Clementine by Cherie Priest

face.
    While she adjusted herself, he told her, “I hope you’re not easily sickened by flight or other travel, and if you have any sensitivities to height or motion, I’d advise you to brace your feet on the bar below and refrain from looking down.”
    “I’ll take that under advisement,” she assured him and indeed, she braced her feet on the solid dowel while she gripped the frame’s side.
    With the pump of a pedal and the turn of a crank, a hissing fuss became a sparking whoosh, and in only a moment, the Flying Fish scooted off her moorings and hobbled up into the sky.
    The experience was altogether different from flying on the Cherokee Rose , with its accommodating seats and its heavy tanks, its lavatory and galley. Every jostle of every air current tapped at the undercarriage and sent it swinging ever so slightly, in a new direction every moment or two. It was a perilous feeling, being vulnerable to insects, birds, and the very real possibility of toppling off the bench and into the sky—especially as the craft climbed higher, and crested the last of the buildings, passing the edge of the town and puttering westward over the plains.
    Algernon Rice spoke loudly enough to make himself heard over the pattering rumble of the engines and the wind, “I ought to have warned you, it feels like a rickety ride, but we’re quite safe.”
    “Quite safe?” she asked, determined that it should come out as a formal question, and not as a squeak.
    “Quite safe indeed. And I hope you’re warm enough. I also should have warned that it’s cooler up here, the higher we fly. Is your cloak keeping you satisfactorily comfortable?” he asked.
    She lied, because telling the truth would neither change nor fix the situation. “It’s fine. It keeps me warm in Illinois, and it’s managing the worst of the wind up here.” But in truth, the dragging rush of the air was a fiendish thing with pointed fingers that wormed between every crease, crevice, and buttonhole to cool her skin with a dreadful determination. She fervently wished for another hat, something that would cover her ears more fully, even if it crushed her hair and looked appalling; but her only other clothing was stashed below, and retrieving it would only slow the mission, which was an unacceptable cost.
    So all the way to Kansas City, in the hours over the winter-chilled plains, she held her hat firmly onto her head with one hand and gripped the railway with the other.
    They chatted only a little, for the ambient noise was sometimes deafening, and Maria’s entire face felt utterly frozen within the first hour. If she parted her lips her teeth only chattered and stung with the cold air rushing against them, so instead she huddled silently, sometimes leaning against the firm, confident form of Algernon Rice—who appeared to be glad to have her close, though he made no unwelcome advances.
    After what felt like eternity and a day, but was surely no more than half a dozen hours, Kansas City sprouted out of the plains. Buildings of various heights were scattered, and even at the Fish ’s altitude Maria could tell the blocks apart, guessing which neighborhoods were cleanest and which ones were best avoided by respectable people. The streets split, forked, and ran in a crooked grid, sprawling across the ground in a life-sized map that Maria found more fascinating than when she’d spied Jefferson City from the Cherokee Rose . She was closer to the world this way—even chilled to the bone, with skin pinkly chapped and hands numb with winter.
    She looked down past her feet, and the bar around which she’d wrapped her toes. She watched the land draw up close as the Fish drew down low; and she saw the commercial dirigibles lined up, affixed to pipework docks that were embedded in the earth with roots as deep as an oak.
    There came a clank and a soft bounce, then a harder one. The Fish settled into a slot beside an enormous craft painted with a freight company’s logo, and a