The Twister Sisters Read online

  Jessie was in the middle of another nap the next time someone came to her room, so she didn’t know anyone was there until she heard the key turning in the lock. She came awake, and briefly it occurred to her that she could always try attacking whoever came through the door and make a break for it. But she wasn’t ready. She was still too sleepy to move fast enough, and the stiffness in her leg would have slowed her down anyway. Also, she had no idea what to do next if she were able to escape. The sound of the engines certainly gave the impression that they were still in the air, so there would be no way off the ship even in the unlikely event that she didn’t get a crossbow bolt through the heart as she ran.

  Jessie sat up in bed as the door opened. Her eyes had grown adjusted to the dim light of her room, so she had to squint to see as the only-slightly-less-dim light of the hallway came in. A woman entered wearing the same sort of battle armor that Jessie had seen during the attack, although now that she saw it up close she could see how cracked and shabby the leather really was. A second woman stood in the hall with a crossbow pointed at Jessie, but the one in her room appeared to be unarmed.

  “Come with us, please,” the woman said. Her accent was much different from the ones Jessie had heard so far. It seemed much more refined, and Jessie even thought it was familiar. After a second she realized it was very similar to Corin’s. All the other raiders might have been from some unknown region, but this one was originally from Rhianna.

  “Is it time for my execution, then?”

  The woman looked startled. “Who said anything about an execution?”

  “The weird little girl with the wrench. Leech.”

  The woman snorted. “I’ve told her to stay in the engineering level, but she never listens.” The woman actually smiled and held out a hand to help Jessie up from the bed. “Just ignore her. You’ll never see a more brilliant mind for machines in such a small body, but she gets confused easily. You don’t really have anything to worry about. Unless you try to do something stupid. You’re not going to try anything stupid, are you?”

  Jessie accepted the hand. “I guess not.”

  “Good,” the woman said. “What’s your name?”

  “Jessie Maygrew.”

  “You can call me Lock.” The woman held up the keys to the room, which were at the end of a chain hooked to her belt. “For obvious reasons.”

  “You do realize this seems odd to me?” Jessie said. “Talking so cordially to the woman who’s been keeping me prisoner.”

  “Sorry about that,” Lock said. “We just hadn’t decided what to do with you yet.” She pulled out a length of rope from a pocket of her pants. “Sorry, but I’m going have to tie you up. Just for now. Just until we’re sure about you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘until you’re sure about me?’”

  “I’ll have to let the captain explain that.” Lock turned Jessie away from her and tied Jessie’s wrists behind her back. “How’s the leg?”

  “Um, fine, I guess. Still hurts.”

  “The medic gave you a cursory look before we put you in here just to make sure it wasn’t bad enough to bleed you out. We can give it a more thorough look after you talk to the captain.” She gave the rope one final tug, then led Jessie out into the hallway. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  The hall was very narrow and they had to walk down it single file, Lock in front with Jessie behind her and the armed guard bringing up the rear. Small sconces in the walls gave the hallway what little illumination it had, and Jessie was startled to realize they didn’t hold candles but glass bulbs. She’s heard about such things but had never had a chance to see any in Sun River. Even though she was tied up and heading towards some unknown fate with a mysterious captain she still thought maybe it was worth it to actually see light bulbs for once in her life. It occurred to her just how absurd that was, and she actually had to let out a small giggle.

  Lock looked over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. She just smiled. None of this seems right, Jessie thought. This is all almost enjoyable. And it was, in its way. It was like an adventure, some strange vacation from the mundane life she had been leading.

  Unbidden images came into her head of the mayor and her son dead on the floor of their home, of Sun River burning while people screamed all around her. Suddenly she didn’t have the urge to giggle anymore.

  At the end of the hallway there were two narrow stairways, one leading down into some darker space and one leading up into the daylight. Jessie had to squint her eyes again as Lock led them up, so before she saw anything she felt the wind upon her face. There was the distinct scent on the air of oil and burning coal, but it was overpowered by the brisk, clean scent of the open air. She opened her eyes and had to suppress a gasp at the amazing view in front of her.

  The deck of the flying platform was mostly flat, but there were a few doors here and there that led underneath. In the center of it all was rectangular tower about two stories tall with a series of ladders, steps, and catwalks surrounding it. At the top was a room about as big as the saloon, except it was completely surrounded in glass.

  Jessie had seen the various towers all along the side of the deck last night, but she hadn’t been able to see them in all their magnificence until now. At first they looked like solid metal, but as Jessie passed one she saw that it was studded in thousands of tiny moving parts- gears, pipes, pistons. She couldn’t even begin to understand what all of their purposes might be. At the top of each tower- and from her current vantage point she could see twenty to thirty of them- was a giant propeller whirring so fast it was no wonder she hadn’t been able to see them in the dark.

  The deck was absolutely covered in women. Many appeared to be working, swabbing the deck or carrying goods or simply keeping watch with their crossbows ready. Others were at a series of make-shift booths set up in loose rows. From some of the booths she could smell the rich scents of cooking meats and vegetables, making Jessie’s stomach rumble even though she was still full from her earlier meal. Other booths had rows of jewelry or weapons or even books. The proprietors of each booth called out to passersby in an attempt to hawk their wares, although a few stopped and stared at Lock and Jessie as they passed. It was amazing. It was like an entire city above the clouds.

  And that, beyond everything else, was the most spectacular sight of all. There was no railing along the edge of the deck, and most of the women kept a respectful distance from the edge, but Lock led them close enough to the side that Jesse got a clear view of the world beyond. Clouds passed below them, and sometimes the ship sliced right through them, sending parts of the clouds beneath them while the rest temporarily obscured the deck. Beyond it all she could see plains beneath them, bright green as early spring grass became nothing but gigantic blobs of color. Sometimes she could see the land form rough rectangles where it had been cultivated as farmland, but they appeared to be far enough from civilization that this didn’t happen often. Further out on the horizon Jessie could see mountains, and she even thought she could see them curve just a little with the shape of the planet.

  “My gods,” Jessie whispered. “Just what exactly is this place?”

  Lock smiled at her again. “This is the airship Twister. This is freedom.”

  4

  Lock indulged Jessie for a brief time, letting her see everything there was to see on the deck of the Twister, before leading her once more in the direction of the central tower. Lock said the quickest way to the top was by one of the ladders, but with Jessie’s hands still tied behind her back they had to instead take a series of winding stairs. As they got near the top Jessie took another look out at the activity on the deck, and something occurred to her that she hadn’t noticed before.

  “Where are all the men?” she asked.

  Lock stopped and looked back at Jessie. For the first time since Jessie had seen the woman in her cell that cordial look left her face. “Men have their place.”

  Well, that didn’t tell her anything. “What about
the men you took from Sun River? Where are all of them?”

  “Where they should be,” Lock said. “You may want to stop asking all the wrong questions. Especially in front of the captain. Unless of course you still have your heart set upon execution?”

  Jessie raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

  “Good,” Lock said. She smiled, but this time the smile seemed more guarded. She led them the rest of the way to the top and opened a door to the glass-surrounded room.

  “You’re not going in first?” Jessie asked.

  “The captain wanted to speak to you alone,” Lock said. “And the last thing anybody wants to do is disobey the captain.” Lock gestured for her to enter and, with some hesitation, Jessie walked in. Lock closed the door behind her.

  Considering that the walls of the captain’s room were made entirely out of glass, Jessie was impressed with just how much stuff was hanging on them. Several paintings of landscapes, all from a decidedly higher viewpoint than any other landscape Jessie had ever seen, hung from the walls by some means that Jessie couldn’t see. At the center of the room was an enormous desk, almost twice the size of the one Jessie had seen in the mayor’s office, and its top couldn’t even be seen under the clutter of various navigational maps and instruments. Behind the desk a woman, hunched over an easel and canvas, stood with her back to Jessie. With a fine paint brush she added a dab of grayish white to a distant mountaintop.

  The woman said nothing at first, just continued concentrating on her painting for several minutes. She had tensed a little when the wind had blown in through the open door, so Jessie was certain that she knew she wasn’t alone. Her brush kept hesitating as she went to put it to the canvas, like she was expecting Jessie to do something and couldn’t concentrate while she waited for Jessie to act.

  Finally Jessie just had to speak. “You painted all these?”

  The woman set her palette and brush down on a worktable next to her easel. “Ah. I see. So you lived in that small town your whole life.”

  Jessie blinked. “How did you know that?” She also wanted to ask what that had to do with anything, but this was apparently the woman who was going to decide her fate. It might not be a good idea to sound snippy at her.

  The woman turned around for Jessie to see. When Lock had referred to a captain, Jessie had thought of things she had been told about the Argonan military, of neatly pressed dress uniforms and people with a ramrod straight way of carrying themselves. In this captain’s case the clothing was way off. She wore a heavy pair of pants, a belt with a wide variety of pouches hanging from it, and a tank-top that at one point had probably been white but was now gray from various grease and dirt stains. Her hair was held up in two loose buns that looked in danger of falling out. Her hands were covered in worn-leather fingerless gloves that did nothing to hide the thick calluses on the pads of her fingers. All up and down her bare arms she had dark tattoos etched into her skin, some tribal-looking pattern unlike anything Jessie had ever seen before. After a moment’s inspection she realized the tattoos were stylized versions of various wind patterns. Gentle breezes, brisk zephyrs, raging tornadoes. Jessie had a strange urge to reach out and touch them.

  “You have a small town mentality,” the captain said. “I’m certain that you’ve never seen an airship before, and I know Lock just took you through the bazaar. You’ve probably seen more amazing things in the last minute than you have in your entire life. Yet the first thing you ask when you meet the woman who created it all is about my paintings.”

  The captain went around to the front of her desk and hoisted herself up on top of it, not even bothering to move the maps beneath her before she sat. “Just like a small-towner,” the captain said. “They ignore all the greater things of the wide world in favor of things they can easily categorize, things they don’t have to think about too much. Does that seem like an accurate description of you?”

  Jessie wasn’t sure whether she should be amazed by the woman or annoyed. That was an awfully presumptuous thing to say, but it wasn’t entirely wrong. “Perhaps. But that’s not the way I wish I were.”

  The captain’s shoulders relaxed. Jessie hadn’t even realized how tensed the woman had looked before now. “Good. That’s good. That means I was maybe right about you.”

  “What do you mean?” Jessie asked.

  “I mean I found it quite amazing that someone, especially someone from a small town, would actually grab onto one of our cages and try to stow away on it. Something like that takes a whole lot of guts. Or maybe just a lot of desperation.”

  Jessie thought about that for a second. It certainly hadn’t seemed to her at the time like she’d been especially brave. It had all just seemed like an accident of circumstance. Yet she couldn’t deny that the whole experience, no matter how horrifying it had all been, had still been exhilarating.

  “So what does all that mean?” Jessie asked. “What are you going to do with me?”

  “I’m not going to do anything,” the captain said. “It’s you who’s going to make the choice here.” She reached into one of the pouches at her belt and pulled out a black and ivory handle. When she pressed a spot on its side a silver blade popped out. “You can either choose for me to use this knife to cut away that rope at your wrists, or you can choose for me to shove it in your eye.”

  Jessie's heart missed a beat, but that seemed to just be an unconscious biological response to the threat. In truth, for some reason, she didn’t feel afraid at all.

  “Seems like a rather obvious choice.”

  “You would think so,” the captain said, “but it’s not. You’re not the first that I’ve given this choice to. I gave it to most of them.” She gestured out the window to the throngs of women going about their business. “But a few women, every once in a while, can’t take the consequences of that choice. A rare few admit it right away, and I kill them right where you’re standing. The rest, though, don’t realize it until later. Those are the ones who don’t get the benefit of a quick death. Those are the ones I throw over the side. Do you know how long it takes to reach the ground from this height? Long enough to know exactly what’s happening to you. Long enough to wonder just how painful the end will be.”

  “So what exactly would be expected of me if I chose to live?”

  “For starters? You can’t leave.”

  Jessie thought about this. “Lock said that the Twister was freedom.”

  The captain raised an eyebrow. “I’m glad Lock feels that way. She’s right. It is. I know that sounds like a paradox, but it’s not. We’re a working society here, and I’m the leader of it all. We exist beyond the rules of the mundane world that lives below us. We do what we want when we want. And there are some people out there in the land below that don’t like that. People that would destroy us. I can’t let anybody leave here and tell our various secrets. We have the freedom we do simply because we’re a mystery.”

  That made some sense to Jessie, even if she wasn’t sure that she believed it completely. “So I can never go back to where I came from?”

  “Never.”

  “I won’t have to serve drinks here, will I?”

  The captain hadn’t expected that question, and she sat quietly for a few moments before she answered. “Well, no. Probably not. Not if you don’t want to.”

  “I could live with that, I think. What else?”

  “The second rule is I am in charge. You do what I say, no matter what. That’s a part some women have a problem with. Some women don’t like the things I make them do. What they don’t realize is just what it takes to keep an airship like the Twister going. You don’t necessarily have to be a part of our main enterprise that you saw last night if you don’t want. There are many things you can do on the ship that don’t involve violence. You have to find a working place within our society, though.”

  “What exactly is it you do, then? Why did you take all the men from Sun River?”

  “And that brings me to the third rule. You don’t
ask any unnecessary questions. You don’t ask anybody else those questions, either. And until I say I trust you, you are not allowed to go down to the third level.”

  “The third level?”

  “There’s the deck, where we have our own little civilization going. There’s the first level, where everyone’s living quarters are, and the second level below it where we take care of the inner workings of the ship. Then there’s the third level. Strictly forbidden to you until I say otherwise. That’s it. Have I made everything clear to you?”

  Jessie looked at the knife as the captain twirled it absently in her fingers. This whole moment right now didn’t seem entirely sincere to her. She couldn’t buy for one second that there might be any woman out there who would actually say no at this moment. The captain’s speech and actions seemed staged to Jessie, a way to simply startle her into behaving.

  She couldn’t deny, however, that the captain had to have some capacity for violence or last night’s raid wouldn’t have been so horribly destructive. Maybe, if Jessie played along for now, there might be something she could do in the future to keep anything like the attack on Sun River from happening again.

  “Understood perfectly,” Jessie said.

  “Good,” the captain said. She turned Jessie around and sliced through the ropes. “Then welcome to the Twister. Just remember what I said and I assure you it will be a happy existence. What’s your name?”

  Jessie turned back to the captain. “Jessie Maygrew.”

  “You will call me Captain Vestra.” She gestured toward the door. “Now go. I’m sure Lock will show you around some more, and my paints are starting to dry.”

  5

  For a group of people who had essentially kidnapped her after destroying her town, the women of the Twister were an exceedingly friendly bunch. The room that had been Jessie’s cell immediately had its lock removed, and she was allowed to come and go as she pleased. Several women who owned booths in the bazaar accosted her as she wandered on the first day and actually offered her a number of free things with which to decorate her room, although Jessie was still a little too shocked by this whole thing to even consider decorating. She was also offered free food by a few vendors, although she was made to understand that this was only temporary, a series of welcoming gifts by women who had been in her situation once upon a time. In the future she would be expected to find work somewhere on the ship and earn wages like everyone else to pay for whatever she might need.