of me. I keep kicking, moving toward the energy. (I have no choice. I don’t mean that ARIS is forcing me; I mean that whatever it is—the feeling, even though it’s almost painful—won’t let me turn back.)
Someone tugs on the line attached to me, a signal that I should stop. I don’t. I swim over the deck gun and dodge the bulk of the aft superstructure. As I pass over the smoke funnel, I feel a stab of terror, like I’m going to be sucked into the blackness and disassembled. But I can’t stop swimming.
I reach the aft mast, and I know I’m in the right place. The burning in my chest turns to a thump. Built in the base of the aft mast is a door fastened by a busted lock. Without thinking much about it, I slam the base of my flashlight into the lock, once, twice, three times. Already worn by time and exposure to water, the lock breaks.
The little door opens and I turn my beam of light toward it. Inside the mast there’s a small trunk about the size of a toaster, elaborately decorated with gilt and enamel in a pattern of flowers and leaves that reminds me of babushkas and matryoshka dolls. I know I should swim with it to the surface, let the ARIS officers scan it with their equipment to make sure it’s safe. But if I do that, they’ll form a perimeter around it, and I have to be looking at it, holding it, feeling inside me the pounding of its heart.
So I open it.
Settled inside on a bed of black velvet is a silver needle about the length of my palm.
Koschei’s Needle.
I read a lot of folktales to prepare for this mission. They say Koschei was a man who couldn’t die. He hid his soul away from his body in a needle and put the needle in an egg, the egg in a duck, the duck in a hare, and the hare in a trunk. Only when a person broke the needle could they take his life.
I am trembling when I touch it. I think it trembles too.
And then—horrible pain, a flash of white. The tingling of returned feeling is gone, and in its place, I’m enveloped in flames. Scalding skin peeling away from muscle, muscle cooked away from bone, bone turning into ash, that’s what it feels like. I scream into the regulator mask, and it pulls away from my face, letting in water. I choke and thrash, struggling to grab the line that attaches me to the boat, but my hands won’t work.
And then it’s like—a pang so deep I feel it in every part of my body, like the sounding of a clock tower at midnight. It feels like wanting something so much you would die to get it, more than craving or longing or desire—I am empty, and more than that, a black hole, so absolutely composed of nothingness that I attract all somethingness to me.
All around me the water swirls and churns, bubbles so thick they keep me from seeing anything. Pieces break off from the ship and enter the cyclone of water. Black shapes tumble past me—the ARIS officers in their scuba suits. I choke on water as I scream, and I feel like I’m pulling something in, like I’m drawing a breath.
The next time I open my eyes, I’m staring at the sky. All across it are clouds. I tip forward, water rushing down my back and into the wetsuit. The water that surrounds me isn’t blue; it’s red, dark red. My hand hurts so badly I can’t stand it. I lift it up to look at it. Something hard and straight is buried under my skin like a splinter, right next to one of my tendons. I press against it. It’s Koschei’s Needle.
Something bobs to the surface next to me. It looks like a piece of plastic at first, but when I pick it up, it’s soft and slippery. I scream, dropping it when I realize it’s skin. All around me are pieces of skin and muscle and bone and viscera.
Everyone is dead. And I’m alone.
TOP SECRET
9
THEY LEFT ALBIE with Cho so he could try the device. She had promised to get him home when they were finished.
Sloane had no doubt that the device worked—she would not have felt its presence so strongly if it didn’t. They all had their own way of relating to magic, and hers was with craving, and