She slid from bed, pulled her boots over her bare feet, and went outside. She snuck into the back of the Cyclone building and made her way to the utility washroom, used the toilet, then washed her face and arms. She drank water straight from the faucet until her stomach bulged, and hurried back to the shack. Her stomach cramped from hunger, an ache she’d grown accustomed to. Drinking a lot of water helped, but not much.

In the distance, the giant cuckoo clock chimed eight. Pin sat cross-legged on the floor and reached for the magazine Larry had given her. She flipped through the pages until she found the continuation of a story she’d started last month.

CHAPTER III: AMONG THE MISSING

“Where is the coach?” he cried. “Where are Jane Mint, One-Eyed Dell, and the Eskimo woman, Kittigazuit?”

She read until she finished the chapter and tossed the magazine aside. She bellied onto the mattress and gazed at the wall, where she’d tacked Clyde’s photo alongside an advertising card for Vin Fiz grape soda, with a color portrait of the aviatrix Harriet Quimby, clad in knee-high leather boots, trousers, aviator goggles, and a plum-colored satin jacket with a hood.

On April 16, 1912, Harriet had flown across the English Channel in those clothes—the first woman to achieve such a feat. But because the Titanic had sunk the day before, no one remembered Harriet Quimby.

Pin did. She’d watched a Mutoscope of Harriet’s flight dozens of times, memorizing Harriet’s masculine attire, her knowing smile. Two and a half months after she’d flown across the Channel, Harriet died when her monoplane crashed during a Boston air show. The only time Pin had cried harder was when Abriana disappeared.

Glory loved Harriet, too. The first time Pin visited the film studio, she’d stopped at her room to ask for directions and spotted a color poster of the beautiful woman in plum-colored satin and black leather, standing in front of her plane. A bold signature swooped across the image.

Yours affectionately, Harriet Quimby.

“Holy smokes.” Pin barely glanced at the girl bent over an ironing board across from her. “Where’d you get this?”

The girl set down the iron. She seemed unperturbed that a strange boy had walked into her dressing room. “G.M. gave it to me. He knew her—she wrote for the movies before she began to fly.”

“She did?”

“Sure. What, you think girls can’t write?” The girl gave Pin a scornful look and reached to flick Pin’s cap. “Who are you, kid?”

“Pin.”

“Pin? What kind of name’s that?”

“Nickname.” Pin hesitated. She’d stopped explaining it after she got beat up too many times, but this girl was unlikely to beat her up. “They called me that when I was little, ’cause I was small and sharp.”