Free Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) by Richard Ellis Preston Jr. Page B

joining in the battering delivered by the loose folds of the parachute.
    Buckle shoved himself away from the snake’s-nest mass of tangler, parachute, and ropes. Something jerked him back. He reached down and found a rope wrapped around his ankle. He swung the razor edge of the repair needle to slash the line, kicked free, and pulled the reserve ripcord.
    The reserve parachute popped out perfectly, whiplashing Buckle back into a much slower descent. Stunned and adrift, he felt like he was floating as light as a bubble, after plummeting three thousand feet. The mountain loomed a hundred feet below. Beyond that, to the south, lay the massive Los Angelesbasin, its dense clusters of tall buildings the only things visible above a great sea of yellow-brown fog.
    Beneath his boots Buckle saw the tangler, its body somersaulting end over end, until it slammed into the crest of the mountain ridge, disturbing the pristine snow with a whopping
sploosh
of blue-green innards.
    The mountain rose up at Buckle too quickly. The reserve chute had been deployed too low and late to give him much of a cushion: he was coming in far too fast for a decent landing. This was going to hurt. He tugged on the control lines waffling next to his ears, aiming to land on the open ridge where the thwacked tangler had plopped. He took deep breaths to rein in his pounding heart. He concentrated on the calm, reassuring sound of the air rippling across the parachute silk…rocking him like a baby. No need for concern. He’d find a big fat snowdrift to land on.
    Buckle peered up and caught a glimpse of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
in the sky, high, high above. Sabrina, as first mate, would have taken command now. The airship was on course, southbound. She had not turned around. The mission was too critical to turn back for a dead man, even if it was the captain.
    Buckle glared at his boots as they swayed beneath him. It was his mission. He was supposed to rescue Balthazar. Now he was out of the picture, perhaps permanently, if luck didn’t go his way.
    The mountain crest rushed up to meet him in a dirty white wave of frozen bushes and snow. He swung past the towering letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign, each one stained a weird gray yellow, propped up with timbers, and pied with a patchworks of rusty metals. Actually, they now read as HOLL WOOD, because the tangler’s body had crashed down upon theY, smashing it asunder in a blast of splinters, green copper tiles, and intestines.
    A shame, Buckle thought. He didn’t know what the sign was ever meant to be, but it was a grand navigational landmark. And it wasn’t so bad, coming down here in Hollywood Land. At least he knew where he was. Alchemist territory. Yes, the Crankshaft and Alchemist clans weren’t on the best of terms, but the animosity was fueled more by suspicion than any actual nose-to-nose conflict. The isolated and xenophobic clans rarely had much contact with each other, and most everyone was locked in a state of uneasy truce or on the verge of conflict with everyone else—except for the Crankshafts and Imperials, who were engaged in an off-and-on skirmish war. But the Gentleman’s Rules would apply to Buckle and the Alchemists, meaning the Alchemists would be required to feed a downed airman some soup and return him to his home clan unharmed.
    Ice-sheathed branches crackled at the soles of Buckle’s boots as he raised his knees to clear a bush-covered ridge. A huge snowdrift loomed in the ravine below. He yanked hard on his control line to reduce the parachute’s lift, and it ducked down. He stretched out his legs to catch the crest of the big, soft snow pile. He missed.
    Not so lucky today, Buckle thought—just before he slammed into the trunk of a tree.
    Everything went black.
    A gentle breeze whispered in Buckle’s ear. His eyelids fluttered, stung by the weak sunlight. His whole body ached, but he ignored that. He knew that he was lying on his back in the snow. He knew that he was lying on a