They brought her up, at last, into a light so sudden and so total that it hurt worse than a chemical flashbang.
Bee stood swaying on legs that had forgotten, in however many hours it had been, how to trust a moving floor, and blinked through streaming eyes at grey morning sky, open water on every side. The specific quality of light - flat, colorless, the sun somewhere behind cloud rather than above it - told her, when she'd recovered enough sense to reason at all, that she could be anywhere from the Bristol Channel to the western approaches of the Atlantic, and no landmark visible in any direction to narrow the guess.
Her hands, at least, had not been retied. She noted this the way she noted everything now - not with gratitude, but with calculation. A bound woman was a woman thought dangerous. An unbound one, on a deck surrounded by water and armed men, was a woman thought contained by circumstance alone, which meant her captors believed, correctly for the moment, that circumstance was chain enough.
The Erebus, seen properly for the first time, was smaller than she'd expected and considerably stranger. She counted the crew without appearing to count and arrived at perhaps twenty men, moving about the deck with the unhurried competence of people long practiced at their work and entirely unbothered by an audience. Their accents, what she caught of them, ranged wider than any merchant crew had business ranging: Portuguese, she thought, in one man's low exchange near the rail, something Baltic in another's, a rough London dock accent from a third that made her, absurdly, homesick for streets she had never particularly loved. Rough men, hard-used, several of them scarred in ways that spoke of a life spent somewhere considerably less lawful than any register of merchant seamen would admit to keeping.
And all of them, she noted, deferred not to any captain shouting orders from a quarterdeck, for she saw no one behaving as a ship's master ought to behave, but to something else entirely, a set of instructions already given and already understood, the crew moving through their tasks with the self-directed calm of men executing a plan rather than following commands in the moment.
She turned her attention, since no one seemed inclined to stop her looking, to the vessel itself, and here her scientific habits, so long suppressed in the service of appearing stupid, woke fully and gratefully to the work.
The sails were furled - all of them, every mast bare of canvas, and yet the schooner cut through the grey water at a speed she estimated, watching the wake curl away from the bow, at somewhere near ten knots. No sail. No visible funnel, no plume of smoke, no clatter and hiss of any steam engine she had ever heard described. And yet the deck beneath her bare feet carried the same low, continuous hum she remembered from the dark compartment below - fainter here, muffled by distance and open air, but unmistakably the same sound, the same patient turning of something she could not see and had not yet been permitted to understand.
She noted, near the stern, an arrangement of brass and glass she did not immediately recognize - not a compass housing, not a ship's bell, something with the deliberate look of a signaling apparatus, angled skyward at a precise elevation and left, at present, dark and unused. She noted, near the bow, a section of deck fenced off by a low rail and further barred by a locked grating she could see but not approach, two crewmen posted near it with the specific idle attentiveness of men guarding something rather than simply working.
'Whatever drives this ship,' she thought, watching the water slide past at its impossible silent speed, 'is forward, and it is guarded, and it is not something they wish an ordinary sailor, let alone an ordinary prisoner, to look upon too closely.'
"You're awake, then." Spade's voice, close behind her, came entirely without alarm at finding her studying his ship with such evident attention. She turned to find him watching her with an expression she could not immediately place It was not suspicion exactly, more the flat professional assessment of a man taking the measure of a tool he had not yet decided the use of.
"Where is he?" she asked, keeping her voice in the register of frightened confusion rather than the sharp inquiry she felt. "Rath. The gentleman I attend."
"Safe." Spade's eyes moved once, briefly, toward the guarded section at the bow, and then away, and Bee filed the glance without letting her face show that she had caught it. "Safer than you'll be, if you keep asking questions a girl in your position has no business asking."
"I only wondered," she said, and let her mouth tremble slightly, "what's to become of us."
"You'll see." He studied her a moment longer, and something in his gaze sharpened - not suspicion, she thought, but the beginning of it, a man noticing that a frightened woman's eyes had, for one unguarded second, been doing rather more work than frightened eyes ought to do. "Best you go below again. It's not a sight for delicate stomachs, where we're headed."
She let herself be led without protest, cataloguing as she went - the angle of the sun, which she judged now to be somewhere past midday; the absence of any gulls, which meant they had come far indeed from any coast; the persistent, patient hum beneath the deck boards, driving them onward at, she guessed from the breeze, ten silent knots toward a destination she could not begin to guess. And all this propelled by an engine she could not see, built by a mind she was beginning, with real and reluctant admiration, to suspect might rival even Rath's.
'Someone aboard this ship,' she thought, descending again into the dark, 'understands something about the sea that no Admiralty on earth has yet been permitted to learn. And I am going to find out what it is, whatever else becomes of me first.'