Page 90 - G5.1_M1-5

myNotes
1 Matt Cruse is a cabin boy aboard the airship Aurora. The
Aurora stays afloat using a gas called “hydrium.” One day Matt

spots a damaged sky balloon with an old man named Benjamin
Molloy inside. Molloy has fallen ill and is rambling on about

beautiful creatures he saw in the sky. With Molloy unable to
communicate clearly, Matt and Molloy’s granddaughter, Kate,

have only his journal entries to guide them on their mission to
figure out whether these flying creatures are real or imagined.

2 he journal’s spine was cracked and flabby, and there was a hair
ribbon round the book, holding it all together. Moths danced
Taround in my stomach as I climbed up to my bunk and stretched

out. My cabin mate, Baz, was on crow’s nest duty until four. I turned on
my reading lamp. I untied the ribbon and carefully turned back the
cover. The pages were all scabby, as if the book had been soaked by rain
then baked in the sun.
3 The pages were covered with small neat lines of ink: date, position,
wind speed, altitude, observations. There was a little preface telling
about how he, Benjamin Molloy, planned to do a complete west to east
circumnavigation of the globe in his hot air balloon. I read quickly over
these first pages, not because they weren’t interesting but because I
could see Kate’s bookmark up ahead, and it made my stomach feel
swirly, wondering what was written there. It was hard to concentrate on
the stuff beforehand.

4 Kate’s grandfather had started out in Cape Town to catch the jet
stream and traveled quickly eastward over the Indian Ocean. But over

Australia his luck ran out, and he got shunted off course to the
northeast.

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