Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,26

Princess she understood again what a massive, wounded beast the ship was. Soon enough the crew began to lower themselves in the last of the lifeboats, and Vida watched, numb and refusing blankets or reassuring words from the twenty or so others who huddled on the wooden benches around her.

A lifeboat! She shuddered as the real meaning of the phrase occurred to her.

What had they left, then?

Well, the answer was painfully simple. It was a death ship now.

Up above, the lights of the Princess had begun to blink on and off. The crew was shouting that the final boat must be lowered. The others who surrounded Vida with their anxious, breathless waiting fixed their attention on that last boat of crewmembers, and when its tethers were released from the big ship, a great collective sigh escaped from the other passengers on Vida’s boat.

That last lifeboat rowed toward them, and then both boats began to row in the direction they believed the Artemis to lie. Though no one spoke, it was not quiet. The air crackled with their fears. They were so small under that tower of ominously winking windows. And yet they were smaller still when, quite suddenly, the lights went out and the darkness surged over them.

“The electricity’s gone!” cried one of the crewmembers in the other boat.

“That means the water is in all the boiler rooms,” Sal called back. “She’ll be sunk soon.”

“Is Carlton with you?” cried the crewmember in the other boat.

“He went to the Artemis some time ago,” Fitzhugh shouted.

Once again Vida thought that time was a very odd concept that explained nothing. It seemed to her the ship had only just been hit, but also that she had lived a whole life since then.

The water had begun to bear them up and down more forcefully, and the crewmembers in the other boat seemed not to have heard.

“What did you say about Carlton?” Fitzhugh shouted. “Why would he be there?”

The man was shouting, and though the name “Carlton” came clear over the din of the water and the wind, little else did.

“Why would Carlton have been with us?” Fitzhugh asked Sal, and Sal said he did not know. “He must have been back on the ship somehow. If he’s back on the ship, I can’t leave him.”

Vida glanced around at the other people crowded onto the benches of the lifeboat. Their faces were immobile, and their eyes averted from Fitzhugh as though they did not want to know what he was suggesting. There must have been about twenty of them—a few crewmembers, men she recognized from the first-class dining room, several ladies in their nightdresses, and two women with hair that had never been arranged for a party, faces that had never been painted for an evening’s entertainment, holding tight to four small, frightened children. Vida swallowed to see those little bodies hiding in their mothers’ humble shawls. Vida knew what he was suggesting, and it infuriated her. She opened her mouth to tell him so, but no sound came. And suddenly she realized how terrified she herself was.

Fitzhugh ordered the men to row. The other lifeboats had rowed hard away from the dark, listing ship, but the Farrar crewmembers obeyed Fitzhugh; they piloted their lifeboat back.

Sal’s voice was even, but Vida thought he betrayed some anger, too. “It’s too late, Fitz. The bow is starting to lift.”

“Oh God,” said Fitz, and the tone in his voice was enough to make the other men stop rowing.

In the darkness Vida could see the massive form of the Princess, but no other detail, as half of the ship lifted up out of the water. She rose slowly, awesomely—she seemed almost alive. A mammoth sea creature showing its true size just before it dove deep to see what was below.

“Hold on!” Fitzhugh shouted. “Stay low!”

And Vida, and the others, gripped the rails of their boat. They bent low, they held tight. Stay low, stay low, Vida repeated in her mind. It was the last thing she was able to think clearly before the Princess stood on her head and began to slide out of view. In a matter of minutes the ocean swallowed the great ship whole. Her fingers ached from clinging to the wooden rails. A massive swell rose beneath their own tiny vessel, twirling them around and around and around. They were powerless—the sea had them—and they were flung into the darkness and the unknown.

Part Two

Eight

Vida had not known how alien the dawn was until she saw