Chapter Twenty

They found their first trace of the Tsarevich’s ship a week out of Gibraltar, in the middle of the Atlantic. Osman turned to Sarah and asked what she wanted to do—storm the bigger ship in the middle of the ocean or wait to see where it made landfall? She bit her lip, unsure of what to think, and chose land to buy herself some time.

Crossing the Atlantic nearly killed them. The waves grew taller than the tug and when storms shot across their bows the water rose, and rose, and threatened to capsize the little boat. Osman got them through, with skill and the creativity born of self-preservation, but it was always a close thing.

They followed the Tsarevich long after they ran out of food. Sarah at least knew what to do in the face of hunger. Ptolemy took the lion’s share of the steering after that. Sarah and Osman spent a lot of time asleep. Eventually they saw seagulls again. Landfall turned out to be half a world away from where she started. A new continent, a new hemisphere, a place where they measured distances in miles, not kilometers.

For most of a day they hung back, keeping the Tsarevich in radar range but out of sight just over the horizon. He was looking for something. His ship hugged the coast line but cast back and forth as if her pilot were trying to remember where to put in to land. They passed north past a jungle, a riotous, overgrown beach where grass grew three meters tall. They passed dead villages and towns and resorts like empty tin cans strewn along the sand. Still they headed vaguely north, past a sandy spit that ran for miles, studded with the ruins of houses, crowned with an enormous, dark light house. Finally the larger ship came to a halt and Osman touched his controls, locked his wheel, cut the tug’s throttle. The Tsarevich’s ship had put in at Asbury Park, in New Jersey.

“You know we’re only about sixty kilometers from—” Osman began.

She grabbed the chart away from him. “Yeah. I know.” Sixty kilometers made about forty-five miles from New York City. She could read a map.

New York was where her father died. He’d been born there, too. He had fled it as a teenager, come back to it as a man and saved a lot of people and then he died. Sarah knew something about dealing with ghosts. She knew to stay away from them, if she could, that what they had to offer came with a steep price tag.

The tug boat stood at anchor in the water a kilometer out on the ocean swells, far enough not to be noticed if they kept quiet, close enough to watch the Tsarevich’s ship through Ayaan’s old field glasses. They waited for darkness to fall. A nearly perfectly straight boardwalk confronted them, a grey and linear extrusion of American decay. The buildings on the shore, an endless line of restaurants and gift shops and unrecognizable brick piles stood weathered and old in the twilight, the color of sandstone mesas in some desert eroded by memories, by secrets she didn’t share. This was the country of her ancestry but she knew none of its signs and meanings. They were forgotten now: the windows on the boardwalk were all broken out and blank or boarded over with rotting drift wood. Sunlight striped the insides of empty rooms, lit up places where roofs had fallen in over time. Some of the buildings were fronted with rusty gates like the bars of jail cells. Some of them had come down—lightning, rain, wind, who knew what had toppled them. Maybe the roots of the trees that choked the wide streets, maybe over a decade the root systems of so many trees could break down the foundation stones of pleasure palaces and arcades. Soot and smoke damage darkened the countenances of most of the structures that remained standing.

At the boardwalk a parade of monsters hurried down an improvised gangplank and into the forests of the unreal city, flopping, crawling things, things with no legs, monsters with bodies warped by death, monsters who had yet to die. They laughed and sang hymns and psalms that floated out over the water. In single or double file they headed into the foliage and out of sight.

Night fell, eventually. The Tsarevich’s ship blazed like an anglerfish in the black water, its lights the only illumination in the world except for cold and distant stars.

Sarah found herself paralyzed, unable to do a thing. What would Ayaan do in her place, she asked herself? She would try to learn more about what she faced. She would sit tight and send in a scouting team and try to get some sleep. The sleep part was right out, but maybe Sarah could take a lesson from the rest.

“You can see in the dark, right?” she asked Ptolemy.

my more vision was like yours was is vision more than yours it was, the soapstone told her.

“Just be careful,” she told the mummy. “This is simple reconnaissance. There’s one of yours on that ship, probably. Don’t go rushing in though or you’ll get us all killed.”

There was one of hers in that ship, too. Sarah’s special vision couldn’t let her see through the hull of a ship or the dense trees choking the streets of Asbury Park. She didn’t need it to know that Ayaan was still alive, though. She had to be. Otherwise this long trip had been for nothing. Otherwise Jack had lead her on a wild goose chase. She couldn’t believe that anyone—not even her cranky old ghost—would put her through so much if she couldn’t expect a reasonable chance of completing her mission.

Or maybe... maybe it didn't matter if Ayaan was still alive. Maybe the mission had changed. Jack had hinted at a new game, with higher stakes. Maybe this rescue mission that had consumed her for so long had always been about something she didn't understand.

They moved in close to the shore, running the engines just a touch though the diesels still grumbled and coughed and roared, well to the north of the Tsarevich’s landing zone. Sound travels far over water, especially at night. Sarah hoped the waves would cover their noise. The got as close as they dared and then Osman cut the engines and they drifted in until the tug’s flat bottom hissed on the bottom. Ptolemy scampered over the side and onto the beach in a spray of sand, then disappeared instantly into the blackness.

“Okay,” Sarah whispered, and Osman took them back out to sea. They needed help. Jack had told her as much—she couldn’t face down the Tsarevich on her own. They needed an army he said, or atom bombs, well, they weren’t going to get that. But maybe they could get some help. Farther up the coast, around the curve of New Jersey, past Raritan Bay and the Harbor. New York, the place she didn’t want to go. “Next stop Governors Island,” she whispered to Osman, and he nodded, didn’t even chance a verbal agreement.

END OF PART ONE OF MONSTER PLANET