Worldshaper

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Worldshaper Page 29

by Edward Willett


  A goal which continued to elude him, because Shawna and Yatsar continued to elude him, despite his having almost the entire law enforcement and military apparatus of the United States and other countries at his disposal. The missing sailboat Amazon had not gone down: he could be certain of that since he would know instantly if Shawna died. He suspected, though he was less certain of it, that he would also sense Yatsar’s death.

  Therefore, the boat had to be somewhere beneath the extensive layer of low gray cloud that was all that remained of the now-dissipated storm, which showed no sign at all of lifting. More of Shawna’s work, no doubt. Radar showed nothing beneath that cloud, even though wave heights were now too low to block the yacht’s reflection: Shawna might have arranged that, as well. The ceiling was so low aerial searches were all but useless. Visibility at sea level was limited to less than a mile in heavy mist. Spotting a small vessel under those conditions would be a miracle, and as long as Keys lived, the Adversary couldn’t quite manage one.

  Of course, by now Amazon might have turned back toward shore, or turned due north or south, the straight-out-to-sea episode nothing but a red herring to keep him looking one way while Yatsar took Shawna in an entirely different direction, to wherever he would open the next Portal.

  The Adversary poured another cup of coffee from the carafe the attentive Emerald Palace staff had provided, sat back in the black office chair, and sipped the bitter liquid. The multiple monitors showed multiple feeds from multiple vessels and multiple aircraft, but in all of them, he saw only multiple versions of the same dull, blank grayness.

  He had sent all of the remaining members of his cadre except for his two-man bodyguard to the USS Bonhomme Richard, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship involved in the search. If . . . when . . . Amazon was sighted, its crew would be flown to the vessel, where his cadre would kill Shawna and secure Yatsar until the Adversary could join them.

  The Adversary had done all he could do. For amusement, he turned his attention to a video feed showing protestors being tear-gassed on Canada’s Parliament Hill and settled in to wait.

  * * *

  We sailed all day across gray seas beneath gray skies. The waves would have seemed monstrous to me two days before; after the storm, they seemed next door to a dead calm. The motion didn’t upset my stomach at all, and I gladly ate a hot breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, which seemed like the first really good meal I’d had in days . . . probably, I realized upon reflection, because it was the first really good meal I’d had in days.

  I filled a plate for Julia, and took it to the door of her cabin. Karl had said he’d locked it, but of course it only locked from the inside. What he’d actually done was tie the sliding door closed with a piece of rope, which ran through its handle and was knotted around a stanchion supporting the companionway steps. I put the plate on one of the steps, untied the door, then knocked. “Julia.”

  “Go to hell,” Julia said. “Whoever you are.”

  “I have food,” I said. “Bacon and eggs. The door’s open, if you want it.”

  A pause. Then the door slid open. Julia sat on the edge of the bed—there was barely space between it and the door to accommodate her feet, so all she’d had to do to reach the door was lean forward. I held out the plate, and she took it hungrily. I sat on the steps and watched her as she ate.

  When she’d finished, she handed me the plate. I put it on the step beside me. “Where are you taking me?” she demanded then. The light spilling down from the cockpit lit her face enough that I could see her eyes were red and watery.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “Does he?” She jerked her head toward the cockpit.

  I glanced up at Karl. I didn’t know if he could hear us or not; he was just a few feet away, but the sound of wind and water might be drowning us out. I looked back at Julia. “Sort of,” I said.

  “Shawna, you have to listen to me,” Julia said urgently. “I told you earlier, we’re not outfitted for a long ocean voyage. We’ll run out of water in three days, food in a week. And the pumps are still working off and on. That means water’s getting in. I think we’ve strained the hull. If we hit another storm . . .”

  We won’t, I wanted to say with absurd confidence . . . but I couldn’t guarantee it. Nor could I do anything about it. I just shrugged.

  “What are you running from?” Julia demanded then. “What kind of trouble are you in that you’d risk this? Why did the Coast Guard want you?” She shook her head. “And why the hell did I think I needed to protect you? Did you drug me? Hypnotize me?”

  “No,” I said. “Not exactly.”

  “Then what, exactly?”

  I shrugged helplessly. What could I say to her? Hi, I created this whole world out of primordial nothingness ten years ago. You didn’t exist until then, and sometime soon your whole reality is going to be rewritten so thoroughly that you won’t remember this conversation, your old life, or even the fact you owned a yacht.

  What I actually said to her was, “There’s another piece of bacon, if you want it.”

  “Too crispy for my taste,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not much of a cook.”

  “The eggs were proof of that.” She suddenly smiled. “Remember that time when you . . .” The smile faded. “No. That never happened. I . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It’s so weird,” she said after a moment. “I have memories of you, but I have other memories that contradict those memories.” Her voice rose in pitch and volume as she spoke. “I remember doing things with you, but I also remember doing them with someone else. I remember going to Niagara Falls with you on a high school choir trip. But that wasn’t you, it was Marilee, my best friend back then. I remember that, too. They’re the same memories, but with different people in them. Am I going crazy?” And then, again, the sixty-four-dollar question. “What have you done to me?”

  “You should get some rest,” I said. “And I’m sorry, but I need to lock . . . tie . . . you in again.”

  Julia’s lips tightened. “You better hope I don’t get out. Both of you.” She pulled her feet back. I slid the door to the cabin shut, and secured it with the rope. I put the dirty plate on top of mine in the tiny sink, but I didn’t wash either, Julia’s warning about how little fresh water we had lingering in my mind. I’d swish them over the side later.

  I climbed back up the steps to Karl. “Julia is . . . badly confused,” I said.

  “She would be.” He didn’t look at me.

  “She said we don’t have enough water or food for a long voyage.”

  “We won’t need it,” Karl said. He sounded a little strange, and I took a closer look at him. He was staring out to sea, but his eyes looked almost unfocused. “We are far closer than I had reason to hope.” He turned the wheel to the left; the boom swung a few degrees, the mainsheet (clearly also automated) tightened, and then we were sailing . . . I half-stood so I could crane my head to see the compass . . . due southwest.

  I looked down the length of the boat, past the billowing jib, but saw nothing but the same thing I saw in every other direction: white-flecked gray waves, fading in the indeterminate distance into gray mist beneath a gray sky. “Are you sure?”

  “Very,” Karl said. “If you were not . . . exhausted, by now you would be feeling it yourself.” He cocked his head. “We are getting closer every minute.” He frowned. “Although, there is something odd . . . something I have never felt in any of the other worlds I’ve . . .” He paused. When he spoke again, his voice was sharp. “Keep a sharp lookout.”

  In books, characters aboard boats are always saying things like that, but it’s harder than it sounds when everything looks the same and mist has erased the horizon. I stared into gray nothingness until my eyes ached, but saw nothing. Not in the first hour, nor the second, nor the third.

  Noon came and
went. I went below and made ham and cheese sandwiches. I handed a plate up the companionway to Karl, then knocked on Julia’s door. She didn’t respond, and a quick look inside showed her asleep, one arm thrown over her head. I hesitated, then shrugged, closed the door, and tied it up again. I wrapped her sandwich in plastic wrap and put it in the tiny refrigerator, then took my own up into the cockpit, where I resumed staring into the mist while I chewed and swallowed, seeing nothing more than the nothing I’d seen all morning.

  As the afternoon wore on, it seemed to me the mist might have lifted a little; though it still shrouded the horizon, I could see a wider expanse of water. I took the wheel for a while to give Karl a break, but he seemed restless; he went below long enough to use the head, and to temporarily let Julia out to do the same. He also gave her the sandwich I’d made for her. I heard her yelling at him, and his monosyllabic replies, though I couldn’t make out any of the words. He shut Julia back into her cabin and climbed up again to take the wheel.

  “We must be practically on top of it,” he growled, sounding frustrated. It would be suppertime in a couple of hours. I was thinking about what other supplies I’d seen in the cabinets below, and wondering if I dared use enough water to boil pasta. “Where the blazes is it?”

  “Who says ‘blazes’?” I said. “Honestly, you talk like you came from a Dickens novel sometimes.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “He was a favorite of mine. His reading of A Christmas Carol was . . .” His voice trailed off even as I shot him a startled look. His eyes had narrowed, and he was staring intently ahead. “There’s something in the . . .”

  He never finished his sentence. With a horrible crunching noise, Amazon ran aground.

  TWENTY-THREE

  KARL HAD TOLD me, during that long day, that we were sailing at about seven “knots,” which he had translated, at my insistence, to “about eight miles an hour.” If you’re in your car and you run into something at eight miles an hour, you’ll get a horrible jolt. If you’re really unlucky, you might get whiplash. But if you’re smart enough (or at least law-abiding enough) to be wearing your seatbelt, it won’t seem that bad.

  We weren’t wearing seatbelts. And the tethers we were wearing were only designed to keep us from separating from the boat if we fell overboard. They did nothing to stop us from being hurled forward as the boat came to a sudden halt in the middle of what had looked like open ocean. I was thrown hard into the bulkhead next to the companionway hatch. Karl bounced off the wheel and went down behind it, groaning. Below, things crashed.

  And then Julia screamed, “There’s water coming in!”

  Dazed, I rolled over and stuck my head into the companionway.

  Water was bubbling up through the carpet in the bottom of the boat . . . and Julia was trapped in her cabin.

  Adrenaline surged through me, clearing my mind like a bucket of ice dumped over my head. I scrambled to my feet and down the stairs, stepping off into water already ankle-deep, and rising fast. I fumbled with the rope holding Julia’s cabin door closed, managed to undo it as the water reached my knees, slid it open. Julie, eyes wide and white in her dark face, held out her hand. I grabbed it and pulled her out of the cabin. She’d taken off her lifejacket at some point, but she snatched it from the bed, then followed me up the steps.

  Karl had a nasty bruise on his forehead, but was conscious and getting to his feet. “Rocks,” he said, unnecessarily, I thought, unless we’d hit a submarine. Then he jerked his head forward. “Island.”

  “That’s impossible,” Julia said, as she struggled into her lifejacket. “There are no islands for hundreds of miles along the course we’ve been sailing . . .” She followed his gaze, and her protest died away. “Oh.”

  The mist had lifted some more. Maybe five hundred yards away, wet black stone rose precipitously from the ocean, festooned with pine trees growing on preposterously small ledges or, in some cases, emerging from what seemed to be nothing more than cracks in the rock.

  “We have to abandon ship,” Julia said, and I could hear the pain in her voice even through the practical-minded sailor’s advice. She fastened the latches on her lifejacket, pulled the tabs tight. “If she slips off this rock and goes under, she’ll drag us with her even if we’re trying to swim away.”

  “Dinghy?” Karl said.

  Julia shook her head. “It’s an inflatable, and its stowed . . .” she pointed into the cabin, now awash all the way to the portholes.

  “Then we swim,” Karl said, and started forward. Julia followed, and I brought up the rear. The boat seemed strangely solid now, where before it . . . she . . . had bobbed and swayed. Before she had been alive; now, stuck on the rock that had ripped open her belly, she was dead, or at least dying: another death to add to the list of those I’d caused or abetted.

  “You said you can swim?” Karl said to me. He didn’t ask Julia, presumably assuming anyone who owned and skippered her own boat could swim . . . or maybe he didn’t really care. My previous thoughts about whether he even considered her a real person bubbled up again like indigestion.

  “I did,” I said. He didn’t know I’d qualified it to myself with “sort of,” and the distance to the island was a lot more than a couple of pool lengths, but at least I’d be wearing a lifejacket.

  Amazon suddenly shifted under us, groaning. The sail, which had gone flat, filled as a gust blew across the water. The boom swung sharply out . . . and slammed into me.

  I felt the blow, felt myself flying through the air, felt myself hit the water. Dazed, I would have drowned there and then if not for the lifejacket: maybe even with it if not for the hand that grabbed me and guided me to the surface. It was Karl’s, of course, who must have jumped in after me. Now, treading water, he looked at me with worry-filled eyes as I coughed and spluttered. “Are you all right?”

  From the pain in my side, I thought I might have cracked a rib, but there was nothing to be done about that. I nodded.

  Julia splashed into the water behind Karl. “We have to get away from her!” she cried.

  “Come on,” Karl said to me, and struck out toward the island, which somehow looked much farther away from down there in the water than it had from the listing deck of Amazon. I swam after him, every stroke stabbing my flank with pain, kicking as best I could. My strokes were clumsy and splashy, but I didn’t really need good form with the lifejacket keeping my head above water: at least I was moving.

  Julia moved a lot faster, leaving me behind, and soon catching up to Karl. I persevered womanfully, and a few minutes later crawled up onto a narrow bit of rocky beach beneath the black cliff, where I promptly got to my hands and knees and retched up a stomach’s worth of salt water, along with some partly digested ham sandwich, every heave tearing at my bruised side. When nothing else came up, I crawled away from the mess and flopped over onto my back, staring up at the trees clinging to the cliff. “Oof,” I said. I thought for a moment, then added, “Ugh.”

  Karl appeared in my vision, carrying his lifejacket loosely in one hand. He still had the pistol stuck in his pocket; I wondered if it would fire after being submerged in salt water. “All right?” he said, looking down at me.

  “No,” I said. “But alive.” I sat up, wincing. “I think the boom may have cracked a rib.”

  “You were lucky it did not hit you in the head,” Karl said. “And maybe lucky the lifejacket cushioned the blow a bit.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Where’s Julia?” I looked around, and spotted her a little ways off, still wearing her lifejacket, sitting on a rock, with her arms wrapped around her chest. She was rocking back and forth, weeping, as she stared out at Amazon, now heeled over so far that her keel was exposed, awash in the surf. “Oh,” I said in small voice. “I feel so guilty . . .”

  “Both guilt and remorse are a waste of mental energy in this circumstance,” Karl said. “You are almost done with this world.” He stared up a
t the cliff. “Somewhere on this island we will find the place to open a Portal. I can feel it, but there is still something . . . strange . . .” He closed his eyes but kept his head tilted back. “Up,” he whispered. “It is above us. And inland.” He opened his eyes again, and pointed at the cliff. “Up above that, somewhere.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “Rock climbing. Ranks right up there with swimming and sailing and horseback riding on the list of things I’m no good at.”

  “We cannot climb this cliff,” Karl said. “We must find another way inland.” He looked both ways along the beach, then pointed past Julia. “Over there is a gentler slope. We will start there.” He put his lifejacket on the ground and knelt beside it, disconnecting the flashlight and the multi-tool. “These may prove useful.” He stood again, attaching the flashlight to his belt and pushing the multi-tool into his left-hand pants pocket—the pistol still bulged in the other—and then walked toward Julia.

  I got up, took the flashlight and multi-tool off my own lifejacket, dumped the lifejacket itself on the ground, and then limped after him. Karl strode by Julia without a glance, but I stopped. Guilt and remorse might be a waste of energy, as Karl had said, but I felt them nonetheless. I put my hand on Julia’s shoulder. “Julia.” She didn’t move. “Julia,” I said again. “We’re going inland. The place we’re looking for . . . it’s somewhere on this island.”

  “The thing I loved most in this world is being torn apart by the sea, thanks to you,” she replied, her voice as gray and flat as the sky.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “We were going to let you have Amazon back as soon as we’d landed. We didn’t know about the rocks.”

  “How could you?” she said dully. “They don’t exist.”

 

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