by Carrie Patel
Jane gasped as she cannoned into a woman coming around the corner at a fast clip.
“What’re you doing aki?” the woman asked, glaring at Jane as if the collision were entirely her fault. In her loose, ragged shirt and trousers, she could have been anyone, but the pin on her collar marked her as a segundo – an officer of the ship.
“Final checks,” Jane mumbled, trying to keep her answer – and her accent – as ambiguous as possible. She ducked her head a little lower.
“Shoulda finished twenty minutes antes,” the woman said, suspicious.
Jane remembered that on Salvage, people didn’t grovel and scrape. They talked back, even to authority.
“Ee so? Nobody tells me,” Jane said, mimicking the rhythmic accent and surly demeanor of the Salvagers.
The woman grunted. She seemed to buy it. “Pass to the hangar. The aviso’s in progress.”
Jane was evidently supposed to know where the hangar was, so she nodded and turned toward the hallway the woman had just vacated, figuring it was her safest bet.
The commotion coming from belowdecks sounded louder. Jane found herself both wondering and dreading what she might find there.
She took another stairway down and after that, the noise of the crowd was guide enough. She followed it to an immense, high-ceilinged room, almost as high as the ballroom in Brummell Hall and more than twice as long. Jane had to pinch herself when she remembered that this room was only one part (albeit an enormous one) of the great ship Kennedy.
And it was full of people.
Most of them were gathered at the other end of the hangar, where the speaker, little more than a smudge of color from here, stood on a catwalk overlooking them all. As the cheers and applause of the crowd died down he raised his voice, which was little more than a forceful mumble at this distance.
She noticed a sign for the galley. It pointed to the other side of the ship, across the hangar and its massive crowd. Perhaps she could find some food there to take to Roman – that would provide a likely enough story for asking directions to the brig.
For a moment, she considered going up another couple of decks and cutting across that way, but that carried the risk of running into another prowling segundo. Easier to blend in among the crowd.
Jane pressed forward, keeping her head down and her pace even. The rocking deck helped. Everyone was swaying and jostling to keep their balance, and she used the collective motion to slip ahead. Under other circumstances, the sight of a room full of serious, stern people tripping over themselves as they slid around the room together would have been funny, but as it was Jane felt her heart in her mouth every time she bumped into someone.
She also found herself wondering what the speaker was saying to leave everyone else so serious and stern.
She was halfway across the hangar before she could make anything out.
“– tyranny of… Continent–”
At least, that was what it sounded like. But Salvagers were always going on about the twin evils of the Continent on one coast and the buried cities on the other. She kept weaving forward.
“– the almirante’s idiocy–”
Something unpleasant tingled through Jane’s blood. However brusque Salvagers were with one another, and even with the segundos, they never criticized the almirante. At best, denunciatory speech was punished with a few hard shifts cleaning the latrines. At worst, it was mutiny, which was punishable by death – casting out.
Jane had internalized that thoroughly enough that even hearing this kind of talk made her feel nervous and exposed.
“– this churn… a bendiction from God–”
The hairs rose along the back of Jane’s neck. The wind and waves were playing the hull like a great drum, and the hangar echoed horribly, and half of the speaker’s words sounded like mush, but there was no mistaking the other half.
This reminded her of the exchange she and Roman had overheard in the engine room – about the future of Salvage, the destiny of the Kennedy, and strange “bendictions” from God.
She hazarded a glance at the faces of the men and women around her. She’d taken their rigid expressions for fear at the storm and their somberness for concentration with fundamental problems of gravity, but she realized now that she’d misread them completely.
These were the deadly earnest faces of men and women committing themselves to a desperate act of high treason. And Jane had seen more than enough of that for one lifetime.
“– so long we tell… do not hear–”
She wanted to get away as soon as possible, but she still had to find Roman. She’d made it more than halfway through the hangar. Just past the catwalk where the speaker roosted were more doors. All she had to do to reach them was muscle and squirm through a few hundred packed, angry people.
At least she’d had practice.
Jane continued to move with the rocking of the ship, disguising her maneuvering as counterbalancing. And, as short as she was, no one seemed to notice her elbowing ahead. Or no one cared.
She was able to catch more of the speaker’s tirade as she got closer, too.
“– afinal, we have the opportunity ee the recourses to escape.”
A raucous cheer went up from the crowd. Jane joined in, shouting and clapping her sweat-slick hands.
“As the churn gives us passage through the flotilla, God gives us a ticket to liberty! A motor that does not fatigue o succumb to corruption!”
Another cheer went up. Jane couldn’t have said what it was, but something in the speech was turning her belly to ice.
“Companyeros! With us is the Continental fugitive! The disappeared prince whose blood remedies disease ee waters terrens.”
Jane didn’t understand what the speaker meant, but he was talking about Roman. He had to be.
“With his blood, we buy our future!”
Jane followed the next chorus of whooping and applause to the speaker and his escort, who were now standing almost directly over her. She couldn’t make out the details of their faces, but their clothes were stained and spattered with dark red patches.
Blood.
Surely they wouldn’t have killed Roman – they needed him alive. She told herself as much again and again, but it didn’t stem the dread rising in her chest.
She needed to find him. Fast.
The doors leading out of the hangar were just a stone’s throw away. Jane mimicked the zealous expression she saw on the faces around her and wove her way toward the exit.
She had just reached it when a humorless young man stepped in front of her.
“Discourteous to abandon the capitan’s talk, no?”
Before Jane could pick an excuse, the lady next to him stepped forward.
“Companyera,” she said, “what’s this with your hand?”
Jane looked at her left hand. The finger that had lost a nail was still bleeding impressively.
“Accident,” Jane said. “Just want to clean it up.” She held it out toward the young man.
He stepped back. “Use the second head. First ess still a disaster.” He blanched, though Jane didn’t have time to consider whether it was at her bleeding finger or the state of the bathroom. She hurried on. Signs for the galley pointed ahead, beyond the bathrooms.
She wondered if all of the Kennedy’s crew was as eager to break away as the people in the hangar. Salvagers were loyal to their capitans, but mustering a rebellion of hundreds seemed like an iffy endeavor.
Unless, of course, the ringleader and his collaborators were counting on the bulk of the crew to be too disorganized – or too afraid – to stop them. Maybe some of the others in the crowd had been doing the same thing she had – putting on an act while they navigated their way to an exit.
Maybe she could find someone who’d be sympathetic.
She continued along the corridor where it seemed widest, following the thick red stripe along the bulkhead. At the first major junction, the stripe blurred and dripped, as if it had been smeared.
> Except it hadn’t, of course. No, Jane was looking at bloodstains. And they weren’t just on the bulkhead. They streaked the deck and the pipes snaking across the ceiling in long, distorted handprints.
And they seemed to lead toward the door on her left.
She pressed her ear to the cool metal, careful to avoid touching the blood. Silence.
She didn’t really want to see what was on the other side, but she felt she should. If only to reassure herself that it wasn’t Roman.
Jane took a deep breath and pushed the door open with a trembling hand. She fixed her eyes on her toes and raised them slowly, degree by degree.
She saw a broken tile floor stamped with red bootprints.
A pool of blood sloshing with the waves and oozing down the drain.
Hands. Legs. Bodies, sprawled and heaped on the floor.
And for one awful moment, they all had cotton-white hair, aquiline noses, and blue eyes that stared back at her.
But the moment passed, and Jane saw that none of them were Ruthers, and they didn’t appear to be Roman, either. Jane felt relief, and almost as quickly, shame.
“Ah.”
Jane’s heart thudded. She turned. A man sat slumped against the wall, his head resting against the first in a row of metal basins.
He was looking back at her.
“Y-yes?” Jane said. Words felt as slippery as oil on her tongue.
He opened his mouth for a long time before he managed another sound. “Be,” he finally said.
Jane waited for the rest, but he only stared back, his mouth opening and closing silently.
“Be?” Jane said. “You want to be something?” She felt silly and helpless asking a dying man for clarification on what could be the ramblings of a delirious brain, but it seemed right to acknowledge him. And as much as she hated being in this room filled with death, it seemed wrong to leave.
So she knelt, braced herself against the wall, and took one of his hands in hers.
“What can I do?”
His eyes found hers and sparked.
“Trade,” he groaned.
“Trade?” Jane asked. “You want to – oh.” She swallowed. “You were betrayed.”
The dying man moaned one long syllable, his eyes rolling back in his head. The ship rocked, unbalancing her for one perilous second.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Then she realized she could offer him more than sympathy. “You can help me get back at them.”
The man’s eyes circled back to her and widened with interest.
“There’s a prisoner here. Roman Arnault.” Saying his name still felt like a breach of trust, though she couldn’t imagine it would matter under the circumstances. “Help me find him, and I’ll take him from the ones who betrayed you.”
The man’s paper-dry tongue darted between his lips. “Kill.”
Dread shivered down Jane’s spine. “What?”
“Kill him.”
The words left her cold. Still, she knew what she had to say. “Of course. Tell me where he is.”
The dying man closed his eyes long enough that Jane thought she’d lost him. But then his throat bobbed in one slow, smooth motion.
“One. Thirty-two. Two. L.”
It sounded like gibberish, but the man spoke slowly and carefully, and when Jane repeated the same sequence back, he groaned softly.
She’d seen codes like that written around the ship. She hadn’t given much thought to what they might mean, but now she suspected they were directions, albeit strange ones.
“Thank you,” Jane said. “Which way?”
He gazed toward the left, down the corridor she had just crossed.
It wasn’t much, but it would have to be enough.
Jane gave his hand a final squeeze and tried to ignore the cold feeling seeping into her bones.
The racket from the hangar was still dimly audible. She watched the bulkheads, using the numbers to guide her. She found 1-32-4-A. Roman had to be near.
She turned a corner and saw what she’d hoped and dreaded: a cluster of guards leaning against the bulkhead.
They were guarding Roman. They had to be. She just needed to get rid of them.
Jane ducked back around the corridor. She guessed there were three or four, but it was hard to tell from the way they stood together in the narrow space.
The ship rocked, and Jane grabbed the handrail to steady herself. She didn’t imagine she’d be able to talk her way past the guards, and her original idea of bringing something from the galley wouldn’t be enough, so she’d need to get them away from their post.
She needed a distraction.
Jane went back the way she’d come. If she’d learned one thing from her adventures with Roman, it was that there was always something within reach that you could use if you looked hard enough.
She checked the first compartment. It was a stateroom with two stacked beds, a tiny closet filled with clothes, and a cracked mirror. The next compartment wasn’t much different. The next was storage for folded canvas sheets and machine parts.
The hangar bay wasn’t far off. That might be the best place to cause a stir, though what she’d do and how she’d get away –
The boat leaned dangerously, and Jane clung to the railing with both hands. As she did, she saw something strange fixed to the bulkhead.
It was a box about the size of her open hand. It was painted red and placed at eye level.
It said: FIRE. And below that was a black tab that read “PUSH IN PULL DOWN.”
The meaning was ambiguous – was it supposed to create a fire? How could a little red box accomplish that, and what would be the purpose?
Jane didn’t know any of that, but she was reasonably sure that, whatever else it did, it would cause a suitable distraction.
So she pushed the black tab and pulled down. Then she waited.
For two long seconds, nothing happened. Then a shrill alarm bleated and echoed down the passageway.
Jane had never heard anything like it and would be happy if she never did again. It sounded as if the whole ship were screaming at her in its rusty, disused voice. Lights strobed to life, brighter by far than the ones that lit the rest of the ship.
The burst of sound and light disoriented her, but soon she heard commotion coming from the direction of the guards. She ducked into the storage compartment and pressed an ear to the bulkhead, listening for the sound of running men over the warbling, shrieking alarm.
Their voices and footsteps blended into a cacophonous drone, moving back toward the hangar bay. She gave them half a minute before poking her head back into the passageway.
It was empty. Though it was only a matter of time before the crowd of hundreds boiled out of the hangar bay to hunt down the source of the commotion.
Jane hurried toward Roman’s compartment. The strobe was dizzying, and she kept her gaze low to avoid the worst of it. She couldn’t believe how well this was working – if they fled in the opposite direction of the hangar bay, they could probably avoid running into any –
A hand snagged her arm, and two hard eyes met hers.
“What’re you doing?” The guard had been standing behind the bulkhead, and Jane hadn’t seen him.
“The alarm!” Jane said through the sudden dryness in her mouth. “There’s a fire near the hangar bay – you’ve got to hurry!”
It was an admirable effort, but the guard wasn’t buying it.
In fact, he was raising his baton.
And the compartment door was opening at his back.
The hinges shrieked, and the guard began to turn. Roman appeared behind him, a series of slow-motion images in the flashing light.
“Move!” he shouted.
Jane dodged to the side, and Roman drove his shoulder into the guard’s back. He flew across the narrow passageway, and his head slammed into the bulkhead with a crack that made Jane wince. He crumpled to the floor with a cry of pain that cut through the siren.
Roman stood in the doorway, lookin
g both surprised and pleased despite the danger. The door that swung open and closed behind him revealed a plain stateroom with a thin cot.
Jane blinked, trying to piece together what had just transpired around the chaos of light, noise, and her own thudding heart.
Roman raised his cuffed hands and held up a pin and a crooked length of wire. “Very carefully.”
She felt warm all over. “Were you waiting for–”
“An opportunity.” He grinned. And reached his shackled hands toward her, drawing her close and –
The ship rolled again, flinging Jane to the deck and Roman back toward the compartment. He grabbed at the edge of the bulkhead.
“The key! Quick!” he said.
Jane scrambled to get her bearings. The guard was still on the floor, curled up like a dying insect and blinking through his pain. Jane took advantage of his disorientation and dove for his pockets.
He grabbed at her wrists with one hand. “Whub ye hink ye doon?”
She twisted out of his grasp easily enough, but his thrashing was making her task more difficult than it should have been.
He let out a gurgling laugh and spat a bloody mass – maybe a chunk of tongue, maybe not – onto his chest. “Where ye gung go? Yer onna hip.”
She tore one hand away again, plunging the other behind his belt. Her fingers found metal.
The deck swayed, and Jane fought to keep her grip. The warbling siren and the flaring lights were giving her a headache. Then the man laughed again, and Jane saw the baton in his other hand, already rising over his head to come down on hers.
Just then, Roman’s boot swung into the guard’s neck. With a strangled cry, the guard released both Jane and the baton. She pulled the key out from under him and scooted away.
“They’ll be back any minute now,” Roman said, holding out his hands again. Jane fumbled with the key, fighting the swaying motion of the ship and the disorientation of the strobing lights.
Finally, the key clicked into place and the cuffs sprang open.
“This way,” Roman said, heading down the passageway. Toward the hangar.
“Not that way!” Jane said.
“You know another way outside?” Roman asked, following.
“Let’s get up a few decks first.”