Time, in the absolute dark, became a substance rather than a measurement.
Bee had read, once, in a journal she could no longer name, an account of miners trapped by a collapsed shaft who reported losing all sense of hours after the second day — not confusion exactly, but a kind of dissolution of the ordinary markers by which a mind kept its place in the world. She had thought it an interesting curiosity at the time, filed away with a hundred other interesting curiosities, never once imagining she would come to test its truth against her own skull in a metal box beneath the sea.
She began, methodically, to build herself a clock out of everything else.
The gag she worked loose within the first quarter hour - a small, grim triumph, achieved by patient work of jaw and tongue against wet cloth until it slackened enough to be spat free where it hung damply around her neck. She rewarded herself for it with nothing more than the freedom to breathe through her mouth without the taste of cotton, which felt, in the moment, like the greatest luxury she had ever been granted. The blindfold she could not shift; it had been knotted by someone who understood knots, and her bound hands, however she twisted them and arched her back, could not reach it. She gave up on that battle and turned her attention instead to the ones she could win.
'Temperature,' first. The air was cool but not cold, cooler than a heated cabin, warmer than open sea air ought to be at this hour and this latitude in November — which told her, tentatively, that she was enclosed within something else, a shell within a shell, insulated from the water directly around her by at least one intervening layer of hull.
'Sound,' second. She heard, at long intervals, a low mechanical hum that rose and fell without ever quite stopping, nothing like the churn of a steamship's engine, nothing like the crack and groan of a wooden hull working against a swell — something smoother, more continuous, more controlled, the sound less of combustion than of something turning, patiently, at a speed someone had decided upon in advance and had no intention of varying.
'Movement,' third, and this was the detail that would not let her rest. A ship at sea rolled. Even at anchor, even in the gentlest weather, a hull afloat surrendered constantly to the restless disagreement between water and gravity, a thousand small corrections a minute that any body raised near the sea learned to feel without thinking. This did not roll. It did not pitch. It held, instead, a stillness so complete that she found herself, in her worse hours, doubting whether they were moving at all — until the hum shifted pitch, subtly, and she felt beneath her the ghost of a turn, a long slow curve executed with no roll whatsoever, the kind of turn that only made sense for a vessel that did not care what the surface of the sea was doing because it was not troubling itself to remain upon the surface at all.
She thought of submarine boats. She had read of them — curiosities, mostly, small experimental vessels that leaked and stank and drowned their crews as often as they achieved anything, the province of enthusiasts and the occasional desperate navy. She had never read of one large enough, smooth enough, quiet enough, to carry a rowing boat's cargo of one unconscious chemist and one furious chemist and one crew of who knows how many people for hours without anyone drowning or in discomfort worth the name.
'Someone has built something no one else has built.' The thought settled into her chest beside all her other cold certainties and did not leave.
She found Rath by sound before she found him by touch - his breathing, close by in the dark, slow and deep and chemical, and when she managed, working her bound hands blind and awkward across the curved floor as she scooted along, to close her fingers at last around the fabric of his sleeve, the smell rose off it unmistakable: ether still, sweetish and sharp, though fainter now than it had been on the boat, which told her he had been dosed again but some hours at least had passed since the last application. She could not wake him. She was not entirely sure, in that moment, that she wanted to; a sleeping man asked no questions and drew no attention, and there was mercy, of a grim practical kind, in leaving him where he was.
She fought sleep for as long as her body would permit her the fight. She recited, silently, every chemical equation she had ever committed to memory, working through valences and reactions with the same discipline she'd once given actual laboratory work, because a mind kept occupied could not, she reasoned, entirely surrender to fear. She lost, eventually, as anyone must lose against exhaustion and dark and the low hypnotic hum of unseen machinery, and the last thing she was aware of, before unconsciousness took her, was the curious, disorienting thought that she felt no fear at all - only a vast and bottomless curiosity, entirely against her will, about what manner of vessel this could possibly be.
She woke to the smell of bread.
It took her long seconds to understand what had changed: the gag was gone entirely from around her neck, plucked away while she slept by hands she had not felt and had certainly not permitted, and beside her, placed with an odd and specific care, sat what her fingers identified as a tin cup — ale, from the smell, flat but drinkable — and a heel of bread still faintly warm, as though carried down only recently from somewhere with an actual oven.
Someone had come while she slept. Someone had removed her gag, left her food, and gone again without waking her while retying her hands in front of her. In front of her! She immediately lifted her hands and removed the blindfold. She looked around - the cabin was dark enough that the blindfold was scarcely needed. She noted the door - there was a soft glow around it, with mechanical lighting outside seeping in. But within the room, no lights were lit. Even as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out almost nothing beyond the shadowy shape of food in front of her, Rath behind her, and the fact this room was quite small.
This was all, she understood slowly, turning the tin cup in her bound hands, a message of a kind — the same kind, in its way, as the calling card on Dowell's desk. 'You are valuable. You will be fed. You will not, under any circumstance, be permitted to leave.'
She ate the bread. She drank the thin ale. And she sat afterward in the dark, listening to the patient unbroken hum beneath her, and thought that whoever commanded this vessel understood a great deal about the management of prisoners, and considerably more about engineering than any government she had ever heard named.