“Yes, St. Remy.”
“Short for Remigius,” he said.
“An ugly name,” I told him. “In Latin, means oarsman.”
“Ah, perhaps someday you shall row us to some safe shore, yes?”
“But what safe shore is available to us?” I asked him.
His smile faded.
Lazlo remembers his name. He was older than me, even though he was rescued from Topside shortly after I was.
Alden.
Alden Tomas.
He had two names. And he came from somewhere green, he remembered. And he had a mother who sang to him when it rained.
I think I must have come from an island too.
Though I remember so little.
Nothing but an image of a tree, and a sea, and a yellow-orange beach.
A wrenching sound brings me to. Metal on metal screech. A shudder. We’ve struck something. At the very least, we’ve sideswiped another vessel.
The klaxon blares shrilly, but we’re given no order to abandon our current posts.
Another shudder, shouting from the deck above.
And then commotion forward, from the balneary. The raiding party has returned.
I abandon my post momentarily—just long enough to peek in through the hatchway.
The trunk hatch is opened, dripping water, and a prisoner, hands bound behind his back, a sack over his head, struggles, grunts as he is being dropped down through the narrow opening. Brothers Callum and Leighton struggle to contain his flailing legs. Once inside, the figure is led roughly aft by the two of them. I jump out of the way to let them pass. He is wearing a white uniform, this interloper from Topside, the short sleeve of his arm decorated with a colorful array of patches and symbols.
He wails, shrieks as he struggles against the men holding him. But no words. His mouth must be bound shut beneath the hood.
Never in my memory have we brought an adult prisoner on board. A Topsider.
Behind him, Brothers Ernesto and Augustine step down, and then I see Lazlo’s short form among them. Alive. All of them are sweating—Ernesto’s face bloodied. They fling several duffels full of goods to the deck. Supplies from the Topside ship. Coils of new, unfrayed rope. Jugs of water. A square package labeled INFLATABLE RAFT. Now they struggle to leverage in a heavier, more awkward package. Long, rigid.
When they release it, the sack crashes to the deck with a heavy thump, like it is filled with meat.
I look to the hatch opening, expecting Brother Silas to climb down at any moment, but Augustine is already closing up behind him, turning the hatch wheel.
“Sealed. Ready for dive!” Brother Callum cries out into the squawk box mounted on the bulkhead.
“What about Silas?” I say to Lazlo, whose chest is heaving from effort. “We can’t leave without him.”
And, yet, the dive bells are already ringing. I feel the hum of the Leviathan’s turbine in my toes. And Lazlo will not meet my gaze.
“Everyone to their stations,” Brother Augustine says, wiping the sweat and blood and water spray from his forehead, rushing past me.
Lazlo follows, but I hook on to his arm, staying him, making him look at me.
Eyes wide, he glances toward the largest sack resting on the deck.
3
THE DEAD NORMALLY COME to the balneary, the forwardmost compartment, for burial, carried on gurneys. If the body arrives already sewn up in a hammock, then they have come from aft, from engineering.
The Forgotten.
Young, limp bodies.
You can feel their bones through the canvas. Better when we cannot guess, when they could be anyone, or no one. We wear gloves when we handle these remains, for the poison which killed them—the reactor—can also poison you if you’re in contact with it too long. That’s what Brother Silas used to say. He would sometimes come to help us if the body was especially big and needed to be folded in order to be expelled through the torpedo tube.
Now it’s Silas we must relinquish to the deep.
His round face somehow still wearing the faintest smile, even in the rictus of death.
Unlike the Forgotten, he is given a proper benediction. The elders, a few of the Brothers that knew him better, and the Choristers have crammed themselves inside the balneary, circling his big, stout body as much as the space will permit.
We Choristers—we slightly more holy, slightly more damned, are made to bathe the dried blood from Silas’s wounds—three perfectly round holes clustered left of his sternum. Bullet holes.
Upon Silas’s anointed body, Caplain Marston reads the rites as we draw the stitch through his nose. A sailor’s custom of old. Make sure you’re dead.
“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.”
After, when the elders and the caplain have taken their leave, we must dispose of the remains. They must be folded in order to fit inside the tube.
“Go on, Caleb,” I say. He is already standing at a distance, just before the hatchway. He is too weak to be much use, anyway.
St. John is also of little help when it comes to folding, though he is the second oldest. In the end, he always turns away, and so it is Ephraim, Lazlo, and myself, accompanied by brothers Callum and Augustine, left to complete the task. They help us to turn Silas on his side, and lay the planks atop him, and then wrap chains about the planks and the torso, and then work the pulleys, closing the cinch tight until the clavicle cracks.
Next are the hips.
This is not him, I tell myself.
But, if our souls aren’t freed from the sea until the day of resurrection, then isn’t it? Are we not all trapped in our flesh until that day?
“Who killed him?” Ephraim asks Brother Callum when the deed is done and Silas’s earthly remains ejected with pneumatic hiss and swish into the dark.
A question I have already asked Lazlo numerous times today. A question he would not answer.
In fact, he would not divulge anything about the raid at all. He is discreet when it comes to Ephraim and St. John and Caleb, but never with me.
“Topsiders,” the older brother who wears a patch across his left eye says, with the hint of the same accent you sometimes hear in Ephraim’s voice. “Wretched bastards,” he mutters, wiping his good eye. “Got ’em. Praise be,” he says. “Got ’em, yeah.”
“They got us, though,” Brother Augustine says, round, red-faced, and portly, but perhaps the strongest of anyone on the Leviathan, especially now that Silas is gone. He wipes sweat and what must be dried blood from his roughly shaved pate with a grease rag that he then tosses to the deck. “And to make it worse, their helmsman steered right into the ship, tried to ram us.”
“That’s what that sound was,” Ephraim says.
“We didn’t take on water,” I say.
“No, but the dive plane is jarred good. Got to help fix that now,” Brother Augustine says, eyes red with salt. Exhaustion.
“Who is the interloper?” St. John asks, rather boldly, especially for him, who rarely suggests the slightest hint of impertinence, particularly in front of the older brothers. Augustine stops and shares a look with Callum, with Lazlo, who has remained silent all the while. The question all of us have been wondering. All of us gathered, curious as to why a grown man has been brought on board. A Topsider.
This, Brother Augustine is reluctant to answer. I offer a molar and two incisors from my stash, but he only waves his hand, not one to be easily tempted. “Someone Caplain says we needed. Said they was essential.”
“Someone good with the electrics,” Callum answers, clearly still upset, not worried a bit about what should or should not be divulged to us Choristers. “We hadn’t had a good one of them since we lost Brother Calvert. Brother Ernesto in’t up the task.”