The Apothecary Page 0,86

aloof from the others. I thought of Count Vili’s genii, and of the Dark Force that had drifted away from the jaival tree.

Then the helicopter lurched, and my stomach seemed to flip into my chest, and we started to descend. Nova Zembla was as barren and white as it had been before, but there was a great charred circle where the shed with the bomb had been. The Samoyed houses were tiny in the distance, and seemed undisturbed, and so did the island’s spindly pine trees to the north. The helicopter avoided the burned patch and landed on the frozen ground a little distance away. The others climbed down, and Danby dragged me out into the snow.

The men walked with a dreadful tension towards the test site, staring at the cratered, blackened earth. The snow was melted even beyond the burned area, but there was nothing like the damage a nuclear bomb should have left. Danby gripped my arm so I wouldn’t run, but where would I go? There was no sign of any of the others, and I tried to think that they had escaped, far away. The charred ground seemed a fitting place for the desolate hope that my friends had abandoned me for their own safety. My heart felt as flattened as the little shed.

The young helicopter pilot carried the grey metal Geiger counter to test the radiation. He shook his head, baffled. “Chisto,” he said.

Sakharov grabbed the earphones from him and held them to his ear, listening, then dropped the headset. It swung from the cord in the young pilot’s hand. The faint sweet smell of the Quintessence still hung in the air. Sakharov looked around the deserted point.

“How is this possible?” he demanded in English. “It is not possible!” His intelligent face was in torment. He had bent atoms to his will, and he wasn’t used to being confronted by things he didn’t understand.

“The girl knows,” Danby said.

“The girl!” Sakharov said. “Where did the girl come from?”

“She was the bird,” Danby said. “I told you we should have searched the island.”

“She was the bird?”

“And she knows what happened.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I wasn’t here!”

“You are going to rot in a Soviet prison, Miss Scott, if you make it that far,” Danby said. He shook me by the arm so hard that I bit my tongue and tasted the metallic tang of blood. “What did the apothecary do?”

“I don’t know!”

Sakharov said, “I think I am not understanding this word, apothecary.”

“He’s not an ordinary apothecary,” Danby said. “He’s—a kind of alchemist. Or a magician.”

“A magician?”

“No, he’s a scientist,” I said, because Sakharov seemed my only hope. “Just like you are. You’d like him. They wanted to meet you, and thought you’d understand what they’re doing.”

“They?” Sakharov said. “Who is they? And what is it they are doing, besides destroying my work and my reputation?”

Then we heard a cry that sounded not entirely human, and my heart froze. I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from, except that it was above us. It cried out again in terror, the voice nearly carried off by the wind. I looked up, over the sea, and saw a boy falling from the sky.

“Benjamin!” I screamed. I watched, horrified, as he plummeted into the waves.

“How fitting,” Danby said. “The boy who flew too high.”

“That was a boy?” Sakharov said.

I tried to pull my arm free of Danby’s grip, but he dug his fingers in. “We have to go save him!” I cried.

“The fall will have killed him,” Danby said. “Or if not, he’ll drown instantly, in that cold.”

“No!” I pounded Danby’s chest with my free arm, and he grabbed that wrist, too. I felt helpless, faced with his total indifference. It wouldn’t matter to him that I loved Benjamin, that he was fearless and clever and loyal and brave, and that he’d been trying to come back for me. I had to find a reason for Danby to want to save Benjamin, and the seconds were ticking away. “He knows all the secrets!” I said. “He knows everything about his father’s work.”

I saw a flicker of interest cross Danby’s face. I turned to Sakharov.

“That was the apothecary’s son who fell,” I said, trying to make my voice steady. “His apprentice, his closest ally. He can explain what happened to the bomb—how it was contained, and why there’s no radiation. You have to interrogate him! Don’t you want to know?”

I knew that if they took Benjamin alive, they would force him to