The Girl from Everywhere (The Girl from Everywhere #1)(70)

Sweat broke out on my forehead, and I swallowed bile. The muscles in my back grew taut and my spine creaked as I tried to catch my breath; the pain in my chest was unbearable, and I thought I would start to fray like a rope. What was holding me back? I knew the answer before the question had finished forming, and I pushed the thought of Blake from my mind, letting that anchor drop away, down, down, until there was nothing behind me and I was unmoored in the current pulling me onward as steadily as time.

“Can’t see a thing!” Rotgut called from the lookout, but suddenly I could. Through a break in the fog, a shoreline, vague but there, as though I were seeing a picture beneath a sheet of vellum. I blinked twice, and my eyes refocused. It was like that optical illusion where you hold a tube against the side of your hand and you can see a hole right through your palm, clear as day and yet impossible at the same time.

I gave the wheel a quarter turn, and the ship creaked and dipped. “Do you see it?” I called, my heart pounding faster.

“Nothing yet!” Rotgut said. His voice sounded very distant; I could no longer see him in the fog.

A few drops of rain hit my cheeks. The sun dimmed in the sky, and the deck seesawed. Lights flickered at the edge of my vision, and I thought I heard the far-off groan of a mast under full sail. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kash working alone to trim our main, hauling down on the hawser, straining against the swelling sheet. Bee was somewhere up near the bow, invisible in the fog. “Slate—”

“I’m going.”

He left my side and went to Kashmir, but I had lost my concentration, and the hint of the shoreline vanished. I put the crew out of my mind as my eyes swept the horizon. I knew it was there—

Yes, there. Clearer now. Darker. Just off the prow.

The wind turned icy, and it carried a foul smell, like sour musk. My skin was clammy against my jacket, but I did not take my eyes off the shore. We pitched upward on a swell, down on its back, and up again on the next. The rain intensified, small wind-driven drops that stung my face and lashed in bands across the black water, but I did not take my eyes off the shore. The sky darkened to charcoal and the fog swallowed Kash and Slate, but I could still see the shore as clear as a mirror.

Then the ship seemed to leap upward under my feet, and I fell to my knees as the wind and the rain simply stopped. Suddenly everything was still, and the cold darkness was absolute.

My heart throbbed in my throat. Had I been struck blind? Blind and deaf; the silence was overwhelming. Then again, so was the smell, that cloying musky odor I’d noticed on the wind. There was movement too, an odd swaying of the ship. Then I heard Slate’s laugh: wordless, delighted. Had he seen it too—our distant shore, the same shore I had seen?

The fog was gone. As my eyes adjusted, I made out the glimmer of starlight above us and the silvery moonlit shine of the glassy water below, although I saw no moon in the sky. Then Rotgut swore. He lifted the lamp at the top of the mast. It wasn’t the sky I was seeing.

A hundred feet above our heads, the light of our lanterns was glittering back at us from a ceiling studded with diamonds. In this cavern, the sky was a bowl with stars stuck on it. I recognized the constellations . . . Orion, or—in China—the face of the White Tiger of the West. And Hydrus, the Snake’s tail.

I hadn’t seen moonlight on the calm sea; rather, we floated on a rippling pool of mercury, just as Sima Qian had said. Where the waves of quicksilver lapped the shore, our light shone on the skeletons of dying trees looming over piles of shriveled leaves on browning blades of grass. Far off, at the edge of the light, the gleam of red lacquer and bronze: the sarcophagus of Emperor Qin in the center of the blasted, barren terrain. We’d done it.

I’d done it.

I was so proud of myself, it took me three heartbeats to realize the ship was listing.



The deck tilted starboard in slow motion; as the rudder twisted, the wheel spun. I grabbed for it, but it wrenched itself out of my hands. I clutched the base of the wheel and tried to haul myself to my feet.

“What’s happening?” Slate said, stumbling toward the mast and gripping it in both hands.

“The mercury!”

“What about it?”

“It’s denser than water!”

Bee had slipped down nearly to the rail, but she was arrested by her harness. Kashmir was the only one still on his feet. He sprang past me to pull himself against the port rail on the high side, but it was too little, too late. Creaking, the ship continued to tip.

I looked up at Rotgut in alarm. He was wrapped around the mast; even in the dim light I could see the whites of his eyes. The glow from the lantern he held brightened as the crow’s nest swung toward the wall and, with a crunch and a jolt, slammed into the stone. Rotgut cried out as the Temptation stopped there, the deck at a forty-five-degree angle. “My leg!”

I pulled myself up with the wheel; it didn’t budge in my hands. The top of the mast had snapped, and Rotgut’s knee was pinned between the platform of the crow’s nest and the rough stone wall. He was gripping the flesh of his thigh in pain, but he wasn’t moving, and I could see why. The slightest motion would send him scraping down the wall as the ship capsized.

“No one move,” I said, nearly afraid to breathe. “We need ballast.”

Slate closed his eyes. “I wish you’d thought of that before we got here.”

“Me too.”