Deadshifted (Edie Spence #4)

He let me go and shoved me forward with a laugh. My arm flopped down, disconnected from the rest of me. Unwhole, I staggered forward—anything to get away from him.

“Where’s Asher?” I fell to my knees and crawled away before he could think to kick me.

“You won’t be seeing him again. I’m feeding him to the fishes, one piece at a time.” He peered clinically down. “I love how after everything you’ve seen in the past two days, you’re only interested in one man. One would think your nurse’s heart would bleed for the rest of the innocent souls that’ve been lost, and not that monster you were in love with.”

Panic started choking my throat. “What have you done with him?” I begged, my voice raw. I held my loose arm to myself, trying to get my back against a wall, where I could kick out at him if he came for me, someplace where I could protect my belly. “Where is he?” I asked, my voice shrill, as we heard the cabin door open.

“If you want to see what’s left of him alive, you’ll do what I say. Sort yourself out.” He straightened his suit by way of example.

“Edie?” Jorge called from the doorway. “You okay?”

“She’s in here,” Nathaniel said. When Jorge got to the door, he added, “She fell.”

Jorge saw me, eyes wide with panic, clutching my drooping arm. “Oh, honey—” and then he looked at Nathaniel and his fists clenched.

I’d let him get the better of me—and worse yet, I’d have to support him in his lie.

“I fell—I fell!” I said before Jorge could do anything. I could feel myself turning red with pain and shame. I lurched up to standing, ungainly with a quarter of my body knocked out. “I’m clumsy sometimes. I tripped and hit the couch wrong. It’s gone out before.” I held my arm to me tighter. “Please, can you go get Marius?”

Jorge gave Nathaniel a look, and then leaned out of the room to call for Marius without leaving me alone. I would have hugged him, only I couldn’t. Marius came in and looked at me with a cluck.

“Dislocated. How did you—” More slowly than Jorge, he put together two and two.

“I fell,” I repeated as Nathaniel nodded, to encourage me. “It happens sometimes. Can you fix me?”

Marius frowned at us both. But at least Marius’s medical service had given him enough experience in what to do. He shook a pillow on the bed out of its pillowcase, and cut it with a utility knife to fashion it into a sling. “You know I have to pop it back in now, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” I nodded and looked away.

Marius took my dangling arm at a ninety-degree angle, twisted it out, and pushed it in, like a kid forcing together unmatched Legos. It didn’t take the first time—it took all my strength not to scream in agony. I didn’t want to give Nathaniel that too.

The second time it slid home, bone grinding over bone, and it was impossible not to cry out in a combination of pain and relief. Marius wrapped the pillowcase around me, folding my newly reattached arm in across my chest. And over Marius’s shoulder, I could see Nathaniel’s eyes glittering with amusement at what he’d done. He put his arm across his stomach in mocking imitation of me, the sling forcing me to hold my own stomach.

Jorge kept himself between me and Nathaniel in the hall. “Say the word—” he muttered, and I shook my head.

“It’s okay. It’s fine.”

Jorge looked like he was going to argue with me, but the radio at Marius’s waist turned on and piped in Raluca’s voice. “How is it going up there?”

Marius unhooked it and brought it to his mouth. “We haven’t found anyone sick yet.”

“Come down and triage with us then—the rescue ship just radioed, it’s near.”

Marius looked relieved. He wasn’t going to call our “mission” off, but we all knew it hadn’t been fruitful. “We’ll be there soon.” He unclicked the radio and looked at all of us. “Unless anyone here has any objections.”

I shook my head and looked away. Jorge shrugged, and I didn’t know how Nathaniel responded.

“All right then. Back the way we came.” He made a gesture for us all to turn around.

I hung back, and Jorge hung with me. “I mean it,” he muttered.

“No. But thank you.” My good hand found his and squeezed it, and he squeezed back. We reached the freight elevator we’d first taken up to this floor, and its door slid open—revealing a woman in a room service outfit crouching inside, eating the contents of a tray like a wild animal. Our presence startled her, and she loped past us and down the hall like a startled rabbit. None of us said anything or went after her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Jorge and I lagged behind the other two when we reached the third floor—I was trying to seem meek, and he was being supportive. “You should say something,” he whispered to me.

“And what? They’ll put him in ship jail?” I would have shrugged, but it would hurt. Plus, Nathaniel still had answers I wanted. Like where Asher was.

Being fed to fishes.

Which isn’t the same as already dead—but it’s definitely not good. And how did he know that Asher was a “monster”? Maybe Asher had told him about their shared past in an effort to get him to come clean. But then what had happened to him?

After my run-in, it was too easy for me to imagine Asher going the same way. I might not be the only one seven months of safety had made soft.

The only thing I was sure of now was that what Asher had told me was truth. Nathaniel was responsible for whatever was going on here, but I had no way to make him tell me, and I was scared to be alone with him again.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Jorge pressed.

No. Not in the least. But ahead of us, Marius was using the hand sanitizer station, and Nathaniel was determinedly stalking off on his own past the restaurant’s entrance entirely. I ran to catch up to Marius and hold him back from going into the Dolphin. “Marius—give me the master key. Please.”

He tsked. “It’s no use. The ships will be full with the patients we have already. Those who didn’t make it downstairs will have to wait for the next round.”

“They’re not going to make it. Don’t you see? This isn’t anything normal! This whole ship has been infected somehow—” I looked over my shoulder to make sure that Nathaniel was gone. I couldn’t see him in the hall anymore, but I didn’t know where he’d run off too, so I lowered my voice as I pleaded. “Someone did this on purpose. They’re testing things on us. I’ve got to find my boyfriend—”

“Testing things?” Marius repeated. It’d been the wrong thing to say. I could see his eyes glaze over in the way I knew mine did every time a patient at work told me the CIA had put a radio transmitter in their head.

“What else explains it?” I tried, realizing as I said it that it only made me sound more mad.

Marius shook his head and sliced both his hands through the air. “I cannot take any more crazy talk!”

“But it’s true—”

“No!” he interrupted. We were right in front of the Dolphin’s entrance. He straightened his shoulders, and it was clear he was scraping the last of his cruise-ship-employee diplomacy from the bottom of its barrel. “If you’ll both excuse me,” he said, including Jorge and I, “I have an actual job to do. Raluca needs me.” He turned and then disappeared inside, leaving Jorge and me alone in the wide hallway with the Dolphin’s wafting smell. It hadn’t gotten better in the meantime.

Jorge gave me a side eye. “That … is not the direction I thought you were going to go with that.”

“Me either.”

“Is it true?”

I nodded. “I can’t prove it, but it is. And that other man—Nathaniel—he’s in on it. And he knows that I know. It’s why he tried to pop my arm off like a Barbie-doll head.”

“How did you find out?”

I had no idea how to explain. I gave him a wan smile. “Would you believe I’m psychic?”

Jorge snorted. “I’d believe anything for a shot of whiskey right about now.”

Raluca’s megaphone came on inside the Dolphin. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was giving orders. “She’ll need our help to get everyone on the rescue ship.”

His eyebrows rose. “Call me back when it’s called a cure ship.”

Jorge was right. What would the rescue ship be able to do for the dying people anyhow? What was the cure for people who wanted to drink so badly that they’d throw themselves overboard or drown in tubs? What a cruel place they’d inadvertently chosen for their sickroom, with water painted on every wall. Dolphins, indeed. I snorted, and for the first time in my life I wished I was a doctor—not that the cruise ship doctor had seemed to be having much luck.

Why was Nathaniel here among us—just to watch? He’d let his own kid and wife die. What kind of man could do such a thing?

A man who’d known all along he wasn’t going to get sick.

He’d been here with us, exposed to all the same environmental factors. He must have access to some sort of cure.

Jorge and I walked into the Dolphin’s entrance partition. The doctor had abandoned his post, probably to help Raluca, but there were still printouts scattered across his makeshift desk all marked up like homework.

“I’ll be there in a second,” I told Jorge, and gestured to my slinged arm. I wasn’t going to be good for lifting anyone anyhow.

Jorge made a face but let me be. Once he’d left the doorway, I started rifling through piles of paperwork. What was it Asher had said Nathaniel’s last name was? Tannin? Some of the sheets were sorted by restaurants eaten and at what times—but one sheaf was alphabetical. I furiously flipped through these until I got to the T’s, and as I did so I heard a rustling beyond the curtain. I grabbed the papers five-deep so I’d be sure I got them all, and shoved them into my sling. Dr. Haddad appeared, looking gray.