Airborn

Kate de Vries is Matt’s love interest and fellow adventurer. She is a first-class passenger aboard the Aurora, a trip she was gifted by her wealthy but disinterested parents for her birthday. She plans to use the trip to prove that the journal entries left behind by her late grandfather are factual, rather than the ramblings of an ailing mind, as they are believed to be by the scientific community. Kate is intensely curious and craves knowledge, particularly when she can share that knowledge with another interested party. She wishes not only to know things but to show off that she knows them; her aim in searching for the cloud cats is not only to find out whether her grandfather was correct but to prove wrong the scientists who sneer at having a girl among their ranks.

Kate is single-minded in her pursuits, frequently to the point of selfishness, a product of her upper-class upbringing. She lures Matt into her adventures even when he protests that the consequences will be more dire for him than for her, countering that her experiences with sexism are analogous to his with classism and poverty—a viewpoint the novel does not entirely support, though it does depict some of the sexism Kate encounters. When it does not counteract her goals, however, Kate is a supportive friend. She regularly compliments Matt on his abilities and is interested in listening to his point of view, even when it contracts her own. She is undeterred by danger, seeing it as a great adventure, and ends the novel wishing to go on more grand expeditions, despite the death and danger that plagued the previous trip. 

Captain Walken is the captain of the airship Aurora and Matt’s mentor. Walken is calm and self-assured, even in the most dangerous of circumstances, and persistently polite. He retains his faith in Matt even after Matt shows up late for duty twice. Tardiness is a serious offense, and Walken’s leniency towards him suggests that Walken shows Matt some degree of favoritism. In times of crisis, Matt imagines Walken’s voice guiding him through danger, a practice that grounds and aids him. Walken’s tendency to serve as a guiding figure, rather than one who does things for himself, means that he does very little in the novel, instead providing a framework for how things should be done ethically, calmly, and with practicality and confidence.

Vikram Szpirglas is an air pirate and the primary antagonist of Airborn. Szpirglas performs and then subsequently rejects the role of the “gentleman pirate.” He often gives speeches with over-the-top grandiosity that nearly work to convince his auditors that his motives are, if not honorable, at least understandable, only to follow this linguistic performance with brutal acts of violence. He regularly claims not to “like” violence, though this does not stop him from committing violence without compunction. Szpirglas’s villainy is complicated by his obvious love for his young son, Theodore, whom Matt encounters in the pirates’ village, though this humanizing episode is quickly overshadowed by Szpirglas’s murderousness. Still, Matt shares Szpirglas’s adventurousness, and the stories that Szpirglas tells his son echo those Matt’s father told him, pointing to the ways that stories connect and shape fathers and sons. At the end of the novel, Szpirglas dies due to his determination to kill Matt himself, rather than letting gravity do the work for him, the victim of his own egotism and greed. He is torn apart by cloud cats as he falls off the Aurora.