Stranded (27 page)

“Don't be sorry. It's not you; it's the food.”

“I get that all the time. Eat up and we'll go raid the pharmacy.”

Noah looked back at Brewster and his companions. They sat nodding as he whispered something. “I think I'm done,” he said. “I lost my appetite.”

He picked up his bowl and took it over to Boduf. Unlike a true mirror image, there were people on both sides of the reflection. From each side of the glass, the other thought of himself as the original. That couldn't be more the case than seeing how Brewster, Boucher, and Henry carried themselves. “Waste not want not, right?” he said, handing over his dish.

He turned to leave and froze at the sight of the figure standing in the doorway. Unlike the rest of Connor's crew, deprivation had done little to diminish him, as though he was one of those Hindu mystics who lived on only light. When he saw Noah, his eyes narrowed and the reflected William Brewster said, “You're dead.”

Noah was unsure whether it was an observation or a promise.

Connor stepped forward. “I'm sure you guys have a lot to talk about, but it'll have to wait. Noah and I were just leaving.” He walked toward the door and Noah fell into step behind him. If this Brewster was nicer than the one he knew, it didn't register as Noah pushed past him. The Old Man considered his deceased son-in-law with the same malevolence the other one reserved for the living one.

 

27

The Niflheim sick bay was considerably larger than the one aboard the
Arctic Promise
. Noah and Connor had room enough to maneuver around without having to brush past each other. Connor rifled the drawers in the room looking for the key to the medicine locker while Noah attempted to inspect its contents through the wire mesh glass. The selection wasn't broad and he didn't know what much of it contained would be used for, but he did recognize a couple of antibiotics and a bottle of phenobarbital—which he knew by name, but couldn't remember what it was used for. He thought it might be a sedative. While he couldn't see any tramadol, a bottle of codeine sulfate grabbed his attention. He thought that might work if there wasn't something else hidden behind the solid portion of the doors below. Either way, he had a narcotic. If Felix was alive, it would keep him out of pain while they attempted to move him.

Connor slammed the last drawer, rattling the tools inside. “Fuck!” He collapsed into in a chair along the wall and began massaging his neck again.

Noah said, “It's okay. We can jimmy it.” The cabinet appeared resilient, but he was almost certain the two of them could pry it open with one of the crowbars they'd rounded up on the way. What he was uncertain of was whether they'd set off an alarm when they did, and if they'd be able to shut it off before it drove them all insane.

“I know we can, but all the same, I'd feel better knowing that it's not a temptation goin' forward. We've been lucky however long we been here. No one's gotten injured. But things're goin' south, aren't they. People are gonna be getting desperate.” Connor hadn't said much in the hallway on their way to sick bay; seeing Brewster's reaction to Noah seemed to have stolen his happy thoughts and his mood had darkened considerably. Noah was more pragmatic about it. Even if he was dead in the mirror Brewster's world, the Old Man was still likely the kind of guy who'd threatened to break his future son-in-law's neck the night before his daughter's wedding. That he might have softened after Noah's death was merely a consequence of the bastard getting what he wanted.

“Tell me something,” Connor said. His chair creaked as he pushed against the armrests, repositioning himself. “How'd I die?”

Noah choked. He'd been pretending their separation was due to the kind of distance that grows between friends in the mundane world. New job, new family, new town. Someone moves and promises they'll keep in touch, but eventually the best you can do is occasionally click a thumbs-up or an emoji on some social media page and keep scrolling.

“Forget I asked,” Connor said when Noah didn't reply. “Never mind.”

“No. It's okay. It's just … weird, you know?”

“Oh, believe me, I know.” A touch of humor reappeared in Connor's expression. Not enough to mask his anxiety, but it was something.

“There was a storm and the water was rough, but it wasn't as bad as others we'd been in. Not like the one we went through a couple of days ago.” He assumed the storm that had put Felix in sick bay had hit the Niflheim, too, but he didn't know the point at which they'd sailed from one world into another. Perhaps it was the fog that had doomed them and not the storm at all. Either way, he tried to put himself back on track, remembering something one of his professors had said to him:
If you've been shot, what good does it do to ask who sold the bullet? Find a doctor.

“Boucher ordered me out to recheck the cargo lashing. I was pretty pissed about it because I'd already done that on my watch earlier in the day and didn't see how it'd be any different a few hours later. But, you know, Boucher, right? The guy's always busting my balls. I needed to take care of something else at the same time, so I asked you to cover me and go out to check instead. I figured everything was fine, you'd go eyeball it, I'd do my other thing, and then we'd play some chess and have a drink. That was the last time I ever saw you … alive, I guess.”

Connor stared at Noah as he recounted the night of the accident. Noah couldn't face the man's gaze, and looked at the floor while he explained the rest. “I must have missed something, or the storm shook it loose, because a shipping can slid across the cargo deck when a big wave hit, and you got pinned. It…” Noah tried to swallow, but his throat had gone dry. “How much of this do you want to hear?”

“All of it.”

He remembered standing in the master's cabin, his father-in-law screaming at him to get his ass out on the cargo deck as ordered and Noah in the middle of a half-conceived recrimination when the general alarm sounded. He followed the rescue team out onto the deck expecting to hear cries of “man overboard,” and having to fish Connor out of the water, frazzled and cold, but alive. Instead, he stood and watched the men fight to move the container away from the wall. It screeched across the deck as the wind howled and rain pounded them. Noah had rushed forward to grab at Connor's survival suit, shake him back to consciousness and help him to sick bay. Instead, despite the merciful dark of the nighttime storm, he could see there was no coming back from what had been done. A pink wash pooled under their feet, rinsed away from the pulped face of his friend.

The memory made his stomach rebel and he coughed, his dry throat stinging with each convulsion. He bent over, holding his stomach while the fit overcame him. When he was able to finally get himself under control, he tried to take a deep breath. His lungs hurt. It didn't bode well for the arduous task ahead of them.

“That bad?” Connor said.

Leaving out the worst of it, he said, “You were crushed. I ID'ed your body for the investigators but they still had to match your dental records for an official identification. Sheila filed for a survivor's payout from the company insurance, but they turned her down because you weren't married.”

The last sentence cracked Connor's expression. His eyebrows knitted and he held up his left hand to show the thick tungsten band on his third finger. “We got married right after
your
accident,” he said. “I didn't want her to be left with nothing to show if something like what happened to you happened to me.”

Noah shook his head. “It should have been me on that deck.”

“It
was
you. At least in my experience. I suppose you might owe something to somebody, but it ain't me. There was a storm, just like you said, but you went out to check the lashing yourself. The can broke free, but it knocked you overboard. The Coast Guard found you on the beach at Point Hope, Alaska. They identified you the same way—with dental records. Crabs got a taste of you. If it's any consolation, the company paid out to Abby without a fight.”

Noah felt a sudden stab of panic. His legs stiffened as if they were preparing to sprint from the room ahead of his desire. “Wait. What's that again?” he said. His voice was thin and small.

“The insurance company paid. Abby used the money to get through the next year while she looked for a job and got Ellie into preschool, but you know, that money only stretches so far.”

The words punched Noah in the gut and he steadied himself against the medicine cabinet, again struggling for breath. He felt dizzy and the light grew hazy and dim. He squinted his eyes shut and forced his lungs to fill. “Abby's alive?”

“Of course. You trying to tell me she's not?”

“A year and a half ago we got into a car accident, me and Abby. It wasn't bad, but her back and her neck hurt after, so we went to the hospital. They did a bunch of scans and found a tumor. We found out that's why she had headaches all the time and her vision kept getting worse. We thought it was the other way around, you know? The bad eyesight was giving her the headaches.

“After the diagnosis, she tried chemo and radiation, but that didn't kill it. It'd already metastasized or whatever because she'd been ignoring the little aches and pains for months. The doctors told us they could prolong her life for another few months, but that it would eventually get her. No more than a year, they said. She'd already lost sixty pounds, and all of her hair. She couldn't walk to the bathroom on her own and I had to help her down the hall. She hated that she had to hold on to me to get on and off the toilet. Abby said she wanted to die on her own terms, so I brought her home. My mom came out to look after Ellie during those last few weeks.” Noah nodded over his shoulder in the direction of the mess room. “William never came to see her. Abby said her mother died from some infection or something in the hospital when she was a kid, and William was still pissed off and bitter about that. He wouldn't accept his daughter was as sick as she was. She tried to get me to leave him alone, but all I could think of was what would I want if it was Ellie? I thought I'd want to be able to say good-bye. He told me he'd be damned if he was going to set foot in our house if she was just going to ‘give up.' Like it was a game she could win if she just stuck it out for a few more moves.

“I asked you to check the lashing that night because I was fighting with my father-in-law over her. I went to his cabin that night to get in another round. I was furious that Boucher was riding me and I knew it was because Brewster told him to. They doubled up my work during the watch and cut back my overtime. That night, I was feeling cagey. I was missing Abby and I wanted to get my licks in. I wanted to make him hurt. I thought you'd be okay. I really did.”

Noah tried to control the sob that hitched in his chest and made his shoulders shudder. Growing up in a house full of New England Yankee men who kept their feelings to themselves, meant he held in his tears around his daughter while encouraging her to let her emotions out, only allowing himself a restrained emotional outlet in the deep hours of the night after she was sound asleep and unlikely to rise. Lying in bed, a hand on the cold side of the mattress, he let his tears trail down his face and catch in the graying hair at his temples. He would breathe out his stilled screams in long, shuddering sighs until his breath found the rhythm of sleep. And if he was lucky, he would not dream.

Connor stood and reached out for Noah. Noah reared back and dragged his forearm across his face, wiping away his tears and resetting his expression. There was no one else to see but it didn't matter. Emotional reserve was as much a part of him as the pinup tattoo on his arm. That stoicism had been drilled deep into him until it was a part you couldn't get rid of no matter how much you scrubbed or scratched. “That's the thing, isn't it. You shouldn't be standing there any more than I should be here talking to you now. Looking at you is like looking at … I don't know, like the end or something. Like the way the world is
supposed
to be—without me in it. We should have switched places. She was the better one of us.”

Connor wrapped his arms around Noah's shoulders. “This ain't some karmic bar tab comin' due. We're
all
alive here.”

“But we're all dying.”

“No. Not all of us.”

Noah pushed away from his friend. His glistening eyes registering a forming resignation. “We're not sick because the other one of each of us is dead. There's two of everybody else, too, except for Holden and maybe Felix now. And both of them are doing better.”

“What are you saying? That one of everybody has to die for the other to make it?”

Noah held up his hands. “I'm saying everyone who's sick has a twin. Everyone who doesn't is either getting better, or never got sick in the first place. What if the tech is like the crew?”

“I don't follow.”

“What if to fix the tech in one place, we have to destroy its twin? If we could find a way to scuttle one of the ships, I think there's a chance the other's communications systems might come back online. I don't think it's enough to sink it though. We have to completely ruin it. Blow it up.”

Connor stepped back and looked at the ceiling, searching for a flaw in the idea. It wasn't long before he found one. “If that restores one radio. What about the other crew? When yours is rescued, let's say, what happens to mine?”

Noah hadn't considered that possibility, but of course, Connor was right. Just like Holden's rejuvenation came at the cost of his twin, if Noah's idea restored communications to one ship, it would leave the other one utterly beyond repair. And they couldn't all escape to a single time without remaining sick or getting sicker, could they? Noah's shoulders slumped.