Текст книги "Cape Storm"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

There were thirty-eight Weather Wardens on board, and as I swiftly counted heads, I realized that I was one of the last to arrive.

Lewis watched me move down the stairs toward the stage, and I knew he was noting the way I slightly favored my newly funky leg. “Did someone forget to tell you to watch your step?” he asked in an undertone. Not that anyone was paying attention. The Wardens were talking among themselves, probably arguing the finer points of weather control.

“Funny,” I said. “Am I on time for the matinee of A Night to Remember?”

He wasn’t sidetracked. “What happened?”

“I got smacked on the aetheric. Hard. And I couldn’t see anybody doing it—not a trail, not a wave, nothing. No trace. And it hurt.”

That got his attention. “Hurt?”

“Like, ow, crap, damn. And when I came back down, my leg went out on me, like a power failure. It came back, but not right away.”

“Hmmmm.” Without the slightest self-consciousness, Lewis got down on one knee and put his large hands around my thigh. The conversations out in the auditorium came to a stammering halt, and I felt every pair of eyes in the place turn to focus on us.

I jumped a little, and there might have been a gasp involved, but he wasn’t interested in naughty groping at the moment. I felt his power slowly filter into me, rich and warm as sunlight. It followed the nerves in a slow glide down my leg, into my foot, and out.

You could have heard a pin drop in the place.

Lewis finally sat back. “I’m not finding anything except some strains in your muscles. Normal stuff.” He realized that everyone was staring and, for a moment, looked completely vapor-locked about it.

I cleared my throat. “Thanks for the laying on of hands. You might want to stop now, being that it looks a little odd.”

“Oh.” He let go and rose to his full, lanky height. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to—”

“I know.” The other Wardens were stillwatching us, but after a moment they started whispering together again. Yeah, I could bet what they were whispering. “Just be glad that David—”

“That David didn’t see you?” That was David, of course, arriving in a white whisper of fog that poured itself into his human form in less than an eyeblink. He sounded amused. “David did.”

“I’ll take it as written that you said to keep my grubby hands off your woman,” Lewis said. David raised an eyebrow. “ Grubbynot strong enough?”

“Before you say that in the future, most Djinn find the concept of owning someone else slightly offensive,” David said, and I could almost feel Lewis’s wince. “Jo’s her own woman. If she felt uncomfortable, she’d tell you.”

“Yeah, she always has.”

“Uh, guys?” I waved my hands. “Thanks for the macho plumage display, very attractive, but are we done? Time’s a-wasting.”

David smiled. He wasn’t competing with Lewis; he hadn’t for some time. He was possessive, on levels that he would never let anyone but me see, but he was done with jealousy. We were bonded, in his eyes, for eternity, or as long as my human body lasted. He had absolutely no reason to worry. “I came to tell you that the Djinn have completed preparations. We can begin anytime you’re ready.”

“Let’s not delay,” Lewis said, and stepped up to the edge of the theater’s proscenium. “Everybody focus. We’ve got work to do.”

There weren’t five people in the world who could get thirty-odd Wardens to shut up and listen without arguing, but Lewis was one of them. I wasn’t, so I shut up and paid attention, too. He’d taken his hour of downtime to shower, shave, and change clothes, and although he still looked exhausted, I wouldn’t have bet against him in a fight.

Which was good, because we were about to step into the ring for the fight of our lives.

“David,” Lewis said, “I need the Djinn to form a perimeter around the storm. Keep it from moving toward us. Try to hold it in place while we cut its generators.” By that, I understood that he was going to do the logical thing and try to affect not the storm but the underlying forces that fed its fury. There were relatively simple ways to do it, but out on the open ocean, they also required massive amounts of power. The less energy we spent chasing the damn thing around, the better.

David nodded. “It’ll stay as still as we can manage.”

That wouldn’t be easy, but he had at least fourteen Djinn at his command—ten of his own, four of Ashan’s. I didn’t think there were many things that a couple of Djinn couldn’t do, so fourteen seemed a pretty comfortable safety margin.

Still. I was getting a clammy line of sweat forming along my spine. Bad Bob knows us. He knows how we think. He’s one of us.

I wished I hadn’t thought of that.

Lewis paced, because that was what Lewis did when he was under stress. He prowled the stage, talking without focusing directly on anyone, even me. “Four teams,” he said. “Jo, you’re heading the team that will focus on a rapid cooling of the water temperature directly beneath the storm and out to a margin of about half a mile beyond. We’re shooting for a minimum drop of at least ten degrees.”

Someone in the audience whistled, and it was all I could do not to echo it. Ten degrees on the open ocean? Holy crap, that was hard. The amount of force it took to effect even one degree of change in that vast amount of water was astonishing.

“Ten degrees,” I said, and managed to keep the incredulity out of my voice. “All right.”

“Pick your team.”

David watched me as I looked out over the audience and called names. I knew most of them, and more important, I knew their capabilities. I wanted raw power, and for this, at least, I wasn’t overly concerned about fine control. There wasn’t a single person out there I’d name my bosom friend, but they were all solid talents. Good enough.

Predictably enough, though, someone raised a hand. It was Henry Jellico, whom I hadn’tpicked. Henry was one of the worst know-it-alls that I’d ever met, despite being an overall nice enough guy. He’d studied hard, and dammit, he wanted every single person to know it. “Excuse me, Lewis, but wouldn’t it be wise to also match the cooling of the water with lowering the temperature of the exhaust process? Try matching it to the temperature of the eye to expand it outward?”

Lewis stopped pacing, but he didn’t face Jellico. “I believe I said four teams,” he said. “Henry, you’re in charge of team two. Exhaust process matched to the core temperature of the eye. Once you’ve got those equations balanced, try taking the whole thing down another five degrees.”

“Five?”

“Please.”

Henry Jellico wasn’t in for any picnic, either. Lewis waited as Henry picked his ten Wardens, and then chose Amanda Chavez to head up the third team, which was smaller and focused on lowering wind speed. The fourth team batted cleanup, remaining in reserve and watching for any imminent threats, and it was headed up by Lewis himself.

I sat down on the edge of the stage, my legs dangling over the lip, and lowered my head in concentration. Out in the audience, all the Wardens did the same. We looked like we were engaged in prayer; in a sense, that was what we were doing, only on a slightly more active scale.

“Anybody got an eyewall wind speed on this beast?” someone asked.

“Approaching two hundred fifty miles per hour,” Lewis said. We had a moment of contemplation on that one. The storm was seriously powerful. The highest speed the Wardens had ever measured in an eyewall was two hundred fifty-five, give or take a bit. There was no such thing as a Category 6 storm, but if there was, this might have been the template. “One last thing. There’s been a report that our enemies might have the ability to strike us while we’re on the aetheric, maybe even causing physical side effects. Watch yourselves, and my team will deal with any attacks that come at you.” That raised a few heads. “Let’s get it done. The faster we’re in and out, the safer we are.”

I rose up into the aetheric, and the entire roomful of Wardens rose up with me. They were an army of glittering, powerful forms, shifting from the limitations of the physical to the more metaphorical shapes we registered on higher planes. I never knew what I looked like—none of us did—but I watched Henry Jellico morph from a mild little man into a bulky, muscular warrior who’d have been at home in World of Warcraftswinging a barbarian axe .Some Wardens didn’t even keep human shapes; Greta Van Der Waal became a shining white dog that bounded and leaped through the clouds. We all had our fantasies, our true natures, and we couldn’t really control how others saw us.

Lewis looked like himself. Always. He had a powerful aura, but the essence of him never changed, and that was both impressive and a bit on the scary side.

Speech wasn’t possible on the aetheric—after all, no lips, tongues, teeth, or lungs—but the Wardens had developed their own methods of communication, mostly hand signals. I grabbed my team members’ attention and arrowed up, fast and high, getting above the towering storm. It was like taking a glass elevator past a vertical oil spill. Nasty, and shiver-inducing. We went up almost ten miles into the atmosphere and leveled out at the top, where the storm formed a smooth dome. This was where the intake/exhaust process went on, dragging in warm air, cycling it down through the eye, breathing it out.

It was a living thing, after all, however strange it might be to our senses and logic.

The aura colors of the storm hadn’t changed significantly from my first impressions—dark, shot through with photonegative spots and shapes, with livid purple around the edges. I didn’t see any sign of that poisonous, otherworldly green that I’d glimpsed, though.

Good.

I felt a shudder running through the aetheric—a thicker atmosphere than the regular physical world, almost like matter caught in a phase transition from gas to liquid. Few things in the real world could stay at that balance point, but I’d always thought the aetheric was nothing butthat—a place where everything, always, was transitional.

The shudder that ran through the aetheric came from the Djinn grabbing the storm and pulling it to a violent halt.

It fought them almost instantly, twisting, slashing back with waves of power. This was the dangerous part; if the forces got too far out of balance, things would happen that none of us could anticipate or control. We were dealing with the power of several nuclear bombs. Not the sort of thing where you want to apologize for a mistake to whatever survivors are left wandering around .

I signaled my team, and we took the express elevator back down, plunging through the storm and into the thick black water beneath it. The area directly beneath it was devoid of life; the residents of the sea that normally thronged the area had prudently departed. Good. I didn’t want to be responsible for any massive fish kills, anyway.

My team—good people all—spread themselves out in an approximate rough circle near the edges of the storm’s fury, and each of us concentrated on a pie-shaped wedge of the water—not that water was static, of course, which was what made this so difficult. Water, like air, was always in motion. Unlike air, it had real density, and it took a lot more effort to really make a change in it on the molecular level.

Ten degrees.Thanks for nothing, Lewis.

I’d pushed my section down a solid eight degrees, but I could sense that there were massive imbalances emerging from the change. Some of the others were having trouble managing the temperature shift at all. Nobody had hit the ten-degree mark. To make matters worse, power was collecting in odd places, like pockets of gas in a mine. That was the risk of working with multiple Wardens.

I think I sensed trouble coming—an oddly thick ripple in the aetheric, maybe—and then I saw one of my Wardens spin helplessly out of position, losing control of her weather working. She vanished into the heart of the storm, and I felt her screaming.

Then I felt her stop.

Something was attacking us.

The fragile balances that the Wardens had built—layers of control, of forces, of risk—began to shatter like a glass tower in an earthquake. I desperately struggled to hold on to what we’d achieved. More Wardens were being attacked around me by invisible forces—battered the same way I had been earlier, but with far deadlier results. I could sense terrible things happening, but I had to hold on. Hold on.The strain increased. I was strong, but this was too much for any one Warden to hold on to . . . and then the storm ripped free of the Djinn holding it and began to move.

No way I could stay with it as it roared closer, heading for the Grand Paradise.

Something grabbed me as I faltered, but instead of bracing me, it dragged me backward, away from the fight. Up. Out.

I was just far enough away to survive what happened next.

The storm pulsed and shifted into that poisonous green color, shot through with drifting flecks of red and jagged cutting edges of black.

The power that the Wardens had been manipulating explodedin a brilliant burst of light, and I felt it rip through me, flaying apart my aetheric body. I re-formed, slowly and painfully, and fell with unbalanced speed back into my own body.

I jerked, gasped, and almost fell off the edge of the stage. David had me by the arms, and he dragged me backward into his embrace. He was seated on the stage, and I fell weakly against his chest. I felt broken inside, shredded, unable to think or feel.

My eyes focused slowly, and my hearing told me that people were shouting. Screaming.

Earth Wardens were arriving in the theater, summoned by emergency signal, and they were dragging limp Weather Wardens out of their seats and laying them flat for treatment. Lewis was already down there, holding Henry Jellico in his arms, pressing his palm to Henry’s pale, high forehead. Henry was completely still. Lewis was gasping, shuddering, barely holding himself together.

“What happened?” I whispered. David’s arms tightened around me.

“Don’t try to move,” he said. “You can’t help them.”

“But—” I tried to get my body under control, but it was like swimming through syrup. Slow and cold and clumsy. “They’re—”

“Dying,” David said. His voice was low and hushed, and very gentle. “Most of them are dying, and there’s nothing you can do to help that now.”

“No!” This time I put real effort into the struggle. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t David’s strength holding me back—it was my own weakness. I collapsed against him again, sweating and shaking, and watched as my fellow Wardens slipped away into the dark.

I’d been right. Bad Bob knew us.

In one stroke, he’d chopped down a significant number of the Wardens who could have posed a threat to him.

And I had no idea how he’d done it.

In the end, more than half of the Weather Wardens couldn’t be saved. They’d been the closest to that blast of power, or they’d been drawn into the storm’s hungry maw. Their aetheric forms had been completely destroyed, and there was no soul to come back into the bodies they’d left behind. Without that, the body stuttered and died, and there was nothing any Earth Warden, however powerful, could do to stop it.

That didn’t mean Lewis didn’t try with every last ounce of courage he had left before he collapsed and had to be carried away.

It was a dark, silent place after that.

I sat there numbed, watching as the dead were lined up on the stage. Most of my water team had caught the blast, or been spun into the center of the storm by invisible attacks. Henry’s team, which had been mirrored above, had been a little luckier, but not that much.

It was a devastating blow.

“Sons of bitches were waiting for us,” I whispered. I didn’t feel as shaky now, but I was still cold and weak. Someone had done me the kindness of wrapping me tightly in a thick thermal blanket, and my body heat was slowly coming back.

Cherise was holding my hand. I don’t know who’d called her, but she’d appeared before David had let go of me, and I hadn’t been left without human contact since. I wondered if they were afraid I would just dissolve without it, like those poor bastards we’d just led to their deaths.

David had gone to see to Lewis, though I doubted that there was much that could be done for him, either. He was strong. He would survive.

It was our mutual curse, seemed like. Being strong.

“Somebody pulled me out,” I said. “Was it David?”

Cherise’s thumb rubbed lightly over my knuckles, and she squeezed my fingers. “I don’t know. He’s not so sharey right now.” Even Cher’s usual defiant good cheer was gone, replaced by a sobriety that was new to me. “You just sit and rest.”

“The storm—”

“It’s moved off to the west,” she said, which surprised me. “At least, that’s what the bridge crew told me.”

“You were on the bridge?”

She raised an eyebrow, and an echo of the old Cherise came bouncing back. “Honey, there are men in uniformon the bridge.” She let it fade again. “It looks like we’re in the clear. For a while, anyway. Let yourself recover a little.”

I nodded, still feeling numb, and for no apparent reason, burst into tears. Cherise rubbed my back and murmured things that I didn’t hear, a comforting sound like rain on the window. I wasn’t the only person having a breakdown. At least three of the other Wardens had already been removed from the room, unable to stop crying and shaking.

“You should go lie down,” Cherise said. “Nothing you can do here, babe.”

She was right, but with Lewis flat on his back, the Wardens needed a leader, and by default I was it. I wiped my eyes, took a deep breath, and shook my head. I unwrapped the blanket and stood up.

Cherise took my arm, balancing me on my feet before stepping away and letting me go it on my own.

I found a knot of uniformed crew members outside in the theater lobby, whispering together. They fell silent when they spotted me—fear, or respect, I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. I suspected my blue eyes held something terrible, because none of them would look at me directly.

“What can we do, miss?”

“Body bags,” I said. “I assume you have some on board. I’ll also need some medical assistance, as we have some very traumatized people. Bring tranquilizers.”

They all exchanged startled glances. One of the female stewards nodded and stepped away to a phone. The response time for the medical staff was impressive, but then again, it wasn’t like they had lots to occupy them right now. I followed the gurneys, doctors, and nurses into the theater, and went to consult with the next most senior Warden in the room.

That was a Fire Warden named Brett Jones. Brett was a big man, solid; I’d heard he played professional football, once upon a time, but he’d taken retirement before it had left him too busted up. He nodded when I approached him. The Fire Warden contingent of our little war party had been kept out of danger so far, but I could see that the losses had affected him just as deeply as they had me.

“What went wrong, Jo?” he asked. He sat me down next to him, angling to face me as much as a man that big could in theater chairs. “Nobody can give me a decent explanation of what went on up there.”

“I’m not sure I can, either,” I said. “There’s something on the aetheric. I can’t see it, but I can feel it, and it can hurt us. That’s how it started. Then the storm itself—it was like it converted our power into something else. It changed,Brett. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I have,” said a childlike third voice, and we both looked up to see the Djinn Venna leaning over a seat in the next row, staring at us with unearthly calm blue eyes. “Do you want to know what it is?”

We exchanged looks. “Uh, if you don’t mind?” Brett said. He knew what Venna was, and he was nervous. So was I, but for different reasons.

Venna’s small, pointed face screwed up into a frown. “If I minded, why would I have offered?”

“Forget it, Ven. Tell us.”

The frown smoothed out into a bland mask. “You shouldn’t order me, you know.”

I felt a savage bite of anger. “It’s been a bad day. And I’m not too concerned about your fragile Djinn feelings right now. You’ll live.”

From the disbelieving stare Brett was giving me, I could tell he couldn’t quite grasp that I was sassing a supernatural time bomb of power this way, but I really didn’t care. Venna wasn’t going to hurt us, and I didn’t want to play ego games.

She let it pass. “A long time ago, there was a thing that happened. It doesn’t matter what it was, but it left a kind of scar between the highest plane of our existence and another place. A bad place.”

“The place where Demons dwell,” I said. “Right?”

“Oh no,” she replied. “Much worse than that. The Demons love aetheric energy, but really all they want is to eat their fill and go back where they belong. No, this is a place the Demons fear. We don’t know what lives there, but it came through, once.”

“Came through,” Brett repeated. “What happened when it did?”

“The universe died,” Venna said. “I told you it was a long time ago.”

I stared at her, speechless. So did Brett. So did everyone else within earshot of this bizarre conversation.

She tilted her small head sideways. “What?”

“Um—even youcan’t be that old, Venna.”

“I’m not. I read about it.”

“Where? At the Djinn Bookmobile?”

“Of course not.” She kicked her feet, just like a regular kid at the movies. “In the stars. In the dirt. In the water. It’s all around us. You can’t see it?” She answered her own question with a shake of her head. “Of course you can’t. Even most of the Djinn can’t see back that far. What we are wasn’t always this,you know. Everything in the universe recycles. Universes expand, contract, explode again. But this wasn’t from our universe. It was bad.”

“I’m—not sure how this is going to help us,” Brett said.

I was. “You’re saying that what’s on the aetheric, what took over the storm, it’s what came through last time?”

“No. I’m saying that it startedthis way, before. With the storm, and the power, and the ghosts.”

“Ghosts.” It was my turn to repeat her words. “On the aetheric.”

“You can’t see them, can you?”

“What kind of ghosts?”

“I can’t see them either,” Venna said, “but they’re angry. They don’t like Wardens.”

“Do they like the Djinn?”

“They don’t notice us, really. At least, not so far.”

This was interesting, but it wasn’t getting us where I needed to be. “Venna, I need a way to stop this. Is Bad Bob behind it?”

“He was,” she said, and her eyes went unfocused and distant. “He opened the door, but he’s not interested in what’s coming through. Chaos is what he wants. It’s what he’s getting.” She snapped back to focus with such suddenness that I flinched. “You can stop it, but not if he keeps the gate open. You need to stop him, and then you can worry about the rest.”

“What about the storm?”

“You can’t hurt it. You can only survive it.”

Kind of like this day. “Venna,” I said, and looked right into her eyes. Not a comfortable experience, really. “Can you kill Bad Bob for me?”

She considered the question for a long, silent moment. “No,” she said. “I could hurt him, but he could hurt me just as much. His power cancels mine in many ways, and I think he might just be worse than I am.”

“You mean he could kill you.”

“No, he probably couldn’t. But I wouldn’t like what was left of me, in the end, if I won.” She said it without much emphasis—just a calm assessment of her chances, nothing to be afraid of. “It’s better if you do it, anyway. Humans. You don’t have the same vulnerabilities that we do.”

It was veryodd to hear a Djinn talk about human strengths instead of considering us slightly less useful than a soiled tissue.

Of course, she ruined it by adding, “And you’re much more easily replaced.”

Lovely. “Does hehave any vulnerabilities?”

“Of course. He can still die,” she said. “He can still feel pain. Part of him is still human. A small part, but it remains, and it feels things the way humans do. The way you do.”

I felt the ship’s speed lurch, accelerating. Some of the ship’s staff looked startled.

That wasn’t standard procedure, obviously.

“I sped us up,” Venna said. “We were moving too slowly. I don’t want the storm catching us again. It would be inconvenient.”

Maybe, but now I could feel the thudding impacts of waves through the ship, and the very slight rolling had increased to a definite wallow. A ship this large dampened the usual motion of the sea, but in waves this high, at unnatural speed, we were going to be in for a rough ride.

I glanced at Brett, who was already looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Better get the ship’s stores to break out the giant economy-size Dramamine.”

He nodded. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Bad Bob was a Weather Warden, when he still had just his regular set of powers. Fire may be our best bet to overcome him—it’s his biggest weakness. You get your guys ready. I want original ideas, something he can’t anticipate or plan for.” I chewed my lip for a second. “And whatever your plans are—don’t tell me about them. I’d rather you keep it in your team.”

Whatever he thought of that, Brett nodded and left me. I sat, watching the dead Wardens being loaded into body bags, then trundled away on gurneys.

I looked at the faces of the survivors. Almost all the Wardens had gathered now, except those with specific duties related to the voyage or standing lookout up on the aetheric, and they all had a similar expression.

They were measuring themselves against the body bags.

I stood up and walked to the stage. I didn’t go up, just stood in front of where the medical team was working. Venna turned in her seat to watch me, and all the Wardens did as well.

“Okay,” I said, “I’m not going to lie to you. We knew this trip would be tough, and today we got clear evidence of that. We made a mistake, and it cost lives, but those lives were not wasted. It’s the duty of Wardens to give their lives in the protection of others. It’s part of the oath we all took when we signed on to this job.” I paused and made sure that sank in. “Now we know things we didn’t know before, and couldn’t know without triggering that trap. It sucks, yes, but our enemies aren’t playing around. They want us dead, every single one of us. Every Warden and every Djinn. Once we’re gone, there’s nothing standing between them and the defenseless human beings of Earth. Once humans are gone, they’ll strip this planet clean of every single thing with a connection to the aetheric—every animal, plant, insect, and bacterium. They’ll devour all the aetheric energy they can get, and then they’ll leave. It’s what they do.”

The only sound in the theater was that of body bags being quietly zipped behind me.

“The Wardens were formed to save people,” I said. “For thousands of years, we’ve tried our best to do that. Sometimes we’ve been better at it than others. Sometimes we’ve outright sucked, like lately. But we cansave people. We have to.We’re Wardens, and we cannot give up. Ever. Agreed?”

A few of them murmured or nodded. Wintry, unwilling agreement, but at least it was a start. “So what now?” asked one of the Earth Wardens, holding the hand of a still-trembling and shell-shocked Weather Warden survivor.

“Now we get ready to kill us a Demon,” I said. “And if you’ve got any good ideas, start talking.”

Sometime later—hours later, in fact—I realized that I was hungry, and so tired I was likely to doze off even if Bad Bob himself showed up and asked me to tango. Food wasn’t an issue; the ship’s staff brought us buffets, mountains of sandwiches and chips and drinks, entrées steaming in silver trays, sliced cheeses and elaborate desserts. I guessed we were getting first-class treatment. It tasted good, although I didn’t linger after I got a turkey sandwich into my system.

I grabbed a ship’s map and tried to find my way back to my cabin. The effort was marginally successful. Hallways were clearly labeled, but faded into one another with dizzying regularity. Add in the other decks, and I could see that I’d be getting lost for some time to come. That was something I really couldn’t afford. You never know when you might need to get somewhere in a real hurry.

Following my map led me down a maze of corridors, mostly deserted . . . whole decks were empty and lifeless now. Somehow, my exhausted brain betrayed me during some turning, and I found myself in an area that didn’t match up to my less-than-expert map reading.

A housekeeper was just coming out of one of the cabins, and I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, smiling. She was a cinnamon-skinned young woman with black hair pulled back in a sleek, lacquered bun, and warm chocolate eyes. Not very tall, but graceful. I could see her as a dancer, somehow, moonlighting as a maid.

“Miss?” she asked. “Can I be of assistance?” She spoke excellent English, though I could tell it wasn’t her mother tongue.

I held out my hand. “My name is Joanne Baldwin. I’m one of your—ah—special guests. You’re on staff, right?”

She looked at my outstretched hand, at my face, and slowly took my fingers to shake. “Hello, Miss Baldwin. But I’m not staff. I’m crew.”

“There’s a difference? Call me Joanne.”

“We’re not allowed to use the first names of guests, miss,” she said. “Yes, staff would be the people who work in guest relations areas. I’m a cabin stewardess. We’re crew, not staff.” She read the expression on my face, and smiled. “Ships are very tightly regimented, miss. We all know our duties and where we fit.”

“Trust me, the rules are going to be shredded on this trip. So I’m Joanne, and you are . . . ?”

“Aldonza Araujo,” she said, and her handshake grew a little more firm. We were about the same age, I thought. “Aldonza, miss.”

I gave up temporarily on forcing informality on her. “I’m looking for my cabin. I know I’m close, but—”

She got my cabin number and showed me the route by tracing a French-manicured fingernail on the map. I’d mirror-imaged my route, and I’d somehow ended up on the opposite side of where I should have been. Port, not starboard, in nautical terms. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go around this way,” she said.

I frowned down at the map. “What about this way?” It was marked in featureless gray.

“Those are service areas, miss. You can’t go that way.”