The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  Sylvia started back toward the main corridor, negotiating the rough ground in her high heels.

  Janie looked at Magnusson lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Opal had never been able to please him, and now she would never have a chance. Janie crouched beside him. “Opal was really smart,” she said. “You just made her think she wasn’t.” But Magnusson didn’t seem to be breathing now, and she didn’t think he could hear her.

  “Janie,” Danby said.

  She looked up. His hands clutched the bars of the cage.

  “In Siberia,” he said, “there is a tribe of people whose word for the future means ‘to go back.’ Their word for the past means ‘to go forward.’”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Janie said.

  “It does, because you can’t see the future coming,” he said. “All you can see is the past. We stare at the past, we analyze it, we replay it, while the future sneaks up behind us, unseen.”

  “Okay,” Janie said.

  “I’m trying to make a better future for all of us, Janie. You have to believe me.”

  Janie looked at him, mesmerized by the thought of moving blindly backward into the future, and then she shook her head to clear it. She shouldn’t be listening to Danby. He was slippery, and might talk his way out of the cage. She turned to run after Sylvia.

  “Janie!” Danby called, but she didn’t look back.

  As they approached the mill, Janie saw billowing dark smoke coming out of an industrial-looking steel door. Two uniformed guards stumbled out, coughing and squinting, and ran toward the elevator.

  Sylvia handed Janie her silk scarf. “Tie this over your mouth and nose,” she said. “And stay low.”

  They crawled through the open door onto a clean concrete floor, the air heavy with acrid smoke. A man in a white coat lay dead or unconscious. The smoke was coming from beneath a second door. When Sylvia reached to open it, Benjamin tumbled through from the other side, dragging his father’s body.

  Janie felt her heart skip at the sight of Benjamin. He looked anguished. “Help me!” he said. “We need someplace he can breathe!”

  Janie helped him carry his father out into the mine, but the body was lifeless and heavy. They struggled past the tunnel that led to Danby’s cage, and two of the Malay miners emerged. One had bony cheekbones, but the other’s face was soft. They must have seen Magnusson dead and Danby caged, so they would know that everything had changed.

  “Please help us,” Janie begged. Her arms ached and the smoke stung her throat.

  The miners glanced at each other, then took up the burden, one lifting the apothecary’s shoulders and the other his feet. They were strong, and carried the unconscious body toward the elevator as if it weighed nothing.

  Janie and Benjamin followed, and she reached for his hand, which was sweating in the underground heat. She hoped it wasn’t too late.

  CHAPTER 58

  The Count

  The Hungarian had appeared in the Manila apothecary shop unannounced, and Vinoray feared that he was there to steal the Pharmacopoeia. Guarding the ancient book had made him anxious, and kept him from sleeping. He wished Marcus Burrows and his son would come back.

  The Hungarian, in an expensive linen suit, asked a lot of questions and swung his blackthorn walking stick within inches of the rows of glass bottles, making Vinoray wince. But finally he got to the point. “Where are Burrows and the boy?” he asked.

  “I have no idea what you mean,” Vinoray said.

  The Hungarian put a telegram on the counter. It asked the recipient to come to Vinoray’s shop, and was signed Alistiar Beane. “It’s from Burrows,” the Hungarian said. “I had a hell of a time getting here. So let’s not play this game.”

  “You are a true colleague of Marcus Burrows?” Vinoray asked.

  “True as true.”

  “Then do something.”

  The Hungarian raised his eyebrows. “A party trick?”

  “A demonstration,” Vinoray said. “So I know you are no impostor.”

  The Hungarian frowned, then struck the tip of his blackthorn walking stick twice against the floor. Vinoray’s open account book riffled its pages in an arc, and then the heavy leather cover closed. The book slid, untouched, across the glass counter.

  Vinoray watched, amazed. He couldn’t do that. “Come upstairs,” he said.

  * * *

  They went through the things Marcus Burrows and Jin Lo had left behind, including a map tucked inside a book about the anthropology of the Pacific Islands. The count—for the Hungarian was Count Vilmos Hadik de Galántha, of whom Vinoray had heard many stories—unfolded the map and studied the pinpricks in it. “There must be a way to determine which pin was put in the map last,” he said. “Which molecules of the paper were disturbed most recently. That might tell us where they are.”

  “Perhaps,” Vinoray said.

  The count picked up the book about the islands and let it fall open where it would, to a photograph of a man in a loincloth. He peered at the photo. “Now, that might be the last page that was held open, or it might just be someone’s favorite page,” he said.

  The bell rang downstairs. Vinoray excused himself and received a telegram from a messenger boy. He took it back upstairs to show to the count.

  The Hungarian glanced at the telegram and then ran down after the boy. He was very spry for such an ample man.

  Vinoray, meanwhile, took the Pharmacopoeia from the wall safe behind the photograph of his mother and laid the book open on the table. He emptied the little glassine packet of powder into a glass of water, as instructed. There was not much powder left, but Vinoray hoped it was enough. He drank the solution down, sat before the book, and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  The count returned, pink from running up the stairs, and unfolded the map again. “The telegram from Burrows originated here, in Malaya,” he said, pointing. He noticed the Pharmacopoeia, the glassine packet, the water glass. “What are we doing?”

  “It’s a sort of telepathy,” Vinoray said, keeping his eyes on the book. “The boy designed it.”

  “Benjamin?”

  “He wished to see the girl in America.”

  “I see,” the count said. “Mater artium necessitas.”

  “Marcus Burrows now wishes to use it to read the Pharmacopoeia, through me,” Vinoray said, turning a page of the book.

  “How do you know you’re on the right page?”

  Vinoray had wondered the same thing. “I don’t. It’s an incomplete science. One can only see and hear in one direction.”

  “I see.”

  They waited. Nothing. No buzz of connection, but Vinoray had been warned that he might feel nothing.

  The count said, “Perhaps we should just go to the island in my boat, and take the book with us.”

  Vinoray turned a page. “He needs to see it now. And the boat might capsize. The book is irreplaceable.”

  “Fortune favors the bold,” the count said.

  “I’ve been charged with a task.”

  The count sighed. “Oh, bloody hell.”

  Vinoray hadn’t felt authorized to read the Pharmacopoeia before, but now he couldn’t take his eyes from it. The page he was on contained instructions for making the human body invisible. He had always longed for that ability, and heard that it was possible, but hadn’t come across the correct information before. He turned another page, trying to feel for any intrusion in his brain, any slight indication that he should stop on this page and not another. He felt nothing.

  After a while, the strain of concentration grew too much, combined with his recent lack of sleep, and he felt his eyes begin to close. He snapped them back open. His colleagues needed help: the beautiful and brusque Jin Lo, who made Vinoray so shy that he could not speak, and the boy, Benjamin, and Marcus Burrows, who was supremely accomplished. Sometimes a bit pedantic, perhaps. But interested in the local plants, which was gratifying. Vinoray’s eyes began to droop again. He must not fall asleep. He
must complete his task. But he had slept so little, and he was drowsy.

  In the darkness, behind his eyelids, he saw a small table laid out with a makeshift laboratory: a Bunsen burner, a series of glass jars. A pair of hands, where his own hands would be if his eyes were open, was grinding a yellow stone into powder. He heard the boy’s voice: “I still think we should’ve called for help.”

  “Please, Benjamin,” the voice of Marcus Burrows said. “It’s no use rehearsing what’s been done. We must move forward.”

  “By helping our enemies?” Benjamin asked.

  Burrows must have looked up, because Vinoray saw Benjamin sitting across the little table. “I would like to think that I could sacrifice your life for my principles,” Burrows said. “But I find that I can’t. You’re my son, and you are all I have in the world, and I would appreciate your help keeping you alive.”

  “All right,” Benjamin said, more impatient than a dutiful son should be. “Then I have an idea.” The image in Vinoray’s mind was starting to fade.

  “For treating the uranium?” Burrows asked.

  “For getting us out of here.” The boy lit the Bunsen burner and the flame blazed up, like a spirit set free.

  CHAPTER 59

  Unintended Consequences

  When Benjamin emerged from the mine, he saw Jin Lo running toward them, out of the trees. Benjamin was even more grateful to see her than he had been on the little sailboat, harassed by sharks. Sylvia brought up her pistol, but Benjamin pushed it down. “She’s our friend!” he said.

  Jin Lo kneeled and felt his father’s pulse. “Weak.”

  “You have to help him!” Benjamin said.

  “In the garden,” Jin Lo said. “Everything is there.”

  “The golf cart,” Sylvia said. It had been abandoned at an awkward angle near one of the houses.

  The two miners eased the apothecary’s limp body into the passenger seat. Jin Lo squeezed in beside him, and Sylvia climbed in to drive. The two miners clung to the back of the cart, and the electric motor strained. There was no room for more passengers.

  “We’ll follow,” Benjamin said. “Just go!”

  The golf cart drove off, the motor complaining about the weight.

  Benjamin watched for stray guards as he walked with Janie through the trees, along the narrow waist of the island between the mine and the villa. He couldn’t stop thinking of his father. It eclipsed the strangeness of being with Janie again. “I thought it was a good idea,” he said. “It seemed like a good idea!”

  “He’ll be all right,” Janie said.

  “Remember the orange smoke Jin Lo made so we could escape from the bunker in London?” he asked. “I was thinking of that. I thought if I made something that created a lot of smoke, and put it out under the door, then they would have to open the door to see what was wrong. The smoke would mask us, and we could escape. But there was something wrong with it. It poisoned him.”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “But I should have known! I should have!”

  “Benjamin.” She stopped and took his face in her hands. “He’ll be all right. Jin Lo will help him.”

  And there in the trees, the world seemed to fall away. He leaned forward. He was kissing Janie Scott again. He could hardly believe it. Her lips were softer than he remembered. Even in dirt-smudged pajamas with smoke in her hair, her skin smelled fresh and sweet. He pulled back to see if she was really there.

  “You’re not going to vanish and fade away,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  A sudden pain reminded him. “That actor,” he said. “The one you were staying with.”

  “Raffaello,” Janie said. “He helped me.”

  “I sent Pip to New Hampshire to rescue you from him.”

  “From Raffaello?”

  “It seemed important. He kissed you.”

  “You saw that?”

  “I didn’t mean to spy—”

  But Janie was kissing him again, and the pain in his chest turned into a sweet, flooding ache. She put her cheek to his and whispered in his ear, “You can’t be jealous of Raffaello.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s not you. No one else could ever be.”

  Benjamin’s heart felt dangerously full, hearing that.

  Then shouts came from the direction of the villa, startling them out of their reverie. They were acting like fools. Keeping their heads low, they ran along the edge of the road. When they got close to the villa, the gate in the electrified fence stood open.

  “We have to get to the garden,” Benjamin said. “Stay low.”

  When they rounded the corner of the house, they saw that the kitchen garden was growing. Vines entwined themselves among the fruit trees, making a green wall, and climbed willfully up the side of the house.

  “Hey!” a voice shouted, and Benjamin saw two of the uniformed guards running toward them.

  “Go!” he said. He parted the vines for Janie, who climbed through. He followed, forcing the branches apart. One of the guards grabbed his ankle, but Benjamin wrenched it free, and the entwining tendrils wrapped around the guard’s torso and carried him upward as they grew. Benjamin heard a shout of fear from eight feet over his head, then ten, then twelve. The gap he and Janie had climbed through had already filled in, dense and green. Benjamin saw the ragged edges of grape leaves in the wall, and the long, smooth leaves of vanilla vines.

  Jin Lo was inside the protective green cave, hunched over Benjamin’s father, who lay on his back, unconscious. The two miners were there, too. The plants were still growing. Jin Lo had opened the apothecary’s shirt, and his bare chest rose and fell with his labored breathing.

  She looked up at Benjamin. “What is in this smoke?”

  He told her, and her face darkened with disapproval.

  “I had to find a way to escape,” he said.

  “So you make poison.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “And Danby?”

  “He’s in a cage in the mine,” Janie said. “And Magnusson is dead.”

  Jin Lo raised her eyebrows. “You feel his pulse?”

  “Sylvia shot him in the heart. You can ask her.”

  “There are others?”

  “There was a man in a white coat,” Benjamin said. “An engineer. But he was poisoned by the smoke.”

  “You feel his pulse?”

  “We were in a hurry,” Janie said. “And he was unconscious, like Mr. Burrows.”

  Jin Lo was impatient. “Mr. Burrows has many substance in body. He is bird, he is shot with arrow, he is breathing underwater twice. He is not young. Human body can support many transformation. But many transformation, plus wound, plus poison, this is difficult.”

  Benjamin looked at his father lying helpless on the ground. He hadn’t thought of all the ways his father might be weakened—all of them in the service of finding Benjamin.

  “So,” Jin Lo said. “Situation is this. You poison father. You leave number-one enemy Danby alive in cage. Also Magnusson—maybe dead, maybe not. Also engineer, alive, to unlock cage.”

  When she put it that way, it didn’t seem good. And the plants were still growing, creaking and rustling, sealing them in.

  CHAPTER 60

  Danby

  Danby stood in the elevator cage, listening to Sylvia and Janie’s footsteps receding up the tunnel: Sylvia deliberate in high heels, Janie hurried and light. He considered Magnusson lying on his stomach with his cheek to the bloody ground, wide-eyed and staring. A humiliating position. It was time to reassess. Danby had planned to get rid of Magnusson, but not yet. This wasn’t how he’d intended things to go.

  He pulled on Sylvia’s padlock with his handcuffed hands. It was a good lock, solid and heavy. He inspected the rusted hinges of the cage door.

  Shouts came from the direction of the mill, followed a few moments later by a smell. Not a good smell. It wasn’t the sulfuric acid used to leach the uranium from the ore, but it was similar
in its noxiousness.

  Danby had often thought about smell, how the sense communicated information to the human brain on the most primitive level: this is good to eat, this is rotten, this is poison. In that instinctive way, he knew that the smell that came to him now was not healthy.

  Other people knew it, too, and they were running. Danby heard footsteps, and people calling. He reached down with both linked hands and pulled up his khaki trouser leg. He squeezed the release to draw a knife from the scabbard strapped to his calf. The knife was RAF aircrew issue, meant for cutting harnesses in case of a crash, but sometimes you had to improvise. He wedged the base of the blade behind the top hinge on the cage’s door and put his weight against it, testing the strength of the tempered steel knife against the brittle, rusting hinge. The hinge began to bend, but it had no flexibility. It snapped off. The top of the door was free.

  Two men came running past, and Danby slid his knife awkwardly into his sleeve. “Let me out!” he shouted, to keep up appearances. The men ignored him and were gone.

  He brought the knife out again to work on the middle hinge, which was stronger and took more time. But then it, too, snapped. He pushed at the door. It gave a little, but the gap wasn’t large enough for him to step through. So he wedged his knife behind the bottom hinge, the last barrier to his freedom. It was awkward, this low one, and he swore with the effort. It snapped.

  He pushed open the door in the dim light. With his wrists still linked together, he felt for Magnusson’s pulse. The skin was prickly with a day’s beard, the muscle thick, the jowls incipient. He searched for the carotid artery, for any sign of life, and felt nothing.

  Sylvia had taken his cash, but he would have enough of that soon. When the United States and Britain consider you a spy and a traitor, and the Soviet Union considers you a disappointing failure, your options for career advancement become strikingly limited. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy: When the world considers you to be an international criminal, you must become one. You have little choice.

  The smell was getting worse, but he didn’t panic and run from the mine with the others. He walked deeper into the earth. The poisonous smoke would rise, so the air would be safe below. This tunnel would connect to other tunnels. He had work to do.