A face came into view, wavering around the edges as my eyes worked to dispel the ocean’s tears. “You are indeed aboard,” agreed the female voice. “And that brings us to the thorny question of who you might be.”
The face, when my eyes focused, belonged to a woman, her rich brown hair woven into two meticulous braids. She wore a coat the same gray as the walls, with red trim at the collar and cuffs and two spots on the breast pocket where insignia had been ripped off.
“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I said. “Dean Harrison sent me to meet Rasputina Ivanova. He told me to ask her about the Hallows’ Eve they spent in New Amsterdam.”
The woman flushed bright pink and then drew back out of my line of sight. She snapped a few orders in Russian, and before I knew it I was on my feet, being helped down a walkway by a bear-sized man in an undershirt, red suspenders and filthy, oil-stained pants. “Easy, sweetheart,” he rumbled, in an accent twice as thick as the woman’s. “You’ll be walking on your own in no time.” We came to a galley where a half-dozen sailors stopped eating and stared at me. Another command from the woman and their eyes dropped back to their plates.
The man shoved a ratty blanket at me, along with a steel cup full of tea.
“Drink,” he ordered. “Or you’ll never get warm.”
Now that I wasn’t seeing things or drowning, I became aware that I was shivering so violently my muscles were spasming. Still, I hesitated to take a drink from a stranger.
“Drink,” he insisted, shoving it at me again and slopping a little on my skin this time. I could see every vein, every freckle and every scrape on the back of my hand painted in stark relief. It was as if the sea had sucked every drop of blood from me and left icy water in its place.
I grabbed the cup and drained it. The tea burned my tongue, but the pain reassured me at least that I was thawed enough to feel something. I wrapped the blanket around myself, still shivering hard enough to rattle the bench I sat on.
“You weren’t in the water very long,” said the man, refilling the cup, “but you might still have the hypothermia. Keep warm and keep drinking, if you please.” His English was good, but each word was as heavy and 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.”