The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  “It’s really important that I get there,” Benjamin said.

  “Sorry, kid,” Harry said, shaking his head. “I’m not taking my boat into a cyclone for some runaway girl.”

  Charlotte, who smelled like gardenias and coconut oil, tousled Benjamin’s hair sympathetically, and they sent him over the side. He walked back up the dock, drenched with sweat and disappointment. He thought of Pip, who would’ve been able to talk his way onto that boat. Pip would be helping to take up the dock lines right now. He wondered if Pip had received his telegram and where he might be.

  Despondent and hot, Benjamin dragged himself back to Vinoray’s closed-up shop and let himself in with a key. It was no cooler inside, but at least the sun wasn’t beating down on him. He closed the door behind him and looked round.

  There was a fishy smell to the cluttered shop, and many of the jars held things from the sea: dried squid, dried sea slugs, dried octopus. There were bottles with cobras preserved in liquor, and bottles with scorpions, and bottles that contained both cobras and scorpions. The scorpions were black, the cobras coiled and gray. It wasn’t anything like his father’s shop in London.

  He tried to think clearly and consider his resources. If he could get a small amount of gold, he could make an invisibility bath and stow away on a boat, but he had no guarantee that the boat would go to the right place. Most of what he’d learned in the last year had to do with closing wounds, fighting infection, and drawing out bullets. None of it was going to get him any closer to Janie.

  Then he remembered that his father had a small amount of the avian elixir left. It was only enough to turn one person into a bird. Benjamin would become an English skylark with it—a strange and foreign-looking creature, in a land of bitterns and cormorants. And there were birds of prey here that would eat a skylark for lunch. He had seen them hunting overhead: white-bellied sea eagles and mountain hawk eagles, with great wingspans and talons for ripping apart their prey, and collared falcons and peregrines that killed with their beaks.

  The sea winds, too, were treacherous and unpredictable. Cyclone season was starting, as everyone kept reminding him, and it would be dangerous to look for a tiny island on his own. He remembered his body changing back into human form over the freezing sea and plunging into the waves. The memory made him cold, even in the heat of Manila. But Janie had rescued him from that icy sea, and now she needed his help. If no one would take him by boat, he had no choice but to go by air.

  He went upstairs to the apartment over the shop and pulled his father’s satchel from under the cot where he slept. He lifted out amber glass bottles until he found the right one. Then he tore a page from a notebook and wrote to his father.

  Dad—

  Gone to look for Janie. I know you won’t think I should, but please understand. You always say we must do what we can to right wrongs. I’m taking the avian elixir. PLEASE DON’T FOLLOW ME. I will be back when I can.

  B.

  He rolled up the note and put it in his father’s bag. He made sure the window was open. Then he opened the bottle and drank the rest of the avian elixir.

  It had the familiar, bitter, mossy taste. His skin began to tingle all over as if both arms and both legs had fallen asleep. His body tilted forward at the hips, and he felt his legs begin to shrink and lighten beneath him. Feathers burst from his prickling skin and his skull lightened. His nose and mouth drew themselves into a hard, pointed beak. His hands disappeared into feathered wing tips, and his toes into tiny talons.

  He wasn’t sweating in the heat anymore. His eyesight improved so much, it was as if he were looking through a telescope at the buildings across the city, and his hearing grew sharper. His human sense of regret at leaving his father seemed to lessen. He was a skylark, and wanted nothing more than to fly.

  He hopped up on the windowsill, scanned the sky for danger, felt the air currents moving past him, and soared out into the blue day.

  PART FOUR

  Transmutation

  1. the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form

  2. (physics) the changing of one element into another by radioactive decay, nuclear bombardment, or similar processes

  3. (biology) the conversion or transformation of one species into another

  4. (alchemy) the process of changing base metals into gold

  CHAPTER 29

  Flight

  The airplane was a 1952 Twin Beech, with two propellers. It had two pilots and six fairly comfortable passenger seats, but only three of the passenger seats were filled. Sylvia sat directly across the aisle from Janie, knitting something from pale blue wool. Magnusson sat in front of Sylvia, reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Janie watched through the window as the Great Lakes went by beneath them. She thought of her parents, down there somewhere.

  Over what must have been Wisconsin, the pilot started to circle and descend. Janie saw a narrow runway coming straight at her. They were landing sideways. She grabbed Sylvia’s arm. “We’ll crash!” she cried.

  “It’s all right,” Sylvia said. “It’s how they manage the crosswinds. He’ll straighten it out.”

  Janie watched the ground hurtle toward the side of the plane. At the last second, the plane straightened toward the runway. It rattled and bounced to a stop, and Janie realized she hadn’t been breathing. She unbuckled her seat belt and started to get up. She had to get out of this death trap.

  “Oh, no,” Magnusson said, his head touching the ceiling of the cabin as he stood. “You stay here.”

  “You’re joking,” Janie said.

  “Do I look like I’m joking?” The pilot opened the door and Magnusson climbed out.

  Janie turned to Sylvia in disbelief. “What am I going to do, run away? In a place I’ve never been?”

  “We can’t take the risk.”

  “Please, Sylvia.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re going to jail,” Janie said. “I hope you know that.”

  “We’ll be in Canada soon,” Sylvia said. “You can stretch your legs there.”

  Janie looked longingly out the window. She wanted to escape, but even more, she wanted to breathe the outside air. “I promise I won’t scream that I’ve been kidnapped by evil people who should be arrested.”

  Sylvia smiled at her. “Sorry.”

  “Just let me off the plane!” Janie cried, desperate. “Please!”

  “Canada,” Sylvia said.

  Refueled, they took off again, the plane shuddering with complaint as it regained its natural element. They flew over mountains, and the way the plane bounced and plunged in the changing air currents made Janie feel sick. Her stomach seemed to rise into her throat. She hadn’t gotten seasick on the trip to Nova Zembla, so it didn’t seem fair that now she got airsick. She wondered if the Pharmacopoeia had a good cure for nausea in its pages, and thought she would trade all the rest of the book for that one thing.

  Neither Sylvia nor Mr. Magnusson seemed bothered by the turbulence. Mr. Magnusson wore shirtsleeves and a loosened tie. He was making notes in a notebook. Sylvia was curled up against the window of the plane, asleep under the pale blue blanket she’d been knitting, with just her soft golden hair sticking out.

  They landed sideways again in Canada, at a tiny airstrip, and let Janie off the plane. “Where are we, exactly?” she asked, looking out at the empty plains.

  “You don’t need to know that,” Mr. Magnusson said. “And the attendant is deaf, so save your breath.”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Sylvia said, taking her arm.

  Janie eyed the old man in a jumpsuit refueling the plane. Sylvia steered her smartly away, across the tarmac. The wind was blowing cold and clear. There was an airplane hangar, and the fuel pumps, but there was nothing else in sight. “Where do we land next?” Janie asked.

  “Alaska,” Sylvia said.

  “And then where?” Janie asked. “The Soviet Union? They’re protective of their airspace—I don’t know if you’ve notic
ed.”

  “Magnus has many connections,” Sylvia said.

  “How can you work for him?” Janie asked. “How can you love him?”

  “He’s been very good to me,” Sylvia said. “When my brother was killed in Korea, I fell apart. I don’t think I would have made it through without Magnus. He’s been tremendously sympathetic and understanding.”

  “He’s using you,” Janie said.

  “He’s not as bad as he seems.”

  “That leaves a lot of room for badness.”

  “You’re going to be helping people, Janie,” Sylvia said. “You’ll be providing the miners with a source of fresh water.”

  “No, I’ll just save Magnusson the expense of shipping water in.”

  “It amounts to the same thing.”

  “It does not!”

  “Let’s go back to the plane.” Sylvia had a tight grip on her arm.

  Janie felt a sudden panic rising in her chest. She couldn’t let them take her. “No!” she said, trying to dig in her heels. “Help!” The man in the jumpsuit didn’t turn. Either he really was deaf, or her voice had been carried off by the wind.

  “Janie!” Sylvia caught her by both shoulders and shook her, looking into her face. “Pull it together. If you don’t, he’ll chloroform you again. You don’t want that.”

  Janie stared into Sylvia’s eyes. Sylvia was right. She didn’t want that. And she couldn’t run. She was in the middle of nowhere, in another country, with no money and no way to get home. She wanted to weep, but her eyes were dry in the cold, arid air.

  Back on the plane, Janie hugged her knees in her seat and made herself small. As they shuddered along the runway toward takeoff, she closed her eyes and imagined herself elsewhere.

  First she imagined herself in the auditorium with Raffaello kissing her, but that memory was still confusing, so she pushed it away. Benjamin on the deck of the icebreaker was the safe memory, the appropriate and innocent one: her first kiss. There were no betrayals in it, no complications. But that memory didn’t seem to have the power it had once had. It had lost some of its glow. Was that because she had kissed Raffaello? She longed for sleep, for escape. Sweet sleep. She willed it to come.

  Then she dreamed it was bright day, and she was flying. Not in an airplane, but as a bird, as she had in London with Benjamin and Pip. She was over the blue ocean, but she could dip and soar in the currents, with the wind in her feathers, instead of bouncing and shuddering in a clumsy, noisy, manmade contraption. She was grateful for the escape, and she felt stronger than she had ever been as a robin. Her wings were sturdy and she could catch every updraft, every thermal. This was bliss! This was real flying. The Wright brothers might have been brilliant and bold, but their rattling invention was a pale imitation of the effortless glory that was natural flight.

  In her dream, there were islands in the distance. The air was soft and tropical. The islands, as they grew closer, were white sand and lush green. She hoped the dream would take her down close to one of them. The sun gleamed silver on the blue water.

  Then a shadow came over her head, blocking the sun, and a terrible blow struck her in the back of the neck. Was it a knife? It held her tight. It was something with claws, a flying thing with talons, lifting her upward, and she was helpless, caught. Her heart began to race, and she understood. She wasn’t asleep. It wasn’t a dream.

  Benjamin. Something had snatched him from the sky.

  She sat up on the plane and screamed.

  CHAPTER 30

  Alistiar Beane

  The striped cat vanished, slipping away on the day Jin Lo’s childhood house was swallowed up in greenery. Jin Lo sometimes wondered if the cat had ever really been there, or if she had imagined him out of loneliness. But she remembered his small, persistent forehead, his silky body, and his rumbling purr.

  The woman next door made her a bowl of mushroom dumplings and a bowl of chicken broth with green vegetables in it. She didn’t ask about the swallowed house, or the green mound where it had been. She treated Jin Lo with a wary deference, as if she knew there were no simple answers. She brought out Jin Lo’s clean clothes, fresh and folded.

  Jin Lo walked out of the city the way she had come, and saw shimmering ghosts at every turn: children playing in the street, women sweeping, men pacing. They were there, the lost people of her city. They were doomed to haunt it. She could do nothing for them, although some of them looked at her as if they knew she had set her own ghosts free. Father, Mother, little Shun Liu, Mrs. Hsu. They had left this place, and Jin Lo could leave it, too.

  She arrived at the train station with just enough time to buy a ticket and board before the train began to move. She would go back to the town where she had been apprenticed to the master chemist, and where she hadn’t gone to collect her mail for two years.

  She slept in her seat on the train. When she woke, she ate a hard-boiled egg. Another passenger on the train gave her a ball of rice and a cup of tea, and she smiled in thanks. The muscles in her face were so stiff and unused that she felt like a statue grimacing, but the man didn’t recoil, so she guessed she looked something like a human being.

  At her station, she got off the train and walked toward the post office. The first time she had arrived here, she had been an orphaned child, walking double time to keep up with the long, purposeful stride of the missionary. She had twisted and craned her neck to look at the strange, intimidating sights around her. Now the town looked drab and gray, and very small. She wished she had the striped cat for company.

  At the post office, her vocal cords felt dry and unused, but she made herself understood, and they gave her a sack of mail. She sat on a bench in a small park and began to sort through it.

  There were letters from colleagues within China, some of them two years old, and a letter from the university in Beijing. There was a coded letter from Marcus Burrows, postmarked before she left for London to join him for the voyage to Nova Zembla—it was pointless to decode now.

  That the mail hadn’t been seized was a good sign. No one was tracking her. Then a thought made her freeze with an envelope in her hand: Maybe the authorities did know everything. Maybe they had left the sack of mail untouched so she would think they weren’t on her trail.

  She scanned the park, and saw no watchers. Jin Lo looked down at the pile of envelopes again and pulled free a small envelope with her address typed on the front. It was a telegram, and it was recent: dated two days before. She tore it open and read the typed message:

  NEED HELP. PLEASE COME. SEND REPLY WITH CONFIRMATION TO ALISTIAR BEANE, 151 CALLE ILANG-ILANG, MANILA.

  Alistair Beane, deliberately misspelled as Alistiar, was the apothecary’s code name, to be used in an emergency. To confirm that she had received the telegram, Jin Lo was supposed to reply with her own alias, which was Mrs. Josef Bankes, after the botanist and explorer Joseph Banks.

  She held the telegram in her hand. She had set her family free. Now her friends needed her help. It seemed very simple. The telegram had been sent just in time for her to retrieve it. Perhaps the world was orderly after all, and not chaotic and random.

  Either way, she had to make a decision. She sifted through the rest of the mail to make sure there was nothing else recent, and went back to the post office to ask where she could send a telegram.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Sea Eagle

  Benjamin left Manila as a nervous skylark, keeping an eye out for hungry falcons, but after a while he settled into the pleasure of flying and the absorbing work of navigating in the empty sky. The sea was bright turquoise and deep blue, marked by reefs and depths and currents, the air shot through with lacy clouds. Benjamin caught thermals that let him rest his wings, and flew southwest along the coast of the Philippines, charting the islands along the remembered path in his head.

  It was lonely, flying by himself. On the way to Nova Zembla, he’d had Janie and his father and Jin Lo and Count Vili for company. Count Vili, an albatross with a vast wingspan, had na
vigated. Now Benjamin had no one. He whistled to himself. He looked for fish, although he wouldn’t have known how to catch one, and couldn’t imagine swallowing it raw—bones and scales and all. He saw an ominous gray shadow beneath the waves, at least twelve feet long. It made his speedy skylark’s heart race even faster, knowing he might change into a boy and plummet into the water.

  The wind came up, surprisingly strong. The sky on the horizon was dark blue like a bruise, and it seemed to be moving toward him, fast. Benjamin tried to remember what he knew about cyclones, how they rotated in the same direction as the earth, how they strengthened as evaporated water from the ocean rose and condensed in the air, how the core was always the warmest part. But none of that helped him decide what to do as the storm picked up his tiny bird’s body and whipped him across the sky. He couldn’t see anything, with the wind and pelting rain in his eyes. When he stretched out his wings to ride the air currents, strange gusts caught him so hard, he feared his fragile bones might break. On and on the storm battered him. Sometimes he didn’t know which direction was the ocean and which the wet sky. He had seen dead birds washed up on beaches after storms before, and he began to fear he might become one of them.

  And then suddenly it was still and warm. There were other birds—exhausted, wet, and now flying weakly. He thought he might have lost consciousness, because the warm stillness had the surreal quality of a dream. He was in the eye of the storm, trapped in the center of it, being carried wherever it decided to take him. He considered fighting his way back into the swirling winds, but it seemed too dangerous. He didn’t think he could survive that battering much longer. So he let himself be carried along with this bedraggled aviary in the strange warm core.

  Hours later, or maybe days, he found himself huddled beneath a stand of trees, ragged and disoriented and missing feathers. As he rested there, he saw other windblown birds eating seeds off the ground. Benjamin was hungry, and drew nearer. The storm-tossed birds darted away, full of mistrust. There was something about his skylark form that made the real birds uneasy.