She couldn’t easily sneak in there, because the main entrance was at the top, and no doubt the Picklemen would station themselves there to oversee operations. With a resigned sigh, she made her way out onto a balcony and began climbing down and around the outside of the airship toward her standard entrance—the sooties’ hatch.
There were no sooties waiting to help her inside this time. The massive room was suffused with the flickering orange of flames and a general smoky cloudiness Sophronia had grown to expect and find rather comforting. She made for her favorite coal pile, the one upon which she and Soap had spent many happy hours practicing reading and occasionally practicing smooching. Ordinarily, this part of the boiler room was humming, off-duty sooties mingled with those sent to tap the coal reserves. With only a kidnapped skeleton crew, there were no breaks, and the area was abandoned. Occasionally, Sophronia could pick out a strange new sound—a loud crack.
She peeked out from behind the coal pile to where the sooties were working the fireboxes. Or, to be more precise, where the sooties were slaving. They were running their normal patterns—feeding, stoking, checking the smooth motions of the main boilers—but they were doing so under ready punishment. The speaking-tube Pickleman was not on the supervisor’s platform, but down among the workers. He stood armed with a bullwhip in one hand and his gun in the other. If any sootie slackened his pace or did anything the Pickleman considered amiss, the whip flashed out, striking the unfortunate boy across the back.
The sooties were grim-faced and sweating, working as hard as they could. When the whip flashed, the poor unfortunate would wince and grit his teeth but not cry out. They were tough boys who’d started on docks or up chimneys. Sootie to a floating school was a cushy job by comparison, but that didn’t mean the lads had never before felt the kiss of a whip. They simply hadn’t expected to do so again.
Sophronia, on the other hand, had never witnessed such a thing. Her parents weren’t ones for harsh punishment, and she’d never visited the plantations of the West Indies, where, rumor had it, caning was commonplace. Every time the bullwhip struck, she winced and swallowed down a cry of sympathetic distress.
She watched as one small sootie got a second lick, right near the first. His shirt went ragged under the blows. He stumbled forward, and Handle jumped to his aid. She caught Handle’s expression. It wasn’t one of meek servitude. He was absolutely livid.