They came a little after two, when even the wind seemed to be holding its breath.
There was no warning worth the name - no scrape of boat against shingle carried far enough to reach her, no voice raised in the dark. What there was, instead, was a sound so small she nearly dismissed it, a small metallic squeak. The faintest give in the bottom bolt, metal easing back through wood with the particular quiet of a thing well-oiled by a man who had planned for exactly this silence. Bee was on her feet before she had finished hearing it, the knife already free of her boot, and she thought - with the strange clarity that came to her only in the worst moments, a clarity she'd once mistaken for calm and now understood was simply her mind refusing, out of long habit, to stop working even as the room came apart around her - that she had perhaps four seconds before the door gave entirely.
She used two of them to grab the fire iron.
The first man through took it across the forearm hard enough to crack bone, and his cry was still rising when the second man's hand found her wrist and turned it with a competence that spoke of long practice against women exactly her size. She bit him as she stabbed with the knife in her other hand, drawing blood with both attacks. She had time to be almost proud of that, a small clean fury of an act, before something struck the back of her skull with enough force to turn the dark room briefly white, and then there were hands everywhere at once - three men, she counted, even as counting became difficult, - and a cloth was forced between her teeth before she could get breath enough to scream, and rope found her wrists, and last of all, almost gently, a strip of black fabric was drawn down over her eyes and knotted at the back of her head.
"Easy," said a voice she recognized — flat, disciplined, the voice of a man who did not fidget. Spade. "She's no use to him damaged."
'To him.' She turned the words over even as they carried her, as furious and wriggly as a wet cat, out into the cold grass. Not 'to us.' To 'him.' Someone specific. Someone who wanted her whole.
She could smell it as she was dragged outside, the medicinal smell of ether. It was faint enough that she knew it wasn't being used on her. Rath was receiving it, but the sweet chemical weight of it reached her even through the gag and the space, and she understood they had not troubled themselves to ask him any questions at all. He would remember nothing of this. She envied him that, briefly and with real bitterness, before deciding the emotion was a luxury she could not afford and setting it aside with the rest.
The walk to the water was short — she counted it without meaning to, the old habit refusing to abandon her even blindfolded, 'forty, forty-one, the ground changing from grass to shingle' - and then hands lifted her bodily and set her down hard on wood that rocked beneath her, a small boat, oars rather than engine, no more than four men's weight distributed around her by the shifting balance of the hull. Rath was set down somewhere near her feet; she could hear his breathing, slow and even.
The crossing took longer than she expected. She used the time as she had trained herself to use every enforced stillness of the past four months: cataloguing. The oars pulled in a rhythm too disciplined for fishermen, too quiet for anything but long practice at moving unseen. The air smelled of salt and, faintly, of hot metal, an oiled-machine smell that had no business being present on a rowing boat. Twice she felt the boat check speed and turn, as though navigating around something rather than simply crossing open water, and once she heard, very close, the groan of a large hull working gently at anchor — the Erebus, she assumed, though she had no way to be certain of anything blindfolded.
They lifted her again at the boat's end, up and onto a deck that did not feel like a deck at all — too narrow, too crowded with unseen apparatus that struck her shins and forearms as she was half-carried across it, men's voices around her low and businesslike, giving no names, taking no evident satisfaction in their work, which frightened her more than shouting would have done. Competence, she had learned in her years among forgers and men who dissolved things for money, was always more dangerous than cruelty.
She expected, when they finally stopped moving her, to be set down in some cabin - a berth, a chair, some ordinary furniture of an ordinary ship. Instead she felt herself lowered, hand over hand on what she now understood must be a rope harness cinched beneath her arms, down through an opening far too small and far too vertical to be any hatch she'd ever heard described, the air growing close and metallic around her as she descended, until her feet found a floor that gave slightly underfoot - not wood, not the solid honest give of planking, but something that flexed like the skin of a drum, taut over emptiness.
Hands guided her to sit. Rope secured her ankles, a tight knot that didn't chafe, more precaution than punishment. A door - she heard it as a door, but the specific mechanical clang was quite unlike any cabin door - followed by the distinct scrape and thunk of a bolt thrown from the outside, and then, worse, a second sound beneath it: a wheel turning, metal biting metal, the unmistakable working of a seal.
The footsteps retreated. She was alone.
Bee sat very still in the total dark, the gag still cutting at the corners of her mouth, and made herself breathe slowly through her nose, counting each breath the way she had once counted the pieces of a sugar-cube fortress, because counting and rational thinking were the only weapons left to her and she intended to use them.
The floor beneath her was curved. Not flat like a hold, not angled like a hull's belly, but 'curved,' gently, consistently, the shape of something built to a purpose she could not yet name. The air did not move the way air moved in an ordinary ship's hold, thick with bilge and tar. It was cool, and faintly acrid, and utterly, unnaturally still - the stillness not of a small enclosed space but of a space with no draft finding its way in from anywhere at all.
'This is not a ship,' she thought, and the thought arrived with the particular cold clarity of a fact she recognized but could not yet classify, a compound she'd never encountered but whose danger she could intuit regardless. 'Or if it is, it is not the kind of ship that sails.'
Somewhere beneath her, she was almost certain, she felt the whole structure shift - not roll, not pitch, but 'sink,' smoothly and without any sound she could name, as though the sea itself were being asked to swallow her, obligingly, and without complaint.