They gave her three days before they gave her any freedom, and when the freedom came it arrived with such calm, unremarked confidence that Bee understood at once it was not freedom at all, but a different, subtler kind of cage.
"Walk where you like," the woman who brought her meals said, on the fourth morning - a broad, weathered creature named Ness who spoke English with a Cornish burr that confirmed, more thoroughly than any geological guess, precisely which stretch of coast Bee had correctly suspected. "Ain't nowhere to walk to, is there."
She said it without malice, the way one might observe that water was wet, and Bee understood, taking her first unescorted steps along the lagoon's edge, exactly how right she was.
The cavern was larger even than her first golden-lit glimpse had suggested. She counted, over those three days of careful, unhurried observation - the only kind of work left available to a woman with no chemistry to hand, no journals to study, and removed from her ward - perhaps a hundred men moving through the space with the settled, unbothered rhythm of a population long established rather than newly arrived. There were carved barracks along the northern wall, tiered like theater boxes, each opening dark with sleeping men or bright with lamplight and low talk. There were storerooms she glimpsed but was not permitted to enter, their doorways guarded loosely rather than strictly, in the manner of men guarding goods rather than secrets - she caught, in passing, the gleam of silk bolts stacked against one wall, crates stamped with markings she recognized as tea and spice houses from three different countries, barrels she suspected, from their smell alone, contained good French wine, and, more troublingly, a long low structure fenced apart from the rest that she was quite certain, from the particular oiled-metal smell drifting from it, housed rather more rifles and powder than any honest cargo required.
There was a distillery. She found this by the smell of it before she found it by sight, a low stone chamber near the lagoon's edge where coiled copper pipe caught the lamplight, converting seawater to fresh with a patient chemical competence that made her, despite everything, feel the old familiar itch of professional admiration. There was coal, stacked in a dry chamber well back from the water. There was, most remarkable of all, a wide chimney of natural rock rising from the cavern's roof toward what she assumed was open sky far above, and through it, on the second day, she watched men feed great armfuls of wet seaweed onto a smouldering fire, producing thick grey smoke that rose through the chimney in slow, deliberate plumes.
'Volcanic smoke.' She understood it the moment she saw it. Any fisherman or coastguard glimpsing that smoke from a passing boat would think only that some old, half-dead formation was venting harmlessly, as it had likely done for centuries, and would sail on without a second thought. The confidence of the deception took her breath rather more thoroughly than the cavern's scale had done. These were not men hiding badly. These were men who had spent years, and considerable ingenuity, ensuring they need never hide at all.
Her own quarters, when Ness finally showed them to her, proved to be a small carved cell off a side passage, furnished with a cot, a washstand, a single shelf bearing three books she had certainly not brought herself - an old chemistry primer, considerably out of date, and two novels she recognized as popular fare from a decade past - and, she noted with a small internal jolt, no lock. No bolt. No mechanism of confinement whatsoever, beyond a plain wooden door that swung freely on its hinge.
She stood looking at that unlocked door for a long time.
A locked door was, in its way, an insult easily answered - a problem of mechanism, a puzzle for patient hands and the right tool, and Bee had picked enough locks in her worse years to know the particular relief of a barrier that could, in principle, be defeated. An unlocked door offered no such comfort. An unlocked door said, with a confidence more chilling than any bolt, 'there is nowhere for you to go that we have not already accounted for.' She was a hundred men and an ocean and a mountain of stone away from anything resembling rescue, and her captors knew it so thoroughly that they had not troubled themselves to trouble her with chains.
She sat on the narrow cot and made herself think as a strategist rather than a prisoner, because the alternative - sitting and feeling the full weight of where she was - served no purpose she could afford.
'Resources.' The distillery, the coal, the stores — this was a settlement built for permanence, not for a single crime and a quick escape. That meant patience on someone's part, and patience, in her experience, always finished its seams. 'Numbers.' A hundred men was a great many men to keep quiet, fed, and loyal indefinitely; loyalty bought with plunder had a way of thinning when the plunder stopped, and she resolved to watch, in the weeks ahead, for any man whose devotion looked thinner than the rest. 'Geography.' She knew, now, roughly where she was, and knowledge of a coastline this well was not nothing - if the volcanic chimney vented to open air above, then open air existed somewhere within reach of a sufficiently determined climber, whatever the depth of black water lay between her cell and that distant sky.
And Rath. Somewhere in this hollow mountain, behind some guarded door she had not yet located, sat the actual prize around which the entire vast enterprise revolved, and until she found him, she reasoned, she understood only half of what she needed to survive whatever came next.
She lay back at last on the narrow cot, in the lamplight that never quite dimmed to true dark in this place, and closed her eyes, and let herself, for one careful unwatched moment, acknowledge the strange black comfort of it: she knew this coast. She had walked stretches of it in her worst years, moving other men's stolen goods along cliffs not so very different from the ones that must lie somewhere above her now. Whatever else this cavern was - prison, fortress, hive - it was not, to her, entirely unknown country, and an unknown country was the only kind of country a clever woman could not eventually learn to use.
She kept that knowledge folded away with the rest, beneath the floorboard of her mind, and did not let it show on her face even in sleep.