Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (31 page)

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.”

“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I whispered, wondering what on earth Rasputina had seen through the periscope to make her react in such a way. Nothing good, clearly. “I haven’t told you one lie since you brought me on board.” That in itself was a lie, but I’d told the truth where it counted, hadn’t I?

Rasputina pointed behind her, at a young girl, younger even than me, sitting at a radar station. “Explain that,” she
said to me. She snapped at the girl in Russian, and she took off her earphones and spoke to us in English.

“Ping bearing one mile off port side, visual range in fifteen seconds. Border Guard destroyer. Seems to be holding its position, ma’am.”

The Border Guard—the Proctors who patrolled coastal waters to keep out Crimson Guard spies and heretics of all stripes—were notorious for their black ships, their silent gliders and their brutal interrogations of anyone who crossed their path. We’d watched a few reels on them at the Academy.

“We are six miles off the coast of Maine,” Rasputina told me. “They have us dead to rights, and they aren’t moving. No torpedoes. Not even a screw turning. Now, were I a Proctor, I wouldn’t hesitate to blow us right out of the water and into the sky like the pirates we are.” She pressed the pistol against my forehead until it bit into my flesh. “The only thing that’s different on this trip is you. The only reason those bastards haven’t opened fire on us is you. Who are you?”

“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I repeated. My shivering now had nothing to do with being frozen.

“All right, Aoife Grayson,” Rasputina snarled. “If that’s who you are, what’s so special about Aoife Grayson? Why is she so precious and dear to those squawking blackbirds?”

“Captain,” said the old man. “We’re on a full charge. We can outrun them.”

“And drain our batteries halfway to land and drift around like a piece of garbage until we sink, suffocate, or run aground,” Rasputina told him. “No. We’re getting to the bottom of this now.”

“I destroyed the Engine,” I blurted. Rasputina snapped her gaze back to me, and the pistol wavered away from my head. The barrel was as black and endless as the space outside the dome in my dreams, and when it dropped to her side I let out a breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding.

“Good lord,” Rasputina said. “I knew you looked familiar.”

“The Proctors are keeping Dean hostage until I get to the Bone Sepulchre. I have to …” I kept my eyes on the gun. My heart was thumping so loudly I could barely hear my own words. “I have to do what I did to the Engine. I have to destroy the heretics who live up there, where the Proctors can’t reach, or they’re going to kill the person I care about most.”

That sounded plausible to me, and left out both the nightmare clock and Draven’s compass, ticking away like a tiny evil bomb in my satchel.

Rasputina holstered her pistol. She looked at the blinking blob on the radar screen and back at me. “So you’re not a spy. You’re an assassin.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m doing what I have to, for Dean. I’m not happy about it, but if either of us wants to survive long enough to try to find a way out of this, you better get the hell away from the coast while they’re holding their fire.”

Rasputina’s mouth set in a hard, long line, like the blade of a knife. “You better be telling me the truth.”

“I am,” I said quietly.

“Dive,” Rasputina said to the old man. “Ten degrees down. Make your depth one-zero meters.”

The dive officer grumbled his assent in Russian, and a bell rang three times, short and sharp. The sub dove, the
rivets of the hull creaking and groaning all along its length. Rasputina straightened her cap and jacket after she removed the rain gear, then touched me on the arm. “Come with me, Aoife.”

She took me to the captain’s quarters this time, a small, curved room like the one I’d tried to sleep in, but paneled with real wood instead of rust-bubbled steel. The insignia of the Crimson Guard was inlaid in the wall above the bed. Someone had hacked a thick slash mark through it.

Rasputina got a bottle of clear liquid out of her foot-locker, along with two glasses. She poured an inch into each and pushed one at me. “I suppose I should apologize,” she said. “For holding a gun to your head.”

“You had a good reason,” I said. I would have done exactly the same in her position, and I knew it. I wasn’t angry that she’d threatened me, just terrified that she’d realize that the story I’d come up with about destroying the Brotherhood was bunk. If she found out Draven was tracking me, using her ship as a pilot fish, I’d be out a hatch faster than I could blink.

“We’re going to be dead in the water after that dive, unless we put in at Newfoundland,” Rasputina said. She let the words hang between us, regarding me as she swirled her drink in her glass.

I sniffed at mine. It smelled faintly like the incendiaries rioters tossed at Proctors during the every-other-day upheavals in Lovecraft. “I’m going to the Bone Sepulchre one way or the other,” I told Rasputina. “I won’t let the Proctors hurt Dean.”

“And to protect your love, you will destroy another’s life? All of the Brotherhood?” Rasputina asked.

“It’s not …,” I started, my face heating. Was
love
the right word to describe what Dean and I had?

“A woman after my own heart,” Rasputina said. She tossed her drink back.
“Na Zdorov’ye.”

I drank mine. It burned my throat and made me cough. Rasputina chuckled. “You can walk around the boat, but don’t get in the way. We’ll be a few hours yet up the coast.”

“So you’ll take me to the Arctic Circle?” I said, refusing to budge. Rasputina waved me away with an annoyed gesture.

“I can’t very well leave Dean Harrison to rot, can I? Damn that boy.” She stood and opened her door, the signal for me to leave. I started to obey, then stopped. “Why do you trust me? Just like that?”

“Because,” Rasputina said. I didn’t know if the drink had made her more expansive, or outrunning the Proctors, but her iron-hard face softened. “Once, I was a girl who believed in the Crimson Guard above all else. I signed on to the navy at fourteen. And I served, until the day our engine batteries ruptured and the commander abandoned ship. The batteries were leaking toxins, and we were left to die. Expendable to the cause.” She cleared her throat. “A few of us made a lifeboat, but it sank in the freezing waters, and I washed ashore near Lovecraft. A heretic boy took me in, fed me, got me clothes. And when I found the commander who’d left us all to die for his own ends, I took his new ship and I never looked back, at his cause or any other.”