by Mailie Meloy
“Mollow fe,” the apothecary said, and he ducked beneath the water.
Jin Lo expected him to resurface, but he didn’t, and she remembered. They had prepared for this. She lowered her head beneath the murky water and crouched there. Light filtered down from the surface and made the water yellow-green. The apothecary had already moved away. Jin Lo followed. She wasn’t taking the water into her lungs, to extract the oxygen there. She must be taking it in some other way—through her skin? She simply had no need to breathe. She should have asked the apothecary how it worked, but she had been too impatient to get to the island.
She held on to roots and rocks beneath the water, and she blew out the air in her lungs to make herself less buoyant. It felt like a dream, gliding silently underwater, between the stumps of trees and the strange gloomy plants that grew up from the bottom of the swamp. She wanted to catch up to Marcus Burrows, to share the pleasure of it.
But where was he? They would need to clean his arrow wound. This swamp water couldn’t be good for it. She made her way forward, still holding to the bottom, looking for him in the cloudy green depths.
And then she stopped. A nose was inches from hers, but it wasn’t the apothecary’s nose. It was reptilian, above a vast, uneven row of teeth. Two blurry catlike eyes looked into hers. She pulled back slowly, beneath the water. The thing was a monster. Its giant head must be two feet across. If she had been breathing to begin with, she would have stopped. It was a crocodile, so close it could crush her head in its jaws simply by opening and closing its mouth.
But it hadn’t attacked, and Jin Lo thought it was trying to decide what she was. Humans didn’t move silently beneath the water with no bubbles, and fish didn’t wear clothes. She backed slowly away from the terrible jaws, and felt the trunk of a tree in the water behind her. It was a mangrove, with multiple trunks all woven together. If she could get a foothold, then she might be able to climb up into the air, to safety. But would the crocodile snap out of its trance and take her leg off? The bark was smooth and slippery. It wouldn’t be easy to climb.
Words from her childhood came into her head: We be of one blood, ye and I. The master words of the jungle, from a copy of Kipling’s The Jungle Book in the Reverend Magee’s library at the mission.
She tried to move slowly. She lifted her head above the water, and the crocodile raised its eyes up to watch her. She could see it clearly now, the ridge of its armored back. Was it twelve feet long? More? She told herself to be calm. She breathed the tropical air in the usual way. She tried to concentrate on speaking clearly. Her life might depend on it. “Please,” she said softly. “Be we of one blood, I and ye.” She reached up into the tree—slowly, slowly, trying to grab the highest handhold she could. “Klease don’t pill me.”
The crocodile burst out of the water like a rocket shot from a cannon, seized her arm, and yanked her from the tree, rolling her over beneath the water. Jin Lo gasped instinctively, forgetting that she didn’t need to breathe. She tried frantically to think. There must be some way to gain the upper hand, get a finger in the animal’s eye, get an arm around its enormous head, find a vulnerable soft place beneath the scaly armor. But the crocodile had her upper arm in its teeth, and its huge body lay on top of hers. There was no way to gain leverage.
She realized she was going to die here, on this strange island, so far from home. She thought of her parents and little brother. It was time to join them: That was all. She had lived many years that would have been taken from her if her father hadn’t hidden her in the trunk. She had been given an unexpected life. Who would have thought that a crocodile would be the collector of that debt? She heard something in the water: splashing, footsteps. A search party. Rescue, maybe. But they moved past.
After a minute, the grip on her arm released and the huge weight slid ominously off her chest. She prepared herself for the great jaws, but they didn’t come. She rose to the surface and took a breath of real air, and she heard voices, but now they were beyond her in the swamp.
She saw a long curved knife raised in the air: Marcus Burrows, dripping swamp water, stood ready to stab the crocodile.
“No!” she cried in a half whisper.
He stayed his knife, confused. The voices of the search party receded. The crocodile moved away in the other direction, a long, sinuous gray curve at the surface of the water. It turned its head to give her a reptilian glance before disappearing beneath the surface. She understood.
The master words of the jungle had worked. The crocodile had saved her life. It had hidden her from the search party with their knives and their cookfire. Now it would lead her out of the swamp. It wasn’t time to join her family yet. There was a murky future still ahead.
CHAPTER 45
Babysitting
Pip sat at a table in Bruno’s restaurant with Janie’s parents, eating a giant plate of spaghetti and meatballs. He had always liked the Scotts, but they were in a bad way now. Mrs. Scott was pale and seemed to be in shock, and Mr. Scott was seething. They explained how Janie hadn’t arrived at home when she was supposed to. The bus had been the fastest way for her to get home, and she had insisted that it was safe. But then she just disappeared. They met the bus in Ann Arbor, and the driver said he’d never seen her. So they drove all night from Michigan to New Hampshire. At Grayson Academy, the headmaster told them Janie was staying with a doctor aunt in Concord. But she didn’t have a doctor aunt in Concord! Or any aunt in Concord! And they still didn’t understand how Janie could have been kicked out. She didn’t need to cheat at math. She could do math circles around that headmaster.
Pip let them talk. Adults, especially parents, never knew what to do with full information. They overreacted, and they failed to strategize. They wanted to challenge authority directly, when every kid knew that a frontal attack just made authority dig in. You could circumvent a powerful opponent or you could launch a sneak attack, but it was no use bashing your head against him.
“I’m calling the police as soon as we finish dinner,” Mr. Scott said. “I also want to contact that roommate’s parents. What’s her name? Jewel? And I’m going back tomorrow to that ludicrous headmaster, Willington.”
“Willingham,” his wife said.
“Willingham,” he said. “He’s going to wish he’d never seen me.”
Pip wanted to explain that the police wouldn’t know anything. And that the headmaster had to be in on the deal. Magnusson was dangerous, and connected. The Scotts would just get themselves and Pip in trouble, while Janie was still stuck in Malaya. Pip tried to think of any way they could be useful, before he got rid of them. “Do you know anyone with a private aeroplane?” he asked.
“Oh, sure,” Mr. Scott said. “I’ll just call up Jack Warner at Warner Brothers.”
Pip was impressed. “Can you?”
“No!” Mr. Scott said. “That was a joke.”
So they were really no use at all.
“I think Janie’s in Florida,” Pip said. It was the first state that popped into his head.
“Florida?” Mr. Scott said.
“I think she went looking for Benjamin.”
“Who?”
Pip realized that the Scotts hadn’t been at St. Beden’s School, surrounded by people who had known Benjamin. So they hadn’t had any reason to work at remembering him. They’d gone along with their lives, minus three weeks, and minus Benjamin Burrows, happily oblivious. “A friend of ours,” Pip said. “She thinks he’s in trouble.”
“But why wouldn’t she tell us?”
“Because she knew you’d tell her not to go.”
“Well, of course we would have!”
“See?” Pip said.
“Where in Florida is she?”
“Fort Lauderdale,” Pip said, because it was the only city in Florida he knew.
“Fort Lauderdale? Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Pip said. He hunted in his jacket pockets until he found Deborah’s father’s card, from the ship. He also found Deborah’s folded poem about c
elestial bodies meeting in the sky, but he wouldn’t give Janie’s father that. Deborah believed in fate, and he was sending her a little dose of fate.
“It just isn’t like Janie to run off like this,” Mr. Scott said.
Pip wanted to tell him that it was exactly like Janie, who’d run off to Nova Zembla without telling them, but of course the Scotts didn’t remember that. “This man can help you,” he said, handing over the card. “He’s a friend. Tell him I sent you.”
Mr. Scott studied the address. “Will you come with us?”
“I can’t,” Pip said. “But I want you to follow any lead you can. Be observant. Listen for clues. Talk to the daughter especially.” Deborah would tell the Scotts ominous, confusing things to keep them busy, and her genial family would keep them safe. And then they couldn’t get Pip rearrested, or tip off Magnusson to the fact that Pip was coming. “And listen, Janie needs you. So you need to eat, all right? You’re no good to anyone all starved and useless.”
Janie’s parents picked up their forks obediently.
“I wish we had any information that didn’t come from a kid,” Mrs. Scott said.
“If you don’t mind my saying, ma’am,” Pip said, “you could do a lot worse.”
CHAPTER 46
A Squall
Tessel and Efa tried to teach Benjamin their language in the long hours on the sailboat. He had guessed they were eight or nine years old, but they weren’t exactly sure. Their sense of time was different.
Their sense of space was different from his, too, and much, much better. Benjamin hadn’t known what he was getting into, leaving the island—he just knew he had to get away. He hadn’t understood how tiny the boat would feel, bobbing in the vast ocean. He never knew where he was. But Tessel knew. Benjamin had drawn a crude map of where they were going, and Tessel could rise from sleep, look out at a vast, unchanging horizon, and know instantly that they had veered half a degree off course. They had no instruments. Tessel had only the wind, the sun, and the stars, and some freakishly accurate gyroscopic compass inside his brain.
At least it seemed freakishly accurate, because Tessel was so confident. Benjamin guessed he would discover how good the boy’s instincts were when they found Janie, or found Antarctica and penguins, or died of exposure at sea.
But it was clear that Tessel and Efa were tough and resourceful and devoted to each other. Tessel’s kava-making career was over, and Efa had been made untouchable just by being in the boat, but she was learning to sail it, and she had grown cheerier the farther she got from home. She seemed wired for happiness, in general, and she found Benjamin’s attempts to learn their language enormously funny. Tessel did, too. There was no question in their minds that he could ever have been John Frum. How could someone so deeply ignorant be a god? They called him Benjonfrum, and thought it a splendid joke. Their dark skin protected them better against the sun than Benjamin’s did, and he was sunburned by the second day. Concerned and motherly, Efa rigged a sunshade from a spare sail.
“How is America, Benjonfrum?” she asked, as if asking about some distant, magical planet.
“I don’t know.”
Efa was startled. “Why?”
“I’ve never been there,” Benjamin said. He’d seen glimpses of America through Janie, but he didn’t know how to explain that to Efa. He’d seen a room with flowered curtains, a boy actor, a dark auditorium, and two different bathroom mirrors. Not much of an American tour. “I come from England,” Benjamin said. “It’s an island. Like yours.”
“Not like ours,” Efa said.
“Well, no. England has cities. Big cities, where many people live. And much smoke. And it gets cold there. People wear heavy clothes made of the hair of sheep, not just grass skirts and loincloths.”
“You have tabu?” Efa asked.
“Not the same ones as yours.”
“You have a god?”
Benjamin wondered how to explain a country of mostly Anglicans but also Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists, atheists and agnostics, Catholics and Jews. “There are so many people that they have different gods,” he said.
“You see them?”
“No. Only statues and paintings.”
“But they will come?”
“I don’t think so,” Benjamin said. “Some people say their god is coming back, but a lot of people don’t.”
Efa studied Benjamin’s face. He could see her trying to imagine this far-off place with many clothes, many gods, and no waiting, no endless anticipation of the return. “People pray?” she finally asked.
“They do.”
“For cargo?”
Benjamin thought of Father Christmas with his bag of loot over his shoulder. “They do pray for cargo, sometimes,” he said. “For things they want. They pray for other things, too. For safety, for peace, for good weather. For people who are sick to get better. For love.”
“It comes?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Efa,” Benjamin said. “Sometimes the things we want come. Sometimes they don’t.”
Efa nodded, absorbing that.
Tessel complained that he couldn’t see over the sunshade, and when they lifted it, the sky behind them was bruise-colored and ominous. Another cyclone, or at least a really nasty storm.
“Oh, not again,” Benjamin moaned.
Tessel said something with dread in his voice, and set about reefing the sail. Efa deftly rigged the sunshade as a sluice to collect water in their emptying casks.
“What should I do?” Benjamin asked. “To help?”
Tessel clambered over him with furious concentration and said, “Pray, Benjonfrum.”
CHAPTER 47
Underground
When morning came, the work of the mine began. Janie sat in the padlocked elevator cage in her pajamas, where Magnusson had left her. The miners looked at her when they passed by, and she looked out at them. They were all Malay, all coated with sweat and dust. The older men were leaner, their faces more hollow. She thought she had never seen any group of people work so hard. Her father had sometimes said of certain writers, with admiration, that they worked like hard-rock miners. If she ever saw her father again, she would tell him he was wrong. But would she see her father again? It was looking doubtful. She had studied the heavy padlock and yanked on it, and it wasn’t going anywhere.
She wished she had some of the apothecary’s sweet-smelling Quintessence to absorb the radiation from the air. She leaned back against the bars of her cage and thought about that lovely smell, the smell of hope and sunlight.
It was impossible to tell what time it was, underground, but it might have been the middle of the day when Osman, the young cook, brought her a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and a bottle of lemonade.
She scrambled to her feet when she saw him. “Osman!” she said. “Can you get me out of here?”
He glanced back up the tunnel. Janie saw one of the green-uniformed guards waiting there. Osman passed the sandwich and the bottle through the bars of her cage. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Have you seen Magnusson?” she asked. “Is he going to leave me down here?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have to go.”
“Listen,” she whispered. “My friend Benjamin is going to be looking for me. But it’s dangerous for him here. Maybe you can help him.”
The guard barked, “No talking!”
“Wait!” she said. “Osman, please!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, backing away.
When he was gone, she felt lonelier than ever. She opened the waxed-paper parcel and found a chicken salad sandwich inside, cut diagonally in half, the lettuce crisp and fresh. Her stomach grumbled in anticipation, and she took a bite. It was delicious and mustardy, with chopped-up bits of some crunchy vegetable from his kitchen garden. It made her think that Osman really was her friend.
A little later, Magnusson came and looked into her cage. “Did you get the sandwich?” he asked.
“What, are you expecting
thanks?”
“Yes, in fact I was,” he said mildly. “Danby wants to see you, but I’ve told him he can’t. I don’t trust him.”
“You think he’ll kill me?”
“He might, in anger. He bears a grudge. And I need you alive, to summon your friends.”
“They won’t come.”
“We’ll see about that,” Magnusson said, smiling. And he left her alone.
As soon as he was gone, she spread out the waxed paper that had been wrapped around her sandwich. With the last of the lemonade, she made a little mud with dirt from the mine’s floor. There was a tiny chance that Benjamin could see where she was. Painstakingly, with her finger dipped in the sticky mud, she wrote a message on the paper:
BENJAMIN—DON’T COME.
CHAPTER 48
A Sail
Jin Lo and the apothecary, arms bandaged with strips torn from their clothes, waded silently along the island’s swampy northern coastline, keeping an eye out for venom-spined rockfish and angry islanders. They were looking for one of the island’s boats to borrow. Marcus Burrows was usually opposed to stealing, but he seemed to relax his moral stance with people who had tried to roast him on a spit.
Jin Lo’s biceps ached. Her arm was bruised, the skin broken. The crocodile might have had good intentions, but even the gentlest crocodile bite left a mark. He could have taken the arm right off, if he’d wanted to.
They made their way through tide pools. Little fish darted away from their feet.
“Is it possible to become fish?” she asked. “Like birds?” They could talk normally now, which was a relief.
“No,” Marcus Burrows said. “There’s a note in the Pharmacopoeia from a previous owner. I don’t know the handwriting, but it certainly predates my grandfather. The writer believes it is possible to become a fish, but unadvisable, as fish are so often eaten. So he provides no instructions.”
“I see.”
“There’s also the question of freshwater or saltwater fish—it’s very complicated.”
