specimen as Danzig.
Danzig must have guessed as much from Michael's hesitation, because he said, “It's not impossible, you know.”
“But when do you see her?” Michael called back, even as he gathered up his equipment and stored it all in the bag. “I thought you lived here.”
“Not all the time,” Danzig replied.
“Where is she?” Michael asked, then said, “Wait. Tell me when I get down there.”
When he joined Danzig among the bones on the beach, Danzig said, “Miami Beach,” and Michael inadvertently laughed.
“What's wrong with that?”
“It's not that. It's just not what you'd expect.”
“Which would be?” Danzig said, as they turned back toward the dogsled.
Michael only had to think for a second before replying, “Valhalla.”
For the first few minutes, Sinclair and Eleanor simply accustomed themselves to breathing again. And then to moving. And finally to being alive… though where-and when-they had no idea.
It was Eleanor who discovered the source of the heat in the room, a metal grate of some kind, glowing orange along the baseboards. She bent down in her wet clothes, trying to see the fire inside or smell the burning of tinder or gas, but she heard only a distant humming and smelled nothing at all. Still, she huddled close and whispered urgently for Sinclair to come near.
Instinctively, they had both been whispering.
“It's a fire,” she said. “We can dry our clothes.”
Sinclair helped her remove her sodden shawl, and they draped it across a stool he drew close. Then she took off her shoes and laid them in front of the grill.
“You, too,” she said. “Before something happens…” What that something could be defied the powers of her imagination altogether. She did not know if they were among friends or foe, in Turkey or Russia or, for that matter, Tasmania. She could hardly be sure, even now, that they were actually alive.
But there wasn't time to dwell on any of it.
“Take off your jacket,” she said, “and your boots.”
He shrugged the uniform jacket off, and Eleanor spread it out. She put his boots beside her shoes. He unfastened his sword and, though keeping it close at hand, let it rest with the wet clothing.
Then, they huddled close in front of the heat, staring into each other's eyes, and silently wondering what the other knew or understood
… or remembered.
Eleanor feared that she could remember too much. For so long-how long? — it was all that she had done… just dreamt and drifted and remembered everything.
Over and over again.
But what she was thinking of, with the clothes drying and her arms gathered tight around her own knees, was the night she had sat before the hearth, just like this, with Moira, in their cold room at the top floor of the boardinghouse in London… on the night that Miss Nightingale had announced her intention to travel, with a small company of willing nurses, to the Crimean battlefront.
Sinclair coughed, his cold white hand raised to his mouth, and Eleanor stroked his brow with her own stiff fingers. It was second nature to her at that point-she remembered doing this for so many of the wounded soldiers, lying in agony at the hospital barracks in Scutari and Balaclava. Sinclair looked up at her now, his eyes red-rimmed and wild, and said, “But you? Are you…” and then, for want of a better word, “well?”
“I am…” she said, not knowing what else she could say. She was alive, apparently. Beyond that, she wasn't sure of anything. She was as lost as he was, chilled to the bone, in spite of the remarkably consistent heat from the grate. And weak, too-from ordinary hunger, as well as the unspeakable need.
It crossed her mind that she could die again… and soon… and she wondered if it would feel any different this time.
It could not be worse.
Sinclair's gaze swept around the room, and she followed it. A thing that looked like an enormous spider was trying to clamber out of a square jar, filled with water and a pale purple illumination. There were long counters, like trestle tables, with basins, like flower sinks, in them. A black metal apparatus, with a white box beside it, sat before a stool, and next to that, she saw, just as Sinclair must have done, a wine bottle. He was already springing to his feet.
He picked up the bottle, rubbed the label against the billowing sleeve of his white shirt, then examined it more closely.
“Is it?” she asked.
“I can't be sure,” he said, twisting the cork out. He put his nose to the top, then recoiled.
And so she knew it must be.
In his stockinged feet, he padded back to her and placed the open bottle between them, like a papa bird bringing an offering to the nest. He was waiting for her to take it, but she couldn't. It was too horrible to have awakened, after how long, from a dream-a nightmare-only to be plunged right back into it once you'd been restored to life. The bottle stood before her as a grim reminder, a memento mori. It represented death, but at the same time-if she was desperate enough to want it-life. She could smell the vile odor of its contents, and she wondered: Was that the very bottle he had raised to her lips on board the Coventry? If it was, then how had it come to be here, in this strange place, now? Had one of the sailors thrown it, too, into the heaving sea, after she had been chained to Sinclair? After…
Her mind stopped dead, like a team of horses suddenly reined to an abrupt halt. She could not think of it; she could not allow herself to. She had governed her thoughts for so long, she could not stop doing it now. She had to guide them, control them, even chastise them, like unruly children, if they went too far astray. To do anything else would be an invitation to madness.
If, that is, she had not already gone mad.
“You have to,” Sinclair said, urging the bottle on her.
But Eleanor was not so sure. “What if,” she ventured, “after all this time…”
“What?” he snapped, his eyelids drooping, then snapping open again. “What if, after all this time, everything has changed?”
“It's possible, is it not, that-”
“That what? God's in his heaven again, and we're safe as houses, and Britannia rules the waves?”
There was a fire in his eyes again now. All that time, in the ocean, in the ice- no, her mind said, do not think of it, do not let it in — had done nothing to dampen his ardor, or his anger. That wicked flame, lighted in the Crimea, still burned. He was not the Lieutenant Copley who had sailed off for glory. He was the Lieutenant Copley who had been found, covered with mud and blood, lying among the dead and dying on a moonlit battlefield.
“Shall I try it first?” he said, his face ruddy in the orange glow of the grate, and when she didn't answer, he raised the bottle, tilted his head back, and took a swig. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed, then bobbed again as the liquid tried to come back up again. He sputtered, gasped, then put the bottle to his lips again and forced some more of it down. When he dropped the bottle back into his lap, his light brown moustache was stained the color of a bruise.
“There,” he said, “right as rain.” He smiled, and his teeth, too, were stained. He pushed the bottle toward her.
“What we need,” she said, her eyes nonetheless drawn to the bottle, “is food. And water. Clean water, fresh food.”
Sinclair scoffed. “Spoken like a true Nightingale. And we shall have those things. But you know, as well as I do, that right now you need something more.”
In her heart, she knew he was right… or at least that he had been right. But wasn't it possible that this curse had been lifted? Wasn't it possible that, in addition to whatever strange miracle had released them from their bondage, another one had been performed, too? That this dreadful sustenance, sitting before her, was no longer necessary?
“We don't know where we are,” Sinclair said, softly. “And we don't know what awaits us out there.” He was
