Sail (Haunted Stars Book 1)

by Lindsey R. Loucks

  With our bellies full inside the contained warmth of the kitchen and dining room, everyone eventually fell asleep at the table after dinner. I had no idea if that was customary, or if they just prescribed to the notion of safety in numbers, but they rose individually to go about their duties early the next morning.

  Except Randolph. After I’d jerked awake on my mattress by the stasis pantry, I couldn’t find him in the kitchen or dining room, and I hadn’t slept well enough for him to sneak past me into the pantry. Out in the hallway, I rapped on the door to his quarters, but it was locked and he wouldn’t answer.

  Shivering despite Franco’s thick coat wrapped around me, I twisted my lips together and stared at the broken light down the hallway, trying to decide if I was brave enough to search the entire ship for him. If I did, I could also hunt for more iron.

  If I didn’t swallow the iron, it dissolved in my mouth within hours. If I was going to stay put, I would need more. Lots more. If only this ship had been made of iron, I could just lick the walls and I’d be good.

  It was getting close to breakfast though, and if I wanted to stay on this ship, I’d better try to make the crew happy so they wouldn’t fire Randolph and me.

  After a quick text to Moon for a recipe, warm, buttery pancakes soon stacked each plate around the table. Without Randolph breathing down my neck, I could focus more on what I was doing, though I still expected him to come barreling through the double doors demanding to know why I’d started without him.

  I only burnt a few because I was busy digging through the cupboards and pantry for iron. Among the treasures I found were an ice pick I could use to unscrew things and a pair of fingerless leather gloves to cover up my girlish hands. Later, I planned to scour the rest of the ship.

  Doctor Daryl arrived promptly at six a.m., circling the table once to tap the imperfection on the wall, Esmerelda’s nipple, the crease in the double doors, and the telecom. Then he eased into the chair across from me without a word, his green eyes webbed with red veins. He looked more tired than he did yesterday.

  “I can’t find R—Dad,” I said. “Have you seen him?”

  “No.” He frowned. “Is he in his quarters?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If he is, he’s not answering me.”

  Nesbit, Mase, and the captain entered, and even though I kept my gaze on the pancakes in front of me, my insides still leaped with Mase’s presence. To be honest, it felt like when I had iron in my mouth—a pleasant jolt.

  “I’ll check on him after breakfast,” Doctor Daryl said.

  “Check on who?” Captain Glenn asked.

  Doctor Daryl placed his napkin in his lap and smoothed it. “Randolph. It might be that he needs time to acclimate himself to space.”

  “He’ll get his space legs soon enough,” Captain Glenn said and settled himself at the head of the table beside me. “Takes a while. You holding up okay?” He clapped me on the back, and I nearly face-planted into my pancakes.

  Instead of the string of curses I wanted to let loose, I managed a weak nod. For some reason, Mase chuckled, but when I glanced over, nothing but pancakes warmed his gaze. That man liked to eat.

  He and Captain Glenn discussed a good area to travel through all the space trash orbiting Mayvel. Nesbit kept yawning with his mouth full of food, and the doctor slid his fork through his pancakes to make perfect bite-sized pieces and then chewing them twenty times each.

  Despite the imaginary line I refused to look across, Mase’s voice rumbled past it anyway. It reminded me of the syrup I’d drenched my pancakes with—deep and rich with notes of sunshine every time a chuckle tripped out of his mouth. I stood and took my plate to the kitchen before the jump in my stomach at just hearing him made me choke down my iron. Everyone would get a surprise if the doctor performed the Heimlich on me.

  As soon as I stuck the dishes in the sink and picked up the kitchen a little, I went back to clear the table, but awful sawing noises stopped me in my tracks. Snoring. The four men cradled their heads in their arms, sound asleep. Had I knocked them out with my burnt pancakes? I didn’t know if I should wake them, so I crept around the table collecting their dishes with as few clinks and clatters as I could.

  When I came to Mase, wonder bloomed through my chest. Those mismatched eyes couldn’t see me staring, so I took a good, long look. His light hair feathered across his strong jaw, his mouth fuller when open and relaxed. Sleep looked nice on him. Really nice.

  Once the dishes were done, I tiptoed through the dining room and out into the hallway, my coat zipped up tight. Ice blasted down my lungs as soon as I quietly shut the door. Steam from my breath caught in the air and wound up toward the ceiling with some of my most painful memories.

  One night when I was about thirteen, the temperature in my bedroom plummeted in seconds. Frightened, I hugged the blankets up to my chin, but my breath escaped out over them. The far corner of my mattress sagged, as if someone was sitting on it. The other end corner slumped too, then the blankets began to ripple with invisible snakes on a direct path toward me. My breath came faster, steam puffed out harder, until a twisted face of a ghost appeared through the haze, leering over me.

  I touched my forehead to the glacial wall and patted my iron stash in my pocket to remind myself that I wasn’t a little girl anymore. I was here, on a haunted spaceship, trying to save my sister. One wasn’t much better than the other, but still. I couldn’t do this job alone, though, because once we reached deep space, my cheap phone couldn’t reach Moon and her recipes anymore. Drunk or not, Randolph needed to be in the kitchen with me, or my lack of cooking skills could get me thrown off this ship and snatched up by the police.

  “Randolph?” I called, rapping on the door to his quarters. Several heartbeats later, I pressed my ear to the metal. “The doctor said he would come check on you. That is, when he wakes up. Are you hungry?”

  Should I wake the doctor right now? But what if Randolph was just sleeping it off? I tried the lever again, but the door was still locked.

  My phone buzzed inside my pocket. I slipped a trembling, half-gloved hand inside, but my numb fingers made grabbing awkward, and both my iron box and my phone fell out.

  The cold froze time. My phone bounced once, twice. The box of iron flipped end over end, spraying its contents in a dizzying whirl. I lunged but my icy limbs weren’t fast enough. The bite-sized iron vanished through the squares in the grating along with all the air in my lungs. I dropped to my hands and knees as my stomach heaved, but all that came up was a choked cry.

  I curled my fingers around the grating and tried to rip it away. Darkness stained everything below the metal squares, and the dim overhead light couldn’t reach that far. There had to be something down there, though. Something had to catch all my iron. Please, Feozva, let there be something down there.

  Without enough light to see by, prying the grating up with my icepick wouldn’t help me. I had to find a way down there, and fast. The nail in my mouth had already dissolved to a quarter of its original length.

  With a quick look back at the dining room door, I snatched up my phone and hurried to the end of the hallway, mapping my progress with the periodic table at every door, starting with iron at the dining room.

  Below the light Nesbit must’ve fixed earlier this morning, I stopped. The hallway branched right and left. I chose right for no other reason than calcium had a closer atomic number to iron than strontium on the periodic table map inside my head.

  At the end of the hallway, two regular sized doors flanked a larger one. A green button flashed from inside a control panel next to the center door. I sprinted toward it, the sound of my footsteps recoiling off the walls, and jabbed the button. The door slid open to reveal an elevator, and I shot inside. The digital display at the top read Floor 2, so I pushed the 1 button and slid my phone from my pocket while the door creaked closed. The buzzing earlier had been a text from Moon.

  MD: We have a problem.

  I shoved the phone into my p
ocket and clenched my teeth. One problem at a time.

  The elevator doors opened onto night without the twinkle of stars to light my way. My breath plumed into the air and held there like a frozen cloud before it drifted under the stuttering overhead light in the elevator and out into darkness. I didn’t want to follow it, but my need for iron trumped my fear of the dark.

  The elevator door started to close, so I took a cautious step forward to block it. The glow from inside could barely penetrate the darkness, and the light from my phone didn’t do much better than that from the floor above. But I could kind of make out the squares of grating in the ceiling and that the elevator opened into a hallway.

  All I had to do was retrace my steps from the second floor. In the near-dark. On a haunted spaceship. With less than half an inch of iron in my mouth. A bitter cold fear stiffened every muscle in my body. The edge of the elevator door kicked at the sole of my boot, again and again, urging me onward. I couldn’t move. But I had to move.

  I shined my phone along the walls, hoping, praying to Feozva, for a switch to turn the lights on. The elevator door caught the back of my heel, then grumbled shut behind me. My heart knocked against my ribs. Without its inner light, darkness pressed into my sides, pulling gasps from my mouth. I aimed my phone straight ahead, its faint glow dancing shadows across each door I passed. Unlike the floor above, this hallway had doors on either side, some open, some closed, but I focused only on the left side for easy periodical table mapping.

  Scandium, titanium.

  Shadows shifted up ahead, some a deeper black than others, but my light didn’t reach that far.

  The vanadium door was open, and the air around the room smelled off somehow, like a mix of copper and rot. When I neared, the door made an awful screeching sound as it slowly closed on its dark interior.

  I stiffened. Doors closing by themselves were nothing new, but cold sweat leaked down my sides anyway.

  “Randolph?” I whispered, in case he was in there, in case he could hear me. Nothing but the roar of my pulse behind my ears answered me back.

  I rushed past to chromium, but a door blocked the rest of the hallway even though I hadn’t come to iron yet. This floor wasn’t laid out like the one above. Sucking hard on my nail, I yanked on the lever, and the door swung open.

  I shined my phone around the small room in a sweeping arc to try to see everything inside at once. Grating covered the ceiling above my head, then a square of solid titanium and then more grating. I was pretty sure my iron had fallen through that second square of grating. I hurried forward, head bent toward the floor as I searched, and slammed into a metal cabinet with a sink built into the top. A sink with a drain. Oh, rusted balls no.

  I plunged my fingers down inside it as far as they would go and felt nothing but bits of soggy residue around the drain’s sharp edges.

  Behind me and farther down the hallway, something screeched. Was it the vanadium door opening again? Was whatever inside creeping out? The darkness behind my exposed back slid icy fingers up and down my spine, but I kept searching and sucking hard on my dwindling nail.

  The light from my phone leaped with every panicked tremble shaking through my hands, but its glow caught on something shiny. One of my iron pieces. Yes! Another three on the floor. I clutched them in my fist, thanking Feozva.

  But where were the rest? I’d made over two hundred pieces in the chemistry lab from my spiked belt the night I’d run from my dorm. Now I only had four left. Not enough to get me to deep space and Ellison aboard this ship.

  Tears pricked my eyes. I doubled over the sink, clenching the sides, while helplessness kicked into my gut.

  Whatever haunted this ship would haunt me too, only ten times worse. Without iron, the ghosts would rip me apart bit by bit. The only way to survive this ship and save Ellison was to find more. And hopefully I’d find her before I ran out.

  I shoved away from the sink, and just as I stepped toward the hallway, something crashed over my head. I yelped and threw a hand over my mouth, but my loud breaths still seeped between my fingers. A rush of air tinged with a guttural howl roared above.

  More crashing. Then screams. They came from right above me, where the dining room would be.

  The sound of more horrified screams chased tremors up my back. A loud steady banging shuddered the ship and punctuated the continuous shrieks.

  The crew. I had to get to them to repel whatever was tormenting them. I ran down the hallway, following the light from my phone toward the elevator. The screams and crashes above grew louder, lifting the hair from my arms and building a pressure in my chest that made me want to scream, too.

  A light from inside the open vanadium room snapped on just as I passed. The shock threw spots in front of me and knocked me off balance, but out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a large, dark shape looming inside. The coppery, rotten smell assaulted my nose, so strong it seemed to dull my other senses. All except my sixth one that screamed that whatever or whoever that dark shape was, it wasn’t Randolph.

  I skidded to a stop in front of the elevator doors, and while jabbing the button continuously, risked a glance over my shoulder. The door of the vanadium room was closing, allowing only slivers of light to escape around it and throwing a giant shadow over the floor and up the opposite wall.

  Feozva, open the elevator!

  As soon as it opened, I rushed inside and hit the Floor 2 button again and again. The elevator door shut, muffling the banging and screaming above. The nail in my mouth was nearly gone; it might not be enough to drive away the spirit, or spirits. I popped another piece in my mouth with violently shaking hands. Only three left.

  On the second floor, the light that hung at the junction of the hallways dangled from a single cord again. A strong wind that came from nowhere turned its light this way and that and painted the walls in wild shadows. When I sprinted underneath it, it stopped moving. Soon the screaming stopped, too.

  I ripped open the dining room door, and Mase jumped back, eyes wide, chest heaving. Streaks of blood plastered his white thermal shirt. He held up his hands in a silent question. Deep cuts mangled his fingertips. He didn’t need to say a word; I knew he’d been trying to get out through a sealed-shut door.

  He shook his head at one hand then the other, like he was trying to figure out what just happened. A sharp ache pierced through my heart because he looked exactly how I imagined I used to. Shocked, bloodied, and terrified.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  He blinked down at me and searched my eyes with his mismatched ones. Something he saw in them—pity maybe—curled his hands into fists and twisted his features into an ugly scowl. He swept past me out the door without a word.

  After he disappeared down another hallway, I stepped through the doorway into the dining room, and a burst of sour-tinged air mixed with tobacco wafted around me. Fighting back a gag, I looked around in alarm.

  What had once been the dining room table now littered the floor with splinters of wood and red smears. Doctor Daryl leaned against the wall where Esmerelda used to be. An indentation in the titanium had taken her place, almost like a giant fist had smashed the wall. Sweat rolled down the doctor’s face while he gripped a lethal shard of wood jutting from his hip. Blood soaked his silk suit. He yanked and let out a long hiss.

  Captain Glenn stumbled from the kitchen, tears striping the blood caked to his face. He gripped my shoulder. “I’ll…” The rest of his words must’ve caught in his throat. His shoulders drooped, and he shook his head.

  Sudden laughter jumped my heartbeat. Nesbit sat in the far corner, making a pointless effort to piece the table back together again.

  “No wonder this thing fell apart,” he said. “Didn’t it used to have nails?”

  Chapter 7

  I took everything apart with the ice pick in the kitchen and pantry, then loaded my pockets with screws and washers from hinges of cabinets, an old coffee maker, the remaining nails in what used to be the table that I h
adn’t already taken, anything that had iron in it, whether it was alloy or wrought. Everything was pretty much still operational as long as the new coffee maker didn’t break any time soon. And doors on cabinets weren’t all that important anyway.

  Each piece I found had been rust-proofed with a waxy substance that had most likely been spray-bombed on every surface during this ship’s yearly inspection. My ice pick made quick work of it, though.

  But I still didn’t have enough to make the trip to deep space.

  After I unscrewed the kitchen, I cleaned up the explosion of broken dishes all over the floor and spilled food that had burst from the refrigerator and pantry. Doctor Daryl told everyone to go to the infirmary so he could tend to the injuries. And Randolph? Still no word from him.

  Lunch would have to be simple since we had a lot fewer dishes, no dining room table, and a lone, inexperienced cook who had run out of morning.

  While I scrambled around, my phone buzzed.

  MD: BIG PROBLEM! Where are you?

  What?! I finally texted back.

  When the doctor limped into the dining room, I waved him into the kitchen to his plate on the small table in the center, but he hobbled around the perimeter first to tap the pantry door, the block of kitchen knives, and a worn chip on the countertop. I watched, at a loss for why he did that every time he entered a room. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, maybe?

  He must have felt my gaze because he held up a hand and said, “I haven’t forgotten about Randolph, I promise. I’ve just been a tad…preoccupied.”

  The rest of the crew entered the kitchen, but no one spoke. It kind of amazed me that they’d come back after what had happened, but they did need to eat. If the whole ship was haunted, it wasn’t like there was any safe place to go. No one complained about the unextravagant soup and sandwiches. In fact, it seemed like their shoulders unbunched just a little while they ate. Food had some serious power over these men. As did the safe circle my iron emitted, but they couldn’t stay attached to me all day either. Well, maybe Mase could.