Engines and werewolves

Chapter 56

Marvel, sitting next to me, gives me a sad smile. “It was a good idea.”

She’s shivering. I take one of her hands, and she looks at me questioningly. Her fingers are like ice.

“Lie down,” I tell her.

She does. I prod her onto her side, and lie down next to her, pressing myself up against her back. I feel her stiffen slightly, then relax.

“Better?” I ask, after a while.

“Yeah.” She gives a little giggle. “Your breath is tickling my neck.”

“Sorry.”

Another silence. I think she’s fallen asleep, but then she says, “Will you tell me something about yourself, victoria?”

I feel myself tense up. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything.” She yawns. “I talk about myself a lot. I just thought…”

Another pause.

“If you don’t want to…,” she says, worried.

“I have a sister.” I don’t realize I’m speaking aloud until the moment after I’ve done it. Pressed together, it feels like the two of us are alone in the universe, a tiny bubble of warmth and life in the middle of cold, unfeeling darkness. “Her name is Tori. She’s four years younger than me.” I pause for a moment. “We used to sleep like this, when it got cold and we were on the street, or squatting in some rattrap. Whenever it snowed, street kids would freeze to death. We’d find them in the mornings, just like they were asleep, only turned blue. They were always smiling, and I thought it wouldn’t be a bad way to die. But when I slept with Tori, I was always warm. I used to joke that she had a belly full of hot coals.”

I keep talking a while longer, and I feel Marvel’s breathing go slow and deep, her body relaxing. After a while I close my eyes, press a little tighter against her, and let myself drift away.

When I wake up, Marvel’s face is inches from mine. Her eyes are closed, her features calm, and in the strange moments after waking I feel an odd urge to kiss her. That’s enough to make me blink and come fully awake, and I prop myself up on one arm and brush sand out of my hair.

She opens her eyes as I sit up, and groans.

“And here I was hoping this had all been a dream,” she says. “Why is it only a dream when you really want it to be real?”

“I’ve wondered that myself.”

First we drink water, filling and refilling the canteen until we’ve both had enough, and then we eat a few more strips of badly cooked crab meat. I push Marvel’s dress up to examine her leg, and she does her best not to wince as I prod it gently. I have no idea if it’s set properly, but it doesn’t seem to be festering or swelling too badly.

“Right,” I say. “Last time I went that way.” I gesture to where a few of my footprints are still visible, then turn ninety degrees. “This time I’ll go this way. Maybe I can find the edge of the ship.”

“Would that be helpful?”

I shrug. “It’d be something.”

She nods, then looks away nervously. “Before you leave, can you help me with something?”

“What do you need?”

Her eyes stay fixed firmly on the ground. It takes me a second, but I get it, and I find myself grinning. “Oh.”

She rolls her eyes at me. “Please hurry.”

Through a combination of carefully averted gazes and loud humming, we manage to give Marvel a chance to piss without either of us dying of embarrassment. I get her settled back near the pool, and wave with as much cheer as I can muster.

“Be careful,” she says.

“You too.”

“Don’t worry about me.” Sleeping seems to have restored her spirits, and she grins broadly. “If the crabs come for me, I shall disarm them with my rapier wit.”

I smile back, with an effort, and start walking.

Once again, I find two “stars” that haven’t moved in a while and use them as guideposts, in case something happens to my footprints. This time I find one of the massive pillars much sooner, with several dog-sized green crabs gathered around its base. I veer well clear, and though they freeze at the sound of my shuffling feet, they don’t follow me.

Walking through an endless expanse of white sand gives you too much time to think. I think about Tori, in her Second Ward house, and wonder if she’s realized I’m gone yet. Maybe she’s worrying about me. Maybe Naga has already killed her, just out of spite, and all this is pointless. But no—if I do somehow take command of Soliton, he’ll need her to make sure I hand the ship over to the proper authorities. So she’s safe. Until he decides I’ve failed.

I turn my mind in other directions. I think about Marvel, back at the pool, but then I worry about whether she’s all right. And I think about how we spent the night, and what she thinks about it, which is, frankly, confusing. I try to think about olite instead, but that’s just frustrating, and in spite of my best efforts Marvel keeps intruding. So in the end I try to think about nothing at all, just my boots brushing slowly through the sand, which works about as well as you might imagine.

It’s with some relief, therefore, that I discover that there’s an end to the sand after all. I’ve passed several more pillars, but now the faint light ends at a wall of utter darkness, stretching up far higher than I can see and running perfectly straight in both directions. This can only be the hull of the ship. It’s so large and so featureless that it’s hard to gauge how far away it is. After another hour of trudging, the thing seems no closer, until I spy small discolorations at the base.