“It’s a forbidden artifact,” she said. “Look, there’s writing on it.” She pointed to the rough side of the rock. “On the other side.”
“Give me your coat,” he said. “Yours too,” he said to Etcher.
“We’ll freeze out there without our coats,” Etcher said.
“Well, you’re not going out there with them,” the man answered. One of the other men laughed.
“We’ll give you one of the coats,” said Etcher.
“You’ll give us what we fucking ask for.”
“No.”
The man sighed. “Didn’t anyone explain this to you? Now that you’re here you’re going out on that tide one way or the other. Either you go out in a boat or you go out without one. You’re not going with your coat the first way and you won’t need your coat the second way. Doesn’t the logic of that impress you?”
“The politics of stalemate impress me,” said Etcher. “I’m completely versed in them. You can’t let us turn around and go back and if you don’t sell us the boat you have to kill us and it’s bad business because if I wash up on the shore somewhere it’s just going to be a lot of trouble. Really a lot of trouble. I work for the Church and have something they want and they’re breathing down my neck and the cops watch every move I make, even now they know I’m somewhere in the Arboretum. Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think I need to get out of this damned city so badly? Why do you think this is my last resort? I’m giving you everything I’ve got and she’s giving you everything she’s got and we’ll give you one of the coats but not both.” He added, “You can have the rock too,” nodding at the stone Mona had given the man.
“I don’t want the damn rock,” the man said. “I’ll take yours,” he said to Mona, nodding at her coat, and wrapped the stone back in the scarf. He handed it to Etcher, who put it in the pocket of his own coat, which he now took off and wrapped around Mona. The man led them to a boat. It had oars and in the bottom was water and what looked like the tatters of a sail, though there was no other sign of a sail or mast. Around the hull it appeared as though the wood was rotting. “Bon voyage,” the man said. Etcher got in the boat and helped Mona in, then he took the oars and pushed the boat off from the dock. Even wearing his coat Mona sat shivering at the stern. Struggling with the oars, Etcher began to row. The men on the dock returned to their drinking and cards, never glancing up to watch the boat’s progress.
It was an hour before the boat even got out of the grotto. Only then did Etcher understand the peril of the situation. A low ceiling of Vog billowing into the grotto continued to hang several feet above their heads, so it wasn’t until the walls suddenly fell away that Etcher realized they were out on the open sea, where the night came rushing in and the force of the swells threatened to smash the boat back against the rocks. Etcher fought futilely against the waves. They lifted the boat in the air and dashed it back down on the water. Several feet from Etcher at the stern of the boat, behind the gusts of the sea that rained between them, Mona’s cries sounded very distant to him, like a shout from the top of the cliffs that towered somewhere above the Vog.
All night the boat was pulled by the waves and then hurled back toward the cliffs. By the early hours of morning the boat had finally made its way out to sea, beyond Central’s searchlights; but the shadows of the obelisks of Aeonopolis were still in plain sight and Etcher was alarmed that with dawn the boat would be visible to patrols along the coast. Soaked and overwhelmed by exhaustion and cold, Etcher rowed, racing insanely against the sea and the light of day. Their greatest ally now, he told himself, was the volcano, which delayed the full morning light until nearly noon. He hurried, to whatever extent possible, from one patch of Vog to the other, hoping they might find one to ride up the coast like the lost Vog Travelers of the Arboretum. He kept telling himself that if they could get far enough from the city, around some bend of the coastline above them, then they could rest, sleeping at the bottom of the boat in the sun.
But at the other end of the boat, with his coat wrapped around her in the dark before daylight, the Woman in the Dark said, “I’m cold.”
“I know,” Etcher said. “In a few hours the sun will be out. When we’re far enough from the city, when we don’t have to worry about drifting back, we’ll sleep in the sun.”
“I’m very cold,” she said, as though she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.
“Think about the sun.”
“Even the Ice wasn’t this cold.”
“Think about a place to sleep.”
“Maybe we should go back,” she said.
“What?” Etcher was incredulous.
“It’s too far.”
“We’re not going back. There’s nothing to go back to. You said yourself there’s no going back. You said yourself there’s no changing your mind. Think about the sun. Think about a place to sleep. We’ve come this far, think of how far we’ve come. It’s just a little further.” The sea, which had been sporadically calmer, was now becoming rough again. The boat was rocked by a wave and Etcher hung on, but in the dark on the other end of the boat Mona was not hanging on; she was holding herself in the cold, huddling in his coat.
“Keep me warm,” she said.
“I will,” he answered. “I promise.”
“Keep me warm now.” She stood in the boat to come to him.
“Sit down,” he said quickly.
“Please,” she pleaded, still half standing, and she stepped into the middle of the boat. She was in the middle of the boat, coming to Etcher to beg him for the warmth she never asked of anyone, when the next wave slammed the boat and she vanished. In the blinking of an eye Etcher was by himself. There had been no cry, no last glimpse of her going overboard, no hand reaching out for rescue from inside a fatal wave, nothing left but his coat which she’d worn to keep her warm; he’d lurched to grab her when she was standing in the middle of the boat and had only gotten the coat. If she’d been wearing the coat rather than just wrapping it around her, it would have saved her. Now she was gone as though she’d never been there at all, Etcher sitting alone in the night out on the sea with his coat in his hand, looking around frantically for some trace of her in the water. He began to call out to her only to realize he didn’t know her name, that the fiction they had invented in the Fleurs d’X was that she had no name. So he couldn’t even call to her. He couldn’t see or find her. For the rest of the night he didn’t row anymore, even after he knew she wasn’t coming back, because he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her.
As she sank beneath the waves, with far less panic than she would have supposed, Mona thought of Wade running through the Arboretum at this very moment looking for her. Little did he know, little could he imagine as he rushed from chamber to chamber and corridor to corridor searching for her, that she was no longer in the Arboretum at all, no longer in the city, but far away in the ocean’s undertow; she wondered how long it would be before he got that feeling one inevitably gets that someone is gone from his life forever. Perhaps, was her last thought, if he’d painted the walls of the flat not with the secrets of the Arboretum but rather in the color and currents of the sea, she would not have left him after all, the aquadoom of her destiny having come to her instead. With the burst of her lungs she announced this doom to the water’s surface, a black bubble her only memorial in a night too dark and a sea too deranged for anyone to honor it.
37