Eleanor unlocked the cockpit door of Charlie's flyer, and sat in the pilot's cushioned seat. The other seat held an old-fashioned kerosene lamp atop a pile of canned meats and fresh vegetables, held in place by the crash webbing. Eleanor squeezed Zeek's bag between a pumpkin and a circular loaf of bread, wondering what Charlie expected her to do with a pumpkin at the bottom of a pit. But there was also a paper bag of fresh chocolates, which made her smile fondly.

She reached behind the seats and pressed the furnace's ignition lever. Through a small window, she could see the Green Coal burst into smokeless emerald flames. Overhead, the zeppelin-shaped balloon gradually inflated. She waited, watching the hangar's open front doors for any police craft, but none appeared.

The cabin smelled like chocolate, but also like her departed uncle's cigar smoke, and she thought for a moment about holidays at the country estate. She missed the fireplaces and the flickering candles and the indoor Christmas trees, and even the fog that had engulfed the city in the old days.

She had hoped to have holidays like that with Minnie. Why had Minnie gotten so drunk last night, and why had she believed Zeek, who she clearly didn't trust, and why had she disappeared into the Pit?

Eleanor was muttering, “stupid, stupid, stupid pirates,” when the full inflation chime sounded. Time to go. She reached out her side window and unhooked the parking tether, and dropped the metal hook onto the hangar floor. The little airship drifted upwards.

The controls were the same as an ordinary flyer, but the racing propellers gave her faster acceleration. She nearly hit a larger ship's balloon before she swerved and shot toward the tall doorway ahead.

She swore, and her unladylike language reminded her again of Minnie. The doorway brushed the side of her balloon, but then she was outside, rising into the cloudless sky. She angled the ship toward a clock tower near the Pit, and looked back once to see police craft bobbing far behind her.

She accelerated further, and sped over the rooftops and patches of treetops in the parks. Before she neared the Pit, she began to sink and slow. She glanced at the furnace door. The Green Coal lay dark inside, although it should still be burning. Eleanor reached back and pressed the lever, but it just clicked and nothing happened.

She remembered Minnie saying once that pirates still used wood or true coal in their ships, in spite of the smoke. But the only coal in the reserve scuttle was green. She looked around, and saw the dark Pit in the ground ahead. She might just reach it before she crashed, but without the propellers for steering, she would have to trust in gravity and the emergency parachute on top of the balloon as she descended into the Pit.

She shivered as the cabin's hull brushed a treetop. Ahead, the Pit's edges were jagged. A sidewalk led to one edge and then vanished, and the rubble of a brick wall marked another edge. The wall had reportedly belonged to a warehouse before the Pit had appeared and swallowed the building.

A man looked up from near the rubble. Eleanor worried he might be a policeman, but then saw his wheelbarrow of trash. Just another illegal carter, disposing of garbage or bodies or old love letters.

A pile of charred furniture, including several blackened mattresses, lay at the near edge, and Eleanor briefly considered jumping out onto the mattresses and letting the airship crash into the Pit without her. The police would think she was gone. She and Charlie could disappear, maybe go north and find Minnie's friend Gloria.

The airship scraped over the furniture, and Eleanor's vow to Minnie, “'til death do us part,” flashed through her mind. She hooked the pilot's padded crash webbing around herself and stayed in her seat as the cabin reached the near edge of the Pit, teetered there, and tipped bow-first into the Pit.

The sunlight fell away behind her. It wasn't completely black near the top of the Pit, but she tried to switch on her running lights. However, they were Green Coal-powered, and refused to light. With shaky hands, she lit the kerosene lamp on the seat beside her, which glowed brightly enough to see the Pit walls outside. She drifted down past plain black dirt, and layers of rock, and some thick shiny metal layers, and a layer of rusty metal as she descended faster. She couldn't see the bottom yet, but she decided she was probably falling fast enough for the emergency parachute to work.

She pressed the button, and something whooshed above the balloon. Her fall slowed, and the cabin rocked and settled upright, drifting lower.

The walls of the Pit angled away. She lifted the kerosene lamp, trying to see outside. She was apparently floating down through a giant dark space. Something metallic glinted on her left, and she used the emergency rudder sails to drift slowly closer to it. It was a wide thread of scaffolding, apparently extending upwards and downwards toward the Pit's bottom.

She could no longer see the Pit walls, but her altimeter showed that she was descending faster. A brisk wind fluttered the half-deflated balloon.

She wondered about the ship that Minnie had flown down in. Had Zeek's airship maintained inflation with the police shooting at it? If not, did Zeek's ship even have an emergency parachute? She felt sick, thinking Minnie might have crashed to her death below.

Eleanor was already being blown downward fast enough that her own landing would be jarring. She steered the flyer away from what she supposed was the center of the Pit, hoping the air current would be less strong near the wall.

She didn't reach a wall. She drifted past the scaffolding, but then feared getting lost in the giant cavern, and nudged the airship around to follow the scaffolding down.

Finally she saw pinpoints of light in her below-view mirrors. Hoping that they were on firm ground, and not just floating in this void, she turned off the kerosene lamp and returned it to the co-pilot's seat. Then she pulled her arms inside her own crash webbing and tried not to tense up too much.

As she descended, her mirrors showed a bonfire burning amid a field of trash and wrecked airships. She was wondering which of the airships might have been Minnie's, when a burst of lightning from the scaffolding sizzled up toward her emergency parachute.

She smelled scorched cloth, the cabin plunged, and she screamed. The floor thumped, and she bounced against the seat's webbing. Then she settled, still, upright, and caught her breath. Outside, the trash bonfire flickered between two shadowy airship wrecks. She watched the flames, not emerald-colored but honest whitish-yellow fire.

She hoped that the fire had been started by Minnie.