The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  Jin Lo caught herself, with a start. She had missed a few words. Otherwise she understood what the people were saying. She had read a description of the island’s grammar in her book, and a translation of some vocabulary, but that was all. The mushroom the apothecary had given her to help with his scrambled consonants had amplified her small knowledge of the language so that she could assemble meaning. She paid closer attention.

  The man in the red T-shirt said that the birdman was not John Frum. John Frum would come from the sky, but in an airplane—everyone knew that. The boy had tricked them, and now this second birdman had come to do the same. They would not bring cargo. They would only bring poison. At this, the man took a heavy rock and crushed the glass vials. Jin Lo watched all of the apothecary’s careful preparation spill out on the ground, muddying the dirt among the glass shards. So much for dressing slowly.

  But the man was still talking. The bird people would steal the island’s boats, he said. They would steal the island’s daughters, and their best, most precious kava-makers. But the people, his people, knew what to do. It was ancient knowledge. They would take the birdman’s power. They would revenge the theft of their children. And they would punish the bird people for daring to impersonate their god.

  Jin Lo suddenly understood the words she had missed. The women had been sent for dry kindling, to make a cookfire. They were going to roast the apothecary over a fire, and eat him.

  CHAPTER 43

  The Mine

  Janie lay in the dark in her room in the compound on the island. Her mind kept circling around the fact that she had found Benjamin and asked him to help her, and he had died trying to come to her rescue. She longed to be able to switch off her thoughts and go to sleep. But then she saw a flicker of something. The dark sea, near the surface of the water. A sliver of sail buffeted by the wind. Was Benjamin there? She couldn’t tell. It was too dark. The whole scene was flickering, fading.

  Janie waited, but the image was gone. She opened her eyes and felt dizzy. It had been Benjamin. It had been a feeble signal. But she was sure that Benjamin was alive, in a small boat. She sat up in the dark room, full of new resolution.

  She took her shoes in her hand and pushed her bedroom door open. The hallway was empty. They must have decided she was too depressed and apathetic to need a guard anymore. She slipped silently down the hall in her pajamas. The front door of the house was locked, but the long windows on either side were open for the breeze. She took down one of the window screens, and was able to squeeze out through the gap.

  She crossed the terrace to the lawn barefoot before putting on her shoes. She was sure the mine had something to do with the reason Magnusson wanted Benjamin and his father. She had to get there. But first she had to turn off the power to the electrified fence.

  There were four white cottages that served as barracks for the guards, below the main house. If there was a way to turn off the fence, it might be near where the guards lived.

  Silently, she made her way down to the cottages. A light came from one of the doors, and she heard voices. There was a card game going on: four men around a table.

  The man with his back to the door had his hair cut short, but it grew in distinctive whorls behind his ears: Janie knew those whorls. It was the pilot they’d picked up in Siberia, who never spoke. But he was speaking now—not in Russian but in a drawling, plummy British accent.

  Janie gasped as she recognized the voice, and the pilot turned and looked out into the dark. Janie drew back, pressing herself against the wall. It was bright in the barracks and dark outside, so he might not have seen her, but she had seen him.

  He had a shock of short-cropped white hair in front, where he used to have soft brown curls. His face was older and more weathered than it had been when he was a Latin teacher, as if ten years had passed and not two. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized him in all those hours on the plane. He had always worn his helmet and goggles, but had never seemed to be hiding himself. Or maybe she just hadn’t been paying the right kind of attention. She had been too distracted and upset by the thought of Benjamin in the clutches of some giant bird.

  The pilot returned to his card game. No one came outside to look for her. The men were talking about the hand Mr. Danby had just played, and about his damned luck. Because it was Mr. Danby. She’d been sure he was dead.

  Danby knew how to fly a plane, of course, having been a pilot in the RAF in the war. On her first day in his Latin class, he had asked if she was an Isabel Archer or a Daisy Miller, as an American girl in England. Then he had betrayed his country and left her alone on the deck of a Soviet destroyer to be poisoned by the radiation from a hydrogen bomb. And now he was winning at cards in Magnusson’s barracks.

  “Ill met by moonlight,” a quiet voice said.

  She whirled and saw Magnusson standing behind her in the dark, wearing a dark red silk dressing gown. His blond hair was mussed, as if he had come straight from sleep. He motioned her away from the barracks and she followed, full of questions.

  “Let’s not disturb their game,” he murmured as they walked away from the voices and the light.

  “Why is Danby here?” she asked in a whisper.

  “I was half asleep,” Magnusson said, “wondering when you would try to sneak out of your room again, when I had the strangest dream. It was of a girl’s hands, taking the screen from a window near the main door. And then I was walking down toward the barracks, barefoot. I woke and thought—what would an analyst say of this dream? That my feminine side is interested in the lives of the pilots? But then I thought, no. The analyst would be wrong. This is a practical dream, a useful dream, and I wasn’t even truly asleep. The dream is telling me the answer to my question. It’s telling me something that is happening right now.”

  They were at the equipment shed, and Magnusson threw a switch on the wall and motioned for Janie to get into a golf cart. She climbed in, determined to learn more about what Danby was doing here.

  “I don’t think that I have acquired psychic powers,” Magnusson said as he backed the golf cart with its quiet electric motor out of the shed. “Not at my age. You must explain to me how it works. Did you slip me something? In my food? On the plane? Did Sylvia help you? Or Osman?”

  Janie shook her head.

  “Was it at the restaurant?” Magnusson asked, watching her face in the moonlight, and then he laughed. “Ah, of course! So long ago! I am a fool. I could have been using it all this time. I congratulate you. And I thank you for including me.”

  The gate in the electrified fence was standing open. They drove through, and it closed behind them. Janie found her voice. “Tell me why Danby is here,” she said.

  “There’s something he wants,” Magnusson said. “Why does anyone go anywhere? But please—what was it, exactly, that you slipped me?”

  “A powder.”

  “And how does it work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I had another dream,” Magnusson said. “Three nights ago, of snakes and intestines. Any idea what that was about?”

  “Just your evil, unconscious mind at work.”

  “You flatter me,” Magnusson said.

  They were on the road outside the villa, and she could feel and smell water close by—the little lagoon. Then they were in the trees, on the narrow waist of the island. She wondered if there were animals here, and listened for noises in the brush.

  Then the island opened up again, and Magnusson stopped the golf cart among a cluster of small wooden buildings. The buildings seemed sturdy, if very small, and they all looked the same. Company houses, she guessed, for the miners. But there were no bulldozers, and no earthmoving equipment. Magnusson climbed out of the golf cart, and she followed him.

  They walked among the silent, sleeping houses, toward a larger building like a warehouse. She felt a humming coming from beneath her feet. Magnusson pulled open a garage door, and the humming grew louder. She followed him inside, and in the dimness she could s
ee a bulldozer, a truck, two rows of long tables, and a simple steel kitchen against one wall. Magnusson led her toward two elevator doors. One was normal sized, and one much larger, like a cargo elevator.

  Magnusson drew out a key and turned it in a switch. Janie heard cables moving as the smaller elevator rose to the surface. When it opened, they stepped inside.

  “I’m so pleased that you’ve come,” Magnusson said as they descended. “It’s very frustrating to own a remarkable thing and not be able to show it off.”

  Then the elevator door opened again, and Janie stepped out into the worst place she’d ever been. It was hot and dark and strangely lit, below the ground, and there was a smell of dirt and gasoline. Narrow train tracks ran in both directions. Two carts with open-topped bins stood on the tracks. Janie thought the whole area beneath the village must have been excavated. It looked so little like a mine from above. There were pipes running along the rough ceiling, which must carry water—and maybe air?

  “It’s quite something, isn’t it?” Magnusson asked.

  “Why is it hidden?”

  “So that people won’t see it.”

  “What are you mining?”

  “Uranium, of course,” Magnusson said. “We do the milling beneath the ground, also. It’s a remarkable feat of engineering, this mine, and the mill. A little tricky to dispose of the tailings.”

  “Is it radioactive?”

  Magnusson laughed. “Uranium? Yes, that’s the whole point, my dear.” He frowned comically. “Don’t tell me I’ve made a mistake, thinking you intelligent.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous, to have everything enclosed underground?”

  “Oh, if you were down here year after year, I suppose,” he said. “But not for a quick tour.”

  “Do the miners know it’s dangerous?”

  “Perhaps. They are not men with many options.”

  “So they’re slaves?”

  “No, no!” Magnusson said. “I simply mean that we are each born to our station in life. And we make the best of it.” He took two hard hats from hooks and handed one to Janie.

  Janie looked at the yellow helmet. “The thing Danby wants,” she said. “It’s the uranium, isn’t it?”

  “Put that hat on,” Magnusson said. “Protect that clever little head.”

  Janie wondered if this was her chance to run. There was no key switch to go up in the elevator, just a call button. But Magnusson was strong and determined, and right beside her. She’d never make it. She put on the hard hat and followed him. Her mind tumbled over the new information, putting it together.

  “Who’s the uranium for?” she asked. “Not for Russia. They have their own. And not for the U.S. or England. Danby already betrayed them both.”

  “Perhaps he’s trying to win them back,” Magnusson said jauntily.

  “But they have their own uranium, too.”

  “How does a schoolgirl know so much?” They were walking down a tunnel, along a narrow railroad track.

  “I read the newspaper, that’s all,” Janie said.

  “Because you were trying to figure out where Benjamin and his father were? And with which nuclear test they were trying to meddle?”

  Janie nearly tripped over her own feet, but she forced herself to keep walking. She wondered if now, if she turned and ran, she could make it into the elevator before Magnusson caught up with her. Magnusson might be slower than she was, but not by much. “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” she said.

  Magnusson laughed. “Ah, Janie,” he said. “You are the most terrible liar. It’s very charming.”

  “What do you want with Benjamin?”

  “Oh, come. You haven’t put it all together?”

  They had stopped near an old elevator cage of some kind. It must once have lowered men deeper into the mine, but now it was unused and parked on a ledge. Magnusson pulled open the door, studying the rust on the hinges, listening to them creak. Janie’s mind was racing through everything she knew: that Magnusson was mining uranium, that he had kidnapped her to lure Benjamin and his father, that Danby was on the island, that he had been alive all this time…

  Suddenly her arm was twisted behind her back and she was being propelled, hard, into the elevator cage. She stumbled, trying not to go down on her face. It all happened before she could struggle free, and Magnusson slammed the door and slapped a padlock on it.

  She was locked in.

  But that fact was mixed up with what she finally understood. The two thoughts were like transparencies laid one over the other, with the bright light of awareness behind them. She grabbed the sturdy bars of the cage. She couldn’t squeeze out between them. It made a perfect prison cell. Did she see nothing coming?

  No: She saw one thing, very clearly.

  “Danby wants uranium for a new bomb,” she said. “And he wants to get rid of Benjamin’s father so that no one can stop it.”

  “Wrong,” Magnusson said, smiling.

  “Wrong?”

  “Mr. Burrows has colleagues all over the world,” Magnusson said. “Drop him off a cliff, and another will spring up just like him. My sources tell me that the Chinese girl went home to Nanking, and the fat Hungarian count is still at large. I have also heard that Andrei Sakharov has been doing some troubling experiments, after seeing what your apothecary did to his bomb. He might be joining their number.”

  Janie ran through the facts again. It was like the mystery puzzles her father used to pose for her on the drive to King’s Canyon—the lights go out and the patient dies—but those were for killing time in the car. This was about killing people, and she couldn’t figure it out.

  Then it came clear. “He wants to apothecary-proof the uranium,” she said, stunned by the simplicity of the answer. “He wants an unstoppable bomb.”

  Magnusson beamed at her. “Very good,” he said. “A-plus! You are the brightest student. I knew you were.”

  “Mr. Burrows won’t do it. He would never do it.”

  “We’ll see what he will do.”

  “And anyway, he isn’t coming,” she said, although she wasn’t sure about that anymore, not since she’d seen the flicker of Benjamin’s sail.

  “We’ll see about that, too,” Magnusson said. Smiling, he turned and left her in the poisonous heat of the mine.

  CHAPTER 44

  The Swamp

  Jin Lo, still a falcon, watched helplessly from a tree as the islanders prepared a fire to cook Marcus Burrows. They had a system for rotating a spit, supported by forked branches thrust into the ground, but it was designed for roasting the small island pigs. A large woman in a yellow cotton dress said the spit would be too low. Men knew nothing about cooking! She demanded new, longer, stronger supports, to raise the body higher off the coals. The men went off to find the right branches. Jin Lo guessed that cannibalism wasn’t a customary thing here, but was a disused ritual of revenge.

  When the islanders were occupied, the falcon flew down to the tree to which the apothecary was tied. She hoped he would understand what she was doing. He seemed sluggish and sleepy from the pain and shock.

  She began to tug with her beak at the knots that bound his wrists. The twine was made from bamboo, and was very strong. Threads of it came free as she pecked and pulled, without diminishing the strength of the main cord. She felt the apothecary stir.

  “Lin Jo?” he whispered. He was still talking backward, but she understood him.

  She answered by tugging harder at the knots.

  “Go!” he whispered. “It’s doo tangerous.”

  She got a whole strand of twine free: a triumph. She looked to make sure no one had noticed, and kept working.

  “Bave Senjamin,” Marcus Burrows whispered. “Please.”

  She pecked sharply at his hand. It was a spiteful, falconish thing to do, but she couldn’t help it. It was just like him to give up at a time like this. She wanted him to stop talking and help her.

  Then she felt a hand around her feathered neck. She screeched,
but the strong grip cut off her air, and her cry trailed off. She heard a woman’s voice announcing that she had another birdman!

  Jin Lo struggled and kicked and tried to scratch with her talons, but the grip was tight. She could see her captor as she twisted: It was the bossy cook in the yellow dress, who could easily snap her neck. Her feathered scalp prickled. She knew what that meant, but scarcely dared to hope. The rushing blood slowed perceptibly in her veins. The light, hollow bones of her wings felt heavy and dense. Her skinny bird legs began to stretch painfully, the sharp talons retracting into feet and toes.

  Jin Lo regained her human head and her long hair, and the woman shouted in astonishment, still gripping her neck. But Jin Lo had a sharp elbow now, not a falcon’s wing, and she jabbed it into the woman’s startled face. She got the woman’s neck in a choke hold, then kicked her legs out from under her and dragged her, struggling, toward the apothecary’s tree.

  A small girl approached them, and Jin Lo shouted, “Stop!” in the islanders’ language. The girl froze.

  If she spoke one word at a time, Jin Lo could make herself clear. With her free hand, she tore impatiently at the knots that still bound the apothecary. “Pull!” she said.

  The apothecary tugged his hands free.

  “Knife!” she said.

  The apothecary picked up a large knife with a curved blade lying on the ground.

  “Run!” Jin Lo said, and he did, toward the densest trees. Jin Lo followed, dragging her hostage.

  When they reached the edge of the trees, Jin Lo shoved the stout woman into the two closest girls, who automatically reached to catch her fall. Then she raced away. Within a hundred meters, she and the apothecary were in a swamp, mud pulling at their shoes.

  And they were alone—no one had followed them. Jin Lo wondered why. It was a tidal mangrove swamp, the high tide marked on the tree trunks. They waded in until the water was up to their knees. It was murky, and the trees blocked the sunlight. The dimness seemed menacing. Then the water was up to Jin Lo’s waist.