She presses a finger against her lips, thinking. “Any idea how to steer it once it’s up there?”

Cringing, I shake my head. “That’s a detail I hadn’t gotten to yet.” I twist my fingers in the fabric spread around me, suddenly wondering if this is a stupid idea after all. I clearly haven’t thought through how it all works. What if I end up killing us?

“Elias!” my sister calls out. We hear him grumble in the other room as he pulls himself out of bed and comes to stand in the doorway.

I can’t help but see my sister’s playful grin as her eyes slide down his body. It’s evident they’re feeling much better after being so ill. I glance away, the moment too intimate for me to watch.

“Annah’s making a balloon to carry us to a ship Catcher found,” my sister says as if it’s old news. “She needs a way to steer it. You’re good with flying things—think you can come up with something?”

His eyes light up. “How big a balloon?” he asks.

I shrug, gesturing at all the fabric. “That big.”

He walks to the window and looks out over the river. “How far?”

I shrug again. “Down the coast. That’s what Catcher says.”

“I’ll draw up plans.” Excitement laces through his words. “You know, I was in a plane once.”

My sister rolls her eyes at me. “We know,” she says, giggling.

He shoots her a mock-stern look. “But after that, when I needed a place to spend the night, I slept in an old library. They had books about flying and I read everything I could. I never thought about a balloon, but it could work.”

He’s almost jumping with energy. He begins to pace and mumble, calculating surface area and lift, and my sister and I go back to the piles of fabric.

I push the sewing box toward her. “Think you have enough strength to tackle all this?”

Grinning, she settles back into the chair, pulling out a tarnished thimble and slipping it on her finger. She picks up haphazardly sewn rags. “Who stitched these?” she asks, looking at one of the crude seams.

I glare at her and she laughs, obviously enjoying making fun of me. We get back to work, me struggling to keep pace with her speed and Elias muttering as he sketches designs for some sort of propeller.

Chapter XL

Later, after Elias goes off to search through the building for some gears and soft metal he can bend into blades, my sister stands and stretches, then sets a kettle on the wood-burning stove.

“When you were in the Forest with Elias when we were kids,” she says, staring out the window into the darkness, “did you think you were going to die?”