cheek and he pushed it away and smiled.
“This is what I mean by ‘American hair’,” he said, tugging the strand lightly. His fingers touched my face and then slid around to the back of my neck, and he pulled me close and kissed me.
His lips were warm and soft against mine, and the night air was cold. Shivers went down my spine from the place where his fingers were tangled in my hair and pressing against my skin. It felt infinitely sweet. We were on our way to a nuclear test site with an untested antidote. The Soviet Navy was looking for us in submarines and spy planes, and my parents would be frantic with worry, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be. There is still, to this day, nowhere I would rather have had the first kiss of my life.
Benjamin pulled back and his face was turbulent with emotion. He seemed to be frowning and smiling all at once. I knew he was thinking the same things I was. And then he was kissing me again, and the world fell away.
When we were too tired and cold to stay on deck, Benjamin went to his father’s cabin and I went to the one I shared with Jin Lo. She opened one eye, then the other, when I came in, and I wondered if she ever truly slept. She gave me a once-over.
“Something good happen?” she asked.
“Um,” I said. “Yes.”
“That’s good,” she said.
I undressed down to my silk long johns and climbed into my little bunk, where I lay awake, staring at the rivets in the cabin’s ceiling.
“Jin Lo?” I said after a while.
“Mm-hm?”
“Do you still miss your parents?”
There was a silence in the dark cabin. “Sometime,” she said.
“Do you remember them well?”
There was another pause. “I remember smell of father’s shirt,” she said. “Combing mother’s hair. Sometime faces not so clear. I am eight. I remember baby brother’s feet. Very small toes and very funny.”
“What was his name?”
“Shun Liu,” she said. “It mean ‘willow tree’. But he is so fat, not like willow.”
“Maybe he would’ve grown up to be tall and skinny,” I said. There was no answer, and I thought maybe I’d said the wrong thing.
“Your mother know where you are?” Jin Lo asked finally. “Your father?”
“No.”
“They worry.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know,” she said. “You are child.”
I resented that for a little while, but I knew she was right, and I couldn’t really imagine what they’d be going through. I tried to summon some comforting idea, but could only picture them angry and frantic, and I didn’t want to think about that. I rolled back and forth on my bunk’s thin pillow. My mind drifted back to the look in Benjamin’s eyes on deck, and his soft lips on mine, and his warm hand touching my face in the bitter cold. And finally I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 33
Nova Zembla
The next morning we crossed an invisible line, after which the air didn’t just have the nip of the Arctic in it. The Arctic had seized us in its icy teeth and wouldn’t let go. Even in our furs and woollen clothes, it was impossible to be on the deck of the boat without ducking our faces and hunching our shoulders against the freezing wind. If I breathed too deeply, I felt as if icicles were stabbing me in the lungs. Actual icicles formed on my eyelashes when my eyes watered, and if I took off my gloves, within seconds my fingers became too cold to function. The cook kept hot coffee and hot cocoa on the stove, and passed it around in mugs. The men coddled the engines as if they were unpredictable toddlers who might erupt in tantrums any minute or simply shut down, refusing to do anything their minders wanted.
The mate with the sextant tried to take his sun sightings, but the sky was too cloudy at noon for him to take a reading. He frowned over his calculations. “We’re close to Soviet waters,” he said. “I just don’t know how close. We may have crossed over.”
Not even an hour later, a lookout shouted, “A patrol vessel, sir!”
Captain Norberg took a pair of binoculars from the lookout and peered at the horizon. The apothecary stood beside him. I could see the vessel, too. It was on the horizon, but it was making a direct line for us.
“It’s Soviet,” the captain said, without putting down the binoculars. “However you’re going, I need you off the boat, now. The