by Lauren Esker
***
If Lucky knew what she was about to do, Jen thought, he definitely would not approve.
She was confident she could do it, though.
Mostly confident, anyway.
She waited impatiently for Lucky and Roxy to clear out of the lounge. There were too many people around for her to use the elevator code, but she got a redcap to take her down to Deck A and the shopping arcade. Nguyet was in the boutique and was delighted to see her, greeting her with a hug. "How are things up in the lofty heights where the peons aren't allowed?"
"Desperately boring," Jen said. "I'd be happy to sneak you upstairs so you can look around, but not right now. I wanted to find out something. The laundry is down here, isn't it?" She'd had the idea when her saltwater-soaked clothes came back that morning, clean and fresh and pressed.
"Sure, it's on the other side of the gardens." Nguyet pointed vaguely in that direction. "If you need something cleaned, you can just send it down."
"I actually wanted to know if the laundry down here does laundry for the whole ship, passenger clothes and uniforms for the crew and so forth."
"Yeah, it does." Nguyet looked puzzled now. "Why?"
Jen laughed. "Just settling a bet with my boyfriend. He thought the redcaps—I mean, the crew in the red uniforms had their own."
"No, we handle those down here. We even handle clothes for the special guests, the ones up in the Head."
"The which?"
Now it was Nguyet's turn to laugh. "Oh, that's just what we call it down here. It has some special letter designation like the other decks do. But it's the head of the sphinx, basically."
"People live in it?" Although it struck her immediately afterwards that she really should have known. Had known it already, in fact.
"Yeah, those are the special quarters up there, for the really rich people. Guests of the ship's owner and so forth. I'm really not sure how you get up there. Even Housekeeping isn't allowed. But things come down for cleaning, and food goes up. The upstairs crew deal with anything else, I guess. Ha, redcaps, I like that."
Jen made a little more small talk before claiming a lunch engagement and taking off. She'd originally intended to ask Nguyet to sneak her into the laundry, but had changed her mind. She didn't want to risk getting her friend in trouble, and she was confident she could get in on her own.
As it turned out, it wasn't hard at all. There were people going in and out all the time, and she found a discreet utility closet where she could stash her clothes and shift. After that it was a simple matter of scuttling up the wall and dropping onto the shoulder of a busy-looking young woman with an armful of sheets going in the right direction. Once she was inside the laundry, she hopped off and scuttled under a utility cart while she got the lay of the land and found her target. The redcap uniforms stood out—they weren't exactly subtle. Jen located a whole rack of them, cleaned and pressed with plastic covers on them. She waited 'til no one was looking her way, shifted and snatched one off the rack, and retreated behind a clothes press to put it on.
Some ten minutes after riding into the laundry, she walked out dressed in redcap scarlet. For the final touch, she snatched one of their gold-braided caps off a shelf and plunked it on top of her hair at a rakish angle.
Her clothes were still in the utility closet where she'd left them. She retrieved them with a smile.
Exploration time.
No one looked twice at her, including the other redcaps. It was simply necessary to look like she was engaged on an errand, walking briskly without making eye contact with anyone, carrying her bundle of clothing. She got onto the Deck A elevator with another redcap, a young woman wheeling a large coffee urn on a wheeled hand truck. Some of her curly hair had come loose from her braid and was straggling limply around her face.
"Nothing but work, work, work, huh?" Jen said.
The woman looked startled, as if she wasn't used to her colleagues speaking to her. "I suppose," she said, and got off on Deck B.
Friendly sort. Luckily she had been too distracted to notice Jen stealthily picking her pocket and palming her wallet. In the Deck C lounge, Jen riffled through it until she found the key card and left the wallet prominently displayed on one of the little tables in the hopes it would make it back to its owner.
She dropped off her clothes in her suite, passing Roxy in the hall—who, to Jen's surprise and amusement, didn't look at her or appear to recognize her.
All they see is the uniform. Perfect.
Her original plan had been to go up to Deck G and begin her explorations there, but now she was intensely, burningly curious about the sphinx's head. If Lucia was anywhere on the ship, she'd most likely be there. And Jen's plan for the day was to find her.
She was still convinced that the person she'd seen in their suite yesterday was Lucia. Lucky didn't seem to think so, but Lucky hadn't seen her. While the resemblance wasn't unmistakable, it was entirely plausible. And, really, how many shifters who resembled Lucky could possibly be running around in here, even on a ship this size?
And she wanted to talk to Lucia before Lucky had a chance.
Lucky had come here to free his sister, but Jen did not expect they were going to find her as a hostage. Fifteen years was a long time. People changed. In particular, people who had grown up in the care of a sociopath might have changed a lot. Which was why she thought it would be an excellent idea to talk to Lucia before Lucky had a chance to.
First things first. If Lucia was their mystery guest, she'd gone into one of the nearby rooms. Jen was not at all sure Lucia was actually staying there; she could have easily used a skeleton key, hidden for a while, and then left at her leisure. However, it was worth checking. Jen picked up a selection of magazines off their coffee table—restored to its former appearance as if nothing had happened by the magic of housekeeping fairies—and proceeded into the corridor. She swiped her card in the door of the first room.
After three rooms she gave up. She'd found one room unoccupied, one occupied by a startled woman who was appeased when Jen explained she'd brought fresh magazines, and one apparently empty but with giggles coming from the bedroom. She was not going to find Lucia this way. Lucia was most likely holed up in the sphinx's head, so that was where she needed to go.
She left the rest of the magazines on the gigglers' coffee table—they could make of it what they would—and let herself into the stairwell. It went up to Deck D, she found, but no further.
Nguyet had said she didn't even know how to get to the Head. But nobody who built a giant floating sphinx-shaped cruise ship was going to live in anything less than luxury, which meant there would need to be a ready enough access for servants to get in and out with anything its inhabitants might require.
Having the entrance to the Head separate from the passenger areas of the ship made sense, however. Nobody wanted guests accidentally wandering in, especially while manufacturing and stockpiling a store of an extremely rare and expensive drug.
Let's see, Jen thought. We got up to our room from the boat dock in the sphinx's front paw. That's a logical place to have a second entrance, isn't it?
She clattered down the stairs and peeked out into the docking bay before stepping onto the metal deck plates. There was no one in sight, although she heard voices echoing in the cavernous space. She found another door, but it only led to the level below, the storage deck above the engine rooms.
This is hopeless. I could wander around here forever trying to find it. Let's try Deck G and see if I can find a map or something.
Rather than going back up the stairs, she walked through the storage level to the elevators. It was eerie down here, a vast and poorly lit space with crates stacked almost to the ceiling and a pervasive smell of oil and seawater. The engines' vibration shivered the deck under her feet. She circled around massive pillars that must be supporting the weight of the atrium one level above her.
If we do hit a storm, what are the odds this entire ship is going to collapse like a laye
r cake ...?
Lovely thought, especially since she could tell by the choppy roll of the deck that the weather had roughened as the day wore on.
She stopped at the elevators to finger-comb her hair back and tuck it up under the cap. All the female redcaps she'd seen so far wore their hair up or at least tied back. Her hair wasn't that long, but she didn't want to risk getting revealed by a uniform violation.
No one else was in the elevator, and she took it up to the glassed-in elevator lobby at the top of the ship. There was, as before, no one around. Even with so many people on the ship, most of it was still empty enough not to feel crowded. Before the gamblers came aboard, it must have been like a ghost town. What a strange and lonely life, living on a ship that was in essence a floating city, with no one but a handful of red-clad servants for company.
Jen leaned on the glass and looked across the top of the ship to the back of the sphinx's head. So near, yet so far. From here, it looked as if she could jump across to it. If she only had a parasail, or the ability to shift into something with wings ...
Movement caught her eye, and a flash of red. Startled, she looked down at the tiny figure of a redcap—sans cap, but still dressed in red—moving about on top of the vast glass skylight covering the atrium. She couldn't tell from here if the worker was a man or woman, but they wore a backpack and were clipped to a safety line, and seemed to be doing some kind of maintenance, stopping periodically to bend over and apply what she guessed was lubricant or something similar. After a moment, she located a partner farther down the ship's length, doing the same on the other side.
Of course you can get out there. Things must break, or corrode in the sea air.
And if they could ... so could she.
This time, the access wasn't hard to find. Jen tried a promising-looking door that led to a steep metal staircase, ending in a small foyer with a card-operated lock. She swiped her stolen card and opened the door into a gust of hard, cold wind that caught her cap and sent it skittering across the floor. No wonder the maintenance workers weren't wearing their hats out there. She picked it up and tucked it into her pocket, then stepped out onto a catwalk with a waist-high railing.
Wind whipped at her, not a light sea breeze but a torrent of conflicting crosswinds. The stiffest was, of course, the wind flowing over her from the front of the vessel; the ship was moving faster than it seemed from inside. But they were also hitting wind from all directions. Leaning into the forward wind, she had to stagger sideways when an unexpected gust slammed into her. The sky that had been so blue yesterday was dark with clouds, and a line of blue-gray rain marched across the horizon. She hoped it was only the angle that made it seem as if they were heading for it.
I didn't mean it about the storm. I'd really rather not find out how this ship handles in heavy weather, thanks.
In front of her, a long straight catwalk ran all the way to the far end of the ship, with lifeboats secured at intervals along it. There was a whole network of them up here, going to the other side of the ship, to maintenance access points, and so forth. The workers were off the catwalk system, but had their lines clipped to the railing. Well, they weren't close, and if they did try to stop her, she had a lot of room to run.
She started walking, clutching the railing and leaning into the wind.
After about fifteen minutes' brisk walk, she stopped to look back. She'd come a significant way; the high rear deck had fallen behind her, and the glassed-in observation area where she'd gotten off the elevator seemed opaque from here. The maintenance workers were also behind her now. If they had noticed her, they must have assumed she was about some errand of her own. Just to make it look convincing, she tugged pointlessly at the canvas tarp covering the lifeboat next to her, giving a few good pulls on the cables securing the lifeboat to the ship. Yep. Passes inspection. On to the next one.
Another fifteen minutes of swift walking, staggering as the wind buffeted her to and fro, brought her to the end of the catwalk and to another door with a card lock. Her eyes stung, and her face felt hot with windburn. Her lips tasted like salt.
Sheltered from the wind by the massive sphinx head, she looked up at the underside of its headdress, looming over her like a cliffside overhang. It reminded her of the rock shelters in the American Southwest, the way the open caves were tucked under a leaning sheet of rock.
She swiped her card.
Nothing happened.
"Shit."
She tried it again. No dice. Had they found out about the stolen card, deactivated it ...? No, a more likely explanation was that the locks on the sphinx's head must be keyed differently than those on the rest of the ship. Even the redcaps didn't have unlimited access here.
Paranoid rich people liked their privacy ...
She checked for a gecko-sized gap under the door, but it fit snugly into its frame. They wouldn't want water coming in during a rainstorm, after all.
"Come on, Jen," she murmured. "You're so close. There must be a way in."
The catwalk circled around the sphinx's shoulder, curving out of sight. Jen followed it, in the hope that she'd find another door she could open. The sphinx's headdress extended over the catwalk like a roof, shutting out her view of the cloudy sky—and, as she came around the corner, channeling air at her like a wind tunnel. She clung to the railing to keep from falling down. She'd thought it was bad farther back, but she'd had the head protecting her from the worst of it.
The catwalk ended in a platform tucked under the sphinx's ear. She was exposed to the full brunt of the wind, but it was easier to deal with when she wasn't trying to move. She gripped the railing and looked ahead, across the flat expanse of the sea to the horizon with its towering layers of clouds rising to the heavens. It was difficult to tell, now, which way the storm was coming from. The ominously dark clouds with their sweeping curtains of rain were all around the ship.
Looks like we're in for some nasty weather. Poor Lucky. I hope he handles it okay.
Still, it was impossibly exhilarating standing here at the prow of the ship, beneath the vast serene face of the sphinx, with her hair streaming back and nothing but ruffled gray ocean between her and the horizon. She leaned over the railing to look down at the spray thrown up from the two great paws as they sliced through the water. They must be like catamaran hulls, she thought, though each had the majority of its structure below the water. From up here, she could see down through the water to the blue-green shimmer of steel bracing that ran back and forth between the two paws, keeping them from pulling apart and breaking up under the stress of the ship's passage.
After a few minutes the novelty and excitement began to wear off. There was a door here, too; she tried her key card and wasn't surprised when it failed to work. She tilted her head back to look up at the sphinx's face. She couldn't see much of it from this angle, just the cheek curving above her like an enormous rock-climbing boulder, with a jutting earlobe and part of the nose visible.
Leaning further out, perilously dangling over the railing, she glimpsed something high above her: a flash of light, as of something reflective. There were windows up there.
A terrible, horrible, very bad thought occurred to her.
I could probably climb that ...
As a gecko or a human, she loved to climb. Her hobbies included bouldering and rock climbing. The sphinx face didn't actually look that difficult. It was rough, not smooth. She pulled off one of the white gloves that came with the redcap uniform and ran her fingertips across the pebbly surface. With a belay line, or even if she was climbing unroped with a fifteen-foot fall and a mat under her, a climb like this would be a snap.
At least, on a clear day it would be a snap. The rough surface was damp from spray and earlier rain. That would increase the level of difficulty exponentially.
And doing it six stories above the ocean, on a moving cliffside, with every likelihood that she'd be pulverized by the ship's hull even if she managed to survive the fall ...
But she was alre
ady grinning at the idea of trying it. What a challenge!
She slipped out of her shoes and tested her grip with socks, then barefoot. Barefoot it would have to be. She thought about taking off the uniform jacket for better freedom of movement, then decided to keep it on for warmth. In this chilly weather, she would be in danger of hypothermia if she wasn't careful. Even with the jacket on, standing barefoot on the cold metal grill was starting to make her shiver. She'd work up a sweat once she started to climb—she hoped.
As a last resort if she got stuck, she could always shift and climb as a gecko. She was more confident in her ability to handle this climb as a human, though. The gecko would be able to cling better, but its lightweight body could very easily get blown off into the sea. And climbing something this big as a gecko would take forever.
Her hair was flying loose in the wind. That would never do. She unlaced one of her shoes and bound her hair into a rough ponytail.
Then she took a deep breath, let it out, and started to climb.
The first part of the climb, up the cleft behind the sphinx's jaw to the base of its ear, was easy. She braced her arms and legs against the sides of the declivity, just like climbing a rock chimney, and went up swiftly. Beneath the ear, she paused to catch her breath and wiggle her fingers and toes, making sure nothing was damaged or going numb. Her fingertips were slightly scraped from climbing without protection, but the cold didn't seem to be bothering her too badly.
She climbed up the back of the sphinx's ear and sat on top of it. The ear itself was at least fifteen feet high and provided a nice resting spot. The view had been stunning from down below, but it was even more amazing up here, lent a special energy by the lack of safety railings or anything to stop her from plunging to the churning water under the sphinx's bow, far below.
She stood up, holding onto the edge of the ear, and leaned out to look across the sphinx's face. Her mind was already abstracting it from a face into a series of angles and handholds. It was only a climbing problem to be solved. Glass glinted in the sphinx's vast, open eyes—or at least the one she could see from this angle. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul ... and those eyes were literally windows. Above the eye and the overhanging brow shading it, another band of windows crossed the sphinx's forehead, masquerading as some sort of forehead ornament to go with the headdress. And wasn't that ... she squinted, and then broke into a grin. There was a railing. A balcony. If she could get up there, she could get inside.
