The Apprentices (30 page)

Jin Lo uncovered her phosphorescent light, and they saw coral beneath the water, shaped like globes and trees and fans. Fish darted between the coral branches.

At last they saw starlight above. They surfaced in the lagoon, dripping wet, like Captain Marty’s mermen. Jin Lo extinguished her light. They climbed out, then unpacked their clothes and dressed quickly in the predawn darkness. Benjamin’s father put his spectacles back on with relief.

The villagers fighting the Vietminh had taught them how to crawl on their bellies, silent and unseen. Benjamin was better at it than his father was. His father was pushing forty, after all. Jin Lo moved like she’d been a jungle fighter all her life.

When they reached the villa’s wire fence, Jin Lo warned them against touching it. It gave off an electrical buzz. Benjamin brought out their jar of Alkahest and poured it on a section of the steel wire. It wasn’t
actual
Alkahest, the universal solvent the old alchemists had sought—it wouldn’t dissolve gold. But it was effective enough to be given the name. Benjamin knocked away what remained of the corroded wire with the glass jar.

They climbed through the hole in the fence. Benjamin’s father brushed his leg against the electrified wire and swore softly under his breath, a thing Benjamin had almost never heard him do. His meaning was clear even though his consonants were still mixed up from the underwater breathing.

They slipped into the densest greenery near the main house, looking for a place to hide. Dawn was breaking, and at this latitude the sun came up fast. They found a kitchen garden, planted in neat rows, surrounded by fruit trees and trellised vines. They crouched there, hidden from the house and from the grounds as the sky lightened.

Benjamin’s father looked round the garden. After a moment, he said, “The hardener gere is a mood gan.”

“What?”
Benjamin whispered.

“Good,” his father said, and then he paused. “Man.” He paused again. “He’ll help.” Alliteration made the sentence come out clear.

Benjamin looked at the neat rows of plants, which told him nothing. He was suspicious of the idea that a garden could reveal that the gardener was a good man. He looked to Jin Lo, who shrugged. They had no other evidence to go on. So when a skinny youth came outside with a watering can, Jin Lo grabbed him, covering his mouth before he could call out, and pulled him into the fruit trees.

Benjamin looked into the kid’s frightened eyes and prepared himself for one-word communication. In a low voice, he said, “Janie.” The kid stared at him. “Safe?” Benjamin asked.

The kid’s eyebrows knitted together.

“Benjamin,” Benjamin said, pointing to himself. He waited a safe length of time, then gestured to his father and Jin Lo. “Friends.” He waited. “Janie.”

The kid nodded, in spite of how little they seemed like his friends. Jin Lo carefully took her hand away from his mouth, and he didn’t shout for help. “I am Osman,” he said, in low, precise, accented English. “Janie is locked in the mine.”

“Locked?” Benjamin asked.

“In a cage.”

“Exits?” Benjamin asked.

“Two.”

“Where?”

“One near the miners’ houses. One near the sea.”

“Guards?”

“Yes,” the kid said. He was quick. Benjamin liked him. “Near the houses, but not always by the sea.”

F
rom her cage beneath the earth, Janie talked to the miners whenever they came by. Mostly they ignored her. At the villa, she hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone. But at least people had talked to her. She realized now that there was companionship even in ignoring people, and she missed it.

One of the miners brought her a small blanket, and another a pillow, and that made her cage a little more comfortable. She told them that the radiation would poison them slowly, and that they outnumbered the guards three to one. But they hurried away, their faces full of mistrust. She guessed they had children to feed, in the houses built over the mine. She could hear her father saying, “Now you’re a labor organizer, Janie?”

Out of boredom and frustration, she strained to reach a rock outside her cage, bruising her shoulder against the bars. When she had the rock, she struck it against the heavy padlock, but it was hopeless. It crumbled against the steel.

She heard footsteps and hid the remains of the rock behind
her, but it was only Osman, with a guard. She grabbed the bars. “Osman! You have to help me! I’m going crazy in here!”

“I have food,” he said. He thrust a waxed-paper package through the bars of the cage, into her hand. Then he set a bottle of lemonade on the floor. He looked uncomfortable.

“I don’t want a sandwich!” she said.

“It is important to eat,” Osman said, looking her in the eye and nodding to emphasize his words. “Not drink but eat.”

“I don’t want to eat! I want
out
!”

“It is important,” he said. Then he was gone, back up the tunnel with the guard.

Janie almost hurled the sandwich after them in frustration. Instead, she put it down with the lemonade and turned away in disgust. She didn’t want food. She didn’t want lemonade. She wanted out of this place. She curled up in the corner of the cage, wrapping herself in the little blanket and clutching the pillow to her ears to block out the noise of the mine.

B
enjamin waited under a tarp in the jeep, outside the mine’s main entrance, while Osman delivered the sandwich and the bottle to Janie. He had asked to be smuggled into the mine, but Osman said it was impossible. There were too many people watching and spying. But Osman had to pick up a shipment of food at the pier, and he could hide one person in the jeep and leave him near the sea entrance to the mine. Benjamin insisted that he should go: Jin Lo and his father were both wounded, and he was strong. After a brief standoff, his father agreed, and stayed hidden with Jin Lo in the garden.

It was stifling under the tarp, and Benjamin barely dared to breathe. Finally the cook returned. “So?” Benjamin whispered.

The engine started. “It’s a terrible place, the mine,” Osman said.

“But she’s all right?”

“She’s all right.”

“Did she understand?”

“I think so.” He backed up the jeep. “The guard was there. I couldn’t talk.”

Benjamin felt mad with frustration. The jeep headed down a steep hill, taking sharp, slow turns.

“Get out now,” Osman said quietly.

Benjamin slipped out from beneath the tarp and hid himself in the thick tropical undergrowth. The jeep continued down another turn to the pier. Osman called to a uniformed guard, who helped him load a stack of boxes into the jeep and cover them with the tarp. Then the guard climbed into the jeep beside Osman and they drove away, back up the switchbacks cut in the steep hill. Benjamin flattened his body to the ground as they passed.

He was alone, and could survey the pier built out into the ocean. A motorboat was docked alongside it. He guessed there must be a channel dredged in the reef, for boats to come in. He looked for the mine entrance, but saw only trees and the rocky hillside. He moved closer.

Slowly it all came into focus. It was like looking at an optical illusion. A wide door in the hillside had been painted to look like the rocks surrounding it. It was expertly done. A canopy of trees hung over everything, hiding the door from the water.

Janie was inside there somewhere. She should have been able to escape her cage by now. He moved closer, staying low.

He was still thinking about how to get into the mine when strong hands seized his arms on either side. He tried to break free, but two guards in camouflage uniforms, complete with brush on their helmets, held him tight.

P
ip had never been in an airplane before, and at first he found it delightful. He stared out the window at the clouds below and imagined falling into them, as into soft, white cotton. Angelica Lowell’s father flew the plane himself. Angelica had a stack of American movie magazines, and Pip flipped through them twice, forward and backward. She didn’t play chess, so he played against himself on a little travel set.

He had called Angelica in New York and pitched the idea to her as an island vacation, with the possibility of meeting royalty. Her father did anything she wanted, but he was also keen to test the capabilities of his new plane, which had been fitted with extra fuel tanks for longer distances. It had been shockingly easy to get them to go.

When they landed to refuel in Hawaii, Pip leaped off the plane, full of restless energy from being cooped up so long. Even on the airstrip, the air had the most incredible smell. It was sweet and warm and lush. Angelica noticed it, too.

“Why can’t we just stay
here
?” she asked.

“Too many people,” Pip said. “Where we’re going, it’s much more exclusive.”

“But I like it here,” Angelica said, gazing at the banks of flowers growing up the airport walls.

“We’re going to a private island,” Pip said. “Empty beaches!”

“I don’t want an empty beach,” Angelica said. “I want to see people. And I’ve run out of magazines.”

“So we’ll stay here,” her father said.

“No!” Pip cried. “We’ll get more magazines!”

But Mr. Lowell was already talking to someone, arranging to keep his plane at the airport.

“That other island is too far,” Angelica said.

“But what about Janie?” Pip asked.

She frowned. “What
about
Janie?”

“Well, she might be on the island. That’s all.”

“Oh, then we’re
definitely
staying here,” Angelica said, heading after her father.

Pip wondered if he could steal another plane. But what was he supposed to do, pilot it himself?

Mr. Lowell ushered them both into a cab outside the airport, and kept saying how much he
liked
this place as they drove past palm trees on their way to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

Angelica glowed, having gotten her way as usual.

“I’ve seen so much of the world because of you, sweetheart,” her father said. “Without you, I would have just stayed home.”

Pip wanted to throw up. It was a hazard he should have anticipated. He’d tied his fortune to a girl who got her way in all things, but he had counted on her way being
his
way. He’d forgotten that she might change her mind.

So Janie was going to have to hang on a little bit longer, that was all.

J
in Lo lay on her stomach in the kitchen garden, looking out at the villa’s vast lawn and the white cottages, wondering why the place gave her a bad feeling. Something about it felt corrupted, corrupting. She was trying to decipher the feeling when a golf cart came in through the gate. A man strode out of one of the cottages, in khaki pants and a white shirt. He was tall and thin with an unhurried lope. The way he walked was familiar.