Chapter 17: Below Decks

Celia stitched Tobias's arm on a deck chair, with the whole pool deck watching.

He did not make a sound.

Veda stood over him with a bandaged thigh and a lantern, and the second the last knot went in she turned to the stairwell.

"I'm going down," she said.

"Not alone," said Lois.

"Not alone," said the lifeguard guard.

Eleven more people stepped up behind them, cooks and deckhands and a man in a bathrobe with a boat hook.

Tobias looked up from the chair.

"Go," he said. "Don't carry the whole ship on your back this time. Ask them."

She nodded once.

"Stay with Celia," she told him, and then, because it was no longer an order, "Please."

"I'll stay," he said. "Bring me back the keys."

They went down.

The lower decks were hot.

The engines still ran in the dark below Deck Four, and heat poured up the stairwells in thick, oily waves.

Pipes ticked and sweated along the ceilings.

Veda led them from memory, through crew corridors she had walked once, seven years from now, with an axe in her hand and a dozen men dead behind her.

She knew every turn.

She knew where the pharmacy was, and where a man would go if he wanted to be hard to reach.

"Third deck, aft," she said. "A steel door and a vent in the ceiling."

"How do you know that?" the lifeguard asked.

"I've been there."

Nobody asked her again.

At the first junction a net dropped from the ceiling.

It was a cargo net, heavy rope, and it hit the corridor behind them with a crash that sent the cooks shouting.

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