Not here and not now. They had other plans.
Nothing about this was going to be easy.
There were hands around her waist and someone’s breath was on her neck, but they didn’t feel like rough or dangerous hands and there was no threat in the soft breath, and so she did not jerk awake but lay in a haze of pain and settled back into the comfort of the hands and the breath and the rhythm of the engines.
Later, she opened her eyes briefly and looked through the wire bars of the cage at the sea foaming by in the wake of the ship, the wave chasing them from astern but never catching up. It made her dizzy to watch it, so she closed her eyes again. The hands had gripped her more tightly when she stirred but relaxed when she fell back to sleep, and the breath on her neck remained calm and constant. She slept in fits and woke to watch the stern wave when she could stand it, and the hands holding her let go now and then to tug at the rough wool blankets to keep their naked bodies covered. Then, when they came back, the hands were cold against her bare stomach from being outside the blankets and if she woke in fright from the coldness of the hands, the susurration of breath on her neck rose to a low shhhhhh in her ear and she would be still again.
She didn’t know how long the coughing went on before she woke and was aware of its sound or how long she was awake and watching the naked woman coughing up blood on the bottom of a cage before she and that woman merged, and she became the woman who was retching on the clotted blood that was caught in her throat, her pale blue fingers wound into the wire bars of the trap as she leaned away from the warmth of the blankets and spit out the blood. When she was done, she wiped her mouth with her arm and moved to get back under the blanket, and that was when she felt the hands again.
“Are you all right now?”
She turned and saw Lena. She was partly on Lena’s lap, and the blankets were wound around the two of them where they were huddled in the far corner of the trap.
“Can you talk?”
“I think so.”
But it hurt badly to talk, and her voice was a scratch and a whisper.
She remembered Dean then. She craned around to look for him in the higher cages, but there were only naked frozen men who’d died with their hands locked in the bars and pink foam frozen around their lips and noses. She saw half a dozen men like that. But no Dean.
“They took him inside about an hour ago,” Lena said.
“Was he alive?”
“Yes,” Lena said. She gently pulled Kelly back onto her lap and put the blankets around them. Kelly moved her hands up to her throat and felt it carefully with her fingertips. It was swollen badly. Maybe in front of a mirror it wouldn’t look so bad, but with just the touch of her fingers it felt like a bubble of blood the size of a grapefruit was lodged in her esophagus. Lena pulled her hands away and held them under the blankets.
“I wouldn’t touch that too much, not for now, anyway,” Lena said.
Kelly dropped her hands beneath the blankets, and Lena took them into hers.
“Does it hurt?” Lena asked.
Kelly nodded, then tried to whisper. “It’s bad. But it’ll be okay.”
“They took Jim inside. Maybe two days ago. It’s hard to tell the time.”
Kelly’s mind went black.
“That was the last you saw him?”
“Yes, and he was alive then,” Lena said, and Kelly could hear the small note of hope in her voice. She really didn’t know.
“Have they taken you inside?”
“At least once a day. Like for you. Were you awake for it?”
“For what?”
Lena answered with silence, just looking at Kelly’s face and stroking her hands under the blankets. Kelly wondered how this girl could spare any pity.
“Maybe they didn’t do anything. But—are you hurt anywhere else?”
Kelly hurt everywhere. But she didn’t say it. Lena held her, and they sat in silence for a while. Kelly wondered if this was what it meant to be in shock, and then thought, no, if she could think to ask the question, then it couldn’t be. She was just hurt badly. But it was better to be hurt than to lose her mind.
Then she looked at the frozen men in the cages around them.
“What about them?”
“Already gone when I got here,” Lena said. She nodded with her chin toward the shrunken, frost-covered corpse of an older man in the cage next to theirs. “Except for him. His name was Richard.”
“You talked to him?”
“A little. They’d already taken his clothes, and he didn’t have a blanket.”
“He was delirious?”
Kelly saw frozen icicles of blood dangling from the wire bars of Richard’s trap. As though he’d torn himself to pieces trying to get closer to Lena, who had blankets. It must have been bad.
“Delirious, yeah. I think they were from a research ship. All six of them. The other five were maybe Richard’s students.”
“What do they want?”
“Money. They took our boat, they took the research ship. They took your yacht. They can get a lot for the boats, but it’s not all they’re after. They want, you know, account numbers. Routing numbers or whatever.”
“That’s why they took Jim and Dean inside?”
“I think so,” Lena whispered. “To get them to tell the numbers.”
Kelly opened her eyes again and looked at the husk of the man whose name had been Richard. Once they had the boats, they’d have everyone’s papers. Passports, ship registrations, mail forwarded from port to port until it finally reached the boats. If they had satellite Internet reception, they could do searches. They’d find out who was worth keeping and who could just be tossed aside. Maybe Richard and his graduate students hadn’t been worth it to these men. But Jim and Dean would be. Checking, savings, Vanguard accounts, IRAs, credit lines, offshore accounts—the whole accumulation of digital wealth that could be wiped out in an instant with the right numbers and passcodes.
“They asked you for account numbers?”
“Not bank accounts,” Lena whispered. “They had my Community Health Index number written on a piece of paper. Had it written down before they even boarded us, like they already knew who I was.”
She’d thought Lena was English from her accent. But she knew about the Community Health Index system, knew the sorts of records that would be on file at the main office in Edinburgh. If the men already had Lena’s number when they caught her, it meant they hadn’t scooped her up at random.
They’d sought her out.
“You’re Scottish?” Kelly asked.
She was dizzy again, the waves rolling under the boat and the bloody lump in her throat working against her ability to think. She tried to focus, and she felt the girl nodding against the exposed skin above her shoulders.
“From Inverness,” Lena said. “They put it in my face, the CHI number, and asked if it was mine. They didn’t ask anything else. I don’t really have any money. My mum raised me on her own, and we—we didn’t have much. The boat, all that, was Jim’s.”
“You met Jim in Costa Rica.”
Under the blankets, Lena stopped stroking her hands.
“You told me,” Kelly said. “In Peru.”
“You’re—” She paused, searching her memory. “You’re Dr. Reid?”
“Yeah. Kelly. We were anchored at Adelaide, too. I forget how many days ago. We heard you on the radio before it cut off. When they started jamming you.”
Lena shifted beneath her but held her with the same care. She started to stroke Kelly’s hands again.
“They’d chased us,” Lena said. “We’d thought we’d gotten away, that they wouldn’t be able to find us in all the ice. We thought we were safe.”
Kelly didn’t say anything. She knew what it had been like. She knew the long dread of the ship’s coming and then the sharp terror when it arrived and swung around to face you. The whole world dimmed so that it held nothing but that single and awful second when you knew that it saw you, that it wasn
’t going to pass by and leave you be.
“These men, how many are there?”
Kelly knew she’d need to stop talking soon or she’d lose whatever was left of her voice. But she had to know this much.
“Seven?”
“You’ve seen them all at once?”
“No. I only saw some when they took us. They left one man on Arcturus to bring it back.”
“Back to where?”
Lena shook her head; Kelly could feel her bangs move against the back of her neck.
“I don’t know. Richard said they left a guy on the research boat, Palida. They took a barrel over to your boat. Fuel, I guess. The man who took it didn’t come back. And I’ve seen a bunch of them when they bring me inside. But I don’t think there’s more than seven.”
“Counting the ones on our boats?”
“Yeah.”
Kelly nodded to herself because now she understood the two radar targets she’d seen coming out of Adelaide. One had been La Araña, but the second had been Lena and Jim’s boat. Arcturus had turned east earlier, not heading into the main channel of the Drake Passage but staying closer to the southern continent.
“You’ve seen their faces?” Kelly asked.
“I think they’re Chilean. Military or something. Most of them are older. Forties, fifties. But one is really young. Younger than me.”
Kelly had been thinking maybe they weren’t even human. Maybe they wore their balaclavas and goggles to hide whatever was wrong with them. But they were just ordinary men.
“They speak Spanish?”
Lena nodded, then said, “But one of them, the young one, he speaks English, too.”
“You speak any Spanish?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s only five of them now,” Kelly said. “And three of them are on other boats. So that leaves two with us.”
“What—why five?”
“I killed two.”
Kelly found she could watch the waves for longer periods now without getting that spinning, dizzy feeling. She stared out at them and watched the boat’s progress. In these latitudes it was impossible to tell the direction from the position of the sun unless you knew exactly what time of day it was. They’d taken her watch when they’d taken everything else she wore. But Kelly could tell they were going southeast, because the waves had been going toward the east for days, and the crab boat was cutting through them at an angle that left the starboard quarter facing the crests. If they were going southeast, they weren’t going toward Chile but to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula instead or maybe to the island chain that stretched to the east of it.
Back across the Drake Passage, where there would be no one.
Kelly thought about that and thought about the fact that the men had kept Lena alive even though she had no money. They’d given her a blanket when they’d stripped everyone else and left them to die. Their cage sat atop the starboard engine access hatch, so that of all the cages, it was the warmest. That might not have been a coincidence.
“The pills worked, you know,” Lena said. “Cleared it right up.”
“That’s great,” Kelly said, barely able to whisper now. “I’m glad.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Lena whispered back. “I wish they hadn’t worked. It’d be better if they hadn’t.”
Then Lena slept. Eventually they shifted so that it was Kelly who held Lena, and Kelly who reached out into the freezing air to tug the blankets over their bodies, and Kelly who hid her face in the soft warmth of Lena’s hair and whispered shhhhh into the girl’s ear when she cried in her sleep.
Kelly rose from a daze when a man kicked the trap and banged on the bars with a short-handled fish gaff. He was inches away from her, separated only by the bars of the trap, and she could smell him even through the foul weather gear he wore: a smell at once dangerous and low.
A tiger’s cage. A bag of snakes.
Lena woke with a high-pitched cry and scrambled out of the blankets and off Kelly’s lap, moving to the corner of the trap away from the hinged door. She put her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins to become as small as she could get. Kelly was struggling to sit higher, to prepare herself for whatever was about to happen. The man took a set of keys from the pocket of his fisherman’s jacket and tried them one at a time until he found one that turned the padlock’s barrel. He unclasped the lock and hung it by its shackle atop the trap and then stepped back and lifted the door. He reached into the cage with the gaff and tapped Lena’s thigh with the flat side of the hook, then motioned her to come out.
Lena looked at Kelly, her green eyes wide and full of tears that would freeze on her cheeks if she didn’t wipe them away soon. She shook her head.
Not at the man but at Kelly.
“Don’t,” Lena whispered. “Or he’ll just hurt you more.”
Lena took hold of the curved part of the gaff’s hook and let the man pull her forward and out of the trap. When she was out, she was unsure on her feet and fell to the deck when the ship pitched with a wave. She rolled in a tumble of banging knees and arms until the small of her back cracked into a rusty steel deck bollard. She cried out in pain and lay there stunned.
The man laughed and dropped the door to the cage and then bent to lock it. He used the gaff to slap the bars behind Kelly’s head and laughed again and then went to where Lena lay naked on the ship’s rotted deck planks in a half-frozen puddle of spray. He grabbed her left arm just above the elbow and yanked her to her feet and led her stumbling and screaming back to the door from which he’d come.
Kelly heard the door slam and the wheel turn as it locked, but she didn’t see it because her face was in her hands and her eyes were full of tears. After a while she took the extra blanket and wrapped it around herself and moved back to the corner of the cage where she would be farthest from the spray that sometimes came over the rails.
* * *
She passed an hour staring at the sea and fighting the nausea twisting inside her. The ocean was calmer here, and they were passing between islands. High snowcapped peaks and pinnacles of brown rock that rose smooth and wind-blasted from slate-colored water. She couldn’t stop herself from trying to listen for sounds coming from inside the boat. She heard screams and cries and punches but knew they were all the wind and the waves and the constant rhythm of the engines. Ghosts of her imagination. The ship was made of steel and decked with wood, and she was outside in the wind with the noise of the engines where she’d hear nothing from inside. She thought mostly of Lena, because she was sure Dean was dead. They’d taken Jim inside, and she knew how he’d ended up and was sure that if Dean wasn’t already hanging beside him off the bow, skinned like a seal and frozen, he would be soon.
But she didn’t think they were killing Lena, at least not outright or all at once. And that ate her from the inside until she was shaking. Shaking at her nakedness in the face of these men. Because she couldn’t do anything but wait in the cage and see whether they brought Lena back to her, or brought some broken part of Lena back to her, or simply let her freeze alone in the cage without ever knowing what had become of her husband and the girl. She finally broke then, and screamed herself hoarse through her engorged throat, and clawed and pried at the bars and the padlock until they were both soaked in her blood, and then when she was finally spent, she lay back in the blankets and wept without sound, staring at the ship’s door.
* * *
She was still crying when the door opened and the man brought Lena back out by shoving her from behind and then grabbing her hair to stop her while he paused and closed the door. This time Lena didn’t scream or cry out, and her face was blank. She walked to the trap and crawled into it when he opened the door, and Kelly was glad when he shut it behind Lena and didn’t want anything from her. He locked the cage and went back inside the ship without a word and without ever looking at Kelly.
When he was gone, Kelly opened the blankets and let Lena in. She took the girl onto her lap and hel
d her close. She felt the girl’s cold tears on her breasts, and she held her as tightly as she could. After about a minute, Lena began to shake and sob.
Still, Kelly didn’t say anything and neither did Lena. They just held each other and cried.
Finally, after perhaps ten minutes, Lena began to whisper through her sobs.
“They brought me into, into the galley. They showed me food. Hot stew,” she said. She broke into a long wail. Her breath heaved against Kelly’s neck. “I’m so hungry, no food for days. And free … and I’m … freezing. They said, they said I could have it, have a bowl of stew, if I did—”
“Shhhh, Lena. Shhhhh.”
“—what they wanted. And … and … I did. I did everything they said. And then … and after …”
“Lena, honey. You don’t have to say.”
“After, they sat me down, and, and they gave me a bowl. And I had, I had one bite … and they took it away from me and said …”
“Lena, shhhh.”
Kelly rocked her and put her lips on the back of her neck and kissed her. She let her own tears fall onto Lena’s skin.
We’ve marked each other, Kelly thought. Like this, what we’re doing right now. This is forever.
“And they said I didn’t get to have any, after all, because I—because I wasn’t any good.”
Lena jerked out from under the covers, pulling away from Kelly with force and speed. She went on her hands and knees to the corner of the cage.
“I don’t want it!” she screamed. “I don’t want any of it!”
She shoved three fingers of her left hand into her throat and made herself gag.
“No, Lena. Don’t. Please don’t.”
Kelly was up and holding Lena by the shoulders and trying to pull her back.
The girl shook her off and pushed her fingers deeper. She lurched with a spasm and vomited, spitting out less than half a mouthful of stew. It steamed on the bottom of the cage, and Kelly knew it would be frozen in ten minutes. Then Lena came back to the blankets, to Kelly. They pulled the blankets as tightly as they could, and Kelly knew she could never ask Lena if she knew anything about Dean. That would be too much to ask, and so she swallowed it with everything else. Whether she wanted any of this or not, it was in her and she couldn’t get it out. She couldn’t throw it up. She was trapped, and so she did the only things she could.
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