“He’s trying to save humanity.”
Shiskin scoffed. “Humanity is not worth saving.”
There was a pause. Finally I said, softly, “They’re going to kill you. I tried to argue, but they won’t listen. They’re worried about our survival.”
Shiskin sat up as well as he could, bound as he was. “Janie,” he said, alarmed. “Untie my hands. You must let me signal.”
“I can’t!”
“The radio is in my suitcase. Janie, listen. If the Soviet kidnappers think I have helped the apothecary, there is no hope for my wife and daughter. But if they know I have been murdered in their cause, perhaps they will have some pity and free my family.”
I hesitated, so as not to seem too eager. “You swear on Sergei’s life you won’t do anything but signal?”
“I swear on Sergei’s life.”
It was all going perfectly. I untied his hands, and he rubbed his wrists, bringing blood back to them.
Then I turned to pull the little suitcase close to him, as Benjamin had told me to do, but Shiskin had loosened the rope tying his leg to the bunk, and he launched himself at me. I felt one powerful arm tighten around my neck and tried to scream, but Shiskin clamped his free hand over my mouth.
“Tell them to open the door,” he said.
“Mmph!”
“Any tricks and I will kill you, I swear.” He released my mouth.
I didn’t know what to do. “I’m ready to come out,” I called weakly.
Niels opened the door carefully, with the revolver raised, but Shiskin grabbed the barrel and wrested it free. I screamed, and Shiskin crooked his arm around my face, smothering my mouth. He leveled the gun at Niels. “Put your hands on your head,” he said. “And find my leg.”
Niels lifted his skinny arms. “But I don’t know where it is!”
“Find it,” Shiskin said. “Or I kill her.”
“Benjamin!” I shouted, my mouth full of the wool of Shiskin’s jacket. “Jin Lo!”
Shiskin knocked me in the side of the head with the butt of the gun, making my eyes fill with tears, and he tightened his elbow around my face. I had no doubt that he could break my neck if he wanted to. Niels had disappeared into a cabin, looking for the leg, and we were alone in the corridor.
Count Vili came into the saloon and said something calm and placating in Russian, which Shiskin ignored. Vili held up both hands, one empty and one dangling his walking stick, in a gesture of peace or surrender. He looked inconsequential—soft and whimsical, with his expensive clothes and his unnecessary walking stick, facing the hardness and desperation of a man with nothing to lose.
“Comrade,” the count said. “Friend. Please.”
In the meantime, Niels had returned with the prosthetic leg.
“Put it on,” Shiskin said, nodding down towards his left thigh. “And try nothing, or I will kill you.”
The boy’s hands were trembling as he fumbled with the unfamiliar straps, trying to attach the leg.
Benjamin appeared from the wheelhouse and said, “Janie!”
Shiskin still had the revolver pointed at my head, and my mind was strangely detached. I thought what a peculiar way this would be to die, and how it was the last thing I would have expected: to be killed at sea by a one-legged man, while a teenaged boy tried to get the other leg on him. Who would explain it to my parents?
Then something even stranger happened. The sound of the struggle with the straps stopped, and a deep calm came over the corridor. I couldn’t hear Shiskin’s breathing anymore, and everything was still. The ship had stopped rolling, and the birds had stopped crying. It wasn’t that I couldn’t move, exactly—but I wasn’t moving. And my heart wasn’t beating.
Nothing moved except Count Vili, who came at us so quickly he looked like a flash through the air. He had knocked Shiskin’s gun out of his hand with the walking stick before I knew what was happening, and had pulled me free. The gun hung in the air, motionless.
Just as I formed the thought that the count had frozen time, there was a rush of noise in my ears. Everything came unstuck, and Count Vili caught the flying gun, and the momentum of his pulling me away from Shiskin threw me against the wall of the corridor. I put my hands up to stop myself before my face hit.
Shiskin lost his balance without me to hold him up, and fell to the floor. Vili stood over him with the gun—no longer a racing, superhuman blur, but a round Hungarian count in a rumpled three-piece suit.
Benjamin, who had been frozen across the saloon, rushed forward. He threw himself at Shiskin on the ground, gripping his throat with both hands.
“Stop!” Shiskin’s strangled voice said.
“Benjamin!” Vili said.
“I’m all right!” I cried, thinking Benjamin might kill Shiskin with his bare hands. I knew he didn’t want to do that, and would regret it later. “Really, Benjamin, I’m fine!”
“Get—him—off—me!” Shiskin gasped, with what sounded like his last breath.
Vili pulled Benjamin away, and up to his feet, and the young crewman tied Shiskin’s hands with expert sailors’ knots. Benjamin didn’t look at me. I could see a muscle working in his jaw, in anger and maybe in embarrassment.
As they moved Shiskin back into his cabin, I slipped my hand into Benjamin’s. “Thank you,” I whispered.
Shiskin was allowed to signal the Soviets to tell them he had been discovered and was going to be executed. He seemed subdued and resigned to his fate, and I pitied him, even if he had held a gun to my head ten minutes earlier. Vili, who knew Russian Morse code, monitored the transmission.
When Shiskin signed off, Count Vili took off his earphones and switched off the radio. “That was very good,” he said. “Very moving and patriotic. Now you have died a hero, and your family is of no use to the Soviets. With luck, they will set your wife and daughter free. And with more luck, they won’t find us and discover that you’re alive.”
Shiskin blinked. “You’re not going to shoot me?”
“You think we are barbarians?” Vili said. “The children promised your son that they would try to help your family. We are trying to help them keep their word.”
Shiskin looked to Benjamin and me, amazed. Jin Lo took his radio out on deck and we heard a splash as she dumped it overboard.
“We do have to keep you locked up, you understand,” Vili said. “I apologise for that. We can’t have you taking hostages all the time.”
But Shiskin had his face in his hands and didn’t seem to hear the count, so overwhelming and torrential was his relief. He might not think humanity was worth saving, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t happy, himself, to be alive.
CHAPTER 32
Genii
Dawn broke clear and cold over the North Sea, and the red Anniken plowed steadily north-northeast through the waves. Seagulls flew overhead, calling, and two fought over a fish in midair, wheeling and turning on each other. The light shimmering on the water was so bright, it made me blink.
A man took sun sightings with a sextant at noon to determine our position, and studied charts, trying to keep us from straying prematurely into Russian waters. An albatross soared in our wake. I had come to look at birds in a new, suspicious light in the past few days, but this one seemed genuinely like a bird. It wheeled in our slipstream as if for the pleasure of it, making endless, effortless figure eights with its vast wings.
Jin Lo showed me a vial she had brought, to be used if we were stranded at sea. She dipped a cotton thread into the clear liquid and lowered it, wet, into a beaker of seawater. Salt crystals began to form on the treated thread, and grew until they looked like a piece of rock candy hanging in the water. Jin Lo pulled out the hardened salt and handed me the beaker of water.
“Drink,” she said.
“It’s safe?”
“No, I poison you.”
I smiled, used to Jin Lo’s sense of humour by now, and drank the water. It was cold and tasted clean and silvery, but not salty.
“People co
uld use that,” I said, excited. “All over the world!”
Jin Lo frowned. “Is new. Difficult to make more than small amount.”
In the afternoon we watched her send her particles up into the air so she could practise with her net. Count Vili explained that large amounts of radiation were required to make the net contract sharply, so the low levels of radiation from the sun just made it hang like gossamer in the light. It was barely visible, but cast a golden shimmer against the sky.
The crew of the former Kong Olav, who knew a good fishing net when they saw one, asked Jin Lo to try to snare some fresh fish.
“This is not purpose of net,” she said.
“Just try!” begged Ludvik.
Jin Lo sighed. “Okay,” she said. “You find fish.”
So the men scanned the surface of the water intently, until they saw herring gulls feeding in the distance. “There’ll be a school right there,” Ludvik said. “The birds always find them.”
They steered the Anniken towards the gulls and stopped the boat. Below the birds, we saw small baitfish leaping from the water in silver showers, trying to escape the larger fish below. The big ones flipped at the surface and sometimes cleared it, and meanwhile the gulls went crazy trying to snatch the flying baitfish.
Jin Lo, unmoved by the spectacle, showed two of the men how to hold the net’s nearly invisible golden edges. Together they swung it out over the sea, where it fell like a light rain on the surface of the water. After a few tries they gathered it in, full of fat, shining fish, which flipped and wriggled on the deck.
The cook prepared the fish on an open grill on the deck, grumbling about how Benjamin’s father had taken over his galley as a laboratory. The apothecary had extracted the Quintessence from the preserved flowers in the glass bell, but he was still experimenting with it. Thinking about how intently he concentrated on his work made me think about my own parents, and how soon they’d be back in London to discover I was missing, and what they might do.
When the fish came off the grill, hot and salty and delicious, Count Vili and Benjamin and I took our plates to sit on the storage bin. The brief noonday sun was out, and the count held up a fish by the tail, then stripped off the flesh with his teeth like a great happy cat, basking in the light. I’d grown fond of the count on the voyage. He was sardonic and jaded sometimes, but he was also endlessly willing to be pleased.
“Kings do not have finer lunches than this one,” he said, licking grease off his fingers. “I can promise you that.”
“What do you know about the bomb the Soviets are testing?” I asked.
“Only that it was designed by a physicist named Andrei Sakharov,” he said. “Their young genius. I have longed to meet him under other circumstances. I think he has a very flexible mind. We thought for some time that we might win him over to our work. But I fear he’s rather entrenched in the Soviet system.”
“Maybe he’ll be interested when he sees what you can do,” I said.
The count gave a wry smile. “When we have sabotaged his work? I don’t know how you make friends, but I don’t think that’s the best way.”
I thought of something else that had been bothering me.
“When the apothecary made the jaival tree bloom,” I said, “to harvest the Quintessence, it released something he called the Dark Force. It was like a cloud.”
The count looked startled. “You saw it?”
“We watched it float away,” I said. “Except it didn’t really float. It seemed to know where it was going.”
A momentary frown crossed the count’s face. “Have you noticed ill effects from your experiments with the Pharmacopoeia?”
Benjamin and I glanced at each other. “You were missing the feathers around your neck,” Benjamin said. “When you were a bird.”
“But that was because Mr Danby grabbed my scarf,” I said. I thought about the other things we’d done. “I kicked the drain before Pip could become invisible, but that was my fault, and it ended up helping us, because he was still visible and could distract the police.”
“The memory oil paralysed Jin Lo,” Benjamin said.
“Whenever we tamper with natural laws, there are consequences,” the count said. “The larger the disruption, the larger the consequence. The name of your Pharmacopoeia, for example, comes from the ancient Greek Pharmakon, which meant both ‘drug’ and ‘poison’: the power to heal and harm. I have never seen the Dark Force as a cloud before. But I have seen its effects, in small ways. My tutor, Konstantin, compared it to the Roman idea of the ‘genius’, or guardian spirit. He felt that something like those genii resided in matter, and were released and disturbed when matter was transformed. It explained, for him, the effect of the cloud seeming to know where it is going. There is a kind of intelligence to what is released, and sometimes it has a mischievous or irritable character. But these genii have a strange kind of loyalty. The fact that they bother to tease us with ill effects means they are inextricably linked to those who disturb them, if you see what I mean. I’m not sure of any of this, of course. We work in the dark—we do what we can, as Henry James said.”
“Mr Danby told me to read Henry James,” I said.
“Ah, you see?” Count Vili said. “The dreadful Mr Danby reads good books. Even the darkest forces are never all bad.”
That night, Benjamin and I stood on the rail in the dark, bundled up against the cold, watching the water break and foam beneath the Anniken’s bow. It poured away along the sides of the hull, bright white against the black sea, as if the boat had wings. Overhead, the stars were impossibly clear, brighter than any stars in smoky England or smoggy Los Angeles, and they gave me an odd feeling, as if something was expanding inside my chest and spilling over. It would seem very unfair to be killed at fourteen when the world had so much loveliness in it.
Benjamin broke the silence, saying, “I’m sorry I lost control yesterday, Janie. I couldn’t stand it, watching Shiskin hold that gun to your head and not being able to move or do anything. It was my plan that had put you in danger, and—I sort of snapped.”
“It was a good plan,” I said. “I just wasn’t careful enough.”
“You were brave to do it.”
“I wasn’t brave. I was scared to death.”
“He believed you the whole time. Did you ever want to be an actress?”
I thought about the vain and silly Maid Marian, with her false eyelashes and her obvious flirting, and the other versions of her who’d been in my parents’ shows back home. “No,” I said. “I mean, I used to practise walking like Katharine Hepburn. But that was more about wanting to be the characters she plays than about wanting to be her.”
“Show me the walk!” he said.
I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I’d told him about the Hepburn walk.
“Please?” he said.
“No!”
Benjamin smiled. “Someday.”
I couldn’t help smiling back. “Maybe.”
We watched the bow wave a while longer, and then Benjamin said, “Listen, Janie. Remember that thing I said about Sarah Pennington? Under the Smell of Truth?”
I nodded. My heart was pounding inside my coat.
“I just wanted to say,” Benjamin said, staring hard down at the water, “that—well, that you’re the one I’d want to be here with.”
It was exactly the thing I might have wanted him to say, but wouldn’t have dared to wish for, back when I’d had time to worry about whether he liked me or not. Hearing it out loud, I didn’t know how to answer. He turned to look at me, and his dark, serious eyes had the same effect on me as they had in the lunchroom that first day. The wind blew my hair against my cheek and he pushed it away and smiled.
“This is what I mean by ‘American hair’,” he said, tugging the strand lightly. His fingers touched my face and then slid around to the back of my neck, and he pulled me close and kissed me.
His lips were warm and soft against mine, and the night air was cold. Shivers went
down my spine from the place where his fingers were tangled in my hair and pressing against my skin. It felt infinitely sweet. We were on our way to a nuclear test site with an untested antidote. The Soviet Navy was looking for us in submarines and spy planes, and my parents would be frantic with worry, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be. There is still, to this day, nowhere I would rather have had the first kiss of my life.
Benjamin pulled back and his face was turbulent with emotion. He seemed to be frowning and smiling all at once. I knew he was thinking the same things I was. And then he was kissing me again, and the world fell away.
When we were too tired and cold to stay on deck, Benjamin went to his father’s cabin and I went to the one I shared with Jin Lo. She opened one eye, then the other, when I came in, and I wondered if she ever truly slept. She gave me a once-over.
“Something good happen?” she asked.
“Um,” I said. “Yes.”
“That’s good,” she said.
I undressed down to my silk long johns and climbed into my little bunk, where I lay awake, staring at the rivets in the cabin’s ceiling.
“Jin Lo?” I said after a while.
“Mm-hm?”
“Do you still miss your parents?”
There was a silence in the dark cabin. “Sometime,” she said.
“Do you remember them well?”
There was another pause. “I remember smell of father’s shirt,” she said. “Combing mother’s hair. Sometime faces not so clear. I am eight. I remember baby brother’s feet. Very small toes and very funny.”
“What was his name?”
“Shun Liu,” she said. “It mean ‘willow tree’. But he is so fat, not like willow.”
“Maybe he would’ve grown up to be tall and skinny,” I said. There was no answer, and I thought maybe I’d said the wrong thing.
“Your mother know where you are?” Jin Lo asked finally. “Your father?”
“No.”
“They worry.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know,” she said. “You are child.”