The Nightmare Garden

12 Below the Ice World

Fifth entry:

This boat, and Rasputina, made me realize something important: even if I never see him again, I’ll never forget Dean Harrison. He’s quiet and strong, and he doesn’t fuss and worry over me like every other man I’ve known. I could see myself standing next to Dean for the rest of my life.

I don’t know anything about love. I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like. I don’t think birds swoop down and bells chime, like in those stupid romances other girls at the Academy loved to giggle over. I think it might be more like the Gothic novels our house matron, Mrs. Fortune, read when she wasn’t looking after us—if two people are in love, you may be torn apart by circumstance, but you’re always together, at least in your hearts.

Of course, it’s not a scheming stepmother keeping me and Dean apart. It’s someone much worse. Draven knew exactly where to cut me to draw the most blood. I hate that he’s not willfully ignorant like most Proctors. I hate that if I’m honest, he’s as smart as me, if not smarter. I hate him, in the way that spreads poison through a mind. The more I think about Dean being under his control, the more I hate Draven. Hatred is not what my father would choose in this situation. He’d stay calm. He’d figure out some horribly clever solution. He’d fix everything.

There’s Draven. There’s my father and Valentina. There’s the Brotherhood. Three directions, all pulling at me, like I’m the magnet in a compass. All wanting different things, all wanting to use me for different things. And now Tremaine, letting me know he hasn’t forgotten, that he wants more from me than everything I’ve already given. He’s the worst, because I know that he will be unceasing until I bend to his will.

I’m so tired of being shuttled from one place to another like a ball in a maze. I want to stand up, but I can’t. I have to pretend to work for Draven, for Dean’s sake. I had to lie to my father to find my mother. And I have to face the Brotherhood, with more lies, for everyone else in the world, at the same time avoiding being pulled back to the Fae and whatever new scheme Tremaine has for me to take part in.

So many lies. I don’t even know how many layers deep they go any longer. I don’t think I’ll ever be who I used to be after this is over. The Aoife Grayson who left Lovecraft is dead. And I don’t know who’s taken her place.

Once we’d recharged the batteries and cast off from Newfoundland, the routine on the submersible was unceasing and unchanging. The crew slept in shifts, and everyone had a job to do. I was frequently in the way, so I took to spending a lot of time sitting in the mess, playing backgammon or checkers with off-duty crewmembers, many of whom didn’t speak a lick of any language I knew. The mood was bleak—everyone knew what had happened to Jakob, if not the details leading up to it, and that I was somehow involved, and many of the crew wouldn’t even make eye contact, never mind try to talk to me.

Not that I minded much. I was busy turning over every piece of information I’d gleaned about the Brotherhood, and planning how I’d approach them. I had to appear to be on their side, which wouldn’t be too hard. I didn’t have any love for the Fae, certainly. I just had to keep the compass hidden and figure out a way to put off Draven until I’d found the clock. Then his plans to ensnare everyone in his web wouldn’t matter.

When Rasputina wasn’t busy, she taught me a few snippets of Russian and told me about living in her childhood village, which sounded, if it was possible, even worse than life as a charity ward in Lovecraft.

“There are secret societies as well as press-gangers,” she said one day as we were playing backgammon, “and they recruit children from poor neighborhoods. They make them runners, get them in trouble, and if they want to survive the gulag they have to join the society, get official tattoos and be bound to them forever.” She moved a piece across the board. “It’s that or the Crimson Guard. Don’t know which is worse.”

She looked up at me with that black bird’s gaze. “So what are you trying to find up there, in the Bone Sepulchre? It’s supposed to be haunted, you know. A place built centuries ago, with engineering not of this earth. They say you can only see it if you’re about to die.”

“I told you,” I said. “I’m trying to stop what’s happening back in Lovecraft. All the chaos and monsters everywhere. Sooner or later, it’s going to cover the entire world, like the Storm did. The Brotherhood makes deals with the Fae and other creatures. They’re the problem that needs destroying. And I’d …” I took a breath—I had to avoid saying too much. “I’d really like to have a good night’s sleep,” I finished.

“Wouldn’t we all,” Rasputina muttered, moving another piece. “I win,” she announced. “You’re horrible at this game.”

“I’m better at machines than games and puzzles,” I said. “My brother always beat the pants off me when we played backgammon.”

“He’s dead?” Rasputina said, with only the barest interest.

“No!” I exclaimed, alarmed that she’d automatically assume everyone I knew met a horrible end. “I mean, no, he was alive when I left. Angry at me, but alive.”

“Hmph,” Rasputina said. “Take it from me—family is like having a hundred pounds strapped to your legs.”

“I take it you have one, then.” Though I couldn’t completely disagree with her about the weight, my life had certainly been simpler when I’d only been responsible for myself.

“I did.” She shrugged. “My father was a drunk who had only his boat, and my mother barely survived an attack by the deathless creatures that roamed our village. She was bedridden, and her medical bills cost us everything except the shack we lived in. They’re probably dead now. I haven’t seen them since the Crimson Guard took me.” She collected the backgammon pieces and shut the board with a hard snap, her face rigid and carefully expressionless. “We’re going under the ice in a few hours. We’ll surface to scrub the air and then we’ll be under until we get to the Arctic.”

“How will we know when we’re there?” I asked, surprised by her abrupt change of topic, but not willing to push her about her family. I knew how much that could sting.

“Stories go that the Bone Sepulchre can be seen under the aurora borealis,” Rasputina said. “There’s a launch for journeys over the glacier that pirates carved out a few hundred miles along once we go under the ice. We can come up there and look at the northern lights, see what we see.” She sighed. “And I cannot believe I’m navigating to some place that I’ve only heard stories about on the say-so of a teenage girl.”

“You’re nineteen,” I said with some indignation, having learned this fact during our earlier conversations. “Three years hardly makes me a girl in comparison.”

“It’s not the years,” Rasputina said. “It’s how you spend them.” She waved me away. “I’ll call you when we’re under the ice. If you want a look at the sky before we dive, go up when we replenish our air. It’ll be the last you’ll see of it for a few days.”

Diving under the ice was nerve-racking, even more than I’d imagined, and what I’d imagined wasn’t pleasant. The sub scraped the underside of the glaciers, and chunks of what Sorkin told me were free-floating ice bumped the hull with alarming regularity. Once, we came upon a pod of whales and kept pace with them while Oksana, the radar officer, played their song through her speakers.

I distracted myself from the fact that one wrong turn could bring thousands of tons of ice down on the Oktobriana, pushing us deep into the lightless depths of the Arctic sea, by learning everything I could about how she worked.

The Crimson Guard had built the boat, but she’d been modified to run on aether batteries rather than a steam furnace that meant diving for only a few hours at a time. There was German tech in the sub too, salvaged from the war—air scrubbers and depth gauges and torpedoes. Its periscope had come from a Proctor vessel Rasputina had found stranded on the Outer Banks off North Carolina and salvaged ahead of a hurricane.

The batteries were running down, but they could still power the propellers and basic life support for days at a time, creeping along under the ice at a pace that seemed to be even slower than that of the glaciers above us.

The closer we got to the Arctic Circle, the less I slept. My dreams were tangled and terrible, no longer visits to the dream figure but often just writhing, screaming black masses that exuded the same kind of cold I imagined I’d feel in outer space, a cold that froze me in place so I couldn’t run, couldn’t even scream. Nobody else was dreaming, though—Sorkin remarked to me once that he was sleeping like a baby, deep and dreamless.

I knew what was happening—the iron was creeping into me. I realized after I woke up screaming for the third day in a row that I probably had less than twenty-four hours left before I started raving like Jakob. I had to get off the boat before then. I just hoped Rasputina knew what she was doing, and that the launch she’d talked about was where she thought it was.

That afternoon I was drinking some of the sludgy black Turkish coffee the crew swilled by the quart, trying desperately to keep my thoughts in order and not fall asleep again, when the screws of the Oktobriana slowed and then stopped. Rasputina stuck her head into the mess a moment later and jerked her chin at me. “Get your cold-weather gear and come topside. We’re here.”