Freya crouched precariously atop the mound of discarded metal. She toyed with the intricate pistons of a small gyrocopter engine, its brass casing glinting against the red rust of the sunset. She tugged the engine free of the surrounding scrap, sending it toppling towards her cart below, piled high with parts. To anyone else, these mechanical odds and ends were little more than junk. To Freya, they were a ticket to the skies. Every nut and bolt, every cog and spring, would someday make their way onto her very own airship.

    Before making her descent, she savored one final glance at the distant city towers, which pierced the smoky horizon like spears. Most of the time, her little town of Copperbeak felt like a world away from New London, the Aircademy, and her dreams. But from this vantage point, she could almost reach out and touch all three.

    “I done told you I’m all outta patience wit’ your pilferin’, missy!” came a hoarse cry from below. The bald, grease-stained head of the scrapyard owner poked out from behind his ramshackle office. He’d already finished stuffing the coal powder into his brass-coiled blunderbuss and pointed its flared mouth in her direction. “I’d say it’s high time I let Mr. Justice do the talkin’!” 

    His fat finger squeezed the trigger and Freya jolted. Bullets sprayed the sheet metal below her feet, sending shards flying off in all directions. By the time she’d slid down the heap and leaped into the front seat of her cart, the man was already scuttling into his landcrawler. He pulled the crank, sending plumes of steam into the air as his vehicle devoured the distance between them.

    Freya hadn’t planned on using any of her precious coal powder, but he’d left her no choice. She slammed the brass buttons and yanked the lever. Pistons fired, roaring her tiny cart forward and sending flames shooting out of the exhaust. When she looked back, the scrapyard owner was a forlorn speck in the distance.

    She arrived home to find her uncle in the kitchen, bushy red eyebrows filled with steam from a pot. “A letter arrived for you today, Frey. Official-lookin’. I left it on your bed.” 

    In her room, Freya stared at the sealed envelope as though her thoughts alone could rearrange the words inside into something other than heartbreak. The pile of Aircademy rejection letters from previous years had left her hopes lower than a dust rat’s tail in a sandstorm. 

    She ripped the brown envelope open to reveal the sharp wings of the Aircademy logo on the letterhead.

Dear Ms. Blackthorn,

We regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you a place at this year’s Cadet Academy. Given your lack of affiliation with an accredited local flying club…

    The once pristine paper was now a scrunched ball in her fist.

    She’d need to steal every nut, bolt, and screw in town to afford even the membership fee to the Copperbeak Wings Club. Without that, her dreams of cadetship were dead in the dirt.

    Freya searched for something to fix. Tinkering helped whenever the dark thoughts threatened to overwhelm her. After Mom died, she spent a week taking apart the creaking landcrawler engine and putting it back together till it purred. When Pops split a day after her fifteenth birthday, she built her own steam motor from scratch. Despite Uncle Silas’ kindness, even a year on, she was rarely without a screwdriver close at hand.

    She turned her attention to the broken tube radio that sat atop her desk. She’d found it by the roadside a few days earlier with spools of copper leaking out of it like a sutured wound and hadn’t gotten round to fixing it yet. An hour of tinkering and the radio crackled to life.

    “News from New London: The Aircademy has abandoned trials for their highly anticipated hover tech, citing repeated technical failures. Reports suggest the lead engineer has been dismissed.” Freya twisted the rusty knob on the side to increase the volume. “The Aircademy has also announced their annual Airbox Time Trial will commence on the 8th of August. This year, the winning pilot will receive a coveted spot at the Cadet Academy. In other news…”

    With no flying club willing to take her in, Freya’s only shot was to get her own airship flight ready. It was a project she’d planned to finish by the end of the year, but with the Airbox Trials in just three weeks, the ambitious pet project was now a race against time. She slid the corrugated iron door of the garage open and switched on her headlamp. The scraps of steel in front of her bore little resemblance to the pencil sketches of propellers, cables, pistons, and sails that lined the peeling walls. Freya rolled up her sleeves.

    The next few days whirred with activity. She borrowed necessary parts from her old projects when she had them and stole them from nearby scrapyards when she didn’t. Bit by bit,  the naked chassis morphed into the ship she’d dreamed about. Diagrams of the hull, wings, and tail sprang to life in front of her, clothed by a hotchpotch of mismatched steel plates. 

    As July spilled into August, the mainsail was finally attached, held in place by a dizzying series of cogs and pulleys. 

    “She’s lookin’ just about ready for the skies, Frey,” said Uncle Silas, who carried a glass of lukewarm lemonade in one hand and a bowl of porridge in the other.

    “Not yet, Uncle. Still one more thing to add. Somethin’ I hope to hell I ain’t gonna have to use.” Freya’s sharp features disappeared behind her welding helmet, and she soon threw herself back into the familiar symphony of crackles and sparks.

    The morning of the race, Freya and Silas approached the Aircademy’s enormous hangar entrance. 

    “You sure you ain’t joinin’ me inside?” she asked.

    “I’ll only get in the way. Besides, I wanna see you from the stands. Better view.”

    Inside the hangar, Freya was greeted by a festival of brass bolts polished to perfection, copper needles vacillating in glass dials, and fine fabric sails emblazoned with prestigious flying club emblems. Her own ship, a messy patchwork of riveted plates, creaking rotors, and hand-stitched sails, was met by laughter from a few of the other young pilots.

    “Junkyard’s the other way, miss,” said a straw-haired boy in burgundy leather. He flicked the shiny knobs on his handheld controller to send a tiny, sharp-nosed drone darting around the hangar.

    “Don’t mind Jacob,” said a stocky, freckled boy with round, kindly eyes. “He’s had a bug up his butt ever since his pa’s coal mine ran dry. Still got more money than most everyone here, though, and that’s sayin’ somethin’. Name’s Bryce, by the way.”

    A middle-aged man wearing a navy jacket punctuated with row after row of small brass wings strode to center stage. The entire hangar soon fell silent.

    “Welcome, would-be pilots. I’m Admiral Crow from the Aircademy. Today’s Airbox Time Trial starts now!” 

    He twisted the ends of his gigantic mustache between his fingers. 

    “We have nine of y’all registered to fly today. When I call your name, bring your craft to the runway quicksmart and fly out to the first two aerial buoys. Once you cross ’em, the clock starts, and once you pass between the final two, you’re done. Remember, boys and girls, here at the Aircademy, we don’t just look for excellence; we goddamn demand it.” 

    The Admiral stepped towards a large rectangle on the wall, whisking off the black sheet to reveal a ticker board filled with the pilots’ names, their flying clubs, and a space for each of their times. Freya scanned the list for her name. She’d be flying dead last.

    “Jacob Beechworth, Emberwick Flyers’ Club, you’re up first!”

    Two engineers in matching burgundy outfits hoisted Jacob into his airship. As he made the short taxi out of the hangar’s vast entrance towards the runway, the other pilots rushed out to get a closer look. The makeshift grandstand flanking the runway was already filled with expectant onlookers.

    Steam whistled through the array of pipes, roaring the craft forward. Jacob pulled a lever which sent the cream topsail fluttering open, and his sleek chrome ship took to the skies.

    Just in front of him were the first two enormous, ruby-red helium buoys, suspended by chains to a pair of latticed scaffolds. As soon as his ship passed between them, the timekeeper pressed a gold button, sending the chronometer whirring into action.

    The nimble aircraft banked right between the second pair of buoys and continued its snakelike path between the increasingly narrow targets. It disappeared briefly above a thin cluster of clouds before darting back down, eliciting a roar of approval from the crowd. Nearing the final sharp turn, its mainsail caught a sudden current, forcing Jacob to momentarily kill propulsion as he fought to regain control. By the time he crossed the finish, the chronometer read sixty-five seconds flat.

    Freya watched as one hopeful after another was called. Jacob’s time held strong at the top until Bryce ended his run with a smoother line to take the lead with a final race time of sixty-two seconds.

    Jacob stormed off to sulk with his drone in the corner. Freya stuck out her tongue as he passed. 

    “Put that girly tongue back in your pauper’s mouth’ fore I rip it out.” He waved the tip of his drone in her face. “In fact, a thousand bucks says your pile of junk doesn’t even make it back in one piece.”

    Freya was midway through her caustic reply when Admiral Crow’s voice boomed from behind her.

    “Freya Blackthorn, you’re up!”

    She spun around to give the Admiral an awkward curtsey.

    “Ms Blackthorn, I don’t see your flying club on the list.”

    “Sir, I ain’t a member of no flying club.”

    He looked back at her airship before returning with an arched eyebrow.

    “Well, who’s the engineer who built that thing? He ain’t no artist, but the man seems to know his stuff.”

    “That man’d be me, sir.”

    The Admiral’s second eyebrow joined his first somewhere above his hairline.

    “Well, I never…” He let out a whistle of admiration. “Very good, Ms. Blackthorn. Godspeed.”

    Freya wriggled into the cockpit, crossing the two leather straps over her shoulders. Her ship emerged onto the runway to a mix of lukewarm applause and patronizing laughter. Freya soon drowned it out by slamming the throttle forward and pulling out the church organ-like stops as the metal beast howled its way skywards. 

    As she flew by the first two buoys, Freya clicked the old stopwatch welded to the dashboard. Before the second hand could even begin its arc, she was already busying herself with the delicate operations of the mainsail. Small plumes of steam emanated from the pistons as she twisted the crank.

    Her ship hugged the second set of obstacles so tight that it let out a scratching complaint. The starboard wing grazed the giant buoy. Tacking and jibing through the zigzagging obstacles, Freya allowed herself a fleeting glance at the stopwatch once she’d passed the halfway point. Thirty seconds to go. If she kept this pace, the cadetship would be hers.

    The clouds, which had been little more than wisps for most of the day, were now angrier, darker, and more compact. The next set of narrow buoys required her to fly into the turbulent nimbus sea almost blind. She gripped the joystick tighter. 

    The wind tossed her helpless craft to and fro. By the time she had dipped the ship’s nose below the clouds again, she was greeted by the glistening, pointed beak of a small drone shooting directly toward her. That swine Jacob was sabotaging her race!

    She banked hard right, pleading with the ship to obey, but it was too late. The tip of the drone sliced through the center of her mainsail, and a moment later, it was nothing more than tattered beige scraps.

    The ship lurched downward. Freya wrenched at the throttle with both hands, but the craft failed to respond. The path that should have seen her safely between the final buoys now pointed her squarely at one of the enormous steel structures below. Impact was inevitable. 

    Freya slammed the small red button on the dashboard. The hatch above her head slid aside, launching Freya’s seat upward in a hiss of steam, a moment before the sickening shriek of metal on metal.

    Freya, exposed to the elements, clung to her seat with nothing more than two leather straps holding her in place. She yanked the armrest cover open to reveal a cog-filled control panel with a brass steering rod in the center. As she maneuvered the rod around, the four small exhaust pipes at the base of the seat began to emit steady streams of thick steam. 

    The world stood still. 

    Freya hovered majestically in the air as static and steady as a photograph. She teased the steering rod back, sending her in a gentle descent towards the tarmac.

    Admiral Crow was waiting for her at the entrance of the hangar. She glanced at the leaderboard behind him. Beside her name was a single red X instead of a final time.

    “Tough break, kiddo. You flew good out there.”

    Freya balled up her bony hand into a fist and made a beeline for Jacob, who was being consoled by his team. 

    “You lowdown cheatin’ son of a–”

    The Admiral dragged her back. “Hold it there, hothead. I ain’t done talking.”

    Freya’s arm fell limp.

    “I was just about to explain that while the last cadetship’s gone to Bryce Jones, we are on the hunt for new engineers. I ain’t got the foggiest how you did it, but that hover tech you showed out there is just the kind of excellence the Aircademy demands. Whaddya say?”

    Freya tried to suppress the smile that broke out from behind her usually stoic features.

    “I say ya’ll better fix up a place for my uncle to stay. And I get to do all the test flights myself.”

    The Admiral arced his right hand to his temple in an officious salute.

    “Wouldn’t have it any other way, Private Blackthorn.”