“Dawn approaches.” Bourbon scoops up his hat from the chaise, then bows me out the door. “We’re going sailing.”
The Doge’s Palace sits with its back to the canal, thin docks jutting over the waves like limbs. A sharp black gondola is tied off at the end of one, bobbing in the choppy water. The duke shepherds us into the boat, Helena ahead of me. She hangs a lantern at the prow and takes up the pole without consult, leaving Bourbon and me sitting face-to-face, regarding each other, his pistol resting loosely in his lap.
Helena steers us down Saint Mark’s, between the tall ships and the ferries, until we are spat into the Lagoon. We float alone in the water between the city proper and the surrounding islands. As we pass the harbor where we docked the day before, I scan the sails, searching for the Eleftheria among them, but she isn’t there. The gondola strikes a wave, and a gulp of frigid water soaks my knees.
After what must be near an hour, the silhouette of Maria e Marta blots the horizon. It’s a small spit of lonely land—before the water invaded the churchyard, it could likely have been walked end to end in a half of an hour. The only piece still above the waterline is the chapel built upon a hill, its spire a compass to the sky.
“Here they come,” Helena says quietly.
Two catboats are gliding toward us, a few men in uniforms of the Doge’s soldiers standing at their prows. Bourbon raises a hand to them, tucking his pistol under his cloak but careful to keep it pointed at me.
“Good morning,” he calls.
“You’re out early, my lord,” one of them returns.
“We came to see the island. My nephew, here”—he claps me upon the knee and I flinch more than I think a nephew believably would when clapped by his uncle—“is on his Tour, and I promised him a close view before it goes into the Lagoon.”
“It’s quite unstable,” the guard calls.
“We won’t get too near.”
Look at me, I think as the soldier’s gaze drifts across the three of us, though he seems far more occupied by Helena, who’s perched at the back of our gondola like an inverse figurehead. Look at me and sense that something is wrong. Make us turn back. Arrest him before he shoots me. Tell us to have a good look from here and then go home.
“Keep your distance,” the soldier says. “One of the walls collapsed this past week. Wouldn’t want your nephew to be crushed.”
Bourbon gives a good-natured laugh. “We’ll stay far away, sir.”
The catboats go their way, and we ours. My heart sinks to the bottom of the Lagoon as we draw ever nearer to the jagged ruins of the remaining sanctuary walls, their silhouette a gap-toothed smile against the sky.
We approach the chapel from the east, above what used to be the graveyard before it was submerged. Through the sudsy water, the silhouettes of gravestones ripple and distort. The wings of Saint Mark’s Lions jut out of the water like dorsal fins, marking the gateposts every few feet. The chapel facade is ghostly in the corpse-gray light of dawn. Flecks of quartz in the walls sparkle.
We disembark on a submerged dock, ours the only boat in sight. The loneliness of it makes my heart heave. The water hits me above the knee, funneling around my legs as we hike to the chapel, and the rain picks at me from above. The whole damn world seems made of water.
The sanctuary seems more fragile and precarious from the inside, like one good sneeze might topple the whole thing. The doors creak as the water sluices against them, a crusty line of scum marking the level. Beneath the waves, the floor is slick marble set in a chessboard pattern, so every other step feels like a hole I might tumble into. The silence is absolute but for the occasional splash as mortar drops from the ceiling, and the haunted trembling of the waves crawling into corners and scraping against the bottom of the pews.
Bourbon strides up the aisle, lifting his feet high so that each step splashes. “Where are we going, Condesa?” he calls to Helena, and his voice echoes like the sound of the ocean in a shell. A shard of the cracked rose window falls.
“Down,” is all Helena replies. The waves carry her skirts behind her like ink spilled from a pot.
Helena leads us to a chapel off the altar; it’s higher than the rest of the sanctuary, so the flooding is no more than puddles collecting between the tile. A single tomb sits in the center, two figures carved prostrate upon it. They’re both women, one with her hands steepled in prayer, the other with two fingers held to her thumb. Above the tomb, a few lines of scripture are painted.
It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.
Jesus said, Take ye away the stone.
Helena sets her lantern upon the ground, then works her fingers beneath the lid. “Help me,” she says to me.
I don’t move. “I’m not overturning a saint’s tomb.”
“They’re biblical women,” she says, like that’s an explanation. “Their bodies aren’t here—only their relics.”
“So?”
“So this isn’t a real tomb.” She jerks at her end of the lid and it slides out of place with a screech. A gasp of hot air escapes, smelling of earth and bone and a long, deep dive. Beneath the lid, a spiral staircase sinks into the darkness.
“Help me,” she says again, and I take the other end. Together, we heave the lid off the tomb.
With the stone taken away, Bourbon joins us, all three staring downward. That air billowing up feels freakish, both for its temperature and for its steady rhythm, like the thump of a heartbeat. I’m swallowing fear in short, sharp gasps.
Bourbon draws out his pistol, then jerks his chin at Helena. “You first.”
Suddenly I’m not certain which of us is more his prisoner—she or I.
Helena takes up her lantern again and lights a votive candle at the head of the tomb, the glass holder filled with floodwater but the wick dry enough to catch. I think, for a moment, she’s going to pray before we descend, but then I realize she’s leaving a calling card for Percy and Felicity, so they know where to go if they come. As the flaxen light curls across her skin from below, her face looks empty, any emotion wiped away like rain-fog from a windowpane. For a moment I think she must be too far gone for the gravity of this moment to take root inside her, our shared moment earlier no more than a play act. Then I realize it’s the sort of empty that presses out everything else, like if she isn’t vacant it will fill her up and soak in like a stain. I recognize it because I’ve worn it before. Hollow yourself or the fear eats you alive.
Helena is not afraid—she’s terrified.