She hesitated, debating between running down the plank again and making another attempt to find Henry’s man as compared to stowing away on a ship bound who knew where.
Memory of her close escapes on the docks, along with having no idea how to find the man, decided her. At least she’d made it on a ship. Anywhere might be safer for a Natural than England.
Sam crept around the crates, keeping them or one of the smaller rowboats between her and the crew as much as she could. The last stretch, though, lay bare of any cover. She didn’t want to think about what they would do with her if they discovered her presence, even without knowing her nature, but she had no options left. She’d moved too far from the plank to reach it before being caught even if she’d wanted to go back into that confusing world where everyone seemed a threat.
A quick gasp of air, and she dove across the open space, grateful the scraping of heavy wooden crates masked the thump of her boots though she wished she’d thought to take them off.
None of the sailors seemed to notice her presence, and she reached the hatch without raising an alarm. Still, now she had to brave whatever lay on the other side.
The handle jerked out of her grasp, giving Sam hardly enough time to dive behind and press herself flat.
“That’s the last of it, boy, and you were lucky. Or should I say Mister Bowden was lucky. There’s no damage from the spill. You should be more careful with your next task, or you may not get off so lightly.”
The lanky, dark-haired boy who followed grimaced behind the stout man’s back, as though to say this version of punishment had been hard enough for his tastes.
Sam wondered at her choice to put herself in the man’s control, but the decision had been made. She only waited for the two of them to pass far enough from earshot for her to slip within.
Her second step almost sent her pitching forward as what she’d thought to be a floor vanished beneath her feet. She flung her arms wide and found a banner of sorts, though its cold, metal surface sent shivers down her spine even as her curled fingers identified it to be a pipe.
She stood there as though suspended above a chasm. Little light filtered in through the hatch above, and she could see no portholes bringing in the fading sun either.
Her eyes took a long time to adjust, and still offered only a vague sense of the space, enough to tell her she’d found no small cabin. The darkness stretched off in all directions, a looming presence.
But where the darkness might have scared many young girls, Sam had spent much of her childhood hiding in closets or in dark places like the barn Lily had found to shelter her. Sometimes she had a lamp, and sometimes not. The need to conserve fuel, though, often made her hesitate to light one when she did have it.
That history helped her find the courage now to step down into the chamber and feel her way across a room that offered obstacles of many shapes and sizes. Most she could identify as either wooden crates or different types of metal, some sheets and some pipes like those she’d used to guide her down the steps. What she found there made no sense until she realized the awkward collection could only mean she’d stumbled upon one of the cargo holds.
A better place to hide she could not imagine, but still, Sam made sure she squirmed her way between many layers of pipes until she found a small gap braced on one side by a wooden wall. Here she could listen to the slap of waves produced either by wind or the passage of the many steam vessels that had filled the docks. The sound itself offered enough of a soothing melody to set Sam to yawning.
She pulled off the boots to relieve her pinched feet and tucked Henry’s wallet away in them as well. She’d need both on the Continent, but not likely before then. Her eyes slipped closed, and she decided to worry about food and the like come morning. At least she’d found passage of a sort.
Dreams filled with squeaks and hisses overwhelmed her, but nothing could break the exhaustion that lay claim to every bit of her consciousness.
17
Every muscle in Nat’s body ached from shifting cargo and reorganizing the holds as each new load came in. The captain marked all his purchases with a stripe of ocher as was the tradition for the captain’s share, and they had to tuck every last bit of the marked crates and bundles into the area of the hold kept separate. Though this extra effort raised grumbles on other ships from what the rest of the crew said, never on theirs. Captain Paderwatch shared the earnings from his choices with all of them, recognizing none of that benefit would come to him without their help.
Still, Nat released a grateful sigh when the piles of official and captain’s cargo had all vanished into the hold and been stowed away for their departure. Morning would come all too quickly as the night had grown long. Much of the last work had been done under lamplight.
“Ah, there you are Mister Bowden.”
Nat froze at the sound of the captain’s voice, but he knew he could not ignore the summons no matter how much he longed for his hammock. He gritted his teeth and refused to complain as the captain waved him toward the cabin.
“I want to go over my plan for the morning. You make a better sounding board than my books.”
Nat managed a weak laugh at the familiar joke, but his future depended on Captain Paderwatch’s perceptions about him. He was determined not to give any of the crew, especially their captain, a reason to complain.
“Sit yourself down over there where you can see the charts well.”
Without a word, not that he could be sure to manage a coherent sentence, Nat sank onto the bench and propped his chin with both hands, staring down at the charts as though his mind could make any sense of them.
The captain tapped a chart in front of Nat. “This here is the Dover port. I’ve been checking the tides against the almanac, and they’ll be drawing out a good four bells before when we were told. Most of the other ships will spend their morning loading and sorting cargo, but not us. We can get underway on this early tide, though it might not be enough to move one of the bigger ships. Sometimes it’s an advantage to be so small. Our size makes us nimble. The equipment might belong to an earlier age, but we can still succeed through better planning. I’ve put aside some choice items in my part of the hold. If we can make port before any others from this part of the world, we’ll fetch a pretty penny for those goods.”
Nat’s thoughts drifted, wondering just what the captain had settled on this time, and which port would be their first destination on this voyage. His eyes slipped closed, and his chin sank further toward the table.
A sharp clap on his shoulder sent Nat scrambling to his feet.
The captain only laughed. “You make a grand listener even when you’re asleep where you stand, or sit in this case. But for this to work, we need a well-rested crew. I count you in that number so shouldn’t keep you here when the others have gone to find their rest. Now wipe the drool from your chin and go curl in your blankets. Early morning tomorrow. We’ll be up before the sun rises for sure.”
Nat blinked wearily at the captain’s enthusiasm, his sleeve rubbing against his chin.
“Go on with you. You’ll do me no good asleep on the riggings.”
Stumbling on his way to his hammock, the captain’s speech filtered through Nat’s sleep-dazed brain and he couldn’t help but see the brilliance in it. The crew might see the professor as a nominal leader worth nothing more than keeping the Company officials happy, but all that book learning opened up strategies another captain and crew might not have thought about. Even if they had, they wouldn’t know enough about every place the Company sent them so as to choose just what would be in greatest demand.
He fell asleep with a faint smile curling his lips. The ship might be old, and the crew old-fashioned, but he saw more of a future here than on a bigger steamship where he’d be one of many cabin boys and the captain would never think to bring him in to consider plans.
18
No light shone in her room when Sam woke, but she’d often come alert before the sun, especially with the wint
er just past. She stretched an arm over her head, grasping for the blanket with her other.
Her raised hand smacked into cold metal while she could only find dirty cloth beneath the other.
The events of the previous day came flooding back, and she drew both knees to her chest, shivering as much with the change in her fortunes as the early morning chill. What had seemed so clever an idea in the flush of aether-borne hunger now fell to pieces beneath her.
Despite what she’d thought the previous night, she had to get off the ship.
Sam had no supplies to keep herself hidden, and whatever the charge for being found out stowing away, the penalties would be higher once they figured out what she must be. Starving, she would be unable to control her urges.
Even worse, if they could trace her back to Lily and Henry, her family would pay the price for her failure.
A low groan cut through her frantic thoughts, so close that she first thought another lay hidden in this storage room.
Then the pipe pressed against her side groaned again, and its chilled surface began to heat.
She jerked away and took another look around her now that her eyes had adjusted to use what little light seeped in between the cracks in the ceiling despite the tar she could see staining between them.
The pipes she’d crawled through to get to this corner resembled less the careful storage of cargo and more a haphazard alignment of copper pathways rising from the floor to trace across the ceiling and at every possible height, stretching from one side of the room to the other, with no sign of an end. If she had to guess, Sam would say the pipes did not stop there either, but pierced the very walls to wind their way into every part of the ship, carrying steam to power other machinery or drawing water back to this very room.
Her heart thumped its way through a beat or two before she lost control and turned to face what she’d been too frightened and exhausted to notice the previous day. The distant engine called to her with whistles, groans, and clicks, its worn gearage and poorly aligned tracks begging her to help.
Like the carriage, this machine, the heart of the steamship, did not crave transformation into something different. It loved this purpose, longed for it, but wanted to be so much better at the task the universe had set to its conjunction of moving parts. Aether had gathered here for an age, possibly longer than the fifteen years Sam had walked this earth, hoping, praying even, that someday it would gather enough to reach the ears of one who could hear its cries.
The need dragged at her, pulling both body and soul toward the steam engine. Aether stretched along the pipes that surrounded her, racing toward her and seeping into Sam until her arms tingled with the strength of it, greater than anything she’d felt before.
Her fingers closed on a bundle of gears left strewn across the floor below the steps before she even knew she’d moved out of her hiding place. She undid the knots of fabric and pulled a gear free to press the metal to her palm.
Sam absorbed its shape even as she saw the exact location where it was needed to replace a part with worn teeth. She had never transformed anything as complex as the machine that called her now, but its wealth of aether offered guidance, direction not just for where to place the gear, but how to link it in and balance the mechanism so each tooth fit smoothly with the gears around it.
She rose out of a half-crouch and took a step toward the massive construct on the far side of the room.
Its metal shape soared to the ceiling where the top of the boiler joined with pipes that hung from the rafters and connected everything on the ship to this one room. The heart cried out to her, pushing aside her hesitation in its demand to be whole, but more than that, it wanted to be better. The engine held enough aether to have become half-sentient the way a mechanical man could be. It heard the grumbles of its crew. It knew they needed more.
Aether drove this knowledge into Sam as a series of impressions, flashes carrying with them snippets of conversations spoken over the years this ship had gathered awareness.
It knew every member of the crew: their strengths, weaknesses, flaws, and moments of brilliance. All of this the engine pushed at her, using not just its desires, but those of the crew to shape her will.
Sam had never been so manipulated, not by her family nor a machine, and she wasn’t about to start now. She dropped the gear to the floor with a thud and stepped away, heading back toward her hiding spot.
The engine let out a shriek of steam loud enough to make Sam clap her hands to both ears in a belated attempt to dampen the piercing cry. Her mechanicals had never battered her so. They’d always asked kindly when wanting a change.
Tears sprung into her eyes as she longed to be back in her workshop surrounded by her own machines, ones who loved her as much as she did them.
When the noise finally stopped, the silence seemed deafening, at least until she heard the heavy thud of running steps.
Fear cut through her misery, and Sam dove between the nearest pipes just in time as the hatch slammed open and thin sunlight poured in. She pressed her body to the floor, knowing she couldn’t chance crawling the rest of the way back to her nest, not with someone coming down the stairs and looking into the chamber.
“What’s wrong with it this time?” an unfamiliar voice asked.
“I’ll have to check her out, Captain. It’ll take some time.”
That voice she knew all too well from hearing him tell off the black-haired boy the previous day. She could not afford to be found by such a man. He seemed to have no kindness in his soul.
“Well, make quick about it, Garth. Much rests on us sailing a good number of hours before the others headed in the same direction, especially with the engine acting up. Doesn’t help that it probably woke the crew of at least the vessels on either side if not the whole dock.”
Perhaps the last had not been meant to be overheard from the lowered tone, but the hatchway amplified the captain’s voice so both Sam and the angry man could hear it easily. A flash of sympathy toward the man surprised Sam with what she knew of him, but perhaps he had cause to be grumpy.
“That blasted carry-boy. I let him off too easily. Just look at this mess. Here I thought he’d placed the bundles well, but this one must have fallen with enough force to break open. Or maybe that arrogant shipbuilder didn’t bother securing the ties, and I’m lucky we didn’t leave pieces strewn across the whole dock for pickpockets to claim.”
He continued to mutter a litany of accusations and curses against any and every person who’d come in contact with the gear, the name Nat showing up more than once, but Sam tried to tune him out along with the other demand on her attention.
The engine had learned from its mistakes. Any subtlety had left its efforts, and demand as well. Instead, it laid bare the dreams harbored in each puff of aether and begged her to help. It spoke of a solitude she knew all too well, and of knowing a better future but being unable to reach it.
Sam thought for a moment it read her own life and dreams then realized she could not be alone in having her wishes held captive by forces beyond her control. A kinship grew between them in the time it took the engineer, for that was what he must have been, to gather his tools and the parts he thought would be necessary.
She shifted so she could watch him, the process he used almost painful to see when she knew how it should have been done.
Sam flinched when the engineer pounded a fresh gear into place, feeling the scrape and grind of the gears as though he tortured her, not the engine. She struggled to recognize the man did his best without aether to assist and guided only by sight, but soon she could no longer tolerate the double vision.
When he started pounding another gear, Sam rolled onto her hands and knees, and crept back to her hiding spot. Hunger gnawed a hole in her stomach where the engine had stripped the value from the meat pie she’d stolen. Sam drew her knees to her chest, trying to ignore both the banging and her stomach.
Any chance of sneaking off the ship had ended with the engine’s
scream and the captain’s demand. The engineer would work on the engine until it managed enough to get the ship away from the dock, at which point she’d have no hope of escape, even ignoring the thumps and thuds on the ceiling above her, a clear sign the ship itself was now fully awake. The open space she’d crossed when they were distracted would give her away to the nearest sailor now, if he paid even the slightest attention to his surroundings. And from the sound of it, the sailors were everywhere this morning.
She curled around her aching stomach and wondered just how bad a ship’s rat would taste raw. Perhaps if the pipes grew hot enough, she could cook the meat a little bit, though the smell might draw too much attention.
If she could even find the strength to catch one.
19
Nat stumbled into the kitchen, scrubbing the sleep out of both eyes with the back of his hand. It felt as if he’d just rested his head on the folded shirt he used for a pillow when he’d been woken by what sounded as though a thousand seagulls had taken to the sky to fight over a single fish.
The sun already crested the horizon, spreading a splash of red, orange, and yellow across the water, and the captain had wanted an early weigh anchor.
“You just set down there before you topple over into my porridge,” Jenson said the moment he caught sight of Nat. “I’ll put together a plate for you in a bit. I’m dishing out some for Mister Garth on the captain’s order.”
Sinking onto the same stool he’d used often enough in helping prepare the meals, Nat fought the desire to rest his head on folded arms, an act that would be sure to send him back into slumber. Then Jenson’s odd sentence caught up to him, along with the lack of a sour tone.
“Since when does Mister Garth rate a meal in his cabin?”
Jenson, who’d never been one to miss a sharp comment, just shook his head. “Not his cabin, boy, the engine room. Don’t tell me you slept through the death knell of our ship, now did you?”
Secrets (The Steamship Chronicles Book 1) Page 9
