Akash’s hands were steady on the controls as he guided the Silver Hawk through the air. He had graciously offered Daphne the copilot seat, while Lieutenant Crosby and his soldiers sat in the back.
Daphne was grateful. She loved the open space between earth and sky, a space that felt honest, true. She would have gladly lived the rest of her life in the clouds, close to the sun.
“You look as though you’re enjoying yourself,” Akash commented.
“It’s been a long time since I could relax on an aircraft. The last two times I was trying to keep Danny calm.”
Akash laughed. It was a clear-ringing sound, all bells and confidence. “You’re a good friend to him.”
Daphne raised an eyebrow at her reflection in the window. “Friend.” It was strange to think that she and Danny Hart had become friends. But it would be cold—and untrue—to deny it. “I suppose we are friends.”
Akash smiled. He had a strong jaw with a hint of dark stubble, and his aviator goggles sat perched above a nose slightly too large for his face. He’d offered her a pair before they’d taken off, but she had politely declined, wanting the full experience—glare and all.
She remembered Danny’s warning that the rebel airship could be coming for her. She sat with her back straight, eyes often searching the surrounding expanse of sky. But there was no sign of that behemoth ship.
For now.
She watched Akash fly the craft with ease, like it had become more routine to him than walking. Lights blinked along the control panel, and Akash occasionally asked her to flip a switch.
“Would you like to try?” Akash gestured to the controls.
Daphne reined in her rush of excitement, keeping her face carefully blank. “Why not?”
“Excellent. It’s really not too difficult, once you understand the basics. Now, let us say we want to go higher. If you—”
She pulled the center stick up and the plane pitched higher. She leveled it out and then gently pressed on the rudder bar, yawing them in a zigzag pattern. Releasing the center stick, she glanced over at Akash. His mouth was still open as if to give her instructions, but all that came out now was an incredulous laugh.
“You know how to fly?”
“Not by myself, but I’ve sat in cockpits before.”
“Amazing, Miss Richards. I never would have expected someone like you to know about planes.”
“Oh?”
He must have heard the frost in her voice, for his smile slipped. “I’m sorry. I meant no offense. It’s just that here, in India, our women are not pilots. They may work on the rail lines or as ghadi wallahs, but even then, those women are often treated with disdain.”
“I understand.” It seemed that no matter where she went, working women would always invite scorn.
Akash nodded. “I tried to teach my sister how to fly, but she stuck up her nose at it. I’m fascinated by her work with clocks, but she never seemed to be at all interested in my planes. At first, I was hurt, but when I thought about it more, I suspect she wanted to avoid the scandal of being both a ghadi wallah and a pilot. She hears enough talk as it is.”
Daphne thought of the looks Meena drew in the cantonment, the same looks Daphne herself had drawn when she walked down the halls of the Mechanics Affairs building. She felt a kindred frustration with the Indian girl, an anger that, despite constantly being buried, still grew roots.
“How did you learn how to fly?” she asked.
“Our father has a close friend who’s in the good graces of the British officers. He learned to fly some years ago, and the British took him on as a messenger. He invested here and there, and came to own a small plane. When I was younger he took me and my sister up in that plane. Meena cried, but I loved being in the air, so he gave me lessons.
“I started working when I was ten, first for a merchant in the city. Then, when I was eighteen, as an aerial messenger for the cantonment officers. When I turned twenty last year I realized I’d saved enough to get my own craft.” He patted the side of the Silver Hawk fondly. “With a little investment from uncle-ji and father, of course.
“And you, Miss Richards? How did you come to know so much of flying?”
She stared out the window at a shimmering river below, a serpentine vein in the earth’s skin. “My father was a pilot. He took me up whenever he was off-duty.”
She had always been happiest in the air, far from the ground and the worries that found her there. Her mother had balked at the notion of both her husband and daughter going up in an aircraft. Daphne remembered, even now, the crescent shapes her mother’s nails had left in her skin, anxiously digging into her cheeks and arms.
After a brief pause, Akash asked, “Is he no longer with you?”
“He passed a few years ago.”
“I am very sorry.”
“It’s all right.” She kept her lips slightly parted, wanting to tell him: He was one of you. But she couldn’t make herself say the words. It would feel like a lie, somehow.
An awkward silence brewed in the cockpit. Daphne listened to the low murmuring of the soldiers in the back, wondering how much of the conversation they had heard.
“Urdu bol sakte hain?” Akash asked suddenly. Do you speak Urdu?
“Sirf thodi si.” Only a little.
“Kyaa aap ko yahaan achchhaa lagaa?” Do you like it here?
“Haan.” She paused to think of something else to say. “Meri Urdu … kharaab hai?” My Urdu is not very good.
“Not at all! You are very good already.”
“I need to practice.”
“We are practicing now.”
They spent the rest of the trip speaking in fragmented Urdu and Hindi, Akash laughing at her accent and gently correcting her botched words. They tried to muffle their laughter when, at her insistence, he quietly taught her a few swear words. Daphne didn’t want Crosby to overhear and have a conniption.
They landed outside Lucknow half an hour later, just before sunset. Daphne was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to go to the clock tower today. She had an itch in her belly that begged her to go as soon as possible. But when she climbed out of the Silver Hawk, ignoring Crosby’s offered hand, she could tell that time was running smoothly. She could sense the fibers weaving in and out, straight and orderly. Time didn’t feel sharp here as it had in Khurja.
Still, her scalp prickled when she remembered the report that suspicious people had been seen near the tower at night.
Horse-drawn carts called tongas were waiting for them. Akash hung back to take care of his aircraft as Lieutenant Crosby led Daphne to their transport. As if Crosby could read her restless thoughts, he told her, “We’ll get you to your rooms and settle you in. You can see the tower in the morning.”
She knew it would be useless to protest. Taking a deep breath, she stepped into one of the tongas accompanied by Crosby and a sepoy—Partha, the one who was often in Captain Harris’s company—and it took off for Lucknow. Craning her head around, she spotted Akash watching them trundle away. He waved.
Well, here I am, she thought as they rolled toward the massive city. No airship attack. She found that a little strange, but decided not to dwell on it, fearing doing so would somehow make it come to pass.
She had heard Lucknow called the Golden City of the East. Looking at the metropolis stretching before her, she could easily believe it. Sunset illuminated the endless rooftops, the light striking the tops of large, gleaming buildings in a display of dazzling colors. The roar of the crowds could be heard even at a distance. The river she had spotted from the plane ran through the city, dividing it in two.
“No doubt you’ve heard about this city back home,” Crosby drawled at her side.
“Once or twice.” She glanced at Partha, who kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. She cleared her throat. “It was besieged during the uprising.”
“Yes, indeed. The infamous Siege of Lucknow. After that annoying business with the Enfield rifles, the Oudh and Bengal troops broke into open rebellion. The British troops had to defend the residency here in the city for quite some time, enduring all manner of attacks until the rebels could be driven out. They even had to fight underground through months of sickness and dwindling supplies. Since then, we’ve not had a problem.” He glanced pointedly at the sepoy, who caught his look. “Disgraceful, isn’t it, Partha?”
Partha bowed his head. “A vile time for your countrymen, sahib.”
“Too right.”
Daphne remained silent. She was painfully aware of standing between these two men—two sides of a war, two sides of her birth. There was a strangeness to her skin just then, as if it weren’t actually hers. She wanted to scratch at it, see if it would flake off and reveal something truer. Something in-between, something like a mark, that would determine what to say, what to think, what she was.
In streets clogged with both people and animals, vendors hawked eggs and chickens and milk. Soldiers wearing hats or turbans meandered through the crowds, their hands on rifles and swords. They passed impressive mosques and shrines, the products of both Indian and European architecture. Urchins ran up to the tonga with palms held flat, begging for money. Daphne tried not to meet their eyes.
In a more deserted area of the city, they came upon a structure of red sandstone in what Crosby called the British quarter. Although Daphne saw laundry lines stretching between buildings and chimney smoke rising from roofs, the place felt abandoned.
Again, Crosby attempted to help her down, and again she ignored his hand. He moved his jaw like he was chewing his bad mood and pointed at the building before them. “These are our residences for the next several days. You are not to leave unless escorted by at least one soldier, and you must seek my permission first.”
She tried to mask her irritation. “Is Mr. Kapoor staying here as well?”
“Who?”
“The pilot.”
“Who knows.” Crosby waved away the question. “Though the city has undergone quite the transformation since the Mutiny, there have been incidents in the past few months. Hostility toward our soldiers, a brief altercation at a mosque, what have you. This is why you need an escort, Miss Richards. The city may look inviting, but even behind a well-adorned wall you may still find mold. Partha, take her to her rooms.”
The sepoy made to take her pack, but she shook her head. “I can carry it,” she insisted.
He blinked at her, but silently allowed her to follow him into the building. Inside, the soldiers had carelessly left their doors open. Daphne saw men arguing, laughing, eating, sleeping. They passed an open sitting area where soldiers’ wives drank tea near a balcony. A few noticed her and gave her outfit a disapproving glare.
Partha spoke to a servant in Urdu, who pointed him in the right direction. A minute later, they stopped before a red door. “This is your room, Miss Richards. Do you require anything?”
“I’m fine, thank you. I’ll just wait until the lieutenant comes.”
Inside she found a plain room with off-white walls and a chair so pouffed it looked like it was making up for the rigidness of the bed. A window faced the street, offering a view of flat rooftops. A shirtless boy crouched on one of them, whittling a block of wood as a monkey watched nearby.
Daphne stood at the window, unaware she was tapping her fingers against her thigh until she looked down. It was a habit she hadn’t fallen into for some time, but she knew what it meant.
She opened the door and peered outside, starting when she saw Partha standing guard at the door. He seemed equally startled, his brown eyes large and almost doe-like.
“Yes, Miss Richards?”
“I, um. Never mind.”
She made to draw back inside when he took a step forward. “Do you need something?”
Daphne studied his face. There was a sadness in his eyes, in the set of his mouth, that felt familiar. It reminded her of the way Danny looked when he thought he went unnoticed, when his gaze turned west, toward the boy he was missing.
“Do you … happen to have a cigarette on you?” she asked.
If he thought this was an odd request, he did a good job of hiding it. He darted a glance down the hall in both directions, then slipped a metal cigarette holder from his breast pocket. “Please do not tell anyone,” he murmured. “I’d hate to be on the receiving end of those new words you learned.”
So he’d overheard Akash teaching her swears in Hindi. Her face heated as she said, “I won’t. Thank you.”
She plucked a thinly rolled cigarette from the holder and silently handed it back to him. In the privacy of her room, she struck a match—she always carried them with her, on the off chance—and lit the end. The first inhalation made her cough, but the second was smoother and, almost at once, settled her nerves.
Daphne did not smoke often, but she’d taken it up shortly after her father’s death. Her mother had screeched about the smoke and the smell, making it a rare indulgence. But every once in a while she felt the need, like when she was stranded in an unfamiliar city, the threat of a riot or kidnapping around every corner.
By the time Crosby came to her door with supper, the sun was completely hidden beyond the horizon. She had opened the window to let the air inside, hoping it would carry away some of the lingering scent of smoke.
“We’ve been planning out an itinerary,” Crosby said. “We have all your visits to the clock tower scheduled. The first one is tomorrow morning, so mind you get some sleep.”
“Excuse me,” she said when Crosby turned to leave, “but what am I to do when I’m not at the tower?”
He looked vaguely uncomfortable, and she wondered if he had a wife, or even sisters. Her guess was probably not. Female company seemed a foreign concept to him.
“You’ll be here, I imagine.”
“Does that mean I’m confined to my quarters?”
“You may certainly leave with an escort if you wish, but as I said before, you must inform me first.” At her frown, his voice grew colder. “Is that clear, Miss Richards?”
“Yes.”
He left her to a lonely meal of rice, beans, and some potato dish in a brown broth. She only picked at it. Her mind was back on the Silver Hawk with Akash, in that open space between earth and sky where she didn’t have to hide.