As they refuel, Kate drugs her chaperone who had insisted on confining Kate to their stateroom to keep her from gallivanting again. Their escapades turn out to be fortuitous for the rest however because when they are caught in a topical storm and take refuge in a cave they inadvertently discover a source of hydrium that will enable the Aurora to fly again. Strong willed and determined, Kate defies her chaperone again and again, initially to explore the forest in the hopes of discovering evidence of the creature, then again when returning to collect the skeleton. When they encounter an aggressive, jumping snake, they take refuge in a tree, and climbing high enough to avoid the snake, they inadvertently discover a skeleton of the creature Kate's grandfather had described and drawn. She convinces Matt to accompany her into the woods in search of them, despite Matt's objections and reservations. When Kate realizes her good fortune, she is determined to find evidence of the creatures her grandfather described, and restore his good name in the scientific community. An unexpected confrontation with air pirates causes the Aurora to crash land on the very island Molloy described and drew so carefully.
A year later, Molloy's granddaughter Kate de Vries follows the closest flight path she can in the hopes of seeing the miraculous creatures he describes in his journal for herself. The balloon's pilot, Benjamin Molloy, lives long enough to ask Matt if he'd seen 'them', and dies shortly after realizing Matt had not. The story begins with the discovery of a hot air balloon, adrift and in distress.
When his father is killed in a freak accident, Matt is given a job by the captain of the ship, enabling him to continue to support his mother and two sisters. The story centers around a cabin boy named Matt Cruse who works aboard the airship Aurora, just as his father before him had. Instead, airships of the day use a fuel called hydrium and resemble hot air balloons more closely than they do airplanes of today. This work of fiction portrays what the world might have been like had the aircraft as we know it not been invented. "Airborn" by Kenneth Oppel is a story of possibilities.
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