The Siren Song

by Anne Ursu

  The Observation Lounge was filled with cozy-looking chairs and couches, and a few passengers were perched in various groupings, reading or playing cards or talking quietly. The whole room was surrounded by windows, giving a close-up view of the now full-on storm. As rain poured down, lightning cracked above, and the ship rocked in the high waves, Charlotte felt as if she and her fellow passengers had taken refuge inside a fragile glass bubble that floated inside the storm. A bubble with nice couches, of course, and all the soda you could drink.

  There was a monitor in the middle of the lounge that had a tracking system to show where in the world the ship was. Charlotte looked at the screen carefully, studying the familiar coastline of the eastern seaboard. Off to the left was the coast of North Carolina, and as the ship blinked its way steadily on, Charlotte noted with some surprise that they were actually heading directly away from the shore.

  Shrugging, she went over to the bar and ordered a ginger ale from the bartender (whose name was Ben, according to his name tag).

  “Some storm, huh?” he said to her, raising his voice over the noise of rain beating down the windows.

  “Yeah,” Charlotte mumbled. “I was going to lie in the sun….”

  Ben smiled kindly. “I’m afraid you won’t get much of that done today. But there are other things to do. Look in here.” He motioned to a binder that contained the day’s newsletter.

  Without much enthusiasm, Charlotte skimmed through the events: trivia tournament, computer lounge orientation (Cute, she thought. Teaching old people to use e-mail!), bridge lessons, lectures, fitness classes. Nothing remotely interesting.

  Just then the ship lurched to the right, and Charlotte’s stool rocked to the side. Around her, passengers gasped and cups clinked and slid, while Charlotte grabbed for the side of the bar to steady herself.

  “You all right?” Ben said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I’m afraid the floor isn’t.” She pointed. Her glass of ginger ale had slid off the bar and smashed on the ground.

  “I’ll get that,” Ben said. “Don’t move.”

  As the bartender grabbed a broom and emerged from behind the bar, Charlotte gazed around the room, watching people steady themselves. The ship took another lurch and Ben stumbled violently, while two teacups on a table behind Charlotte went sliding off the table and crashed to the floor. Just then her eye caught movement on the deck outside in the storm, where no one would want to be. She squinted. Someone who worked on the ship was standing there, someone dressed in the white coveralls of the crew. He was smaller than the other crew members and at first glance looked more like a kid, like someone Charlotte’s age, than someone who would be part of the crew. Weren’t there child labor laws at sea? She turned to look more carefully, but he was gone.

  Another lurch, the stool bobbled, and the binder with the newsletters dropped to the floor. Charlotte thought this seemed like a pretty good time to get lower to the ground, and she hopped off the stool. The binder lay open and, as she picked it up, she noticed a familiar pair of cat-like eyes staring out at her. On the back of the newsletter was a picture of the woman she’d seen in the hallway—she was the singer her parents had been drooling over. Apparently they hadn’t seen her manners.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” Ben asked. “Have you heard her?”

  “No, no, I haven’t.” Charlotte looked up at him.

  “She’s supposed to be amazing. Our regular singer didn’t show up, and somehow they got this woman. She’s going to perform for the crew later.”

  Charlotte nodded noncommittally, then straightened herself and placed the binder back on the bar. The ship continued to rock back and forth emphatically, and she felt something inside her head lurch as if trying to catch up. The effect was making her rather queasy, so she decided she might go back to her room, and just as she moved toward the door she saw a flash of white outside on the deck again. Charlotte looked up to find the crew boy from before standing outside, peering at her. Then he was gone again in a flash, but not before she’d gotten a good look at him. She stood up and ran out of the lounge onto the stormy deck, but there was no sign of the boy. She stood, looking around wildly, as the wind whipped rain against her face. She needed to see him again; she needed to be sure. For the boy looked exactly like Jason Hart.

  CHAPTER 15

  Secret Agent Girl

  CHARLOTTE STOOD ON THE DECK IN THE WIND AND rain looking around for the boy who might be Jason Hart. Who looked exactly like Jason Hart. In fact, if it weren’t absolutely impossible that Jason Hart was there on the cruise, she would say that the boy she saw was, beyond a doubt, Jason Hart. But it was impossible. Wasn’t it?

  And if it was him—which would be absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent impossible—what on Earth would he be doing there? Had he actually run away? If he had, running off to join a cruise ship made a certain amount of sense, like running off to join the circus or something. If you were going to run away, it would be a good way not to get caught.

  But were cruise ships normally in the habit of employing eighth-grade boys? Charlotte doubted it. Maybe he lied about his age, maybe he had something forged, maybe he had connections. Maybe it was nothing.

  But really. If it was him—if it really was him—was Charlotte supposed to believe that he had just happened to join the crew of the ship she was currently on? That it was all some sort of magical coincidence?

  So if he was there, the question was why. Did he want something from Charlotte? Had someone sent him?

  Jason Hart was on the ship. Yes, it was crazy. Yes, it was impossible. But so was, say, stealing children’s shadows to make a giant army or taking a city bus to the Underworld to chat up Hades, so, really, as her gym teacher often said, nothing is impossible as long as you try hard enough.

  Charlotte stood there in the storm, awash in befuddlement, as water poured down on top of her. The deck had become slick in the rain, and as the ship rocked to the right, she lost her footing and fell, hitting her head on the ship’s railing as she went down. She yelped and sat on the soaking wet ground holding her head. Now she was befuddled and suffering from a major head injury. Charlotte grabbed onto the offending rail and started to pull herself up. What was she doing standing there? She had to find Jason. She wasn’t going to be caught off guard again—whatever was in store for her, Charlotte was going to meet it head-on. How’s that for taking responsibility?

  Just then the door to the lounge opened, and Ben’s head poked out. “What are you doing?” he yelled. “It’s not safe out here. Get inside!”

  “Right,” said Charlotte, pulling herself up and ducking inside the lounge again. She was absolutely soaking, and the carpet underneath her grew wet in sympathy.

  “What in the world were you doing?” asked Ben, not unkindly.

  “I thought I saw someone I knew,” Charlotte said. “I mean, a crew member.”

  “A crew member?” Ben shook his head. “We stay off the decks in weather like this. Sometimes people have to, but there’s nothing out there”—he motioned to the bow of the ship—“for anyone to do. And even if there were, well, it’s just not safe right now.”

  “Yeah,” said Charlotte. “I mean, I was surprised. Do you have a new crew member, a guy in coveralls, about my age?”

  “About your age? No, we wouldn’t. The youngest crew member is eighteen.”

  “Well, maybe he lied. His name is Jason, and he’s got dark hair and green eyes and…” Charlotte stopped herself. She was about to describe him as incredibly cute, but Ben might not see it that way.

  “Not that I know of,” he said. “Look, why don’t you go dry off? You don’t want to get sick for the rest of the cruise. Anyway,” he added with a smile, “you’re messing up my lounge.”

  “Right,” Charlotte said, turning to go.

  “And try to stay inside,” he called after her.

  She left the lounge, leaving a nice trail of water behind her like a wet dog. Whatever—she could shiver all day lon
g; this was more important.

  Charlotte stood in the hallway, studying the deck plan next to the elevator. On this level there were only three ways to access the strip of deck at the bow of the ship where Jason had been: the glass door in the lounge that Charlotte had gone through, and the doors on either side of the hallway. He didn’t come into the lounge, obviously, and if he’d gone all the way around to the hallway door on the other side (“Starboard,” her father would have said), Charlotte would have seen him. The Observation Lounge was all windows. (Unless, of course, he could transport himself, disapparate, or move faster than the eye could see. Charlotte wasn’t ruling anything out.)

  But if he didn’t have magical speed-of-light/transporting/apparating abilities, and he didn’t go through the lounge or the starboard hallway door, and there weren’t any secret passageways Charlotte didn’t know about, he must have gone through the door in front of which she was currently standing.

  From there, there were a few places to go. You could walk about ten feet and be outside again. The deck was open from there all the way to the back, except for the engine room at the stern. Given what had happened to her, Charlotte thought that if anyone had tried to walk all that way outside, he’d be lying in the middle of the deck somewhere with bones sticking out.

  Other than that door, there was the main stairway that Charlotte had come up earlier, an elevator, and a nondescript door marked CREW ONLY.

  Well.

  Charlotte studied the door, which was so plain and white it looked as if it were trying to hide its own presence, then looked to her right and her left and reached her hand out to the knob. It wouldn’t turn. She started fumbling with it, carefully checking around her for any sign of company, when her eyes caught some drip marks on the carpet.

  She was still leaving a trail wherever she went, she could tell that—there was a trail from the lounge entrance right up to the Sky Bar exit and back to the crew only door. But as she studied the carpet, she found there was another path, one that she had not made, leading toward the main staircase. Squaring her jaw, Charlotte followed it.

  Down the stairs she went, past Deck Seven, Deck Six, Deck Five. The trail was growing fainter, but she could still see it, until about halfway down to Deck Three, and then it disappeared.

  Charlotte climbed down the rest of the staircase to Deck Three. She’d stopped leaving a trail too by this point, but she still felt as if she’d been dipped in a vat of saltwater. She had passed a few passengers and some crew on her way down the stairs, and each one of them regarded her as if she were some kind of swamp thing. She found herself feeling grateful that the singer had not come by.

  Charlotte looked around. She was standing in front of the main restaurant. They’d eaten there the night before, but they’d come down on the restaurant’s other side. She’d never been down here before.

  She stood in the middle of the hallway, chewing her lip. According to the deck plan, in front of her there was just the ship’s doctor’s office and then some officers’ accommodations. On her other side was the restaurant, and behind that was the galley. Is that where he’d gone? Was he a cook or a dishwasher or something? Charlotte took a step toward the restaurant, when someone brushed passed her. It was one of the waiters she’d seen at breakfast this morning, and he smiled at her in greeting as he headed toward the officers’ quarters, then turned abruptly, got out a key card, and put it in a door that was so plain and white that Charlotte hadn’t noticed it before. CREW ONLY, it read.

  The door closed behind the waiter, and Charlotte hurried over to try the handle. No good. It was locked. But she was not going to be fazed; she got through the Underworld into Hades’s Palace, she could get through a simple crew door. Charlotte tucked herself into a small passageway beside the door and waited for someone to come.

  It didn’t take long. Two stewardesses burst through the door chatting so intensely that they did not notice the redheaded girl who came around the corner and grabbed the door before it could swing closed, nor did they notice as she ducked behind it and disappeared from the hallway.

  Charlotte was by a plain concrete stairwell. She could hear voices coming from the hall below. In front of her was another door that read SHIP’S OFFICERS ONLY. It had a space for a key card too, but Charlotte didn’t need to go in there. She’d studied the ship’s maps in all the cruise literature the night before, and what she needed was on Deck Two—the crew’s quarters.

  Slowly, carefully, she made her way down the stairs. She wasn’t quite sure exactly how she was going to get away with sneaking around the crew’s quarters. If Charlotte were a secret agent, she would find a nearby crew member of roughly her build, whack her on the head with something, and take her coveralls. But Charlotte, alas, was not a secret agent and didn’t really want to go around whacking people on the head, anyway. It just didn’t seem nice.

  Or she could make her way over to the laundry and steal some coveralls or a stewardess outfit or something, and she wouldn’t even have to hit anyone over the head. Of course, there might not exactly be outfits lying around, and even if there were, the people in the laundry might notice if some girl wandered over and took one.

  Charlotte sighed. This would be so much easier if she were a secret agent. But there was nothing else to do but walk through the hallways and act like she belonged. Surely members of the crew had families. Surely the crew changed all the time, and no one could keep track of who was who. Surely there were different thirteen-year-old girls wandering through the crew’s quarters every day.

  Right?

  With a shake of her wet, clumpy hair, Charlotte rounded the corner and descended the last few stairs. Before her was a tremendously long, wide, sterile-looking hallway, one that seemed to travel half the length of the ship. There was a door at the end, and she guessed that the crew’s quarters lay ahead and the rooms here were dedicated to some of the ship’s functions. Indeed, activity was everywhere; at Charlotte’s end of the hallway, people were hurrying in and out of rooms looking busy. The first room was cavernous and filled with a cacophony of humming and banging noises. As she approached, the air thickened with steam. The laundry, she realized. There were no uniforms just waiting by the door for her to borrow, which seemed awfully inconsiderate. She pressed herself against the doorway and peeked in, trying to get a look at each person, but no one among the steamers, the pressers, the folders, the sorters, or the scrubbers seemed to be Jason.

  On the other side of the hallway was a smaller room, from which the smell of baking bread oozed into the hallway. Inside, two people were kneading large lumps of dough while another was taking loaves of bread out of the oven. Charlotte was mesmerized—it hadn’t occurred to her everything that must go into making dinner for the whole ship, and as she watched the man place the loaves of bread on the counter, he looked up, and his eyes seemed to meet hers. She gasped and quickly ducked away.

  Nice one, Mielswetzski, she told herself.

  She tried to look as nondescript as possible as she continued through the long hallway through the bowels of the ship, but as people kept passing her and no one stopped her, she became more confident. No one cared about a thirteen-year-old girl wandering the hallways; there was bread to be made and clothes to be washed and a ship to run! We’re busy here, people! Let’s move it along!

  It was at that precise moment that a rough hand landed on her shoulder and a voice growled, “What are you doing here?”

  Charlotte whirled around. In front of her was a mustached man in a white officer’s uniform who looked very cross indeed. A badge pinned on his chest read, quite clearly, SECURITY.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Charlotte said, batting her eyes. “I got lost!”

  “Lost, eh?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Charlotte. “I was supposed to meet my parents by the doctor’s office—my mom’s not feeling well, she says it’s nothing serious, but I really can’t help but worry, I mean, she’s my mom. Since the operation, it’s been hard. Well, anyway, if you could
just point me in the right direction?”

  As the security officer squinted down at her, Charlotte saw a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head and saw a small, dark-haired form move from a room at the end of the hallway through the door to the crew’s quarters. Jason.

  “Look!” Charlotte said. “That boy. Do you know him?”

  The security man straightened. “Boy, huh? Did you come down here to see a boy? Aren’t you a little young?”

  “No!” Charlotte exclaimed, “it’s not like that!”

  “Come with me.” With a curt nod, the man led her back through the hallway up the concrete stairwell, through the plain white door, and out into the carpeted hallway of Deck Three. “In there,” he said, motioning to a small office marked SECURITY. “Sit. Let me see your room card.” He swiped it into his computer, squinted at the screen, and muttered, “Meals-wet-ski, huh? Those are your parents you’re with? Well, let’s see what they have to say about this.” He picked up the phone.

  “Wait!” Charlotte said. “I’m sorry. I really am. I was looking for a boy, yes, but I thought he was someone I knew—”

  But the man was not listening. “Yes, Mrs. Mielswetzski? This is Lieutenant Rogers at the security desk on Deck Three. Could you come down here right now? Thank you.” He hung up and shook his head at Charlotte. “Do you think you can just have the run of the place? There are rules, you know. There are procedures. I’m sure your parents let you do whatever you want at home, but out in the real world there are laws.”

  He continued his lecture while Charlotte slumped even farther down in her seat, waiting for the coming of her doom.

  The doom arrived far too quickly for Charlotte’s taste. She could never get them to, say, go out to eat on time, but there was nothing like a call from security to get her parents moving. They filed into the small office, and as soon as they saw their daughter, their faces grew dark. Of course, Charlotte thought, they automatically assume it’s something bad. Maybe it was something good. Maybe Charlotte had just single-handedly thwarted a pirate attack and the security guy wanted to commend her.