Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (32 page)

She moved aside to let me out then, her stony expression falling back into place. “Dean Harrison is a good boy, Aoife. And if he’d risk his neck for you, I’ll help you risk yours for
him. I just hope you have a plan of your own and not just the Proctors’.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, though I was sure it wasn’t the kind of plan Rasputina was thinking of. My secrets were still my own. That was Dean’s only real chance. “It’s a good plan,” I assured her. She looked like she doubted me, but before she could say anything, there was a great clanking groan, and the entire sub vibrated beneath us.

“What
now
?” Rasputina snarled, shoving past me. The old man with the beard met her halfway down the corridor.

“Captain, the main rotors on the starboard propeller are jammed,” he said. “The jam is tearing the entire screw assembly apart. We’re bleeding power.”

“Then have someone fix it, chief,” she snarled. “What do I have Jakob and Piotr for if they’re not going to fix the damn ship when it breaks down?”

“They’re trying,” the chief said. “But it’s a complicated problem.”

I could fix their problem. At what cost, I didn’t know. Being inside iron was already starting to make me feel woozy, see flickers of light and shadow at the corners of my eyes. But if we didn’t get moving, Dean would be doomed for sure and I’d never reach the Brotherhood. I went to Rasputina and lifted my hand. “I can fix it.”

Rasputina and the chief both scoffed at me. “You?” Rasputina said. “You can’t even fix that bird’s nest you call hair.”

“I’m good with machines,” I insisted, ignoring her jab. “If your engineers can’t fix it, then what do you have to lose by letting me try? I was an engineering student in Lovecraft. I can’t make things any worse.”

“You could blow up the boat, and all of us with it,” the chief snapped. “Get back to your bunk, little girl.”

“Look,” I said, glaring at him. “I’m not an idiot. I can fix your propeller without blowing up your submersible. So you can accept that the
little girl
might know what she’s talking about, or we can all sit here until this bucket rusts through and we sink to the bottom.”

“She’s right,” Rasputina said, heading off what was sure to be a shouting match between the chief and me. “We’re dead. Never mind that the Proctors, the Canadian Coast Guard, or another rogue sub could pick us up at any moment.”

“Fine,” the chief snapped. Rasputina cocked her head.

“Yes, it is fine. I’m the captain, and I give the orders, and you nod.”

The chief muttered a slew of Russian, and I watched Rasputina’s brows draw together. “If my father were here, he’d give the same order. But he’s not here. This is my boat now, so take the girl to the engine room, get her a suit and a set of tools and get her working.” She pointed a leather-gloved finger at me. “Fix my ship, Aoife Grayson.”

I felt the urge to salute but quashed it. “Yes, ma’am.” I just hoped fixing the propeller would actually be a feat of engineering, rather than a feat of magic that caused my brain to short-circuit from the pressure of my Weird.

The chief grabbed me by the arm and dragged me toward the rear of the boat, despite my protests that I could walk on my own. “Aoife, eh,” he grunted. “What kind of name is Aoife?”

“It means ‘radiant,’ ” I said. “At least, that’s what my mother always told me.”

The chief snorted his obvious derision. “Why?” I demanded. “What’s
your
name?”

“Alexei Sorkin,” he grunted. “Dive chief of this boat. And medical officer, since we have no real one. I am the one who restarted your heart when the cold water stopped it.”

“And what’s the boat’s name?” I asked. I was chattering a bit, trying to keep my mind focused outside of myself so that I couldn’t think about the slowly blossoming flower of a headache just behind my eyes.

Not a headache, I knew.
Madness
.

“Her name is the
Oktobriana
,” Chief Sorkin answered. “After the warrior heroine of the Crimson Guard.”

“You were one of them?” I asked. “Like Captain Ivanova?”

“You ask a lot of questions for such a little girl,” Sorkin said curtly, and ducked through a hatch into a steamy space that smelled of oil and metal shrieking against metal. When I hesitated, he grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me along with him. “I thought you said you knew your way around engines.”

“I do,” I said curtly. I didn’t know why I expected a bunch of grouchy Russian sailors to treat me like a lady, but it was starting to irritate me that they didn’t at least treat me like I had a brain. “I like engines better than people, most of the time. I definitely do right now,” I added, and Sorkin surprised me by barking a laugh.

“Ah, so you are little but you have sharp teeth! I like it.” We delved farther into the engine room, and steam all but obscured my vision, giving me uncomfortable memories of the Mists.

“Who’s there?” said a voice from the white world beyond.

“Jakob, this is Aoife,” said the chief. He mispronounced
it “Effie” instead of “Ee-fah,” but I didn’t bother correcting him. “She claims she can fix our boat.”

When he finally came into view, I was surprised to see that Jakob was as thin as Cal and about my height. He was practically miniature, and his ocean-blue eyes shone from his grease-streaked face with an eerie brightness. “Huh” was all he said.

“Have at it. Piotr will be forward if you need him,” Sorkin told me, and turned around to stomp back to the main part of the sub.

Alone and suddenly out of my element, I stared at Jakob for a long, awkward moment, and he stared back. “Do you speak much English?” I asked at last.

“Just a little,” he admitted. His accent wasn’t the rich, rounded syllables of Rasputina’s or the bear’s growl that Sorkin had. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I wouldn’t have called it Russian. Well, they were a pirate crew. Jakob could be from anywhere. I had the niggling thought I’d heard that sort of accent somewhere before, but I put it aside.

“That’s better than no Russian, which is what I speak,” I said to him. “What happened here?”

Jakob extended a handful of what looked like limp rubber noodles, nipped neatly at the ends. “Somebody cut the coolant lines. Batteries, they power the propellers. We recharge in port, but the batteries need coolant or they can overheat and then …” He made a
boom
motion with his hands. Rasputina’s story came back to me with new, stark reality. Overheated batteries could rupture and start leaking acid, causing toxic fumes. A sub trapped below the waves
with no power to surface and no fresh air would have a dead crew in a matter of hours.

It was imperative I get this boat working again, not just for the sake of our journey, but for the sake of all our lives, not to mention my sanity. My head throbbed a bit and the pain warned me not to get overexcited or I’d speed the passage of the iron through my system.

“That’s bad,” I said.

“We don’t start the starboard propeller again, we go in circles, but nowhere else,” Jakob said. He twirled his finger to demonstrate.

“But if somebody sabotaged the boat …,” I said. What on earth could be going on? Even if Draven had a spy on board, he
wanted
me to reach my destination. Sabotaging the
Oktobriana
accomplished nothing.

“I said, we can’t worry about that right now,” Jakob said. “Unless we want to drift where the current takes us, what matters now is getting the boat started again.”

“All right, all right,” I told him. “I’m working on it.” I wasn’t used to being so easily dismissed, but Jakob was right. What mattered now was fixing the boat.

I put my hands on the casing of the rotors, the whole assembly of the motor that drove the sub, feeling out the gears and pistons and letting my mind get a sense of the machine within. “Will you be able to replace the coolant?”

Jakob nodded. “I’m working on it now.”

I nodded back and placed my forehead against the engine case. My Weird whispered to me, and I looked at Jakob. “You have some tools I can use?”

I didn’t have the control to fix the broken bits of the
Oktobriana
purely with my mind. It was different from picking a lock or starting an aethervox. And my Weird was better at destruction, anyway.

We worked in silence for a while, Jakob’s taciturn grunts when I asked him to pass me a tool the only sounds. My sweat soaked through every layer of my clothes, and I stripped down to my undershirt. Jakob took off his shirt, period. His upper torso was smooth and perfect, not a scar, not a mark. For a pirate mechanic, he was in remarkably good shape. He saw me looking and his blue eyes sharpened. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, blushing furiously. “I’m sorry.”

Jakob drew closer to me, and his pale, almost translucent skin caught the aether lamps lighting the engine room, making him look as if he were carved from stone. I backed up, banged into the side of the rotor assembly and realized too late I had nowhere to go.

I was totally alone with Jakob. It was doubtful anyone at the other end of the
Oktobriana
would hear me if I screamed.
Stupid, Aoife
, I berated myself.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
.

My shoulder began throbbing, as if someone held a hot iron to it, and I gasped as I cringed from Jakob’s hot breath in my face. His hand landed on my shoulder, and a thin blade found the soft spot on my neck, under the jawbone, pressing tight and causing me to suck in my breath lest it nick my skin. “Don’t move,” Jakob purred in my ear. His strange, musical accent filled my ears, even more than my panicked, pounding heart, and all at once I placed the voice, the too-bright eyes, the unearthly alabaster skin.

“Fae,” I said, my voice strained as I tried not to move against the knife. “You’re Fae.”

He didn’t reply, just pressed the knife harder against my flesh. It didn’t make any sense. Why try to leave us helpless in the water if all he wanted was my death, in the end? Was he an agent of Tremaine’s? How was he surviving, trapped in an iron tube, when I was already getting the first symptoms of poisoning?

Jakob still didn’t say anything. The pain in my shoulder was dizzying, and I felt tears squeeze from the corners of my eyes from fear. “Who are you?” I choked out. “What are you going to do to me?”

“I got you alone to deliver a message,” Jakob said. “You always have to be the clever one, Aoife. The one to fix things.” He kicked the door to the engine compartment shut, never moving the blade from my throat. Thin, and made from pure hardened silver—Tremaine had a similar knife. He’d also held it to my neck, and it hadn’t made me any more inclined to listen to him than I was to listen to Jakob. “Nobody can break in here. Nobody will hear you scream.” The knife pressed, and I felt a thin line of blood trickle down into the hollow of my throat. “The message is this, Aoife—the Brotherhood can’t help you. The nightmare clock can’t help you. Your only chance to find your mother is to come back to Tremaine and beg for forgiveness.”

A pounding started up outside the door. “Effie! Effie, girl! What is happening in there?”

Jakob cut his eyes toward Chief Sorkin’s voice, but he was immovable, and quick as a cat besides. I stood no chance of trying to get away on my strength alone. My father’s words came back to me:
You’re not much in a stand-up fight
.

“Shut up, Dad,” I grumbled. Jakob cocked his head, then smiled, a thin smile. He turned his wrist to dig the knife in more, and I caught a flash of a flaw in the skin of his wrist, a brand of some sort, which surrounded a small metal rivet. My Weird responded, frantic and hot against my mind in my panic. I had an idea, just a germ of one. I might not be a fighter, but I was smart. And Jakob hadn’t counted on how badly I wanted to live.

Rasputina’s voice joined the clamor outside. “Open this door, Jakob! What’s happening in there?” Something heavy hit, and Sorkin shouted.

“Jammed, Captain! Something is wrong!”

Rather than focus on Jakob, his pointed features, his now-pupil-less blue eyes, I focused on the door. Using my Weird felt like driving a drill through my temple, and blood gushed from my nose, but the wheel that opened the door turned, ever so slowly, and then, with one last push, flew back and dented the bulkhead with a clang like a coffin lid.

Rasputina and Sorkin stood there, and Jakob spun me to face them, arm clamped across my shoulders, knife at my neck. I was closer to this Fae than I’d ever been to anyone, even to Dean, and I could feel his heart beating. “You little sneak,” he hissed in my ear.

I snarled, not willing to be afraid of his blade or the fact that a Fae was here, alive, aboard an iron ship. “What? Did Tremaine fail to mention that?”

Rasputina drew her pistol and aimed it at us. “Jakob,” she said softly. “Your eyes. What’s wrong with your eyes?”

Jakob’s laugh was short and harsh as a seal’s bark. “My eyes? Nothing, you idiot woman. My eyes are open. Yours
are closed. You are ignorant to everything around you, especially me.”

I twisted my neck a bit while he ranted, trying to see if I had any give with the knife. There wasn’t much. Jakob’s skin felt cold and clammy where his bare torso pressed against me, and I caught a glimpse of his eyes, which had so alarmed Rasputina. Fae eyes gleamed with an inner light. If I were Rasputina, I’d have been losing my cool staring into them as well.

“Speak,” Rasputina said. “You’ve been loyal crew for months, Jakob. What are you going to do to this girl?”

“Cut her throat if you don’t lower that crude weapon and leave us to our business,” Jakob snarled. “And also if she declines to obey my terms.”

Fury flared in me. Tremaine still thought he controlled me, either via an agent or directly, through my fear of the Fae catching up to me. Now it had happened, and strangely, I wasn’t panicking. I was just furious. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I told Jakob. “My brother sliced my throat. He almost killed me. I was bleeding all over myself. I’m not going to scream and beg.”

“You mad bastard,” Rasputina said, lowering the hammer on her pistol. The click echoed in the closed space, and I swallowed in fear, acutely aware that I was in the way of the bullet.