Page 36 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

I don’t like it. I say so.

“Five minutes,” he says.

When he’s got his boots on, he crouches in front of me.

“Eat something,” he says again. “Get dressed and grab some water and snack bars. When I come back we go straight away, so be ready.”

He kisses me. Then he goes out, and the door stays open behind him.

The clothes he gave me are on the floor where he took them off me. I put them on. The t-shirt. The sweats, rolled at the ankle three times. The hoodie. It is enormous. It smells of him, and of me now too, and the two of us together, which is a scent that I love more than anything.

I pull the hood up and wait. I grab a couple of bottles of water and tuck them into the pouch of the hoodie, then eat a granola bar standing in the door of the box, looking out into the hold, at the ladder and at the square of gray light at the top of it.

It is the first time I have seen out of the door. There’s not much to see: rust and dark and the bottom of a ladder.

I drink half a bottle of water, in sips, because he would tell me to. I’m sure it’s been more than five minutes, but I don’t have a watch.

Then there are shots.

Two, close together. Flat and loud, then a pause, then a third. They come down the ladderway from the deck. The hold takes the sound and throws it around the steel and makes the sound ring longer.

Roan.

I hear boots on the deck.

Not his. I know the sound of his step by now. These are many, and heavy, and running.

A flashlight beam comes down the hatch, bright and white and moving. Then another. Several.

I hear an American voice shouting words I have only heard on television. “Federal agents. On the ground. Now.”

And under it another voice, in my own language, saying my name and clear, clear, clear.

I step back from the ladder. I step back until the box is behind me, and then I step into it, because it is the only room I know.

They come down the ladder fast with their guns up. The first men down are in gray suits, with earpieces in and blockers so thick I cannot smell them at all. Every suit wears a familiar crest on the lapel. These are my people. Behind them, more slowly, come men in dark jackets. For a second the beams are all on me and I put my hands where they can see them.

“Your Highness. Your Highness, it’s all right. It’s over. You’re safe.”

The one who says it is an American, in a dark jacket with yellow letters on the front. He has had to come down behind my countrymen, and he does not look pleased about it.

I look for Havel. He is not there.

“Are you injured, Your Highness? Are you hurt anywhere?”

“No.”

Someone puts a silver blanket around my shoulders. It crackles.

Someone else is talking into a radio. Package secure. Package secure. A Monteverran with the crest pin comes and stands in front of me and bows, low, the full court bow, here in the bottom of a barge and I want to laugh.

“Highness. Thank the Lord. Thank the Lord.” He is one of Reinhardt’s. I have seen him before but I don’t know his name. “The Prime Minister is on his way. There is a car. We will have you out of this place in one minute.”

“There was a man,” I say.

He waits.

“The man who was guarding me. He was—“ I do not know what I am going to say. He was going to the car. He was coming back. He said five minutes. “There were shots.”