The Fog Diver by Joel Ross

fogsick.”
    I’d never told her that I blamed myself for her sickness, but somehow she knew. Still, I wasn’t sure what to say. So I just sat there as the sound of a bootball game drifted through the wall, and the distant thrip of a rivet gun echoed from Bea’s workshop.
    After a while, I said, “I barely remember my dad. I guess I was too little when he died. But I remember the way he sang me to sleep, and how he read from his scrapbook. And one other thing.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œA story he told me about a lady who risked her life trying to save me when I was a baby. Me and my mom.”
    A faraway smile rose on her face. “Oh, Chess, I still don’t know how I found you in all that Fog.”
    I took a deep breath. “But you—you’re dying, Mrs. E. There’s no way to help, at least not on the Rooftop.”
    â€œShhh,” she said, her eyes closing. “Hush, Chess. . . .”
    â€œWe’re not even sure Port Oro can heal you. The fogheads said so, but who knows if they’re lying?”
    â€œOn the Port,” she said, her voice faint, “many things are possible.”
    She fell asleep before saying more, and I watched her slow, steady breathing. Usually I hated when she slept, because it felt like she was already leaving us, already gone. But this time was different. This time I had hope.

14
    T IME LIMPED PAST AS I clung to the rigging beneath the leaking balloon. I drifted in a painful haze until Hazel swung down beside me, tied the main lines together with leather straps, and said, “You can let go now, Chess.”
    â€œDo I have to?” I gasped as I unhooked my bracers and sagged into the rigging. “I was just starting to enjoy myself.”
    She flashed an uneasy smile, then scanned the Fog with her spyglass.
    I rubbed my aching arms and followed her gaze. Between Bea’s frantic efforts with the engine and my painful grappling with the rigging, the raft could now flywith only two balloons. But not for long—we were still too low, and any strong gust of wind might shove us down into the white.
    For hours, I waited for that deadly gust, yet our luck held. I wanted to tell them about the diamond, but Bea was busy with the engine, Swedish with the wheel, and Hazel scanning the Fog, plotting our route to the inch.
    I decided to wait until things calmed down a little. And finally, squinting toward the setting sun, I caught a glimpse of the Rooftop, a jagged mountain range with foothill “islands” breaking through the Fog all around. Green fields seemed to glow in the high meadows, and distant waterfalls caught the fading sunlight. Fancy mansions dotted the high peaks, where Mrs. E had lived as a little girl, among the parks and estates of the upper slopes, with lakes full of catfish and forests full of deer. She said that a busy city rose on the third-highest peak, packed with shops selling fresh-baked naan, smoked sausages, and unrotten fruit.
    We didn’t completely believe her stories, but Hazel dreamed of flying over the Rooftop for a closer look. She ached to see the elegant clothes, to hear the fancy music, and maybe even to feel solid ground under her feet for the first time in her life. But the roof-troopers didn’t let slum-dwellers onto—or even over—the mountain. Patrolling airships would’ve shot us from the sky.
    Below the highest peaks, ramshackle buildings of salvaged alumina and concrete crowded the lower slopes, along with smoldering smokestacks and ratty windmill-blimps. Even lower, the junkyard surrounded the mountain, floating fifty feet above the Fog on dilapidated platforms. Trash and shacks covered every foot, except for a few sparse patches where the junkyard bosses had “ditched” a neighborhood by overturning a platform and dumping everything into the deadly Fog below. That was the punishment for not paying rent.
    Still, as the raft spluttered closer to