Giving Myself A Start [Anna Fang, Mortal Engines, PG]
Title: Giving Myself A Start
Author: elvenpiratelady
Fandom: Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
Rating: PG
Warnings: mild references to slavery
Prompt: 99) My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong. -- Mother Jones (1830 or 1837-1930), Irish-born American labor organizer, member of the Knights of Labor, deeply involved with the United Mine Workers, and organizer of a strike of children working in mills and mines. (The quote more aptly describes Anna’s life after this fic, but it suits her to a tee.)
Summary: With a life of slavery in Arkangel left behind her, Anna Fang is off to a flying start.
Word count: 1912
Author's Notes: This is not the Anna Fang story I started out writing for this ficathon. That fic is turning into a monster, being 4000 words long and nowhere near finished. This fic is really the beginning of a much longer story, and hopefully I’ll finish it one day. In the mean time, huzzah for actually finishing a fic on time!
So to the actual story notes - doing research about women aviators turned up some amazing ladies and I wish I could throw tickertape parades for them all, but the main inspiration is Katherine Sui Fun Cheung, the first Chinese American woman to become a pilot. This photo of her is the Anna Fang in my head because she’s clearly having so much fun flying her planes. I have to mention the Ninety-Nines because of my prompt number (although I didn’t find out about them until I started research for this fic - coincidence regarding awesome ladies, or something else?), and the Night Witches deserve to be recognised as well. What I discovered more than anything else is the distinct correlation between wittiness and women aviators. There are some great quotes here. The title comes from another quote on the prompt list and I hope whoever actually claimed it doesn’t mind me using it: 141) I got myself a start by giving myself a start. -- Sarah Breedlove Walker.
So thanks go to Katherine Sui Fun Cheung and all the other women who have taken to the skies, Philip Reeve for writing the Mortal Engines series (I have some issues regarding plots and character development, but he created Anna Fang for me so I’ll let them go) and gehayi for running this ficathon every year. Extra special thanks to my brother, who is the only other person I know who has read the Mortal Engines series and who beta’d this for me at short notice and at the last minute.
--------------------
"There’s no feeling like it in the world," she said. "Being up in the air, the wind blowing, the exhilaration... that’s my definition of joy. It’s complete freedom. You haven’t lived until you’ve truly felt that." - from an interview with Katherine Sui Fun Cheung.
--------------------
Anna Fang fell in love with flying from her first moment in the air. All the months she’d spent, all the hard work, the parts stolen, the hopes dashed, the fear of discovery, all the times she’d smiled at the slimy overseers, all the times she’d seen other slaves cower away from their masters, all the times she’d been so close to giving up - in an instant they were nothing, as little to her as dust kicked up by a passing engine. Her little airship was rising with a whine from the slave-quarters of Arkangel, the hole in the roof where she’d blasted out still visible, and it was accelerating into the gloriously empty sky. The whole craft shook with the effort to fly, the rattling of the engines becoming a long, steady drone. Vibrations ran from the machinery to the controls, right up her arms and sent her shaking along with it. She and her airship were a team already, sharing the stress and the exhilaration of freedom, of flight.
Her escape, which she would certainly not call subtle, had been discovered. She could already hear alarms sounding in the city, and see ant-sized figures rushing to their airships. So far below already! she thought, taking her eyes off the controls for a few precious seconds to peer down at Arkangel. And it moves so slowly, like a bull wallowing in mud. It’s not so big, really, from the air. Why did I ever fear it?
She knew the answer to that question too well, and didn’t want to dwell on it. Arkangel from the air looked slow and ungainly, but from the ground it was a monster, its towers and furnaces casting terrifying silhouettes against the sky. She scowled at the rooftops of the slave districts. She understood how it could eat somebody’s world as easily as it ate the little towns that scampered across the vast steppes, how it could fill a person’s mind.
I won’t go back again, she thought. I’ll die before I go back there again.
But there are people just like you down there, said a voice inside her. It sounded like her mother’s voice, to her surprise. Don’t they deserve to see that Arkangel isn’t the world? Don’t they deserve the chance to fly?
She thought she’d forgotten it.
Yes, she thought, yes, they do. But that’s for another day.
She turned her ship away from Arkangel and set on an easterly course, racing away from the setting sun. She could hear the whine of sleeker, faster, stronger airships behind her already, although none of them had caught up to her yet. I need mirrors, she thought in an instant, to see behind me. I can’t fly and twist my head every which way. I must remember that for when I get to another city. Which city? Where on earth am I going?
Focus on getting away from Arkangel first, she cautioned herself. You can worry about getting to another place later.
She stamped hard on her accelerator pedal, and with an audible change in tone, her ship streaked away. She risked a glance over her shoulder and her heart jumped at how close the pursuing airships were already, how much faster they moved. Her airship was a fat old pigeon compared to the hawk-like ships chasing them. She was going to have to outwit them and outrun them. The night looked to be clouding over, and perhaps it would snow. She crossed her fingers and hoped the weather would turn in her favour. If she was desperate she could probably lose the airships by flying low and dodging between the ice floes, but only if there was no other choice. Crashing would be bad, being injured or dying would be worse. And if they caught her...
They won’t, she thought. I won’t go back to Arkangel. One way or another, they won’t catch me. And she felt a little sick at the thought of dying so soon after freeing herself, but if there was really no choice...
There is always a choice, said the phantom voice. Once you die, that’s the end of choices. Life is hard, but there are always more chances if you look for them.
All right, she decided. If I’m not going to die and I’m not going back, then I can only go on. That’s my choice.
Freedom already had a lot of choices. Freedom was cold. The wind was whistling through various cracks in the airship’s metal plates, and she’d have to solder them closed when she reached a safe haven. She was accustomed to the constant cold of the slave quarters, used to never being truly warm, but she was worried about the engines. That would be a fine thing to happen, to escape slavery and have her ship crash in its first hour of flight because she hadn’t built it properly...
No, she thought, that’s not true. I did build it properly, from the best parts I could find. Of course, a scrap-yard is never going to have the best parts in the world. But it’s holding so far. I built it to be strong.
Freedom was choices, freedom was cold, and freedom was quiet. The air hissed at her and the engines constantly droned, but apart from the rattle of her ship and the screech of the hunting airships behind, it was almost deathly quiet. It was never quiet in Arkangel, from the roar of the crushers to the shouts of overseers, to the snores of the other slaves at night and the murmur of frightened voices, all of it underlain by the rumble of the city’s engines, more a vibration than a sound. Sometimes it had been quiet at home, when everyone was asleep and the crickets sang late into the hot summer nights - there were crickets! There were places in the world where people lived in the same houses all their lives, and where plants turned the earth green!
I forgot about crickets singing when I was a slave, she thought. Arkangel took them from me.
She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and breathed deeply, trying to release the tightness in her chest. The memory hurt. Slavery had stolen that memory and she hadn’t even realised until she found herself free again. What other memories had it taken from her? She had no idea, and she didn’t know if they would ever return, and worse was that she wouldn’t even know that she didn’t remember. She thought she’d made a clean break from Arkangel, but it still had pieces of her trapped in the city’s machinery like meat stuck between a dog’s teeth. She shook her head, trying to clear her mind.
I’m not going to cry now, she thought. I don’t have time and I won’t be able to see clearly if I do.
She was reeling from remembering the quiet of the land, but the quiet in the airship was a different sort of quiet entirely, and it fascinated her. I can hear myself think, she thought. I can laugh here and actually hear it. I can sing! The overseers did not approve of singing, so she’d got into the habit of humming just under her breath. She tried it now, but it was almost drowned out by her own engines. That made her laugh, and the sound of laughter was like an old family treasure that had been hidden away from thieves, forgotten, and discovered years later. She laughed again, just for the sound of it, and suddenly she couldn’t stop. She had smothered a laugh so many times in Arkangel and they all seemed to want to burst out of her now. And why not? She was free, and racing into the night away from her prison and her old life. She didn’t know where she was going or what she would find when the next day came. She didn’t know if she’d even see the next day. Freedom was cold, quiet, chaotic, complicated, confusing, terrifying, amazing. Freedom was flying, in her own ship.
Snow had indeed begun to fall, great clouds of it that she burst through after her vision went white for a few moments. She thought she could hear the sounds of the pursuing airships becoming fainter as they fell behind, their captains unwilling to risk a crash. Those ships were faster and stronger, but hers was built out of scrap too tough to be destroyed. The pilots of those other ships thought of Arkangel as home, and they would be tempted by the food and warmth there when they faced down the long, cold night. Soon they would turn back, they must. But there was nothing left for her at Arkangel and she could fly free of regrets. She would disappear into the dark and become a night witch that Arkangel children hid from. She would become a phantom that made the slave-drivers shudder in their dreams. She would teach them to fear the name Anna Fang. She would bring revenge for herself and her mother and father and sisters and brothers and every other person that Arkangel had ever devoured, every person who never flew...
...another day. She would be all those things another day. One day, she swore to herself, I will see the end of that city.
She brought the airship above the snow flurries and through the clouds. None of the airships were still following her, and the clouds hid Arkangel, as if it was a shipwreck lumbering on the ocean floor while she floated high above it on silvery waves. In the cold night the stars hung around her window like hundreds of compasses. She set the airship’s speed to a more sustainable pace and finally let herself relax.
Her hands shook even when she let go of the controls and her breath steamed in the air. Her clothes were damp with sweat and she was beginning to get cold, the first thrill of excitement now fading away.
I’ll need to look for a safe place to land when the morning comes, she thought as she wrapped herself in a blanket that smelt like machine oil. I need to think of a name for my ship. I’ll need more food soon. I need solder and mirrors and fuel. I need to find a place that sells them all. I need to find work. I need a map. I need a place to rest, just for a little while so I can work out what I’m going to do. What am I going to do? Where am I going to go?
She hadn’t thought very far beyond escaping and finding a place where Arkangel’s agents couldn’t catch her, but her whole life was stretching before her and she had to decide what she’d do with it. She had to decide. She had been free for only an hour and there were already so many things that she had to decide, that nobody else could decide for her. She had to look after herself now.
I’ll be fine, she thought as she gazed out the window at the stars, their names slowly coming back to her as she hummed under her breath. I built an airship out of stolen parts from Arkangel’s scrap-yard, and it actually flew. I survived being a slave for more than ten years. I escaped! I’m free! I can do anything.
Author: elvenpiratelady
Fandom: Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
Rating: PG
Warnings: mild references to slavery
Prompt: 99) My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong. -- Mother Jones (1830 or 1837-1930), Irish-born American labor organizer, member of the Knights of Labor, deeply involved with the United Mine Workers, and organizer of a strike of children working in mills and mines. (The quote more aptly describes Anna’s life after this fic, but it suits her to a tee.)
Summary: With a life of slavery in Arkangel left behind her, Anna Fang is off to a flying start.
Word count: 1912
Author's Notes: This is not the Anna Fang story I started out writing for this ficathon. That fic is turning into a monster, being 4000 words long and nowhere near finished. This fic is really the beginning of a much longer story, and hopefully I’ll finish it one day. In the mean time, huzzah for actually finishing a fic on time!
So to the actual story notes - doing research about women aviators turned up some amazing ladies and I wish I could throw tickertape parades for them all, but the main inspiration is Katherine Sui Fun Cheung, the first Chinese American woman to become a pilot. This photo of her is the Anna Fang in my head because she’s clearly having so much fun flying her planes. I have to mention the Ninety-Nines because of my prompt number (although I didn’t find out about them until I started research for this fic - coincidence regarding awesome ladies, or something else?), and the Night Witches deserve to be recognised as well. What I discovered more than anything else is the distinct correlation between wittiness and women aviators. There are some great quotes here. The title comes from another quote on the prompt list and I hope whoever actually claimed it doesn’t mind me using it: 141) I got myself a start by giving myself a start. -- Sarah Breedlove Walker.
So thanks go to Katherine Sui Fun Cheung and all the other women who have taken to the skies, Philip Reeve for writing the Mortal Engines series (I have some issues regarding plots and character development, but he created Anna Fang for me so I’ll let them go) and gehayi for running this ficathon every year. Extra special thanks to my brother, who is the only other person I know who has read the Mortal Engines series and who beta’d this for me at short notice and at the last minute.
--------------------
"There’s no feeling like it in the world," she said. "Being up in the air, the wind blowing, the exhilaration... that’s my definition of joy. It’s complete freedom. You haven’t lived until you’ve truly felt that." - from an interview with Katherine Sui Fun Cheung.
--------------------
Anna Fang fell in love with flying from her first moment in the air. All the months she’d spent, all the hard work, the parts stolen, the hopes dashed, the fear of discovery, all the times she’d smiled at the slimy overseers, all the times she’d seen other slaves cower away from their masters, all the times she’d been so close to giving up - in an instant they were nothing, as little to her as dust kicked up by a passing engine. Her little airship was rising with a whine from the slave-quarters of Arkangel, the hole in the roof where she’d blasted out still visible, and it was accelerating into the gloriously empty sky. The whole craft shook with the effort to fly, the rattling of the engines becoming a long, steady drone. Vibrations ran from the machinery to the controls, right up her arms and sent her shaking along with it. She and her airship were a team already, sharing the stress and the exhilaration of freedom, of flight.
Her escape, which she would certainly not call subtle, had been discovered. She could already hear alarms sounding in the city, and see ant-sized figures rushing to their airships. So far below already! she thought, taking her eyes off the controls for a few precious seconds to peer down at Arkangel. And it moves so slowly, like a bull wallowing in mud. It’s not so big, really, from the air. Why did I ever fear it?
She knew the answer to that question too well, and didn’t want to dwell on it. Arkangel from the air looked slow and ungainly, but from the ground it was a monster, its towers and furnaces casting terrifying silhouettes against the sky. She scowled at the rooftops of the slave districts. She understood how it could eat somebody’s world as easily as it ate the little towns that scampered across the vast steppes, how it could fill a person’s mind.
I won’t go back again, she thought. I’ll die before I go back there again.
But there are people just like you down there, said a voice inside her. It sounded like her mother’s voice, to her surprise. Don’t they deserve to see that Arkangel isn’t the world? Don’t they deserve the chance to fly?
She thought she’d forgotten it.
Yes, she thought, yes, they do. But that’s for another day.
She turned her ship away from Arkangel and set on an easterly course, racing away from the setting sun. She could hear the whine of sleeker, faster, stronger airships behind her already, although none of them had caught up to her yet. I need mirrors, she thought in an instant, to see behind me. I can’t fly and twist my head every which way. I must remember that for when I get to another city. Which city? Where on earth am I going?
Focus on getting away from Arkangel first, she cautioned herself. You can worry about getting to another place later.
She stamped hard on her accelerator pedal, and with an audible change in tone, her ship streaked away. She risked a glance over her shoulder and her heart jumped at how close the pursuing airships were already, how much faster they moved. Her airship was a fat old pigeon compared to the hawk-like ships chasing them. She was going to have to outwit them and outrun them. The night looked to be clouding over, and perhaps it would snow. She crossed her fingers and hoped the weather would turn in her favour. If she was desperate she could probably lose the airships by flying low and dodging between the ice floes, but only if there was no other choice. Crashing would be bad, being injured or dying would be worse. And if they caught her...
They won’t, she thought. I won’t go back to Arkangel. One way or another, they won’t catch me. And she felt a little sick at the thought of dying so soon after freeing herself, but if there was really no choice...
There is always a choice, said the phantom voice. Once you die, that’s the end of choices. Life is hard, but there are always more chances if you look for them.
All right, she decided. If I’m not going to die and I’m not going back, then I can only go on. That’s my choice.
Freedom already had a lot of choices. Freedom was cold. The wind was whistling through various cracks in the airship’s metal plates, and she’d have to solder them closed when she reached a safe haven. She was accustomed to the constant cold of the slave quarters, used to never being truly warm, but she was worried about the engines. That would be a fine thing to happen, to escape slavery and have her ship crash in its first hour of flight because she hadn’t built it properly...
No, she thought, that’s not true. I did build it properly, from the best parts I could find. Of course, a scrap-yard is never going to have the best parts in the world. But it’s holding so far. I built it to be strong.
Freedom was choices, freedom was cold, and freedom was quiet. The air hissed at her and the engines constantly droned, but apart from the rattle of her ship and the screech of the hunting airships behind, it was almost deathly quiet. It was never quiet in Arkangel, from the roar of the crushers to the shouts of overseers, to the snores of the other slaves at night and the murmur of frightened voices, all of it underlain by the rumble of the city’s engines, more a vibration than a sound. Sometimes it had been quiet at home, when everyone was asleep and the crickets sang late into the hot summer nights - there were crickets! There were places in the world where people lived in the same houses all their lives, and where plants turned the earth green!
I forgot about crickets singing when I was a slave, she thought. Arkangel took them from me.
She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and breathed deeply, trying to release the tightness in her chest. The memory hurt. Slavery had stolen that memory and she hadn’t even realised until she found herself free again. What other memories had it taken from her? She had no idea, and she didn’t know if they would ever return, and worse was that she wouldn’t even know that she didn’t remember. She thought she’d made a clean break from Arkangel, but it still had pieces of her trapped in the city’s machinery like meat stuck between a dog’s teeth. She shook her head, trying to clear her mind.
I’m not going to cry now, she thought. I don’t have time and I won’t be able to see clearly if I do.
She was reeling from remembering the quiet of the land, but the quiet in the airship was a different sort of quiet entirely, and it fascinated her. I can hear myself think, she thought. I can laugh here and actually hear it. I can sing! The overseers did not approve of singing, so she’d got into the habit of humming just under her breath. She tried it now, but it was almost drowned out by her own engines. That made her laugh, and the sound of laughter was like an old family treasure that had been hidden away from thieves, forgotten, and discovered years later. She laughed again, just for the sound of it, and suddenly she couldn’t stop. She had smothered a laugh so many times in Arkangel and they all seemed to want to burst out of her now. And why not? She was free, and racing into the night away from her prison and her old life. She didn’t know where she was going or what she would find when the next day came. She didn’t know if she’d even see the next day. Freedom was cold, quiet, chaotic, complicated, confusing, terrifying, amazing. Freedom was flying, in her own ship.
Snow had indeed begun to fall, great clouds of it that she burst through after her vision went white for a few moments. She thought she could hear the sounds of the pursuing airships becoming fainter as they fell behind, their captains unwilling to risk a crash. Those ships were faster and stronger, but hers was built out of scrap too tough to be destroyed. The pilots of those other ships thought of Arkangel as home, and they would be tempted by the food and warmth there when they faced down the long, cold night. Soon they would turn back, they must. But there was nothing left for her at Arkangel and she could fly free of regrets. She would disappear into the dark and become a night witch that Arkangel children hid from. She would become a phantom that made the slave-drivers shudder in their dreams. She would teach them to fear the name Anna Fang. She would bring revenge for herself and her mother and father and sisters and brothers and every other person that Arkangel had ever devoured, every person who never flew...
...another day. She would be all those things another day. One day, she swore to herself, I will see the end of that city.
She brought the airship above the snow flurries and through the clouds. None of the airships were still following her, and the clouds hid Arkangel, as if it was a shipwreck lumbering on the ocean floor while she floated high above it on silvery waves. In the cold night the stars hung around her window like hundreds of compasses. She set the airship’s speed to a more sustainable pace and finally let herself relax.
Her hands shook even when she let go of the controls and her breath steamed in the air. Her clothes were damp with sweat and she was beginning to get cold, the first thrill of excitement now fading away.
I’ll need to look for a safe place to land when the morning comes, she thought as she wrapped herself in a blanket that smelt like machine oil. I need to think of a name for my ship. I’ll need more food soon. I need solder and mirrors and fuel. I need to find a place that sells them all. I need to find work. I need a map. I need a place to rest, just for a little while so I can work out what I’m going to do. What am I going to do? Where am I going to go?
She hadn’t thought very far beyond escaping and finding a place where Arkangel’s agents couldn’t catch her, but her whole life was stretching before her and she had to decide what she’d do with it. She had to decide. She had been free for only an hour and there were already so many things that she had to decide, that nobody else could decide for her. She had to look after herself now.
I’ll be fine, she thought as she gazed out the window at the stars, their names slowly coming back to her as she hummed under her breath. I built an airship out of stolen parts from Arkangel’s scrap-yard, and it actually flew. I survived being a slave for more than ten years. I escaped! I’m free! I can do anything.