all but obscured my vision, giving me uncomfortable memories of the Mists.
“Who’s there?” said a voice from the white world beyond.
“Jakob, this is Aoife,” said the chief. He mispronounced it “Effie” instead of “Ee-fah,” but I didn’t bother correcting him. “She claims she can fix our boat.”
When he finally came into view, I was surprised to see that Jakob was as thin as Cal and about my height. He was practically miniature, and his ocean-blue eyes shone from his grease-streaked face with an eerie brightness. “Huh” was all he said.
“Have at it. Piotr will be forward if you need him,” Sorkin told me, and turned around to stomp back to the main part of the sub.
Alone and suddenly out of my element, I stared at Jakob for a long, awkward moment, and he stared back. “Do you speak much English?” I asked at last.
“Just a little,” he admitted. His accent wasn’t the rich, rounded syllables of Rasputina’s or the bear’s growl that Sorkin had. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I wouldn’t have called it Russian. Well, they were a pirate crew. Jakob could be from anywhere. I had the niggling thought I’d heard that sort of accent somewhere before, but I put it aside.
“That’s better than no Russian, which is what I speak,” I said to him. “What happened here?”
Jakob extended a handful of what looked like limp rubber noodles, nipped neatly at the ends. “Somebody cut the coolant lines. Batteries, they power the propellers. We recharge in port, but the batteries need coolant or they can overheat and then …” He made a
It was imperative I get this boat working again, not just for the sake of our journey, but for the sake of all our lives, not to mention my sanity. My head throbbed a bit and the pain warned me not to get overexcited or I’d speed the passage of the iron through my system.
“That’s bad,” I said.
“We don’t start the starboard propeller again, we go in circles, but nowhere else,” Jakob said. He twirled his finger to demonstrate.
“But if somebody sabotaged the boat …,” I said. What on earth could be going on? Even if Draven had a spy on board, he
“I said, we can’t worry about that right now,” Jakob said. “Unless we want to drift where the current takes us, what matters now is getting the boat started again.”
“All right, all right,” I told him. “I’m working on it.” I wasn’t used to being so easily dismissed, but Jakob was right. What mattered now was fixing the boat.
I put my hands on the casing of the rotors, the whole assembly of the motor that drove the sub, feeling out the gears and pistons and letting my mind get a sense of the machine within. “Will you be able to replace the coolant?”
Jakob nodded. “I’m working on it now.”
I nodded back and placed my forehead against the engine case. My Weird whispered to me, and I looked at Jakob. “You have some tools I can use?”
I didn’t have the control to fix the broken bits of the
We worked in silence for a while, Jakob’s taciturn grunts when I asked him to pass me a tool the only sounds. My sweat soaked through every layer of my clothes, and I stripped down to my undershirt. Jakob took off his shirt, period. His upper torso was smooth and perfect, not a scar, not a mark. For a pirate mechanic, he was in remarkably good shape. He saw me looking and his blue eyes sharpened. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said, blushing furiously. “I’m sorry.”
Jakob drew closer to me, and his pale, almost translucent skin caught the aether lamps lighting the engine room, making him look as if he were carved from stone. I backed up, banged into the side of the rotor assembly and realized too late I had nowhere to go.
I was totally alone with Jakob. It was doubtful anyone at the other end of the
My shoulder began throbbing, as if someone held a hot iron to it, and I gasped as I cringed from Jakob’s hot breath in my face. His hand landed on my shoulder, and a thin blade found the soft spot on my neck, under the jawbone, pressing tight and causing me to suck in my breath lest it nick my skin. “Don’t move,” Jakob purred in my ear. His strange, musical accent filled my ears, even more than my panicked, pounding heart, and all at once I placed the voice, the too-bright eyes, the unearthly alabaster skin.
“Fae,” I said, my voice strained as I tried not to move against the knife. “You’re Fae.”
He didn’t reply, just pressed the knife harder against my flesh. It didn’t make any sense. Why try to leave us helpless in the water if all he wanted was my death, in the end? Was he an agent of Tremaine’s? How was he surviving, trapped in an iron tube, when I was already getting the first symptoms of poisoning?
Jakob still didn’t say anything. The pain in my shoulder was dizzying, and I felt tears squeeze from the corners of my eyes from fear. “Who are you?” I choked out. “What are you going to do to me?”
“I got you alone to deliver a message,” Jakob said. “You always have to be the clever one, Aoife. The one to fix things.” He kicked the door to the engine compartment shut, never moving the blade from my throat. Thin, and made from pure hardened silver—Tremaine had a similar knife. He’d also held it to my neck, and it hadn’t made me any more inclined to listen to him than I was to listen to Jakob. “Nobody can break in here. Nobody will hear you scream.” The knife pressed, and I felt a thin line of blood trickle down into the hollow of my throat. “The message is this, Aoife—the Brotherhood can’t help you. The nightmare clock can’t help you. Your only chance to find your mother is to come back to Tremaine and beg for forgiveness.”
A pounding started up outside the door. “Effie! Effie, girl! What is happening in there?”
Jakob cut his eyes toward Chief Sorkin’s voice, but he was immovable, and quick as a cat besides. I stood no chance of trying to get away on my strength alone. My father’s words came back to me:
“Shut up, Dad,” I grumbled. Jakob cocked his head, then smiled, a thin smile. He turned his wrist to dig the knife in more, and I caught a flash of a flaw in the skin of his wrist, a brand of some sort, which surrounded a small metal rivet. My Weird responded, frantic and hot against my mind in my panic. I had an idea, just a germ of one. I might not be a fighter, but I was smart. And Jakob hadn’t counted on how badly I wanted to live.
Rasputina’s voice joined the clamor outside. “Open this door, Jakob! What’s happening in there?” Something heavy hit, and Sorkin shouted.
“Jammed, Captain! Something is wrong!”
Rather than focus on Jakob, his pointed features, his now-pupil-less blue eyes, I focused on the door. Using my Weird felt like driving a drill through my temple, and blood gushed from my nose, but the wheel that opened the door turned, ever so slowly, and then, with one last push, flew back and dented the bulkhead with a clang like a coffin lid.
Rasputina and Sorkin stood there, and Jakob spun me to face them, arm clamped across my shoulders, knife at my neck. I was closer to this Fae than I’d ever been to anyone, even to Dean, and I could feel his heart beating. “You little sneak,” he hissed in my ear.
I snarled, not willing to be afraid of his blade or the fact that a Fae was here, alive, aboard an iron ship. “What? Did Tremaine fail to mention that?”
Rasputina drew her pistol and aimed it at us. “Jakob,” she said softly. “Your eyes. What’s wrong with your eyes?”
Jakob’s laugh was short and harsh as a seal’s bark. “My eyes? Nothing, you idiot woman. My eyes are open. Yours are closed. You are ignorant to everything around you, especially me.”
I twisted my neck a bit while he ranted, trying to see if I had any give with the knife. There wasn’t much. Jakob’s skin felt cold and clammy where his bare torso pressed against me, and I caught a glimpse of his eyes,
