Chapter 14

Somehow, the warship looked less dangerous in the daytime. It was still enormous, but in the sunlight the wear and tear looked more sad than forbidding, and the waving seaweed and crustaceans on the side of the hull more playful than dangerous. I felt a certain confidence as I tethered our canoe to a bolt at the back of the ship, as I had before.

We climbed aboard, our footsteps clanking lightly on the metal floor. I paused as we stood, scanning the deck. The ghoul was nowhere to be seen. When we had waited and searched around on the top deck for long enough that I was starting to get impatient, I walked to a wall and rapped my gun against it several times. A loud banging echoed and vibrated through the ship.

"We know you're here," I called—not that he'd be able to understand. "Come on out."

There was no response. I waited, watching for movement behind pillars and around corners. There was an airy sound to my left, and I whipped around, following the sound with the barrel of my gun. It was a seagull that had landed on an antenna above us. It looked at me blankly, then lazily took off again.

"I'm sure he knows we're here. I suppose he's hiding down below somewhere, like last time," I said, lowering my gun.

"I doubt he wants to speak with us," Bruce said. "Especially when we're yelling and waving guns around," he added pointedly.

"Are you sure you can get him to cooperate with us?" I really doubted it. It would be much harder finding the transmitter on our own, but I wasn't sure we'd be able to get him to help.

"No," he admitted, "but if he's not too far gone, I think we'll be able to reason with him. There might be something he wants that we'll be able to offer him in exchange for the transmitter."

I gave him a skeptical look. "He was pretty far gone, Bruce."

"Maybe not," he argued. "I doubt there are any significant sources of radiation on the ship, and he has been here since the war. If he hasn't gone feral yet, he's not going to."

"Not being feral doesn't keep him from being crazy."

"It's not surprising for him to have developed some minor mental disorders after living alone for two-hundred years."

"Thank you for the explanation, but that still doesn't help us."

"I only meant that maybe you should not be so hard on him. The fact that he's survived this long alone is by itself impressive. He's obviously intelligent, despite suffering from hallucinations."

I gave him a small, bemused smirk. He was trying so hard to defend him. "Yeah, I guess," I gave in. "I just hope he's lucid enough for you to get through to him."

I turned to a door on the wall behind me—the one I'd used last time that led to the interior levels of the ship—and pulled on the thick handle. It screeched open. I watched the relative darkness inside. A shaft of sunlight cut through it halfway down the hallway, illuminating a slow swirl of dust motes in the air. I listened for human sounds, but if there were any, I couldn't distinguish them from the squeaks and vibrations in the rest of the ship. The ghoul knew he had the advantage in the halls of the ship as well as I did—I doubted he would be coming out any time soon. I hated to walk into what would most likely be an ambush, but we couldn't just stand outside forever.

I stepped inside, keeping my gun at the ready. Bruce slipped in beside me, leaving the door open to let the light in. "Don't be afraid to shoot if you have to," I said, my voice low as I walked forward, checking the rooms as we passed them. "If he's endangering me, shoot him. I'll do the same for you." He walked a few yards behind me, his feet quiet against the floor.

As we got deeper into the ship, I could hear the echoes of dripping and sloshing water. I closed my eyes for a moment as I listened, trying to hear something else. When I felt heat on my face, I opened them again. I'd walked into the weak daylight that streamed through a broken section of the ceiling. I held up a hand to shade my eyes. To my right, something shifted outside the ray of light. I tensed. As my gun arm moved to point toward the movement, I saw the human shape in the shadow of the doorway next to me. Something long, thin, and metallic flashed in the light.

My shot went wild as I twisted out of the way of the sword slashing toward my head. Before I could aim again the blade was lashing out again, then again, and it was all I could do to keep just out of reach, never mind fight back. Bruce was a short ways behind me, probably unable to get a clear shot with how quickly we ducked and dodged around each other.

The ghoul had a look of concentrated fury as he swung the sword at my legs, and as I leapt out of the way he quickly shifted his attack back to my face. I lost my balance and stumbled back as the tip of the blade nicked my cheek, and as I lost my balance he took the opportunity to turn on Bruce. There was a moment when the ghoul was still turning toward him and his shotgun was raised and aimed point-blank at the ghoul. The second seemed to stretch for much longer than it actually was as I waited for him to fire.

He didn't.

Instead he shouted something at the ghoul. His voice was enough to make the ghoul hesitate for a millisecond, but only that. Just as I fired, the ghoul feinted to one side and then the other. He'd moved enough that the bullets didn't kill him, but when they slammed into his shoulder with a wet thud, he shouted in pain. Bruce flinched at the gunshots, and somehow the ghoul managed to recover in an instant and had the presence of mind to pull him off-balance and down, so that the slave was between him and me before I had another clear shot. In one movement, he slithered into a crouch behind Bruce and swept the sword up under his throat. I panicked, but there was nothing I could shoot without hitting Bruce.

Before anything else could happen, Bruce began spewing out a string of loud, fast Chinese. I stared, and the ghoul froze. It was obviously something he'd rehearsed—there was no way he had already learned to talk that well without having practiced what he would say. It was a speech he'd worked on and memorized so that he could use it at this moment. The ghoul didn't interrupt him. I didn't move, fearing the wrath of that blade, so close to taking the life beneath it that I could almost feel it already happening. It made the nerves in the tips of my fingers tingle.

Finally, Bruce's voice slowed, and he hesitantly stopped talking, having said all he could. He swallowed thickly as he looked up at me, waiting for the ghoul to respond. It was silent for a long time, then the ghoul shuddered in pain. Bruce stiffened as the blade moved against his throat. His fingers tightened around the gun he held in front of him. When no one moved, I took a careful step to the side, trying for a better angle. Despite the ghoul's dire injury, he was not distracted enough not to notice. As I moved he shouted angrily, shifting farther down behind Bruce. I stopped, and after a moment he started speaking to his hostage. The strain in his voice was more obvious when he spoke quietly.

"I think he'll talk to us if we let him see to his injuries," Bruce translated softly.

I had to admit, I was impressed the ghoul hadn't passed out already. I grudgingly allowed myself to feel a small amount of respect for him. "Fine," I agreed.

The ghoul growled something else, and I could make out the word 'stimpak' in the middle of it. Frowning back, I reached into my pocket to get one, never moving my sights from the spot just to the right of Bruce's head. I kicked it across the ground to the slave. He handed it back to the ghoul, who grabbed it as quickly as he could with his shoulder still injured, before we could take it back.

The ghoul gestured weakly with his hurt arm for me to move away. As I stepped back, he slowly stood, still clutching Bruce tightly to him. I caught a glimpse of the ghoul's peeling face as he moved, but not enough for a clear shot. They inched over to the door next to them, and the ghoul reached behind him with his free hand to push it open. He slid inside, and for a moment I thought he would take Bruce with him. But then, in one flourish, he folded the sword away from him and shoved him toward me, then quickly shut the door and locked it behind him.

I stumbled as I caught him. When I'd regained my balance, and it was clear that the ghoul wasn't going to reemerge, I held him out at arm's length. I bent to look under his chin. His neck was untouched—the only marks on him were long-healed old scars. He took a deep breath, his eyes closed. I felt him slowly relaxing, and as he swayed a little I tightened my grip on him to keep him upright. "You okay?"

He was obviously still stunned, but he nodded and made a light movement of shrugging off my hands, so I let go of him. I stood straight again, lowering my gun to my side but not putting it away yet. "Idiot," I said, without any real venom. "Why didn't you shoot him?"

He didn't answer.

"You're such a softie," I told him. "I'm surprised it hasn't gotten you killed yet."

"There is a balance to be had between being 'soft' and letting yourself be hurt because of it," he said, almost sagely. "I didn't think he would want to kill me badly enough to silence the first person to speak to him in his own language for probably two hundred years."

I hadn't thought of that before, but he was right. Even if the ghoul hadn't been killing off everyone who came near the ship, there were no other Chinese people around. "You think he's interested in talking? He still sees us as enemies, anyway, no matter what language we're speaking."

"I would be."

"You are already," I corrected him, smirking. "I can feel the eagerness coming off of you in waves. And that's saying something, for you."

"...Yes," he admitted.

I paused when I heard the sound of talking behind the door, but it was clearly not directed at us. I turned back to Bruce. I was reminded of the way he'd spoken to Dawkins when we went to get his asthma medicine. "You make friends wherever you go, don't you?"

"It has worked to our advantage," he pointed out.

"True," I agreed, not that I was fooled into thinking he was all business.

We went silent as we waited for the ghoul to reemerge. I half expected him to leave through another door in the room and circle around back to us, but I could still hear him moving inside.

After a few minutes, I heard the throaty voice from the other side of the door again. Bruce perked up and moved to stand against the wall next to the door. He said something back, and after a moment the ghoul replied.

"What's he saying?" I asked.

"He asks what we want."

"Well go on and tell him. I doubt he's using it. Maybe he'll just give it to us to get us to leave."

Bruce didn't look convinced, but he began talking to the ghoul again. He sounded much less sure of himself now, and his speech was slow as he picked his way through words. I waited while they spoke back and forth.

"He says we can't have it."

I stared at him. "Why not?"

"I don't know."

I sighed, and waited while they talked more. It went back and forth like that for a while, with Bruce forming weird sounds slow and careful, the ghoul talking back impatiently and mistrustfully, and me asking for translations periodically. Bruce tried to explain to him what had happened since the war. Unsurprisingly, the ghoul was not receptive to the information.

Eventually I sat down against the wall as I waited. After a while longer I set my gun down on the ground next to me and folded my arms. Not long after, Bruce did the same, sliding down the wall beside the door. I couldn't understand them, but I listened closely to changes in tone as they spoke. Chinese was a weird language—no matter what emotion they displayed, they spoke with lots of ups and downs with every word. It made it difficult to tell what was going on, but as the conversation went on, it seemed to grow more relaxed.

"I asked him to come out," Bruce said after a few minutes. "He says he will if you leave."

"That's not happening."

"Peaceful negotiations can't go on with a steel door between parties," he said with some exasperation. "Doing what he asks will go a long way toward getting him to trust us."

"Don't be so naive. He'll kill you the second I leave the room." I wasn't positive of that, but I wasn't positive it wasn't true, either. Had the ghoul decided not to kill him earlier because he really didn't want to, or because Bruce had been the only thing standing between my gun and his head?

"He won't." He sighed tiredly and looked over at me. "Please, just trust me."

I was going to point out what had happened when I'd done that during our last contract, but something about the way he said it got to me. It wasn't often that he asked me for something, but it was even less often that he spoke to me so sincerely. Some part of me wanted to hold on to that. I wished he would talk to me like that more often. I suddenly didn't want to argue with him.

He had already been more successful than I'd thought he'd be at placating the ghoul. In any case, if we wanted him to help us, we'd probably have to make a sacrifice like this at some point. He wasn't going to just waltz out with his hands up.

"Tell him I'll put my gun away," I said, "but I'm not leaving."

Bruce talked to the door. I holstered my gun, and waited. After a pause, I heard the ghoul reply again.

"He's coming out," Bruce stated suddenly.

Before I could react, the door swung open. I tensed. The ghoul did not emerge from the room. My hands twitched. I could just see him in the darkness of the room, half hidden behind the door. I held up my empty hands for him to see. Slowly, he came forward until he stood in the doorway. His sword was sheathed. As he stepped into the light my blood ran slightly cold, remembering looking up at that face from the water in the bottom of the ship. I firmly ignored the memory.

"Don't do anything to make him feel threatened," Bruce reminded me, "or we'll be back to square one."

"He feels threatened by us just being here," I muttered, but I set my hands down carefully on the knees of my crossed legs. I watched the ghoul in the low light as his eyes flicked between Bruce and me. He looked tired, now that he wasn't waving that sword around. I suppose I'd be tired, too, if I'd been fighting a war for 200 years. Getting shot probably didn't help, either. He'd taken his jacket off, but there was a concentrated streak of dark, wet, red down the left side of his shirt.

After a moment, he said something, looking at me rather than Bruce. I stared at him as he enunciated slowly, carefully.

"He says you've invaded his ship and he wants you to leave."

"No kidding," I muttered. Then, "Just me? What about you?"

He shrugged. "That's what he said. It probably applies to both of us."

The ghoul continued, and Bruce translated: "This is an act of aggression...if you want to negotiate, leave now. If you go to the main deck, I will speak with you there..." The ghoul gave me a hard look as he closed his mouth tightly. I wasn't going to get any more from him unless I conceded to this request as well.

I stood and backed down the hallway, and Bruce rose to follow. The ghoul didn't move from his doorway until we were halfway down the hall. I could hear him murmuring behind us.

"What's he saying?" I asked under my breath.

"I think he's talking about us," Bruce replied. "I can't tell. He knows I can't understand him very well. When he talks to me he uses simpler words and enunciates more clearly."

"Ask him who he's talking to."

He turned and spoke to the ghoul, who stopped murmuring and snapped something back at him. Bruce kept walking. "He says shut up."

I rolled my eyes. When we got to the door at the end of the hall we stepped outside (several sword lengths away from the door), then waited for him to come out behind us.

I could hear him on the other side of the door. He didn't come out right away. I was about to move to see what was taking him so long when it shut and something that sounded suspiciously like a lock slid into place.

I tried the door. It was indeed locked. And I thought this had been going okay. He'd wanted us out from the start. Now we were.

Bruce called through the door. Unexpectedly, the ghoul answered, in a weary voice. We could hear him quite clearly despite the several inches of steel between us. There must have been a crack between the door and the frame.

"What's he doing?" I waited while they exchanged questions back and forth a few more times.

Bruce turned to me. "I think this might take longer than I thought."

He quietly related the conversation to me after each exchange:

"What did you do that for?"

"We don't have to be in the same room to talk."

"We don't mean any harm, we're not the enemy."

"You're American."

"The United States and China are not at war anymore."

"Do you think I'm stupid?"

"How long have you been here?"

"Tell me what you really want," he said, sidestepping the question entirely.

"I told you, we just want to borrow the transmitter."

"No one would take on an entire enemy ship for something so insignificant."

"But it's hardly an entire ship; you're the only one here."

Another pause. "No," he answered simply. He even sounded like he believed it. "I am not telling you anything, and I am not giving you anything, so just leave."

As Bruce was making his answer, I heard a small noise behind us, coming from the water. "Shhh! Stop!" I hissed to Bruce, and listened. There came a voice that carried over the edge of the boat, sounding distant by the time it reached us, but I could tell it was nearby. Then another voice. Two, no, three, at least. Scavengers? We couldn't have that. The ghoul would think we'd brought them—they'd mess everything up.

I unslung my rifle from my back and walked softly to the edge of the deck. Leaning over the railing, I could see a small wooden boat carrying three men next to the ship. They were all talking—not loudly, but definitely not trying to hide the sound. They must not have been as superstitious as the rest of the city. "Hey," I said in a loud whisper, hoping my own voice wouldn't carry behind that door. One of the men stopped talking and looked up. The others followed his gaze, craning their necks, and they had the sort of looks that told me they probably wouldn't leave just because I told them to. I tried anyway. "This spot's taken. Go somewhere else." I held the rifle at my side, making sure it was in clear view but not yet pointing at them.

"Hey fuck you, bitch," one of them replied loudly, reaching for his own gun. Before he could draw it I'd lifted mine and squeezed off a round. The man—the corpse—toppled backward, nearly capsizing the small boat. Another man fumbled for his weapon and met a similar fate, tipping sideways with a spray of blood.

I turned to the third occupant of the boat, his shocked face huge in my scope. He quickly raised his hands next to his head in surrender. "I'll go! I'll go!" he said. When I didn't shoot, he unceremoniously kicked each of his companions into the water and took up the oars. He began paddling frantically backward, then paused to look up at me again.

"Are you really a ghost?" he asked.

"Yes."

He looked like he wasn't sure he believed me, but even so, he quickly started rowing toward the shore again.

When he was some ways off, I returned the rifle to my back and turned back to the door in the middle of the deck. I stopped when I saw the ghoul standing off to the side of the door, his sword drawn, ready to defend the ship. He'd gotten partway across the deck to me before he'd stopped, apparently to watch the exchange. The look on his face was one of confusion, but it settled back into mild anger as soon as he saw me looking at him.

He glanced back at Bruce, who didn't seem to have moved the whole time. Then back at me.

"You attack your own people?"

"I don't have people," I said flatly.

He looked perturbed at this, but did not reply.

"All we want is the transmitter," I said. "Help us find it, and we'll leave you alone and never come back."

As Bruce relayed this, the ghoul frowned. "I'm sure America has its own radio parts. Why do you need ours?"

Bruce answered this time, coming forward to point at the city. "Because it's too hard to find in a country that stopped running two-hundred years ago. There is no place to buy the part. Do you see the disrepair the city's fallen into?"

The ghoul looked at the skyscrapers for a long moment. From here I could see several that had collapsed completely and one that was leaning on another one. "That's what it always looks like," he said carefully. "It is a broken city."

For a long time they talked as Bruce tried to prove to him that the Great War was long over. The ghoul put his sword away. Sometimes he seemed to almost want to believe him, but he would quickly revert to suspicion and anger just when I thought Bruce might be getting through to him. But he never became upset enough to retreat back into the ship or attack again. It must have been nice enough to talk to someone—regardless of whether he consciously realized how long it had been—that he didn't mind who he was speaking with.

By the time Bruce spoke to me, it took me a moment to realize he was speaking English again.

"Ma'am?"

It sounded like it was the second or third time he'd tried to get my attention. I raised my eyebrows as I turned to him and saw the ghoul already opening the door to the interior of the ship.

"We've come to an agreement," Bruce told me. He looked pleased with himself, in his own way. No one else would have noticed, but I'd been around him long enough that I was getting better at divining his moods. Maybe it was his posture that had changed, or his tone of voice.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"He's going to give us the transmitter. He knows where to find it." He followed the ghoul inside, and I walked back into the darkness behind him, shutting the door after us.

I was surprised they'd reconciled their differences at all. It had taken the better part of an hour, but I hadn't really expected it to happen at all today. But of course, I doubted he would give it to us for nothing no matter how persuasive Bruce was. "In exchange for...?"

"My shotgun."

"You can't give him that," I said reproachfully. Guns weren't rare, but good ones were difficult to come by, and they were expensive.

"He wants nothing else. It's alright, we can find another one later."

"You should have asked me."

"I will ask you next time," he assured me, not very convincingly. The ghoul turned to see what was holding us up, and gestured for us to come.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"He's taking us to the room that has their communications equipment. The transmitter is in there."

"Can't he just get it himself?"

"I can't describe it to him well enough for him to understand what we need. He's just going to take us there and we can find it ourselves."

"He doesn't have a problem with us being in here?" I said, a little taken aback.

"I doubt that," Bruce said, "But this way he at least knows where we are. He says the radios don't work, but if the part is still intact then it shouldn't be a problem."

We turned a corner, went through a small room and down a narrow, steep staircase. We entered a new hallway, smaller than the main one I'd used before. It grew very dark as we descended inside the ship. The ghoul took a flashlight from a pocket and clicked it on. It flickered moodily, and he hit it impatiently against the wall. I resisted the urge to cover my ears at the noise. After a few strikes, something in the light fell into place and it shone steadily.

Finally we came to a communications room. It was small, lined with control panels. The ghoul stepped aside to let us search for whatever it was we needed. I realized as I was looking around the room that I didn't know what this thing looked like.

"Hey Bruce..." I started, but he was already unscrewing the top covering on one of the panels with a screwdriver that, of course, I hadn't thought to bring but he had. I went to look over his shoulder, my shoes squelching as I moved. "You know where it is?"

"No, but this is as good a place as any to start looking. Is that alright?" he asked, not stopping to see if I would agree.

"Yeah, fine."

"How will you know when you find it?"

"One of the Leaguers gave me a note while I was waiting for you that shows what it looks like. I think I'll know it when I see it."

I shone my light down into the control panel for him while he dug. He continued without comment, moving to peer past lights and wires. When he had worked for some time and found nothing, he gave up and replaced the metal sheet that covered the electronics.

I was at first confused about why he bothered—the machine was obviously not functional—but watching how carefully he handled the piece and the way he thoroughly twisted in every screw, I guessed he did it out of respect for the ghoul, who stood with his back to the far wall, staring at some spot in the air near the ceiling. As I'd suspected, Bruce's care was wasted—he wasn't even paying attention. However, just as I was thinking this, the ghoul seemed to notice me watching him and suddenly shifted his gaze to me. I stiffened involuntarily. I was reminded of the way he'd looked after pushing me through the hole in the floor. Not because the expressions were similar, but because of how much they contrasted. When I'd looked up at him from the water I'd almost doubted that I was looking at a living person—perhaps he wasn't a ghoul, he simply really was a walking corpse, because nothing alive could be that cold. But for a moment when he looked at me now I could see the tinges of fear and uncertainty in his face before he had the chance to hide it.

Just as quickly as it had appeared, however, it was gone, and he was just disdainful again. He crossed his arms and glared back at me.

"Could you...?" Bruce nodded to the flashlight that I still held over the control panel. He'd moved on to the next one. I moved next to him again and raised the light over the screw he was currently working on.

A few minutes later, Bruce made a satisfied sound and carefully pried something out of the wall of electronics. He held it up in his own light, now that he had both hands available. The object looked like a circuit board, small enough that it could fit in the palm of your hand. It was kind of annoying how small and simple it was. All that effort, for this.

Several metal prongs stuck out of one side. Aside from that it looked like much of the rest of the inside of the panels, but it must have been unique enough that Bruce could tell it apart from the rest of the parts inside. It was not wet, unlike most of the rest of the ship. Which reminded me: "Won't it get messed up if we take it back under the water?"

Bruce paused, and frowned at the device. "Probably," he agreed. He turned to the ghoul and said something, aiding the words with the usual hand gestures and pauses as he searched for phrases. After a minute the ghoul waved a hand to indicate he understood well enough and Bruce could stop stammering. He turned and walked through the door we'd come in and down the hall. He turned into another room, and then down another hall, and into another room, and up a flight of stairs. Unlike other stairs I'd seen on the ship, this flight didn't stop off at each level—as we climbed up and up I realized it must be taking us even further up, to the structure that was built up above the deck.

As we got closer to the top it got brighter as light shone through cracks and rusted-through gaps in the walls. But it was still a shock when the ghoul thrust open a door to the outside. The white light of the sky glared in, and for a moment I had to cover my eyes. When they adjusted, I carefully followed him outside onto a small platform with a railing around it. It was only after I'd stepped onto it that I realized it was suspended in the air off the edge of the structure, creaking in the wind. The ghoul said something, gesturing to a ladder that hung from the edge of the platform. It only went about three-fourths of the way down to the deck below, but it was close enough. He waved at something invisible near his head, as though swatting a bug, then climbed down. Bruce and I followed him down. I winced as I hit the metal floor too hard. Imaginary pain went through my prosthetic.

The ghoul stood impatiently to the side with his arms crossed.

"We're going, we're going," I muttered, walking back to our canoe. "You should probably thank him, I guess," I said to Bruce.

"I did."

"Of course." As we climbed into the boat, I glanced curiously back at the ghoul. He switched between watching us and looking back at the "broken" city. Maybe something was finally starting to sink in for him. I looked down at the transmitter. The city was going to be even more broken after this.