For half a minute, there was silence. The ship's engines hummed on, but the world outside had come to a standstill, a portrait both unimaginably beautiful and inconceivably terrifying. Dreamcatcher hung in a hole in the storm. Clouds rose to all sides, but none touched them just yet. Far below, the ocean's profound blue was a sari laid out without wrinkles. That was an illusion granted by altitude, Rav knew. Already he could see the snags of whitecaps. To be visible at this distance, they must have been the size of ships.

Rav could have screamed a warning, but by the silence on the ship, it seemed the others already knew. No matter what they did now, Dreamcatcher wasn't going to come out of this afloat.

The ashen trunk of the thunderhead coasted towards them, and Rav saw the very moment Dreamcatcher's nose pierced the clouds. Grey swathed the ship. Then there was a great shriek of wind and it was fired upwards. Rav's back slammed the wall as the room spun out of control. Dreamcatcher was a toy tossed in the hands of a giant. Its acceleration forced Rav to his knees. He shut his eyes, clung to the bolted table, and began to pray.

Let this be over quickly. Let me not feel my death, and die peacefully with the ship. Let my mother have rest when I am gone.

Around and around and around. Altitude sucked the oxygen from the air, and Rav's head began to spin worse than the ship. The change in pressure drove knives through his eardrums and into his head. Endless grey blurred by speed whipped past the windows as they were pitched up... up...

And down.

Rav's weight left the floor as the clouds reversed. A deluge like a waterfall pounded the windows, more liquid than air. They fell as though Dreamcatcher's lifting gas had turned to lead.

Rav wrapped both arms around the table leg. Maybe if they were spat out the bottom of the cloud, they could regain their lift before they hit the ocean. All the hairs on his arms stood on end. Blue light crackled, and a bomb-like boom shook the ship. Rav slammed his hands over his ears. He cracked on eye to find Dreamcatcher suspended in a spider's web of live, sheetlike lightning.

No, they weren't going to make it to the bottom of the cloud. They were going to burn apart.

The ship began to spin again. Gusts pitched it until Rav's arms ached from clutching the table and his head. The fall ended in a blast that nearly flipped Dramcatcher over. The ship was slammed from below. Rav's ears popped and the air rushed past, rushing away, sucking away his breath. His thoughts thinned to a tin whistle's ringing. The boom. A hideous tearing sound. A smash. Something screeched, long and low, then built and built, rising in pitch and volume, until the ship lurched sideways and everything ceased.

Rav did not let go of the table. He was dead. He knew it. He supposed it had been peaceful, given that he could not recall what of all the dangers in the storm had taken his life away.

It was calm on the ghost Dreamcatcher. There were no engines, and only the creak of the ropes supporting the gondola eased the quiet as a wind bumped the ship. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Rav was startled nearly out of his skin as footsteps broke the haven. Someone hammered on the door.

"Cabin boy? Cabin boy! Are you in there?"

Would they see him if he was dead? Rav hugged the table tighter. There was a soft curse as someone rattled the door handle. The latch had fallen into place when the door slammed shut. Footsteps retreated a pace and skipped forwards. The latch flew from the wood under the force of Sanjay's shoulder.

Manish darted past him and crouched in front of Rav. "Cabin boy! Are you awake? Are you hurt? Talk to me."

Rav opened his eyes, afraid of the spectre he would see. Manish looked alive. He took a firm hold of Rav's shoulders and looked him over.

"Thank Adarajah." He pulled off his jacket and wrapped it tightly around Rav as the boy started to shake. "Sanjay, all good here. Go see the captain."

Sanjay nodded and left.

"Is everyone... okay?" Rav managed to whisper.

"By some miracle. Indra wrenched his shoulder, but the captain can see to that. The rest is just cuts and bruises."

Rav tried to get up, but his shaking legs would not permit it. "But the ship. We have to fix... we're going to fall. The lightning..."

Manish pushed him back down with a strained smile. "The envelope is fine. Skydragon skin is a luxury for a reason."

But that didn't explain the silent engines, or the tearing Rav had heard.

Manish sighed. "We lost the rudder and both engines. One seized; the other had its propeller plucked like a summer lily. We can fix them both, but not in the air."

"But they'll come looking for us, right? When we don't come back on time?"

"There's no 'on time' with Dreamcatcher, cabin boy. Nobody bats an eye when the captain takes a month to make a two-day journey. And even if they did... they're not coming to rescue us here."

The Khaalee Navachandr. Of course nobody else was fool enough to come here.

Manish stood and brushed off his knees. "But, the good news is, we always make it out okay. The captain might be a bit crazy, but he gets where he sets out to go. Even if it takes a month. Come."

He helped Rav to his feet and kept a grip on his arm until Rav trusted himself not to drop like a newborn Barasingha. Rav followed him back through the ship. They found the captain and crew gathered in the navigation room below the glass-encased steering wheel. Indra's arm was in a sling. The captain had a bandage across his forehead. It had not slowed him down in the least.

"Find our heading," he said. "This ocean won't take me yet; I'll sail her end to end before she shakes my ship from the sky. Then we'll see who's stronger."

Sanjay stood with his arms crossed, as solid as a tree and just as unmoved. "We need supplies."

The captain waved him off. "Then we'll find them! Find the heading."

"We need to get to land."

"Bleed my ballast! We lost the forward bellows in that storm, and there are no mountains in this ocean. If you propose a means to inflate the ballonets or drop this ship without handing over my lifting gas, you can abseil to land and collect your supplies. Until then, I steer this ship. Understood?"

Sanjay's frown did not budge. The captain, though, scampered back up the ladder to his steering wheel. He gave it a great spin that did not turn the ship an inch.

"Face me, you witch!" he roared to the ship's shifting cloak of grey clouds. "Give me your worst! I'm still floating."

A wind made Dreamcatcher shudder as if in reply.

Rav was struck with an image of his brother's small boat coasting in to shore after a storm. Trembling in the wind where the mast had been, his brother's coat billowed on a cross made of paddles.

"We can sail," he said.

"We're sailing our best right now, cabin boy," said Indra.

Rav's face flushed hot. "N—no. I mean... on the wind. Like a boat."

Now Manish and Sanjay stared at him, too. Rav's already insignificant stature compressed under the weight of so many eyes.

Manish switched his gaze to his crewmates. "You know, he might be onto something."

"Do you know how to sail a ship, boy?" said Indra in a voice that dripped condescension.

Of course he did. All children from the west coast learned that as soon as they were old enough to stand on an outrigger canoe. "I—I do."

Their eyebrows all lifted. Indra snorted, but he was from the inland. He wouldn't know water ships. And the north coast had boats, but they were punted or paddled through the dense jungles and shallow, broad lakes there. Rav stood stricken as it hit him. He was the only one here who could sail.

Already the crew watched him with expectant faces. Did they doubt him? His plan? Was it even a plan? He hadn't even thought it through before he blurted it out like a fool. He didn't even know if it was possible to rig water-ship sails on an airship like Dreamcatcher. They would have to replicate the tensions and angles of a Dhow's lateen sail to move against the wind that had blown them here, and the mainland was over a day away. But if they could just get down to an island...

"D—do we have blankets?"

That was dumb; of course they had blankets.

"Or canvas?"

That would hold less water from the clouds, and weigh them down less. Though the weight would not be a bad thing if they were trying to land.

Wait.

"The water capture system," said Manish, coming to the same conclusion as Rav in the very same instant. "We can fill the ballast tanks."

"We can't reach them," grumbled Indra.

"Do we have tubing?" said Rav. He already knew they did, but whether or not they could use it for... no, they had to use it. Fixing the ship depended on it. They had to fix the ship so he could get home and run and never come back.

The crew disbanded like scattered ants. A minute later Manish and Sanjay were back with canvas and tubing. Indra had gone to spread the mist nets that replenished the ship's water supplies any time they sailed through clouds.

Rav tied himself to the gondola with a safety rope this time as they took to the deck. It quickly became clear that the lack of anchor points would make it impossible to rig a triangular lateen on any part of the ship. It didn't really matter, though. So long as they were upwind of an island when they spotted it, square sails would do.

They stopped only for a lunch Manish cobbled together in the mess of the galley. The containers he stored things in, luckily, were metal and wood, not glass, so their food supplies at least were intact. Twelve days worth if they rationed it. Rav reassured himself that they would have to find an island within such a length of time.

After lunch, they finalized the sails and tucked them away for use the moment the drifting ship sighted land. Indra hauled the first bucket of water up to the deck. As the smallest in the crew, Rav rappelled off the side of the ship to secure the tubing to the port into the ballast tanks. The tanks sloshed hollowly with the pitiable influx. It was going to take a long time to fill them.

The sun went down without a sign of the ocean, let alone land. The crew went to bed early, then woke up early, unable to sleep. Rav wandered the ship. When his feet ached from pacing, he pulled out the book of plants he had brought along. He had been through it twice already just this trip, though he already knew every word it contained. It helped keep his mind off the wind. When he wasn't distracted, his hearing tracked every gust and breath obsessively, alert for any shift or rumble that might mark the storm's return.

In another day, the captain was muttering about cursed clouds. Rav found that ironic, given the ship they were on, but by day five, the unending grey blanket was getting unnerving. Manish counted up their supplies and rationed them thinner.

On the eighth day, it rained. Indra disconnected the channel that caught water running down the bottom of the envelope, and in a mad scramble, they got it hooked to the ballast tank. Water poured in. Now they were losing altitude. They had to break out of the clouds soon. The crew returned to the navigation room. Indra fiddled with a delicate series of barometers on the wall and called out pressure readings to Manish, who jotted them down on a scrap of paper. Sanjay spread out a map.

"We're somewhere here," he said when Rav joined him. His finger traced a crescent moon across the ocean's southern half. Rav's optimism about islands crumpled like a deflating envelope.

The vastness of the empty ocean did not seem to bother the crew, though. Indra took the scrap of paper and scribbled calculations to deduce their altitude and speed of descent. Manish dropped a compass and a wind chart on the map and fell into heated discussion with Sanjay.

"Land ho!" bawled the captain from his steering wheel. "At altitude and five degrees to starboard; get to your sails, boys! We can land on this one."

Silence fell over the room. Sanjay and Manish looked at each other.

Indra lowered his pencil. "We're at six thousand feet, Cap'n. There shouldn't be land at six thousand feet."