“What price?”
Ah. The drughr paused, as if considering. Why is it the smallest creatures, Jacob, the most defenseless, the mice and the voles, prefer darkness to day? Your Dr. Berghast wishes to preserve the world as it is, the powerful in their interests, the meek in their place. But I … I do not believe it has to be the way it is. Do you know why the dark talents are called dark, Jacob? Oh, it is nothing to do with good or evil, with rightness or its perversion. It is because they make it possible for the weak to conceal themselves, to live like the strong.
“Bertolt wasn’t weak,” he whispered.
The drughr was silent, smoke swirling over her face.
“Why would you help me?” he said. “Why?”
The rigging creaked in the starlight. The drughr rose smoothly, a blacker shadow against the shadows of the ship’s masts.
Because I need something too, Jacob, it said quietly. I need your help, too.
* * *
In the morning, Frank Coulton sat on a deck barrel, hearing the soft swish of the cards being dealt, a warm wind flaring in his shirtsleeves and crackling in the yards of canvas overhead. The shadows played across his face. He was distracted, thinking of Jacob, worried about the lad. His eyes looked ill, like he was no longer sleeping.
There were four Orang Laut sailors cross-legged and grinning, all leathery and tough, the second mate dealing out their hands. The sailors’ poison was zanmai, a game using those strange little colored karuta cards so common in the Tokyo streets. The rules were basic: three cards, trying to add up to nineteen. The cheating, though, was exquisite.
Coulton, a connoisseur of skill no matter its nature, enjoyed the way the sailors peeled his coins up off the deck, one by one, with exhalations of surprise each time they drew nineteen.
Later, at dusk, Ribs said: “I can tell you how they done it. I been watchin.”
He stopped what he was doing, looked at her. “You get caught working your talent, here on this little ship, an we’ll all be swimming to Singapore. Just act like a normal kid. Can you do that, like?”
Ribs gave him a withering look.
“I ain’t,” she sniffed, enunciating slowly, “a kid.”
But the sun-drenched days were long, the warm air soupy and thick. He couldn’t really blame Ribs for her boredom. He too was fading. Increasingly sick of the sea’s swells, eager for dry land and a cold bath, he tried and failed to smother his irritation.
They were two days past Taipei and Coulton was in his little cabin with the door closed and the hammock stowed, writing at the narrow desk nailed to the floor, when he paused and put down his pen and half turned on the stool.
“Right,” he said softly. He stared up at the ceiling. “If you’re wanting to go all the bloody way to Scotland with us, there’s got to be rules, like. First rule is: no sneaking.”
The cabin was empty. Jacob was up top. The ship lifted and fell, lifted and fell.
At last, out of the emptiness, came Ribs’s voice. “How’d you know I was here?”
“I can smell you, lass.”
“You can’t never.” She sniffed, uncertain. Paused. “You can’t, can you?”
Coulton closed his journal, a knuckle marking the page, and rubbed at his face in exasperation. “You said you was done working your talent on board. You said you’d refrain, like.”
She materialized suddenly, a scrawny naked thing right in front of him. “This better?” She grinned.
He recoiled sharply, the heat rising to his cheeks, and turned his face away. He fumbled for a moth-eaten blanket from the hammock. “For God’s sake,” he muttered. “What’s anyone like to think, they see you wandering about like that? I told you to act like a normal person. This ain’t normal.”
She was grinning at him. “Frank, Frank, Frank,” she said.
“You want to make the voyage in my bloody trunk? And it’s Mr. Coulton to you.”
She laughed, and in the blink of an eye vanished, the old blanket dropping to the floor.
But if Ribs was reduced to pranks and foolishness, Jacob in his moodiness only grew more disturbed. Coulton watched the dark rings under his eyes go from yellow to gray, he watched the way he’d pinch the bridge of his nose, and lean out of the sunlight, and he’d worry. The lad had unlooped his collar and taken off his cravat and his dark coat so that he walked about now half-dressed, in only his shirtsleeves, his hat half the time left in their cabin. It was the apathy of it all, the long sameness of the days, the way it ate away at your usual disciplines that made a person ship-mad.
Some nights he’d wake to find the lad’s hammock empty, and go up on deck, and see him staring out at the starlit sea, his haunted eyes angry. There were nights at the captain’s table when Jacob didn’t show. He never wanted to talk about it.
And then, one night, he did. He came in and paced their narrow cabin, twisting his long beautiful fingers up in front of him. Coulton was at the little desk under the porthole, and he turned on the stool with the pencil in his fingers and he waited. His neck was sunburned, his big nose raw and peeling badly. But Jacob, somehow, looked almost pale.
When the lad spoke, his voice was vague, unhappy. “I couldn’t help her, Frank,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything to help her.”
It took him a moment to realize who he meant. Komako’s little sister. “But you did help her,” he said.
Jacob shook his head. “You don’t understand, you weren’t there. She begged me to save Teshi.”
“You didn’t do nothing wrong, lad.”
“I told her to let her sister go. I did it. Me.”
“Aye, and what choice was there? Were she going to bring a litch on board with us? All the way back to Cairndale? Or maybe not come at all, just go on living with a litch in that place? How long do you reckon she’d have lasted then?”
“Her sister didn’t have to die.”
“She were already dead, lad.”
Jacob glared at his long fingers, twisting in his lap.
Coulton got to his feet. He made himself look at the lad, look directly at his hurt, when he said, “That ain’t the kind of power you want. You think you do. You don’t.”
Jacob’s eyes flashed. “Maybe it is. Maybe I should be more powerful. What’s the point of these talents if we can’t save anyone?”
“Save who? From what? From dying?”
“Yes!”
Coulton stared at Jacob, just stared at him, at the bitterness in him, and he didn’t know what to say. It was because he understood. “But your Bertolt’s already dead, lad,” he said quietly. “He’s dead, and there’s not a thing what can bring him back.”
Jacob turned away in anger.
“It weren’t never for that purpose, our talents,” he went on. “Death ain’t the bad part. You know that.”
But the lad, impulsive, unhappy, just kicked at the door of their cabin, and was gone.
* * *
Not really gone though. There was no going anywhere on that ship.
Jacob went up the ladder to the foredeck but couldn’t be alone there and he paced instead at the stern like a cat, prowling the railing, watching the sun sink low in the west and fuming.
It wasn’t Coulton’s fault. He knew that. It wasn’t anyone’s.
He was glaring out at the fading day when Komako came up, and put a hand on his arm, and he looked down at her in her floral kimono. All at once he felt his fury drain away. She seemed so uncertain, so shy.
“You all right?” he said.
She shrugged. There were clouds in the north, darkening. The sky was streaked with gold.
“At the institute,” Komako said, “will there be others like me? Like Ribs?”