precisely formed as an ingot, and he fidgeted, as if he was afraid of saying the wrong thing.
The woman came back into the galley and barked something at him in Russian, and he bobbed his head at me apologetically and left the room.
The woman took his place across the table from me. She moved like a man, taking up a lot of space. She folded her arms so that her elbows hit the table. “I am Rasputina Yelena Ivanova,” she said. “Captain of this vessel.”
I tucked deeper inside the blanket, wilting under her gimlet gaze. She didn’t look much older than I was, but her eyes were older by decades. Eyes that had seen and absorbed too much. I couldn’t hold them.
“Nice to meet you,” I murmured, staring down at my hands.
“Yes, whatever,” Rasputina said brusquely. “So. You know Dean Harrison.”
“He said you’d get me where I need to go.” I forced myself to meet her eyes again and found them now full of cautious curiosity. “Was I wrong?”
“A girl comes from a village full of Proctors, we’d be suspicious on a good day,” said Rasputina. “But a girl who jumps into freezing water to get away from that village, well.” She shoved my waterproof satchel across the table at me, along with a pair of utilitarian black shoes to replace what I’d left on the dock. “I suppose I can at least hear you out.”
Rasputina wasn’t particularly pretty, in the sense of delicate features, ruby pouts and pleasant smiles. She had a broad mouth that looked like it wouldn’t know a smile if it bit her, cheekbones that stood out from her face like they were trying to escape and wide black eyes that felt like drill bits boring into the center of my forehead. They were the eyes of a crow, a primeval thing that missed nothing and knew every lie before you told it.
“All right,” I said, deciding a mostly true story would get me further with her bull-like directness than an outright lie. “Those Proctors were after me. I’m a fugitive, and I’m going to the Arctic Circle. A place called the Bone Sepulchre.”
Rasputina’s eyes widened, and her hard face split into an expression of shock. “Maybe you aren’t cracked,” she muttered. “I knew that kid Harrison had a taste for the strange, but this …” She shook her head and stood. “Even if I knew how to get there, I wouldn’t.”
“Why not?” I insisted, determined not to let her put me off. “Dean said you’d take anyone anywhere, for a price.”
“I plucked you out of the sea, girl,” Rasputina told me. “At great personal risk. You have no proof that you are who you say you are, and you have no money. I don’t have to do a damn thing for you besides not stuff you into a torpedo tube and shoot you back to the surface.”
“That’s fair,” I said. “But please, hear me out. I swear I do know Dean, and he’s in a lot of trouble.”
Rasputina pulled a bottle of clear liquor over and poured herself a glass.
“If you spend enough time with Dean, you’ll learn he’s always in a lot of trouble,” she said, tossing back the shot. “So, here’s the situation: you’ll ride with us until we get out of territorial waters, and then we’ll drop you at Newfoundland or somewhere like that, and you can tell Dean that I said I hope like hell I get the chance to meet him again so I can smack him in his smart mouth.”
I didn’t have the strength to argue. I was shivering too hard, and my teeth clacked when I tried to talk. Rasputina softened a bit and offered me the bottle.
“No,” I said. “I feel like I could pass out as it is.”
She stood and pointed down the corridor. “Take one of the empty bunks. We’ll be running underwater until we clear Maine. Then we’ll find a place to put you off.”
“I can pay you,” I said to Rasputina. “I have money.” I don’t know why I lied. Desperation, most likely, but I shouldn’t have worried, because she saw right through me.
“No amount of money could convince me to tangle with what lives under that ice,” Rasputina told me. “Get some rest.”
She was probably right. I was exhausted, and I had a little while before they dumped me off. I could figure out how to change the captain’s mind, but not when I was exhausted and half frozen.
I went into the small, curved cabin Rasputina had pointed out. Something on the other side of the wall hummed, and the bunks, though steel framed, looked like the most comfortable things on earth at that moment. I crawled into one and pulled both blankets over me.
I didn’t sleep, though. I listened to the engines churn and tried to ignore the sharp pain in my skull reminding me that the longer I was trapped inside an iron tube, the worse I was going to feel.
After hours of staring at the rust spots on the ceiling and listening to the engines, the entire ship shuddered, and the tilting in my stomach that let me know we were moving ceased.
Footsteps rang in the corridor outside, and I swung out of my bunk and peered into the hallway. “What’s going on?” I asked a passing crewmember. He growled something in Russian and shoved past me, slamming me into the bulkhead, hard.
“Ow,” I muttered, but it was lost as sirens blared and the light in the corridor changed to red.
Rasputina barreled past me, and I caught her arm. “What’s wrong?”
“Another sub,” she snapped. “You might as well come up to the bridge.”
Heart sinking, I followed her up a ladder and into a room similarly lit with red warning lights, stuffed with controls, a wheel and a periscope at the center. Rasputina grabbed a floppy rain hat and then leaned into the periscope, icy seawater raining down from the seal that led to the top of the sub.
She spat out a curse and put the periscope up. “You,” she said to me. “Who are you? Really?”
Before I could blink, I found the thin barrel of a pistol leveled at my face. “Answer me,” Rasputina said. “Or I’m going to paint the dive controls with your brain.”
“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I whispered, wondering what on earth Rasputina had seen through the periscope to make her react in such a way. Nothing good, clearly. “I haven’t told you one lie since you brought me on board.” That in itself was a lie, but I’d told the truth where it counted, hadn’t I?
Rasputina pointed behind her, at a young girl, younger even than me, sitting at a radar station. “Explain that,” she said to me. She snapped at the girl in Russian, and she took off her earphones and spoke to us in English.
“Ping bearing one mile off port side, visual range in fifteen seconds. Border Guard destroyer. Seems to be holding its position, ma’am.”
The Border Guard—the Proctors who patrolled coastal waters to keep out Crimson Guard spies and heretics of all stripes—were notorious for their black ships, their silent gliders and their brutal interrogations of anyone who crossed their path. We’d watched a few reels on them at the Academy.
“We are six miles off the coast of Maine,” Rasputina told me. “They have us dead to rights, and they aren’t moving. No torpedoes. Not even a screw turning. Now, were I a Proctor, I wouldn’t hesitate to blow us right out of the water and into the sky like the pirates we are.” She pressed the pistol against my forehead until it bit into my flesh. “The only thing that’s different on this trip is you. The only reason those bastards haven’t opened fire on us is you. Who are you?”
“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I repeated. My shivering now had nothing to do with being frozen.
“All right, Aoife Grayson,” Rasputina snarled. “If that’s who you are, what’s so special about Aoife Grayson? Why is she so precious and dear to those squawking blackbirds?”
“Captain,” said the old man. “We’re on a full charge. We can outrun them.”
“And drain our batteries halfway to land and drift around like a piece of garbage until we sink, suffocate, or run aground,” Rasputina told him. “No. We’re getting to the bottom of this now.”
“I destroyed the Engine,” I blurted. Rasputina snapped her gaze back to me, and the pistol wavered away from my head. The barrel was as black and endless as the space outside the dome in my dreams, and when it dropped to her side I let out a breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding.
“Good lord,” Rasputina said. “I knew you looked familiar.”
“The Proctors are keeping Dean hostage until I get to the Bone Sepulchre. I have to …” I kept my eyes on the gun. My heart was thumping so loudly I could barely hear my own words. “I have to do what I did to the Engine. I have to destroy the heretics who live up there, where the Proctors can’t reach, or they’re going to kill the person I care about most.”
That sounded plausible to me, and left out both the nightmare clock and Draven’s compass, ticking away like a tiny evil bomb in my satchel.
