Free Uncrashable Dakota by Andy Marino Page A

to trust?”
    Rob shook his head in wonder. “You think this goes all the way to the top?”
    It sounded as if he wanted Hollis to say yes, so they could play at being Pinkertons unraveling a grand conspiracy.
    “ Rob ,” Delia said. She gave Hollis’s knee a little squeeze.
    “All I know right now,” Hollis said, “is that this whole trip has been wrong from the start. I keep getting these little glimpses into stuff I’m not supposed to see.” He rubbed his face. “Like my dreams last night,” Hollis continued, running on fumes, slipping into a welcome delirium. “The airship was a castle. The moon was fake. My father told me to swear to something, I’m not sure what, and then when I woke up, they took my mother away. I feel like I should have known, somehow.”
    Delia moved her hand from his knee to her lap and began to fuss with her bracelet. “It’s not your fault, Hollis.” She was looking at him so deeply, it brought him back to how everyone had treated him in the wake of his father’s accident. As if it were a contest to pick out the most sympathetic and understanding person. He turned away and watched Rob’s aggressive thinking, fingertips playing at invisible typewriter keys. Over his shoulder, the sky had brightened. Golden rays sliced through the dorm room, illuminating dust. Suddenly Rob stopped moving. He was looking outside.
    “Hey,” he said, “I think something’s wrong.”
    “Oh, now you do?” Hollis glared at Rob. His stepbrother always had to be the one to figure things out in front of Delia. “Were you listening to a word I just said? We have to…”
    What did they have to do, exactly? Tell someone powerful but unconnected to the crew, a first-class lawyer or doctor? Appeal to the second- and third-class passengers for help? Or was he just being paranoid, and he really should have gone to find Captain Quincy or another high-ranking officer?
    “I know—just get over here.” Rob beckoned, peering outside. They joined him at the window. The dawn had given way to a wispy morning, and the ship’s forward progress was measured by the clouds drifting past.
    “Tell me what you see,” Rob said.
    The view put Hollis in a trance. He felt like he could push open the window and dive out into fluffy white softness, buoyed along on a pillow of air.
    “What are we looking for?” Delia asked.
    Then the clouds parted unexpectedly, exposing a patch of earth below, and Hollis felt a little shiver of understanding.
    “We’re not over the ocean,” he said, pointing at the horizon. “That’s New York City over there.” Just before the clouds gathered to block the view, Delia and Hollis crowded the window to peer at the office towers of Manhattan, toy blocks in the distance.
    “Right,” Rob said. “We shouldn’t be able to see it. Which means sometime in the night, we turned. We’re flying due south.” He looked at Hollis. “Does that make any kind of sense?”
    “Okay,” Hollis said, not wanting to give Rob the satisfaction of discovery. “So we’re not following the flight plan exactly , but—”
    Rob snorted. “We seem to have completely ignored it.”
    The Wendell Dakota should have been headed east over New York, before flying straight across the Atlantic to the sky-dock in Southampton, on England’s southern coast. Captains filed their flight plans weeks in advance and obeyed them with strict precision. Hollis was certain that Quincy was not the type of man to test the uncrashability of the Wendell Dakota by violating a sacred flight plan.
    “Maybe there’s a good explanation,” Hollis said.
    Rob snorted again.
    Hollis sensed they had reached the moment when a true leader would step up to propose a sensible course of action. He looked down at his tasseled shoes and tried to think.
    “Here.” Delia handed Hollis a thick leather-bound book, at least a thousand pages long. He studied the embossed lettering on the cover.
    “A dictionary?”
    “The room across the hall