“What the fuck is going on here? Where’s Asher?”
“Shhhhh,” they warned me, from the darkness inside a dead man’s mouth. “Keep your voice down.”
I don’t know why I listened to them, but I did. “Where. Is. Asher?” I asked, my voice low.
“We don’t know. He’s not hiding in here with us.”
In with the dead bodies, in the dark. Where there’d be a continual stream of sad people to feed on. Of course.
“Then what good are you—” I said, standing.
“Don’t you want to know why you’re on board?”
I slowly sank back down, still straddling the corpse.
“That’s more like it. Listen close—we don’t have much power here, unless you’d like to cry for us.”
“I’m listening.”
“We sent you here.”
“What?” I’d never been so tempted to strangle a dead man.
“We’d heard rumors, so we decided to send you in. You’ve got a nose for trouble and a knack for staying alive—not to mention a shapeshifter bodyguard.”
“But Asher picked out this cruise—”
“Oh, it was nothing to convince him,” they said, interrupting my protest. “So easy for us to plant a few ideas inside his overstuffed head. Plus, this mess is partially his fault—it was the least he could do to help us clean it up. He owed us, and the Consortium.”
“So why aren’t you out there fixing things?”
“We’re not omnipotent, and we have to stay in the dark. Plus”—the voice receded, as if it was speaking from deeper inside the dead man’s throat—“we’re in hiding.”
“From?”
“You’ll see.”
I pounded another fist against the man’s frozen chest, and hoped to hell no one else would come in the morgue just then to see me. “Is there anything useful you can tell me?”
“Yes. Try to stay alive. You’ll see. Oh, Edie, you’ll wish you’d come back to us by the end of this. Working for us will seem like a distant dream—” they said, and then their voices abruptly stopped.
“Dammit, Shadows!” I yelled. All I got in return was silence.
“You’re all insane.” I stood and nudged the corpse with my foot. It felt just like kicking a cement block would.
There was a knock at the freezer door, and this time I managed to whirl around without falling. Jorge was at the door, a bouquet of flowers from outside in his hands. “Everything okay?” he asked. I nodded, and he came in to set the flowers down on Stefano. “Don’t get me wrong, but you sounded a little crazy there. Talking to yourself in other voices. It’s not like I haven’t done the same thing, but usually when I do I’m getting paid.”
“I’m fine.” I hugged myself and realized how cold I was getting. All this excitement probably wasn’t good for the baby, either.
“Was he here?” Jorge asked.
I looked down. I hadn’t made it past this first man in a suit, because of the Shadows. I surveyed the rest of the room. I wanted to believe what they’d told me—not that things would end badly, but that Asher wasn’t here. If Asher was in here dead, wouldn’t they show me his body so I would grieve and they could feed? I had to believe they would have.
“No. He’s not,” I answered Jorge with a head shake.
But if Asher wasn’t in the restaurant-sickroom or in the floral-storage-morgue, where else could he be?
What had Nathaniel done to him?
And—as I knelt to replace the sheet over the man the Shadows had violated—what was there in the world that the Shadows could possibly be scared of?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
My head was swimming with too many questions and not enough answers as we walked back to the restaurant. I asked the simplest one of Jorge. “How did you know it was a he?”
Jorge shrugged. “Trouble is almost always a man.”
We entered the sick floor just as Raluca was mounting a chair with a megaphone for an announcement.
“Remaining volunteers—I have good news. The doctor has just informed me that the medical ship is on its way.”
Maybe twelve hours ago that would have been good news. But right now all the enthusiasm those standing could muster was a sarcastic “Hooray” from Jorge. I heard Rory’s matching snort from across the room.
Undeterred, Raluca continued. “I’ve put out rations for anyone who wants them. You have to take care of yourself, so you can take care of your loved ones. Remember to wash your hands. That is all.”
She clicked off the megaphone and stepped down.
The volunteers who were mobile staggered up and queued to go outside, and I followed them. I needed to break free from here and look for Asher—or find Nathaniel and get him to tell me more. I scanned the room for him and didn’t see his sneer.
Outside, we walked past the food table en masse. Grilled cheeses all around. My stomach turned green. Without thinking, I sagged forward, bile rising, and Jorge caught me.
“Hey—hey.” He set me upright as I looked for something nearby that I could puke into. “You’re sure you’re not sick?”
I waved away his concern. “Not like that, no. The ocean. It gets me.”
“Raluca’s giving out Dramamine like candy. You should take some,” he advised.
“Thanks, but—” I began.
It was too late; he’d already started to wave for her. “Raluca, she needs Dramamine—”
There was nowhere to hide. What was the worst that could happen—she’d take me into the next room over and tie me to a table?
Raluca came over to give me the nursing once-over—I recognized it, nurse-to-nurse, in her eye. I tried to pretend that everything was okay, for the currently low values of okay we all shared, as she touched my forehead with the back of her hand. I thought I still felt like an icicle from my time in the morgue, and I could tell from her face relaxing that she did too.
“Where did these come from?” I gestured to the table.
“There’s still healthy people crewing the last kitchen, as best they can. We can’t let everyone starve.”
Which begged the most obvious question I hadn’t asked yet. “How many people are left on board?”
She inhaled to answer me, then paused, and I saw my opportunity.
“You don’t know, do you?” I asked. It was hard not to sound excited.
Raluca shook her head. “We haven’t gone room to room yet—”
“So there could be sick people up there.” I pointed above us, to indicate the rest of the rooms. “Too sick to call.”
“We’re overwhelmed as it is—”
“But what if the medical ships come, and they don’t take everyone? There could be hundreds of people, feverish in their beds, trapped.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she gave me another look, nurse-to-nurse. “Just how big do you think the medical ship will be?”
Not big enough. “But shouldn’t we know?” I pressed. “Maybe we could move them down, or put X’s on the doors—something.” Anything that would get me permission to do a room-to-room search. I would pull the entire ship apart to find Asher if I had to.
“If you don’t authorize it, I’ll go do it anyhow. You can’t stop me.” My voice rose as Raluca frowned.
“I’ll go with her,” Jorge volunteered.
Dr. Haddad emerged from behind his desk at the commotion and eyed us all with equal displeasure. I had Asher’s word he was competent, but I doubted the man had ever had a decent bedside manner. Raluca leaned over to whisper something in his ear, and he sighed. “Five people can go.” He held up two fingers and pointed at Jorge and me. “The troublemakers. Then—” He began to look around. “Her.” He pointed at the woman whose son was Rory’s age—I assumed he’d passed by virtue of being away from him—“and him, and you.” He jabbed his finger at a man with a startlingly bad self-tan, and at Nathaniel, who’d been standing in the back. I felt a silent thrill at his being included in our number. Maybe I’d get a chance to talk to him alone.
“I want to go too,” Rory volunteered.
“No.” Raluca shook her head immediately. “We need you here.”
And I realized what the doctor was doing: giving us people he, or Raluca, wanted gone.
“Don’t I get a choice?” the tan-man asked.
The doctor narrowed his eyes. “I caught you trying to steal Valium.” He looked around and spotted someone. “Marius—you’re in charge of this mess. Take a master key and a radio. And this.” He disappeared back into to the curtained room, returning with a paper list that he handed to Marius. “Check the manifest as you go. Putting X’s on the doors is not a bad idea,” he said, glancing at me with a grunt, then turning to our small group as a whole. “The medical rescue ship will be here in three hours. That’s all the time you’ve got. Wash your hands before you go.”
Then the doctor darted back into his room like a moray eel. Raluca gave our group a pained look. “The medical team’s on radio station five. Good luck,” she said, and walked after the doctor.
* * *
I gave Marius a sympathetic glance as the rest of the volunteers followed Raluca back inside, grilled cheeses largely uneaten. He shrugged. “The doctor’s always disliked me. Where is your man, my countryman?”
I shrugged back at him and tried to look competent, but with a side of damsel in distress, just in case it helped my cause. “I’m not sure.”
“Ah. So that’s why you want to do this,” he said, and then turned to address all of us. “We’ll go up and search room-to-room, breaking up into groups of three and doing both sides of the floor simultaneously.” He started making hand gestures to indicate what our plan of attack would be, which sealed my assumption that he was ex-military, and began directing us down the hall. “Head out.”