head of the family. His childhood had been lost in the scent of Miss Viola’s thighs and in the glare of the sun when he fell to earth, and he had killed at least one other human being and perhaps two innocent monsters, and caused who knows what hardships and dismay for the professor and Brookmire, not to mention Schelling and his clandestine tribe. The solution to all the conundrums facing him seemed amazingly simple when he examined it in the faint light of the empty deck. He found himself climbing up onto the rail, staring down at the dark flow that surged around the shape of the Defiance just as the blood coursed through the vessels in his throbbing, cap-hidden head. All it would take was a little weight, and he would disappear without a trace.
Speak to me, Lodema, cried out Lloyd in his mind, reaching out with all his will to feel the spirit of his dead twin. Give me a sign.
“You best get down,” a voice behind him said, and the surprise almost sent him plunging into the black water. Instead, he tumbled back onto the deck, eyes wild, heart racing, all the old fears rekindled and the thought of jumping jettisoned utterly. “Who are you?” he rasped, but he might well have asked where.
“No damn fool like you,” the voice answered, and it seemed to Lloyd that the night itself was addressing him. The pitch and tone were female, but unlike any he could remember.
“I’m not a fool,” he answered, raising himself up cautiously.
“Could’ve foxed me,” the voice replied, and still Lloyd could not pick out a face or body in the gloom. Could this be some magical science of the Spirosians or their foes, or was he imagining it?
“Come out and let me see you,” he said, and was struck dumb when a hand patted his shoulder in response.
He whirled about, but it took several seconds for his eyes to adjust and comprehend the new information that had presented itself so dangerously close beside him. Ever since the alley in St. Louis, he had prided himself on his alertness. Now, here someone had crept up within knifing distance—and a girl at that! She had emerged from under a roll of oilcloth behind one of the distress boats lashed to the rail. She was dressed in dark clothes, like a boy, and was as far as he could tell several years older than he—taller, anyway. She wore a skiff boy’s cap and kept both hands in front of her. Lloyd blinked, half expecting her to fade back into the murk, but her figure held firm, like a phantom reluctantly fleshed.
“Come,” she whispered, and seized his elbow. “Out of sight.”
To his further astonishment, Lloyd yielded to her touch. She pulled him down one of the crew-ways to a step rail that led toward the cargo hold. He had peeped down that way the day before but had grown skittish when one of the crew members, a snaggle-toothed moron they called Clapper burped at him. Inside a tiny storeroom with an ax mounted on the wall, a bald man dozed on his hands at a knotwood table that played host to a tin cup and a spitting candle in a blackout box. The Night Girl shuffled Lloyd softly past and into the jumbled shadows of another chamber. A stack of firewood and some smoked meats hanging in nets met his eyes—a gaff pole, crates, kegs. With impressive certainty, the girl steered him through the maze to a trunk against a bulkhead, and then eased the trunk back without making a sound. She lifted a plank and motioned to him to step down into a hole.
Through the taut working wood Lloyd could feel the thrum and clunk of the engine, chugging at reduced speed now at night—and he imagined that he could also feel the vibrations of the other passengers, tossing in their sleep or making love, fending off creditors in dreams, savage beasts or Indian war parties that awaited them in the wilderness beyond. He had visions of stepping down into some iron cage to be trapped, and yet he did as his strange guide directed and was relieved beyond measure when she followed him, the bare skin of her hands brushing against him when they were settled in the inky confinement just below. Shades of the false-bottomed graveyard, Lloyd thought.
They crouched on the floor, facing each other in total darkness, and he heard the plank slid back