Maggie, John didn’t even know where he might acquire it. He could only hope his grandfather’s doctors had figured out a way to counteract the poison and the old man would live. Gavin was, after all, John’s only true ally, and no matter how crazy the old man had become, John loved him.
Maud had carved an anomaly directly into Traveler’s great room. From there, John led them carefully through the ship to a narrow, half-destroyed passage on one of Traveler’s lower levels. In the middle of this passage, they arrived at a metal door that was wedged open against the buckled floor of the hall.
“My grandmother Maggie’s room,” he told Maud.
Inside was a tiny space—a bed, a small desk, and a closet held shut by the crushed ceiling, everything thrown into disarray. John ducked into the room, clipped a light to the end of the bed, and switched it on, illuminating the cabin.
Everything he needed was on the floor. Maggie’s room had been decorated with several framed photographs and pieces of art. These had all fallen violently when Traveler crashed, and they now lay broken across the floor amidst shards of glass. He knelt down and began to pick them up.
“What happened to your grandmother?” the Young Dread asked from the doorway.
The question surprised John. When he’d first begun training with Maud, she’d spoken as little as possible and would never have asked a personal question. Her conversation was becoming easier the more time they spent together, as though John and the normal world were rubbing off on her.
“They didn’t find her body,” he told her. His own voice sounded too even, too detached, but this was a topic he didn’t want the Young Dread to take an interest in. Maggie’s cold-blooded views would not be to Maud’s liking.
“You believe she got out?”
The rescue workers had found everyone on the ship—some dead, most alive—except for Maggie.
“Yes,” he answered, “I believe she got off the ship somehow.”
The Young nodded at this and took a seat in the corridor. As John watched, she removed Catherine’s journal from a pocket of her cloak. He’d allowed her to keep it since the previous night.
When he turned back to the broken frames on the floor, his mind stayed on Maggie—who wasn’t really his grandmother but a more distant relative. He’d thought about her often since the crash. He did believe she’d gotten out of the ship, though he couldn’t understand how. And where would she have gone? If she were alive and well, why hadn’t she contacted him?
Truthfully, he didn’t know if he should feel sad or relieved. Maggie had raised him, after his mother was gone. He had loved her, of course, but he’d hated her sometimes as well. She’d made him scared for his entire childhood that someone would be coming to kill him, just as someone had come for his mother and so many others. He should be worried about Maggie, worried that she was injured or lost. But he felt something different—a deep disquiet about where she might be and what she might be doing.
His grandmother had once told him a bedtime story about a woman who lived deep in the forest, away from all of mankind except a chosen few. The story had felt like something more than a fairy tale; Maggie had sounded as though she were describing something she’d actually done. Could she be doing that again, living somewhere remote from London, biding her time?
He stacked the broken picture frames on the bed and picked off the last shards of glass. Each frame held more pictures than one would expect—several were concealed behind whatever had been displayed under the glass. Now John tore the backs off the frames, slid photograph after photograph from their hiding places, and laid them across the bedspread.
The hidden pictures were not pleasant. Each captured a scene of grisly death. The images were of men, women, and children, killed by knife, by sword, by gun, by drowning. The oldest pictures had been taken a hundred years before, or more, but the photographs spanned the last century, in black and white and in color. Maggie had first shown him these pictures when he was eight years old. Each dead person was an ancestor of his, a member of the house of the fox. Here was photographic evidence of all the ways the other Seeker houses had victimized his own. The pictures had convinced John to dedicate his life to revenge, just as his mother had