The Boat

Friðargeir smells of salt and diesel and the particular institutional cleanliness of a vessel used by people who are serious about their work and entirely unsentimental about their equipment.

Veira stands on the deck on the morning of the sixteenth watching the crew make her ready, and the frequency is running at a level she has not previously experienced, and she has given up characterising it and started simply carrying it.

The crew are not Folklore. That was Adaeze’s condition and Veira agrees with it completely: whatever happens two hundred kilometres out should not happen in front of people with political stakes in the outcome, because everything that has happened in front of people with political stakes in the outcome has ended up in a filing.

The captain is a woman called Brynja. Fifty, maybe fifty-five. She has worked this stretch of the North Atlantic for twenty years and she received her unusual-requests briefing from the foundation’s board with the equanimity of somebody whose first unusual request happened several decades ago and who recalibrated her expectations at the time and has not needed to revisit them since.

She does not ask what they are looking for.

She asks for the bearing.

Joon-Ho gives it to her: two-ninety, approximately two hundred kilometres.

Brynja looks at the chart on her tablet for perhaps four seconds.

“There is nothing there,” she says.

“That’s why we’re going.”

She nods once genuinely, without any of the performance Veira had braced for turns, and starts telling the crew things in Icelandic. That is the entirety of the conversation. Veira decides on the spot that she likes her enormously.

They sail at seven.

The first two hours are the North Atlantic doing its committed personal January version of itself, and it requires everybody on deck to be present in a way that the warm cabin below cannot replicate. The swell is long and serious. The wind comes across rather than at them, which is worse, and by the first hour Roman has retreated below with an expression suggesting he has survived three centuries partly by declining to be at sea.

Sebastien is on the bow.

He stands in it the way she has watched him stand in weather since Arthurs Seat in October — not comfortable, exactly, but native, as though cold is a language he has been fluent in since before he had any choice about it. She goes forward and stands beside him and the wind removes any possibility of conversation, and she does not try to make one, and they stay there for twenty minutes without saying anything at all.

Then he leans in and says something she doesn’t catch.

“What?”

“How does it feel.” Louder, close to her ear. “The frequency. Out here.”

She closes her eyes. Holds it. Opens them.

“Like coming toward something that’s been waiting.”

“How long?”

“Much longer than us.”

He absorbs that for a while. Spray comes over the rail and neither of them moves out of it.

“Do you want it to be friendly,” he says, “or do you want it to be honest?”

She turns to look at him.

It is, she thinks, the single best question anybody has asked her since Vienna, and she is aware that he has been holding it for at least a day and has chosen a moment where the wind means nobody else can hear either of them.

“Honest,” she says.

“Good.” He looks back at the water. “Because you’ve been telling everybody it isn’t a threat since Tuesday, and I’ve watched you decide that, and I’d rather you hadn’t decided yet.”

“You think I’m wrong.”

“I think you’re probably right and I think you got there too fast, and those are different problems.” He says it without any edge. “You’ve spent seven months insisting nobody gets to decide what you can handle. I’d rather you extended yourself the same courtesy before you walk up to something at the bottom of the ocean with your hands open.”

She stands with that.

“That’s fair,” she says.

“I’m not asking you to be afraid of it.”

“I know what you’re asking.”

Below, in the research cabin, Joon-Ho and Adaeze are building the signal model in real time as the boat moves northwest and the readings update, with Roman supervising from a bench and offering the occasional correction in a voice that suggests he is concentrating on other matters. Emre is somewhere she cannot see, which is characteristic and no longer worries her. Callum is at the stern, looking back at the receding coastline, doing the thing she has watched him do in every outdoor space they have shared since the Borders: orienting himself. Establishing where he is relative to what he already knows.

She goes aft eventually, because the wind on the bow has become a physical argument she is losing.

Emre is at the rail. He appears the way he always appears, which is to say she does not see him arrive.

“Do you feel it,” she asks.

“Yes. It’s different from the five. The texture is wrong.” He corrects himself immediately. “Not wrong. Unfamiliar.”

“Say more.”

“The five bloodlines feel like voices I know. Wolves have a specific weight, vampires have a specific coldness I’ve had thirty-one years of learning what each of them feels like arriving.” He is watching the water rather than her. “This feels like a voice I ought to know and don’t. Which is not a comfortable sensation for a hybrid, because there are exactly two of us and I am accustomed to being one of the only two things in the world I fully recognise.”

“Yet,” she says.

He looks at her.

She is looking at the water and does not look back, and she is entirely aware of what she has just done with one word, and she lets it stand.

“Yet,” he says.

The boat continues northwest.