Frozen

They ran up to the deck together and looked down. There was a massive steel engine hatch on the aft deck, tossed upside down like a tortoise shell. The other hatch was sinking quickly into the dark waters. Only bolt holes remained where the hatches had been torn from their mountings. In the bilge, the starboard engine was nothing but a smoking black void—a broken hose leaked gas and water into the pit. There was a hole in the bottom of the ship where the propeller had been torn free and water was pouring into the cavity. The port engine was still in place, but impossibly damaged. Its thick steel housing had fused together, melted, as if it had been run through a blast furnace. Shards from the motor were strewn all over the deck. One engine had been torn deliberately from the ship, and the other one completely burned.

“There!” Nat said, pointing out to the distance, where the darkness coalesced into a massive, horned shape above the water.

“Where?”

“I thought I saw something—” But when she looked again, a faint light shone through the clouds, and whatever it was vanished. She blinked her eyes—was it merely a trick of the light?

The rest of the crew crept up on board. Daran kicked at the remnants of the motor while Zedric muttered voodoo prayers under his breath. “The wailer did this . . . we’re cursed,” he whispered.

Shakes sighed. “So much for the trashbergs.” The massive trash mountains were the least of their concerns now.

“We’re stuck!” Farouk groaned. “Without an engine we’re dead in the water.”

“Looks like it.” Wes nodded, frowning.

Nat was silent as the crew contemplated the latest disaster.

They were adrift in a vast poisonous arctic sea.

28

NO ONE SLEPT. WHEN MORNING FINALLY came, Nat found the crew gathered on the deck. Wes had ordered them all back to bed the night before, the Slaine brothers grumbling and peeved, Farouk whimpering a little, at the latest setback with the loss of their engines. Only Shakes and Wes appeared untroubled.

“This is nothing.” Shakes smiled. “When we were in Texas, we went for a month without eating, right, boss?”

Wes shook his head. “Not now, Shakes.”

“Right.”

The boys were rigging a sail and Nat watched as Wes drove a bent crowbar underneath a plate in the center of the deck and heaved the square of steel upward. Zedric raised two more panels in the same manner.

“Secret compartments?” Nat smiled.

“It’s a runner’s boat,” Wes said with a grin.

Nat looked down through a crisscross of metal braces into the hold and saw a water-stained cloth wrapped around a steel mast.

A sail.

She was impressed. “You knew this was going to happen?” she asked.

“No, but I prepare for everything. You can’t sail the oceans without one.” Wes shrugged. “Never thought I’d need it, though. I never thought Alby would turn into a fifteenth-century ship. All right, pull it up, boys,” he ordered.

Shakes smiled. “See? I told you, we’ve got options.”

“Yeah, we’re not dead in the water just yet,” Farouk said. “C’mon, Nat, you know we got game.”

“Farouk, stop flirting with the lady and help me with this,” Wes grunted, and the boys struggled to erect the makeshift sail.

“Nice work,” Nat said, walking over to put a hand on his arm—an affectionate gesture that was not lost on him. Or the crew. She felt Wes stiffen under her touch, as if a jolt of lightning had sparked between them.

“Who’s flirting with the lady now?” Shakes laughed.

Nat blushed and Wes’s smile deepened.

There was a moment of solidarity and Nat felt that after the ugliness of what happened earlier, things had settled. The sail caught wind, and for now, everything would be all right.

* * *

That evening, Nat retired to her bunk in Wes’s cabin. Wes was already sleeping in the bed, an arm thrown over his eyes. He slept like a kid, she thought, looking at him fondly. The ship was moving silently through the ocean, the rocking had stopped for a moment, and Nat was glad. She turned her back to him, quickly changed into a T-shirt and climbed in next to him.

“Good night,” Wes whispered.

Nat smiled to herself. So he wasn’t as out of it as she had thought. She wondered whether he had watched her change, whether he had seen her out of her clothes, and she realized she didn’t mind—she was more than a little intrigued by the idea . . . all she had to do was turn around and put her arms around him . . . Instead, she fiddled with the stone around her neck, and the moonlight caught its glow, sending a rainbow of colors around the small cabin.

“What is that?” Wes asked, his voice low in the darkness.

Nat took a deep breath. “I think you know . . . it was Joe’s.”

“He gave it to you.”

“I asked for it,” she said. She could sense him stirring in the dark, next to her, and now he was sitting up, staring at the stone.

“Do you know what it is?” he asked.

Nat felt a reckless inhibition take hold, and the voice in her head was seething—telling her to keep silent— but she did not. “Yes,” she said finally. “It’s Anaximander’s Map.”

The smugglers and traders named it after the ancient Greek philosopher who charted the first seas. But on the streets they just called it the Map to the Blue. The pilgrims believed that the Blue was not only real, but that it had always existed as part of this world, merely hidden from sight and called different names throughout history —Atlantis and Avalon among them. They swore that the stories that had filtered down through the ages— dismissed as myth and fairy tale—were real.

She watched him absorb the news. She had always assumed he knew she had it, and that it was the real reason he had taken the job. Runners like Wes knew everything there was to know about everything in New Vegas. He might be a good guy, but he wasn’t stupid.

“You know the story, don’t you?” Wes asked. “How Joe won it in a card game.”

“I don’t, actually.”

“They said the guy he won it from was shot dead on the Strip the next day.”

Nat was silent.

“Why do you think he kept it for so long?” Wes asked.

“Without using it, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it’s real?” he asked.

“He did live an awful long time; you know what they say, it’s supposed to be . . . well, keep you young or something. Anyway, look for yourself,” she told him, taking it off and handing it to him.

Wes took the stone and held it gently between his thumb and his forefinger. “What do you mean?”

“Hold it up, look through the circle. Do you see it?”

He did, and exhaled, and Nat knew he saw. “Joe didn’t see it. He looked through it and saw nothing. Maybe the map wouldn’t reveal itself to him somehow. That’s why he never used it, because he didn’t know how.”

“This is incredible,” Wes said.

“How long till we get there?” she asked.