The Apothecary (31 page)
Finally we landed on what had to be the deck of the destroyer.
“We need a box, or a cage,” Mr Danby’s voice said.
A hand grabbed me around the chest and pulled me out of the hat. Light flooded my eyes, and I looked around frantically. The ship was huge, nothing like the bathtub toy it had seemed from the air, but almost no one was on deck. I tried to wriggle free, and stabbed at the Scar’s hand with my beak, but he only squeezed me harder, and I gasped. I thought he would crush my tiny bones.
The young pilot appeared and thrust a toolbox into Danby’s hands. “We go belowdecks, below water level now,” he said. He pointed towards Nova Zembla. “Bomb, yes? Much
radiatsii
.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that,” Danby snapped.
The boy hurried away, and Danby opened the metal toolbox, which was the size of a loaf of bread, and empty. They were going to put me in it. If I became human while inside it, I would be crushed as my bones grew. I would die painfully, I was sure—half bird, half human, too big for my prison. I shut my eyes and tried hard to imagine becoming human
now
, my heartbeat slowing, my wings becoming arms.
Nothing happened, and the Scar put me in the box. He seemed to be trying to figure out how to close the lid with his hand still in it, or to get his hand out without letting me go. I screeched in protest.
And then it began. I felt my heart slow, and my bones get heavier, and my skull thicken, and my feathers retract, and then I tumbled to the deck in my peacoat and boots. The toolbox clattered beside me, and the Scar was so surprised that he lost his hat, which blew across the deck of the destroyer. He ran after and snatched it from the air. I stood up, feeling awkward in my human limbs.
“I knew it!” Danby said, grabbing me by the shoulders. “Where’s the apothecary? Is he on Nova Zembla?”
“He didn’t make it,” I lied. “He fell into the sea.”
Danby searched my eyes to see if I was telling the truth.
“I’m the only one who got to the island,” I said. “I couldn’t save them.” A tear rolled down my cheek—for I did really feel hopeless—and I let it stay on my face. I didn’t know what to do except try to buy the apothecary time.
Then a loud alarm went off on the destroyer, and a Russian voice over a loudspeaker issued a command. I wondered if the ship was shielded in some way against the radiation, or whether the water alone would protect us, down below.
The Scar said, “We leave her on deck.”
Fear seized me. “You can’t! I’ll be poisoned and die!”
“Then that will be one problem solved,” the Scar said.
Danby smiled and let go of my shoulders. “That’s true,” he said. “I envy you for seeing what it really looks like, Janie. We have cameras, of course, but film is never the same. It should be very beautiful, so close.”
“Why are you doing this, Mr Danby?” I asked. “It can’t be because you read
Anna Karenina
when you were fifteen.”
Danby seemed surprised for a moment that I knew about his Tolstoy conversation, but then he considered the question. “What better reason could there be?” he said. “I want the nation that produced such a book to survive, and not to be annihilated by your naïve and vicious American government.”
“But a
person
produced that book,” I said. “Not a nation. That’s—” I caught myself using the present tense. “That
was
the great thing about the apothecary. He wasn’t working for a country. He was working to save people everywhere.”
“As am I!” Danby said. “A Soviet nuclear force is the only way to keep the Americans in check and ensure that their weapons will never be used. The US needs a deterrent. I’m sure your parents would agree. Now I really must go below.”
“Don’t leave me out here!” I said. The Latin words on his blackboard came into my head. “
Decipimur specie—rectie!
We are deceived by the appearance of right! Remember? You think you’re right, but this is wrong!”
Danby smiled at me. “You really were such a promising student, Miss Scott. I wish you all luck.”
He followed the Scar towards the last open door, to go below. I thought about running after them and trying to fight my way down, but I knew I would never be strong enough.
I turned to the rail of the ship. I’d been acting as if I believed the bomb would go off because the apothecary wasn’t around to stop it, but now I needed to believe that it wouldn’t. I had to believe that the apothecary was strong enough to stop something twenty times more powerful than he expected. I was alone on the grey deck of the destroyer, in the vast silver sea, and I wanted to be brave. Snow had started to fall. I stood a little straighter and tried to have some of Benjamin’s fire in my eyes.
Then I looked towards Nova Zembla and waited.
F
or what seemed like a long time, I was alone on deck in the silence. I held my breath, standing at the rail and blinking at the island through the snow, hoping that Benjamin and his father had gone ahead with their plan—that Jin Lo’s net would work, and the Quintessence would absorb the radiation. Imagining them working away on the island helped. They would carry on and succeed, and save themselves and the Samoyeds on the island, and the reindeer and the fish and the Norwegian children—and also me, exposed on the deck of the destroyer. I didn’t want to think about what would happen next, when they would have to leave Nova Zembla. They couldn’t possibly rescue me from the Soviet Navy, and the idea left me feeling hollow and abandoned.
I tried to be selfless and hope only for Benjamin’s safety, since he and his father were trying to save the world. But what I really wanted was for
all
of us to be safe, and out of this wretched place. I just couldn’t see how that was going to happen.
As I strained my eyes at the horizon, it began to change. Something small grew out of the surface of Nova Zembla, blooming orange and red like a monstrous flower in the failing light. It rose slowly, ominously, into the air. Then there was the sound of the blast, bleeding into a long, diminishing roar, and the ship trembled on the surface of the water.
I thought of Benjamin in the lunchroom, saying, “We’ll be incinerated. We’ll turn to ash.” The idea that all of them were gone, instantly—Jin Lo with her fierce competence and her hidden sorrow, the affable Count Vili, the kind and haunted apothecary, and
Benjamin
, my Benjamin—was too intolerable for my brain to handle. The fact that radiation would be drifting towards me in toxic waves was nothing compared to my friends vanishing.
The orange cloud was building and roiling in a way that looked agonisingly slow, and I seized the hope that Count Vili was freezing time on Nova Zembla. That would mean he was still alive—that they all were. I ignored the nagging thought that the slow rising was just the nature of the explosion, and allowed a little hope to rise in my heart.
The orange bloom spilled over into a second cloud rising above it, separating until the stacked clouds had only a thread of orange light between them. The two clouds didn’t look intelligent in the way of the Dark Force, but they did look
alive
. They seethed with smoke and grew, expanding inexorably, unstoppably.
And then, instead of billowing ever upward, they stopped expanding. I thought of Jin Lo casting her shimmering net out over the sea, and hoped she had gotten it around the bomb. If she had, and it worked, then the polymer triggered by the radiation would contract and snare the explosion. I waited, holding my breath.
There was a moment of hesitating stillness, and then the topmost cloud rejoined the one below it with a kiss. They became one glowing shape again, and that shape, in turn, began slowly to contract. It looked like the newsreel of an atomic blast being played backward, in bright colour.
The cloud collapsed in on itself, growing smaller and smaller, and then it was gone, like an orange sun slipping below the horizon. There was a strange hush on the empty deck: no seabirds, no splashing waves.
And then a smell came towards me on a gust of wind. It was the sweetest smell I have ever known, even in the many years since. It was sweeter than orange blossoms, sweeter than night-blooming jasmine. It smelled like life, somehow: like green grass and sunlight and birdsong, and the ache in your heart when you love someone deeply.
I knew it must be the Quintessence, distilled from the blossoms in the garden to absorb the radiation. I saw tiny particles winking in the last of the light, among the drifting snowflakes.
The mushroom cloud had collapsed, and I felt a burst of pride and relief. The blast, even contained as it was, had been enormous, and my friends might not have survived. And if they had, I didn’t know how I was going to get back to them. But they had done it. I strained in vain for any sign of movement on the distant island, and saw nothing.
An hour must have passed before the hush on the destroyer ended. A few men ventured back on deck, speaking in Russian, moving as gingerly as people approaching a land mine that hadn’t gone off. A young sailor wore earphones attached to a box that I recognised from newsreels as a Geiger counter, for measuring radiation. He listened, frowning in confusion, and then handed the earphones off to someone else to see if he was mistaken: There was no radiation.
I tried to look inconspicuous and boyish, in my peacoat and watch cap, like a smallish crew member, but someone grabbed my arm roughly and turned me around.
“What happened out there?” Danby demanded, his face close to mine. “We felt the blast, but then something happened. The photographs don’t make any sense.”
“It was amazing,” I said. “It was beautiful. And you missed it, because you were afraid!”
Fury flashed in Danby’s eyes. “Is the apothecary on the island?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m
here
, remember?”
Danby dragged me towards the helicopter by the arm. The Scar followed.
“Where’s Sakharov?” Danby demanded. “Where’s that bloody pilot? Bring that Geiger counter. We’re going back!”
T
he helicopter ride was no more pleasant now that I was human and could see out the windows. The rickety machine swung wildly with every gust of wind, and creaked and groaned as if it were ready to fall apart. It was too noisy for anyone aboard to bother speaking, and Sakharov and the Scar stared grimly down at the sea.
To keep myself from feeling sick and terrified, I tried to fix my eyes on something that wasn’t moving, like I did when I was carsick. That’s when I saw, out the window, a stationary black cloud. It was perfectly round and seemed to hold itself apart and aloof from the others. I thought of Count Vili’s genii, and of the Dark Force that had drifted away from the jaival tree.
Then the helicopter lurched, and my stomach seemed to flip into my chest, and we started to descend. Nova Zembla was as barren and white as it had been before, but there was a great charred circle where the shed with the bomb had been. The Samoyed houses were tiny in the distance, and seemed undisturbed, and so did the island’s spindly pine trees to the north. The helicopter avoided the burned patch and landed on the frozen ground a little distance away. The others climbed down, and Danby dragged me out into the snow.
The men walked with a dreadful tension towards the test site, staring at the cratered, blackened earth. The snow was melted even beyond the burned area, but there was nothing like the damage a nuclear bomb should have left. Danby gripped my arm so I wouldn’t run, but where would I go? There was no sign of any of the others, and I tried to think that they had escaped, far away. The charred ground seemed a fitting place for the desolate hope that my friends had abandoned me for their own safety. My heart felt as flattened as the little shed.
The young helicopter pilot carried the grey metal Geiger counter to test the radiation. He shook his head, baffled. “
Chisto
,” he said.
Sakharov grabbed the earphones from him and held them to his ear, listening, then dropped the headset. It swung from the cord in the young pilot’s hand. The faint sweet smell of the Quintessence still hung in the air. Sakharov looked around the deserted point.
