Close Reach (9 page)

“I killed two.”

Kelly found she could watch the waves for longer periods now without getting that spinning, dizzy feeling. She stared out at them and watched the boat’s progress. In these latitudes it was impossible to tell the direction from the position of the sun unless you knew exactly what time of day it was. They’d taken her watch when they’d taken everything else she wore. But Kelly could tell they were going southeast, because the waves had been going toward the east for days, and the crab boat was cutting through them at an angle that left the starboard quarter facing the crests. If they were going southeast, they weren’t going toward Chile but to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula instead or maybe to the island chain that stretched to the east of it.

Back across the Drake Passage, where there would be no one.

Kelly thought about that and thought about the fact that the men had kept Lena alive even though she had no money. They’d given her a blanket when they’d stripped everyone else and left them to die. Their cage sat atop the starboard engine access hatch, so that of all the cages, it was the warmest. That might not have been a coincidence.

“The pills worked, you know,” Lena said. “Cleared it right up.”

“That’s great,” Kelly said, barely able to whisper now. “I’m glad.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Lena whispered back. “I wish they hadn’t worked. It’d be better if they hadn’t.”

Then Lena slept. Eventually they shifted so that it was Kelly who held Lena, and Kelly who reached out into the freezing air to tug the blankets over their bodies, and Kelly who hid her face in the soft warmth of Lena’s hair and whispered
shhhhh
into the girl’s ear when she cried in her sleep.

Kelly rose from a daze when a man kicked the trap and banged on the bars with a short-handled fish gaff. He was inches away from her, separated only by the bars of the trap, and she could smell him even through the foul weather gear he wore: a smell at once dangerous and low.

A tiger’s cage. A bag of snakes.

Lena woke with a high-pitched cry and scrambled out of the blankets and off Kelly’s lap, moving to the corner of the trap away from the hinged door. She put her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins to become as small as she could get. Kelly was struggling to sit higher, to prepare herself for whatever was about to happen. The man took a set of keys from the pocket of his fisherman’s jacket and tried them one at a time until he found one that turned the padlock’s barrel. He unclasped the lock and hung it by its shackle atop the trap and then stepped back and lifted the door. He reached into the cage with the gaff and tapped Lena’s thigh with the flat side of the hook, then motioned her to come out.

Lena looked at Kelly, her green eyes wide and full of tears that would freeze on her cheeks if she didn’t wipe them away soon. She shook her head.

Not at the man but at Kelly.

“Don’t,” Lena whispered. “Or he’ll just hurt you more.”

Lena took hold of the curved part of the gaff’s hook and let the man pull her forward and out of the trap. When she was out, she was unsure on her feet and fell to the deck when the ship pitched with a wave. She rolled in a tumble of banging knees and arms until the small of her back cracked into a rusty steel deck bollard. She cried out in pain and lay there stunned.

The man laughed and dropped the door to the cage and then bent to lock it. He used the gaff to slap the bars behind Kelly’s head and laughed again and then went to where Lena lay naked on the ship’s rotted deck planks in a half-frozen puddle of spray. He grabbed her left arm just above the elbow and yanked her to her feet and led her stumbling and screaming back to the door from which he’d come.

Kelly heard the door slam and the wheel turn as it locked, but she didn’t see it because her face was in her hands and her eyes were full of tears. After a while she took the extra blanket and wrapped it around herself and moved back to the corner of the cage where she would be farthest from the spray that sometimes came over the rails.

* * *

She passed an hour staring at the sea and fighting the nausea twisting inside her. The ocean was calmer here, and they were passing between islands. High snowcapped peaks and pinnacles of brown rock that rose smooth and wind-blasted from slate-colored water. She couldn’t stop herself from trying to listen for sounds coming from inside the boat. She heard screams and cries and punches but knew they were all the wind and the waves and the constant rhythm of the engines. Ghosts of her imagination. The ship was made of steel and decked with wood, and she was outside in the wind with the noise of the engines where she’d hear nothing from inside. She thought mostly of Lena, because she was sure Dean was dead. They’d taken Jim inside, and she knew how he’d ended up and was sure that if Dean wasn’t already hanging beside him off the bow, skinned like a seal and frozen, he would be soon.

But she didn’t think they were killing Lena, at least not outright or all at once. And that ate her from the inside until she was shaking. Shaking at her nakedness in the face of these men. Because she couldn’t do anything but wait in the cage and see whether they brought Lena back to her, or brought some broken part of Lena back to her, or simply let her freeze alone in the cage without ever knowing what had become of her husband and the girl. She finally broke then, and screamed herself hoarse through her engorged throat, and clawed and pried at the bars and the padlock until they were both soaked in her blood, and then when she was finally spent, she lay back in the blankets and wept without sound, staring at the ship’s door.

* * *

She was still crying when the door opened and the man brought Lena back out by shoving her from behind and then grabbing her hair to stop her while he paused and closed the door. This time Lena didn’t scream or cry out, and her face was blank. She walked to the trap and crawled into it when he opened the door, and Kelly was glad when he shut it behind Lena and didn’t want anything from her. He locked the cage and went back inside the ship without a word and without ever looking at Kelly.

When he was gone, Kelly opened the blankets and let Lena in. She took the girl onto her lap and held her close. She felt the girl’s cold tears on her breasts, and she held her as tightly as she could. After about a minute, Lena began to shake and sob.

Still, Kelly didn’t say anything and neither did Lena. They just held each other and cried.

Finally, after perhaps ten minutes, Lena began to whisper through her sobs.

“They brought me into, into the galley. They showed me food. Hot stew,” she said. She broke into a long wail. Her breath heaved against Kelly’s neck. “I’m so hungry, no food for days. And free … and I’m … freezing. They said, they said I could have it, have a bowl of stew, if I
did—”

“Shhhh, Lena. Shhhhh.”

“—what they wanted. And … and … I did. I did everything they said. And then … and after …”

“Lena, honey. You don’t have to say.”

“After, they sat me down, and, and they gave me a bowl. And I had, I had one bite … and they took it away from me and said …”

“Lena, shhhh.”

Kelly rocked her and put her lips on the back of her neck and kissed her. She let her own tears fall onto Lena’s skin.

We’ve marked each other
, Kelly thought.
Like this, what we’re doing right now. This is forever.

“And they said I didn’t get to have any, after all, because I—because I wasn’t any good.”

Lena jerked out from under the covers, pulling away from Kelly with force and speed. She went on her hands and knees to the corner of the cage.

“I don’t want it!” she screamed. “I don’t want
any
of it!”

She shoved three fingers of her left hand into her throat and made herself gag.

“No, Lena. Don’t. Please don’t.”

Kelly was up and holding Lena by the shoulders and trying to pull her back.

The girl shook her off and pushed her fingers deeper. She lurched with a spasm and vomited, spitting out less than half a mouthful of stew. It steamed on the bottom of the cage, and Kelly knew it would be frozen in ten minutes. Then Lena came back to the blankets, to Kelly. They pulled the blankets as tightly as they could, and Kelly knew she could never ask Lena if she knew anything about Dean. That would be too much to ask, and so she swallowed it with everything else. Whether she wanted any of this or not, it was in her and she couldn’t get it out. She couldn’t throw it up. She was trapped, and so she did the only things she could.

She stayed warm, and she stayed alive.

She held Lena. She waited.

Part Two

Deception Island

The Antarctic dawn was cold and purple, the sun lower than it had been for weeks, so that at its nadir it dropped part way into the Southern Ocean, a moment of half-lit immersion during which the wind calmed and the temperature fell far below freezing. Above the mountains of the islands to the south, the Aurora Australis wavered and crackled in curtains of green fire. Lena had cried herself out and had been asleep for hours. Kelly was wrapped into her for her body heat but was awake and watching the islands and the ship’s progress among them. Somewhere behind them on the gray sea was
Freefall
, carrying in its warmth and safety one of the men who’d done this to them. And somewhere ahead of them, perhaps already at anchor at their eventual destination, were
Arcturus
and the research ship
Palida.
And maybe others she and Lena didn’t know about. She imagined them from above, all the ships tied to this atrocity, strung out across the face of the sea the way storms lined up to transit the narrow alley of the passage.

Dim lights on a dimmer sea. Spots of warmth, spots of cold terror.

The man named Richard and his five students were now so thickly covered in frost that she couldn’t see their skin. And that was a mercy. They were ice statues inside of finely latticed ice boxes, not dead men inside of steel traps. She watched until the dawn brightened and the sun began to sparkle again in the frost and on the distant snowcaps.

Lena stirred when the engines began to slow.

“You feel it?” she asked Kelly.

“Yeah.”

As the ship slowed, its stern wave finally caught it, the transom riding up and then dropping as the boat slowed to a few knots. They passed a pinnacle of rock less than fifty feet away: a tall, gray smokestack of basalt, storm petrels roosting on the higher ledges above the wash and spray of the waves. They motored past it, and then a moment later they were threading a narrow gap formed on each side by cliffs. High gray cliffs, ledges rimmed in snow and ice. The ship slipped out of the chop of the open ocean and into a calm harbor.

The air here smelled different. Kelly could smell the wet rocks and the guano of roosting birds, but beneath that was another smell. Lena noticed it, too.

“Brimstone,” Kelly whispered. “It’s a volcano.”

Lena nodded and whispered back, her voice still hoarse and cracked from before.

“This is Deception Island,” Lena said. “In the South Shetlands.”

Kelly nodded. Lena was right.

“You’ve been? With Jim?”

Lena shook her head.

“Just looked at charts. No one’s supposed to come here now. Because maybe there’ll be an eruption. There were warnings in Punta Arenas.”

Kelly had seen the same warnings. They’d been posted around the marinas of southern Chile, tacked outside dockside bars in Patagonia, handed to them with their
zarpes
when they cleared out of the country. The scientists had already evacuated, taking their equipment with them. The ecotour cruise ships found other islands to look for chinstrap penguins.

Except for the rumblings, Deception Island was an ideal anchorage. It was a ring of basalt, the crown of a volcano protruding from the sea. Through the narrow pass, inside the crater, lay the only truly safe harbor in six hundred miles: a circle of perfect calm. No matter how hard the sea was raging outside the walls, it was a place of shelter. But it was rumbling now, and Kelly could smell burning rock and the bite of seawater heated to steam.