Free The Dragon Lantern by Alan Gratz

hollered, and Mr. Inola blushed through a halfhearted denial. In the hullabaloo, Clyde leaned in to one of the other soldiers at the table and passed him a small glass container from his backpack. “I got you a salve for that rash,” Clyde whispered.
    The soldier quickly tucked it away. “You’re my hero, Chief,” he said, then joined back in with the jokes and the laughter.
    Up above them, a steam whistle blew out a sequence of three notes that made Archie jump.
    â€œUh-oh. Moving out. Better wrap this up quick,” Clyde said. He stowed his pack in a compartment underneath one of the bunks just as the room lurched sideways. Archie went tumbling, but Clyde stayed on his feet and none of the soldiers at the table lost a spoon. Archie was just getting up when the room hitched and lurched the other way, knocking him on his butt again. Another soldier climbed down from above, a broad-shouldered Choctaw with a pair of bandoliers filled with aether grenades across his chest and a long black ponytail down his back, and he laughed meanly at Archie’s clumsiness.
    Clyde jumped to help Mr. Rivets lift Archie to his feet as the room lurched the other way again. “Sorry. Just Colossus walking. Hardest thing to get used to. But you’ll get your walking legs in no time.”
    The Choctaw soldier snickered again and brushed past them, so close that Archie staggered again on the shifting floor.
    â€œNice guy,” Archie said.
    â€œYeah. I don’t know him yet,” Clyde said. “We picked up a couple of new recruits when we put in at Cahokia. He looks like a rough one, though, and that’s a fact. Come on. I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”
    Archie wobbled to the ladder up to the next level and grabbed onto it like a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. He’d be lucky if he got his “walking legs” before the mission was over. Clyde scurried up the ladder and Archie followed, focusing on climbing one rung at a time.
    The third and final floor inside the steam man’s enormous chest had more bunks, though fewer than the crew deck. Its walls were mostly taken up with three personal balloons, like the one his rescuer had been flying when Archie woke up in his hole. You didn’t ride these balloons, you wore them. Usually they were big, round things that tapered down to narrow openings at the bottom, but right now they were mostly deflated. Beside them, three aeronauts—all Illini—worked at testing and tending to the compressed boiler backpacks they wore when they flew.
    â€œThis is where the officers besides Captain Custer sleep and eat,” Clyde told them. “Just two of them on board: Lieutenant Pajackok, and Sergeant Two Clouds there.” He nodded to the female aeronaut. She nodded back and said, “Hello, Chief.”
    â€œWhat about you?” Archie asked, hanging onto the ladder so he wouldn’t fall over. “Everybody calls you Chief.”
    Clyde laughed. “That’s just my nickname. The soldiers gave it to me ’cause I chat up everybody on board like I’m trying to get elected chief. I don’t do it on purpose. Mrs. DeMarcus says I was probably born talking. You think that’s possible? To be born knowing how to talk?”
    Another whistle sounded—this one less piercing and closer—followed by the canned voice of Captain Custer through a speaking tube from up top.
    â€œSergeant Two Clouds, please deploy two scouts,” Custer said.
    Two Clouds pulled a speaking trumpet out from the wall and talked into it. “Two scouts, aye sir.” She nodded to the other two aeronauts, and they got themselves into their harnesses while she opened up big hatches in the roof. Archie saw blue sky through the holes in the steam man’s shoulders. The aeronaut scouts attached the ends of their balloons to hoses coming up through the floor—hot air from the boiler room, Archie