The Girl from Everywhere (29 page)

I took a deep breath, then another, trying to calm my nerves. The smell of the maps and the books—the ink and the paper—helped me relax, and my hand went to the pearl at my throat. I bent my head and studied the map of the emperor’s tomb, turning the lines on the page into a shoreline in my head, the shore I would expect to see through the fog.

“It will be there,” Slate had said to me. “And sort of . . . not there. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I’d replied. “And no.”

“Smart ass.” And he had reached out to ruffle my hair, like he used to when I was little.

But the memory of our conversation, that rare closeness,
was cold comfort. I shivered then; the air actually was colder. I had to get to the helm. I took one last look at the two maps and left the cabin, but I paused in the open door.

The sky that had been so blue not an hour before had faded to a tea-stained gray, and the sunlight, once golden, had the aged tint you see before a thunderstorm. The Margin was coming up fast.

I threw a last glance back over the stern, at the little island disappearing. Would I see her shores again? If Blake had chosen to thwart the Hawaiian League, I might never return. Against the biting chill of the stiff breeze, I wrapped myself in the memory of our kiss—my first—and walked toward the helm.

Slate watched me warily as I approached, and it was several moments before he stood aside and let me take the wheel. My palms were slippery on the brass, which was still warm from his grip. I wiped my hands on my trousers and grasped the wheel again. Almost immediately, wisps of fog drifted up like steam from the steely water, the air thickening like churned cream.

I heard Slate catch his breath. Goose bumps skittered across my forearms as I kept our course steady into the mist until it swallowed us completely. Would it lift again, or
would we join the other ships—the
Flying Dutchman
or the
Mary Celeste
—and journey without end, ghosts in the fog?

The wind dropped, then gusted, then dropped again for a long minute. Suddenly it was back, whipping through my hair and lashing it against my cheeks. I couldn’t see more than thirty feet ahead in the swirling fog, but the sea was calm, almost eerily so. I squinted as light flickered far away in the clouds, followed, half a minute later, by sullen, distant thunder and the taste of metal on my tongue. The wind snapped in the jib, and I tensed. Then my father put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

I gritted my teeth and tightened my grip on the wheel, still staring into the pearly mist off the bow. As my eyes slid across the insubstantial gray horizon, I became aware of an odd unspooling in the center of my chest, an incongruous, lighthearted feeling that made me want to laugh. At first it was gentle, a tug and a flutter, upward like the rope on the kite I’d flown those years ago, and my body trembled as would the needle of a compass seeking north. Was this the draw of the faraway shore? Then came the counterpoint, a nauseating sinking in my gut, down like a fish on a line, and as we sailed farther into the Margins, the drag deepened like the haul of the anchor on its chain. But still something drew
me forward, and in the center, I stretched like the sails in a gale wind.

Sweat broke out on my forehead, and I swallowed bile. The muscles in my back grew taut and my spine creaked as I tried to catch my breath; the pain in my chest was unbearable, and I thought I would start to fray like a rope. What was holding me back? I knew the answer before the question had finished forming, and I pushed the thought of Blake from my mind, letting that anchor drop away, down, down, until there was nothing behind me and I was unmoored in the current pulling me onward as steadily as time.

“Can’t see a thing!” Rotgut called from the lookout, but suddenly I could. Through a break in the fog, a shoreline, vague but there, as though I were seeing a picture beneath a sheet of vellum. I blinked twice, and my eyes refocused. It was like that optical illusion where you hold a tube against the side of your hand and you can see a hole right through your palm, clear as day and yet impossible at the same time.

I gave the wheel a quarter turn, and the ship creaked and dipped. “Do you see it?” I called, my heart pounding faster.

“Nothing yet!” Rotgut said. His voice sounded very distant; I could no longer see him in the fog.

A few drops of rain hit my cheeks. The sun dimmed in
the sky, and the deck seesawed. Lights flickered at the edge of my vision, and I thought I heard the far-off groan of a mast under full sail. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kash working alone to trim our main, hauling down on the hawser, straining against the swelling sheet. Bee was somewhere up near the bow, invisible in the fog. “Slate—”

“I’m going.”

He left my side and went to Kashmir, but I had lost my concentration, and the hint of the shoreline vanished. I put the crew out of my mind as my eyes swept the horizon. I knew it was there—

Yes,
there
. Clearer now. Darker. Just off the prow.

The wind turned icy, and it carried a foul smell, like sour musk. My skin was clammy against my jacket, but I did not take my eyes off the shore. We pitched upward on a swell, down on its back, and up again on the next. The rain intensified, small wind-driven drops that stung my face and lashed in bands across the black water, but I did not take my eyes off the shore. The sky darkened to charcoal and the fog swallowed Kash and Slate, but I could still see the shore as clear as a mirror.

Then the ship seemed to leap upward under my feet, and I fell to my knees as the wind and the rain simply stopped.
Suddenly everything was still, and the cold darkness was absolute.

My heart throbbed in my throat. Had I been struck blind? Blind
and
deaf; the silence was overwhelming. Then again, so was the smell, that cloying musky odor I’d noticed on the wind. There was movement too, an odd swaying of the ship. Then I heard Slate’s laugh: wordless, delighted. Had he seen it too—our distant shore, the same shore I had seen?

The fog was gone. As my eyes adjusted, I made out the glimmer of starlight above us and the silvery moonlit shine of the glassy water below, although I saw no moon in the sky. Then Rotgut swore. He lifted the lamp at the top of the mast. It wasn’t the sky I was seeing.

A hundred feet above our heads, the light of our lanterns was glittering back at us from a ceiling studded with diamonds. In this cavern, the sky was a bowl with stars stuck on it. I recognized the constellations . . . Orion, or—in China—the face of the White Tiger of the West. And Hydrus, the Snake’s tail.

I hadn’t seen moonlight on the calm sea; rather, we floated on a rippling pool of mercury, just as Sima Qian had said. Where the waves of quicksilver lapped the shore, our
light shone on the skeletons of dying trees looming over piles of shriveled leaves on browning blades of grass. Far off, at the edge of the light, the gleam of red lacquer and bronze: the sarcophagus of Emperor Qin in the center of the blasted, barren terrain. We’d done it.

I’d done it.

I was so proud of myself, it took me three heartbeats to realize the ship was listing.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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T
he deck tilted starboard in slow motion; as the rudder twisted, the wheel spun. I grabbed for it, but it wrenched itself out of my hands. I clutched the base of the wheel and tried to haul myself to my feet.

“What’s happening?” Slate said, stumbling toward the mast and gripping it in both hands.

“The mercury!”

“What about it?”

“It’s denser than water!”

Bee had slipped down nearly to the rail, but she was arrested by her harness. Kashmir was the only one still on his feet. He sprang past me to pull himself against the port rail on the high side, but it was too little, too late. Creaking, the ship continued to tip.

I looked up at Rotgut in alarm. He was wrapped
around the mast; even in the dim light I could see the whites of his eyes. The glow from the lantern he held brightened as the crow’s nest swung toward the wall and, with a crunch and a jolt, slammed into the stone. Rotgut cried out as the
Temptation
stopped there, the deck at a forty-five-degree angle. “My leg!”

I pulled myself up with the wheel; it didn’t budge in my hands. The top of the mast had snapped, and Rotgut’s knee was pinned between the platform of the crow’s nest and the rough stone wall. He was gripping the flesh of his thigh in pain, but he wasn’t moving, and I could see why. The slightest motion would send him scraping down the wall as the ship capsized.

“No one move,” I said, nearly afraid to breathe. “We need ballast.”

Slate closed his eyes. “I wish you’d thought of that before we got here.”

“Me too.”

“Is it poisonous?” Bee whispered, staring down at the silvery pool five feet below her. Her voice echoed oddly in the tomb.

“I . . . I don’t know. Qin believed it was an elixir, but—never mind,” I said. “Just let me . . .” I half-turned toward
the hatch as the thought occurred, and even that slight motion made the ship slip sideways. Rotgut’s scream echoed in the tomb.

“Kashmir?”

“Amira?”

“The bag.”

“What bag?”

“The bag on the nail, the one I use to bail the bilge. Can you go down and empty it?”

He didn’t bother answering; he unclipped his jack line and moved along the rail, hand over hand, until he was in line with the hatch. Then he let go and slid down, catching the opening with his fingertips and swinging inside. Rotgut screamed again as he slid another foot down the wall.

We waited on deck, keeping our positions as though a gorgon had flown through. My palms were slick on the wheel, but I did not adjust my hands. I did not move a muscle but to tighten my grip until my arms shook. Rotgut sighed then, and after what felt like an eon, the ship began to tilt back aright.

As soon as I could let go of the wheel, I scrambled over to the mast. Slate was already loosening the halyard. I shimmied up toward Rotgut, slowly at first, but the ship was more
and more stable. I grimaced as I came eye to eye with the side of his shin; it had been skinned from knee to ankle, and blood dripped down his leg and off his toes. He screwed his face into the semblance of a smile.

“It’s not broken. Looks worse than it is.” He wiggled his toes and then hissed through his teeth. “But it feels worse than it looks.”

The crow’s nest was smashed, but the pulley below it was intact. I clipped Rotgut’s harness to the halyard, and Bee and Slate lowered him to the deck. I climbed down after him, and by the time I’d arrived, Slate was using his shirt to staunch the blood. He looked up at me. “It’s like road rash.”

“You know I’ve never ridden a bike.” I wrinkled my nose at the sight of the wound; when daubed clear of blood, the scrape was the pale pink of the bottom of a rose petal. “There’s a first-aid kit in the cupboard under the desk.”

Slate put Rotgut’s arm around his shoulders and helped him stagger to his feet. “Come on. I’ve got some painkillers.” Rotgut laughed, and I made a face as they hobbled off toward the map room.

I found Kashmir downstairs, sluicing water from his bare arms. I picked up his shirt—he’d tossed it in a wet linen puddle on the floor—and wrung it out into the open hatch
of the bilge. “Good job,” I said to him, tossing him the shirt.

“Quick thinking,” he replied, clapping me on the shoulder. Then he smelled his shirt and wrinkled his nose. “I think there was a dead whale in that bag. A small one, but still.”

I laughed. “Change, then. I know you have plenty of clothes.”

I went into my own cabin then, to get Joss’s map, but I stopped when I stepped in a puddle. The porthole was shut—the water had come from Swag’s bucket, upended on the floor by the starboard side. I grabbed it and swore; the little dragon was nowhere to be seen. I pawed through my things, but he wasn’t under my quilt or in my jewelry box.

My hands stilled, and I chewed the inside of my cheek. There was nothing else I could do. He knew where the pearls were when he wanted to come back. I threw a couple of dresses over the puddle to soak up the water and grabbed the map case, slinging it over my shoulder.

I joined the others back above deck. When I saw Kashmir, I shook my head, impressed. I was still bedraggled from the rain during our journey, but he’d even combed his hair.

I stood beside him at the rail. The air was chilly in the
tomb, and it soaked into my wet clothes and curled next to my skin. Together, we peered into the dim gloom. Waves from our sudden appearance still rippled against the sculpted shore to portside, the representation of the coast of China, where the emperor rested in the central place of honor. His servants would be elsewhere.

All except one. His favorite.

“It’s very quiet,” Kashmir said.

“It is.” The sound of the water, the ship, our voices, all were swallowed by the darkness, and nothing came back out of it. Beyond the circle of light from the ship, there was no sign of life. The only movement here was our own.