The Nightmare Garden ic-2

by Caitlin Kittredge

  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.”

  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.