Agatha H. and the Airship City

never return. Agatha felt a sense of desolation filling her. The future looked bleak.

Mad, Othar may have been, but he certainly had a point. The last several hundred years had been filled with a distressingly long list of catastrophes, disasters, blights, monstrosities and terror directly attributable to a small handful of crazed geniuses.

“Why am I bothering?” she whispered.

Krosp shrugged. “What?”

“Why shouldn’t I just turn myself over to the Baron? Why shouldn’t I just throw myself over the side right now?”

Krosp scratched his chin and then jerked the steering wheel. The little airship lurched to the side. Agatha grabbed onto the railing and held on tightly. Krosp pointed to her hands. “Because you don’t want to die.”

“But Othar had a point. Sparks—”

“Not all Sparks,” Krosp interrupted. “Most of them are dangerous,” he conceded. “But what about the ones who fight the monsters, save the towns, build the machines that help people. It’s not what you are, it’s what you do with it.”

“But so many of them are monsters!”

Krosp grinned. “That’s because being a monster is easy. Doing good, making a positive difference. That’s hard. But that’s what your parents did.” He considered her. “Unless you think the construct was lying about the Heterodynes being your parents.”

Agatha didn’t even have to think about that. “Lilith wouldn’t lie to me. Not about that. Not then.”

Krosp nodded. “I have to agree. It’s not like she did you any favors acknowledging it.”

“And everybody is making such a big deal about it. The Baron must discover new Sparks all the time.”

Krosp glared at her. “Because you’re not just a Spark. You’re the last of the Heterodyne family. Surely you must understand how momentous that is. As long as you’re around, the Baron and every other major power in Europe will want to control you, and everyone else will either want to follow you or kill you. You’ve got to understand that.”

“But that’s all… politics. I don’t care about any of that.”

“Well you’d better start to care. Because everyone’s going to care about you.”

“You mean they’re all going to want something from me.”

Krosp nodded. “That’s right, and like it or not, you’ll cause a lot of trouble just by existing.”

Agatha thought about this and had to admit the logic of it. Her jaw tightened and she straightened up. “All right then,” she declared. “Let’s go cause some trouble.”

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