The White Fox (14 page)

Malik finished talking and turned to them. His correspondent came closer out of the mist, the form becoming clearer as she moved towards them. She was a stunningly beautiful black girl, with a round, friendly face and deep brown eyes. Her jet-black hair was slightly wavy and cascaded down to her shoulder blades. She wore a white shirt, a red waistcoat, baggy trousers, and boots. A tattoo in the shape of a stylized lion wove around the upper forearm, and a crimson bandana decorated with a golden turtle was wrapped around her forehead.

“So who are these?” she said.

Her voice brought Jack back to reality. He found he was staring and looked at his feet awkwardly. He suddenly didn’t know what to do with his hands. At Malik’s beckoning, he and Lucy came closer to the hatch.

“Jack Lawson,” Malik said, “and Lucy Goodman.”

“Alright, then. How much do they know already?”

“Well, a few hours ago they were nearly murdered by the Cult, so they’ve seen their fair share. But remember,” he replied, looking at her sternly, “Charles slipped up on this one. Sardâr left
very
specific instructions. He wants to fill them in personally. Actually, his instructions were far
too
specific, if you ask me. He always seems to plan for the most unlikely occurrences, and those are the ones that always end up happening. It makes me uncomfortable.”

The girl rolled her eyes and looked half-exasperatedly, half-jokingly at Jack.

He suddenly felt very hot around the ears.

“But where would we be without him? He’s our next best to Isaac, and he’s led us right so far. The sooner he gets back, the better.”

Malik shrugged. He turned to Jack and was joined by Gaby, issuing out of the fog like a Kevlar-clad spectre. “I’m afraid this is where we leave you,” Malik said, addressing Jack and Lucy.

“Don’t worry,” Gaby said, laughing at Lucy’s scandalized expression. “You’re in good hands. Captain Ruth”—she gestured at the girl—”will take you to a safe location. We’ve got people on hand there to take care of you. Like Malik said, all eventualities were planned for.”

“What about my parents?” Lucy protested.

“We’ll handle that. We’ll make sure they know what’s going on and that you’re safe. We need to get back and start sorting out this mess—cover stories, fake scientific explanations, burying the temple … It’s going to take a while.”

“But when can we go home?”

Malik and Gaby glanced at each other.

“We don’t know,” Gaby replied after a moment, looking sympathetic. “I’m really sorry, but your guess is as good as ours. We’re not sure how much damage the Cult managed to do and whether they’re planning to come back anytime soon. The idea was to stake out in that mansion until they attacked, then catch them unawares. As you can see, that didn’t all go to plan.”

“What about Alex? What are you doing about that?”

“We’re on the case,” Gaby replied, smiling. Jack couldn’t help thinking it was more of a rebuttal than a response. As much as Gaby and Malik had been helpful, now that he was recovering from the shock of the night’s events and his sense of skepticism was returning to him, he could not help but feel a little annoyed at the lack of explanation for any of the events that had twisted their world upside down in such a short time.

“Sardâr will explain everything,” Malik said tersely, pulling out his watch again and waving it in front of Gaby’s face.

As they smiled at both of them (in what Jack thought was a reassuring way), considering what had gone on, he couldn’t shake a slight sense of abandonment. Both nodded at Ruth and vanished into the all-obscuring white mass, an exit as ethereal as the entrance the two had made into their lives the night before.

“Who the hell is Sardâr?” Lucy whispered to him.

Jack shook his head, as nonplussed as she was. Both of them stared into the fog for a moment. He felt like a package bundled from one keeper to the next. He heard the clunking of the plank being withdrawn, along with his hopes of getting back to Earth on the dimension ship. Jack glanced at Lucy. The panic on her face suggested she was feeling the same way and that she was preparing to jump off the side of the ship and demand to be taken home. Half of him got ready to stop her, the other half wanting to do exactly the same thing.

“Well,” Ruth said after a minute or two, “I think we should get you into something more fitting. Quentin?”

The other new figure, a man in a poorly fitting Regency wig and ultramarine jacket, stepped up to her side.

“Take these two below deck and give them some new clothes.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” replied the man in a badly disguised aristocratic drawl.

“Jack, Lucy,” Ruth continued, “can you come down to the command deck afterwards? There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“This way, please,” said Quentin. He hoisted himself over the side of the hatch and began clanking his way down the metal ladder.

Jack and Lucy looked apprehensively at one another. Then, one after the other, they clambered onto the ladder and descended into the dome.

Ruth did a quick visual sweep of the area (an action rendered virtually useless by the fog) and shouted into the mist, “All hands below deck.” Waiting for the clanging of other hatches to recede, she pulled herself onto the ladder and slammed the hatch shut above her head. Instantaneously, with the sensation of a sinking elevator, the ship started to descend into the water.

Twenty minutes later, Jack and Lucy found themselves standing outside the command deck. Their latest journey had been a blur of bustling men and women, all in a seeming hotchpotch of clothing. Impelled by their guide through a network of tunnels and stairways, all corridors with identical dark wood panelling and lit with soft gaslights, they had been shown the way to their rooms several floors below. They had torn off their filthy school uniform and netball kit and thrown on a collection of seemingly miscellaneous and mismatched items of clothing and accessories.

Jack was now dressed in a flamboyant waistcoat over a woollen white shirt, with two layers of cotton trousers and absurd cowboy boots. Lucy looked like a fortune-teller in a couple of shawls, trousers straight out of a stage version of
Arabian Nights
, an extra large man’s shirt, and several bangles. She had opted to keep her torn-up trainers after offers of clogs, Wellington boots, and leather bags as alternative footwear. Both of them had looked at each other and acknowledged the silent consensus that it was good that their rooms didn’t have mirrors.

Jack knocked, the door emblazoned with a stylized golden turtle symbol, and a moment later the answer came.

“Come in.”

They opened the door and entered. Whatever Jack had been expecting, this was not it. The walls and ceilings of the room were a single curved dome of glass, entirely transparent, save for the metal framing. Beyond the dome, barely illuminated by the jets of gold projected from the lights below them, was the blue black of deep ocean. They appeared to be surging above the ocean floor at considerable speed. Looking up, only a glimmer hinted at the surface of the water.

“We’re under the sea?” Lucy murmured, quite unnecessarily given their surroundings.

“Yes, you are,” came a cold reply from somewhere in front of them.

The contents of the room were computer panels and screens set around the edges facing inwards, a dozen crew members keying things in or following readings on numerous radars and relays. In the center, set into an indentation in the carpeted floor, was a large oak table, apparently anachronistic with the high-tech electronics around it. Pinned to it were several faded maps decrying strangely shaped islets and illustrations of fantastical sea beasts around the edges. Ruth and another woman were standing by it, examining something.

Ruth was stunning, but Jack’s attention couldn’t help but be attracted by the other woman, the one who had spoken. She was like no one he had ever seen. She was taller than both him and Lucy by several inches and extremely slim. She looked vaguely Middle Eastern. Her jet-black hair was plaited down her back, and she was wearing a serene blue tunic with silver trimming. Her clothes would have seemed strangely medieval were they not set next to Ruth’s, Jack’s, and Lucy’s own fashion chimeras. Her eyes were even darker than Ruth’s yet surprisingly cool, and her face had an oddly pinched look.

As they came closer, she stood up straight, regarding them imperiously. “So this is Jack Lawson?” she said, her voice calm and genteel.

“Yes,” Ruth said, then seeing Lucy’s expression, “and this is Lucy Goodman.”

The strange woman stepped around the table and offered her hand to Jack. He took it cautiously and shook it. As he did so, he noticed something else. Her ears were pointed upwards ridiculously far, past the level of her eyes, almost to points.

“Jack, Lucy, this is Adâ Sharif. She’s our escort to the mainland.” Then Ruth saw Jack looking at Adâ’s ears. “And this might come as a bit of a shock to you, but she’s an elf.”

Jack was about to challenge this, but then he remembered what Vince had said about becoming reeducated in this new world.

Adâ’s hand tightened momentarily, and she looked into Jack’s eyes, as if daring him to challenge it. Jack stared back defiantly, and she let go.

Adâ turned, taking no more notice of Lucy than if she had been a balsa-wood hat stand. “I would have greeted you earlier with the others, but I cannot stand that girl Gaby.”

Neither Jack nor Lucy said anything. Both knew what the other was thinking.

Over the rest of the day, Jack and Lucy were given a flurried tour around the ship by Quentin. Along increasingly claustrophobic tunnels of panelled wood, they were taken to the kitchen, the dining room, and below to the mechanical workings of the ship—reactors, turbines, and generators that neither Jack nor Lucy thought could ever work, looking as they did like the inventions of a cartoon evil scientist. It took Jack a while to realize that
The Golden Turtle
was not just a name. The entire ship was literally built in the shape of a gigantic metallic turtle, with the command deck as the head.

Though the tour was quite dull (not helped along by Quentin’s increasingly monotonous attempts to sound piratey through an Etonian accent), they came across many of the crew who were going about their day’s work. From the bits of conversation they had with them, most of them seemed very amiable and friendly. For once, Jack threw himself much more into conversations with strangers than Lucy, who remained stoic and visibly uneasy throughout.

Eventually, the jet lag began to kick in, with the realization that they had been awake for almost twenty hours. After the tour, they were shown back to their own small cabins. Both tried to sleep but found it impossible. Somehow, they had come out on this planet midmorning, despite leaving at midnight. But then, Jack thought, that probably happened when you jumped two hundred thousand light-years through space.

In the end, Lucy managed to doze off, but Jack gave up and took to wandering around, talking to the crew and taking in the atmosphere.

Whilst exploring, Jack discovered an observatory dome on the top deck—one panel of the turtle’s shell made of transparent glass rather than metal, through which he could sit and watch. They had risen over the course of the day, so that now they were much closer to the surface. The echo of silver moonlight glittered above, dancing on the surface of the water. Evidently, the fog had cleared.

“So how are you enjoying your first voyage aboard
The Golden Turtle
?” said a voice behind him.

Jack whipped around to see Ruth leaning casually on the railing, her arms folded. “I was just getting some fresh air,” he said awkwardly. He felt very like a small child, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Her expression broke into a grin. “Don’t worry. You’re not part of the crew,” she said reassuringly, coming to stand next to him. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t give you jobs to do. Everybody’s got to pull their own weight here.”

“Yeah, Quentin made that very clear.”

Ruth laughed. “He’s harmless really. The crew joke about him, but he’s the one who keeps everyone organized. God knows we need it, with so many different worlds, each with their own missions.”