OH my good gravy, is it good to be back! I hope you are all glad to see me? *nervous grin* Those flaming torches and pitchforks are for a... uh, a barn party, right? Ahaha heheh... yeah. Well, I've just crawled out of a black hole of craziness, schedule-wise, and I am so sorry for my absence. But life is settling down for me now, I think, what with the musical over (which went great, by the way. :) Much Sondheim fun was had) and I am ready to dive headfirst back into fan fiction! Starting with this chapter, which takes place about five days after the last one. In case you can't remember what happened in the last one (and I don't blame you), here's a brief review: While Monique is taken aboard the Mapache ship, Tintin escapes being blown into bits and sneaks onto the ship before they leave Sanya, heading for Saudi Arabia. Yes? Nod your head if you remember. Good. I apologise in advance for any sentences that don't make sense, this site has a tendency to randomly delete words from chapters when I post them. Very aggravating. So... *rubs hands together and blows on them, it is COLD in my room* here it is, ready or not.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
PARALLEL
September 30th, 1944
Somehow, the thin line that connected Monique's feet to her mind had broken. She wandered the hallways of the Sea God, one hand slightly lifted towards the wall, in case she lost her balance. It was all off-kilter. She saw this like she was disconnected from it, looking down at the unsteady girl weaving between the Mapaches, heads down, shoulders up, avoiding eye contact.
Monique was fine with that. She didn't need their sympathy, or their curiosity.
Screams echoed through the ship. Blank faces pinned her to the wall. "Stop struggling." Strong hands, pressed against hers. "What's done is done."
She let her feet lead her, blind through a maze of metal walls. Her mind was a sieve; everything passed straight through. There was nothing else it could hold now, no other face or voice. She saw nothing, touched even less.
Her last breath was for his name. And then the boat was struck with sound. Then silence.
They'd unlocked her door. That had been their first mistake. Monique made herself difficult to keep track of, a talent of hers. It was hard to make sure she was eating if she never kept still. Everyone was busy, anyway.
The concrete stopped her fall. Breath ripped from her body. The darkness fell over her like blood, in her head and on her hands. "Tintin." A broken word, a sob. "I'm so sorry…"
It took her almost six days to realize, as she walked aimlessly through the hallways, there was one face she kept expecting to see, popping up from his work, or turning to her mid-laugh. But Alex was nowhere to be found. She tried to get up her courage to ask someone about him, but never quite made it. The best she'd done was ask the date. September 30th. Six days since… Sanya. She held the word like a photograph, every memory burned into it in horrible, vivid detail.
Round gold stone in her fingers. A strangled cry, a quick fist, and the compass hit the wall.
They were close to Saudi Arabia now, probably. That morning, Monique had made up her mind to find Alex. He couldn't avoid her forever. But now, as she made her way to the centre of the ship, she wasn't so sure. The foot traffic in the halls became denser the closer she got to the bridge, where he was sure to be. After so much quiet in her own corner of the ship, the noise was deafening. Every voice, tap, laugh, knock, and heavy footfall suddenly tugged at her ears, as men swirled past her, bumped up against her, murmuring apologies. She was 'in the way.'
Ears buzzing, Monique descended two flights of stairs to reach the lowest level, where the halls were quiet and poorly lit. The ship lurched, and she was pitched against a door. It should have been locked, lower level doors usually were, but instead it gave way and Monique, surprised, tumbled in.
She wasn't sure what it was at first. An angry, frantic wave of papers had conquered the desk, and threatened to spread to the floor as well. The shelves held a strange collection of envelopes, inkwells, books, unidentifiable bottles and naval instruments, all bound together by a layer of dust. Monique inhaled a mouthful of some musky scent that flipped her stomach, almost making her gag.
She put the back of her hand over her mouth and approached the desk. Someone had been there recently. The chair was off to one side, its seat free of dust, and the surface papers had been freshly ruffled, uncovering a small black radio. A notebook perched on top of the pile, and she picked it up.
Immediately she caught a strong whiff of familiar musky cologne, and raised an eyebrow. So, this is Macarthur's office. That explained the god-awful smell. Monique ran a hand over the notebook's frayed cover and felt the rush she used to get, a long time ago, when stealing was out of necessity and, more and more often, out of pleasure. Pure adrenaline crackled through her stomach, undoing the knot and replacing it with restless flutters instead. She fell back into the chair and cracked the notebook open, something like a smile playing on her lips.
The pages were worn with half-formed sentences, crossed out words, symbols and question marks, all in the same liberal, scrawling hand. It was almost impossible to read, covered with splotches of the dark red ink he used. Not quite the colour of blood, but the suggestion of it. Monique was contemplating whether or not the notebook was worth stealing when heavy, awkward footsteps came from around the corner at the end of the hall. She jolted upright, and after a split-second calculation, tossed the notebook back onto the desk, before skidding out the door into the hall.
She glanced to her left and swallowed. The boots she'd heard coming down the hall belonged not to a Mapache, but to one of Macarthur's goons, a different breed altogether. He was tall and off-putting, and always seemed to be leaning to one side. When he saw Monique, he lifted an eyebrow and frowned, setting his face off-balance, too.
"Hold up there, miss, not so fast," he ordered, in an Australian clip, but Monique had already darted past him towards the stairs. She whirled around the corner and took the stairs two at a time, panic climbing up her throat, before she burst out the door at the top into the dining level. It was midday, and swarming with hungry Mapaches, edging past Monique into their own respective dining halls. She was grateful for the crowd now, and let herself be swallowed up in it, even though she wasn't sure if Macarthur's goon would bother chasing her here. If she'd been doing anything those past five days, it was establishing that she wasn't a threat. Threats didn't melt into the walls at every passing glance, or avoid meals.
Meals… the smell of food filled her mouth as if she'd already taken a bite, and Monique's stomach stood at attention. It was easy to deny it food in her lonely corner of the ship, but here, it wasn't going to be denied. Monique risked a glance over her shoulder, and connected with the searching eyes of Macarthur's goon, who scowled and began moving towards her.
With another jab of panic, Monique slid through the nearest open doorway into a riot of noise. Rowdy laughter mingled with shouts, jeers, and forks rattling against plates as the rows of bobbing faces dug into their hurried meal. Monique saw the stripes on every shoulder, and her mouth went dry. She'd stumbled into the lieutenant's mess hall.
Alex was a lieutenant.
She stood frozen, scanning the room for a full five seconds before she was hit by the silence. It had fallen over the room in a ripple, quick enough that she didn't notice until after it had settled. All conversation stopped, forks halted halfway from plates, every mouth fallen still. Men turned around in their seats.
Every pair of eyes was fixed on her.
Monique felt a rush of blood to her head, so fast she thought she might fall over, but she stayed upright somehow, her feet rooted to the floor. The surprise turned to contempt, one by one, a subtle shift in every face. A few men turned back around, shaking their heads. Some dropped their eyes to their plates.
A chair was pushed backwards, scraping the floor like a knife on ice. Monique went weak with relief for the distraction, as every head turned to the sound, but her relief was short-lived.
Alex was burning from his collar up, neck straining as he lifted his face towards Monique, hands still resting on the table. He was livid. His mouth was pinched but soft at the edges, moving in slight twitches. He was keeping control, but barely. Monique felt a pitch in her stomach, as if the ship had just dropped off a waterfall. This can't be happening.
Her brother broke his gaze like it hurt to look at her, and in three long strides he'd crossed the empty floor to clamp his hand on her shoulder, glaring at the space above her head. Monique felt her legs threaten collapse.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" He spoke quietly, in English. It was all wrong. English was their language, for inside jokes, used in private only. Not in front of a room full of people, watching them.
Monique opened her mouth, but choked on her own words before she could get them out. In the end, she just shook her head.
"You're not welcome here." Every word had to twist itself out his clenched jaw. "Do you understand?" He tilted his gaze down into her eyes, demanding a response. When this wasn't enough, he grabbed her chin in his hand, tilting her face up, hard. Monique gasped for breath. His eyes bore into hers with cold precision, the way he looked at a target before he blew it away. There was no mercy in the hard line of his mouth, the turn of his jaw.
"Yes," she whispered.
Alex's hand fell back to his side, where he clenched and unclenched his fingers, eyes still locked with hers. He opened his mouth, then closed it, breathing out through his teeth as if in pain.
"Don't come looking for me again." The words were soft and quick, somewhere between an order and warning. Monique dropped her eyes to his jacket and wrenched herself backwards, away from him, until she stumbled over her feet out the door, and started running. She ran until she couldn't hear his voice echoing in her ears, and her chaotic heartbeat started pounding in time to her feet. She ran until she'd reached the far end of the dining level, down a flight of stairs to the dark, silent halls where the surplus food was stored.
She stopped, half-lost in trying to remember the turns she'd made, and put her weight against the wall. She was too exhausted to stop the tears burning her cheeks. She clenched her eyes shut. There was no point in pretending to be brave, with no one left to convince.
Monique couldn't understand how it had gone so wrong. She should've yelled at Alex, grabbed his wrists to hold him there and make him understand. I've been looking for you the past two months. You can't let me go now, after everything… It was something small and delicate that snapped inside her chest, and she surrendered to the sobs as they came in waves, shaking her shoulders. Every breath was an uphill battle, gulping as much as she could before she was drowning again. She slid to the floor, hands curling up like dead things at her sides. Another gasp, shuddering, and Monique let it go in a sob, loud enough to make her chest jolt, before she snapped still again. She held her breath.
Within the space of the sound, something else had moved. A faint rustle around the corner. Monique clapped a hand over her mouth and listened, eyes wide.
The sound came again, so soft she might've imagined it. But Monique knew better than that. She got to her feet and ventured a few steps down the hall, then stopped and tilted her head, just in time to catch the shuffle of footsteps.
"Hello?" she called out. The footsteps stopped. "Who's there?" she added, a little more bravely. The footsteps started again, picking up pace before they faded quickly into nothing, absorbed by the walls. Monique leapt around the corner a second too late, staring down an empty hallway. She furrowed her brow. Whoever it was, they weren't supposed to be there.
Monique glanced into the room they'd burst out of and saw, not to her surprise, what looked like a pantry. A couple hundred cans still lined the lowest shelves, as well as a few lonely bags of rice. But it was the bag of bread, torn open and half empty, that had been the thief's interest.
Monique felt strange, as if she'd skipped a breath, standing in front of the shelves where this thief had been standing seconds before; someone with a light tread, just as hungry as she was. She frowned, ripping off a hunk of bread, before she switched off the light and retreated down the hall.
/*/*/*/
Tintin hadn't been prepared for that. Five days on the same ship and his luck hadn't run out until the minute he wasn't expecting it to. He was tired, cold, and hungry, not to mention tired of being cold and hungry, and her voice had stopped him in his tracks. Her footsteps, one on top of the other.
For a moment, he'd been waiting for her to turn the corner. Wanting her to.
He'd been a moment short of disaster.
He collapsed back against the wall a few long corridors away and cursed himself, silently, for getting so close. He'd been curious, confused, listening to her harsh, shaky breaths. He couldn't think about it too much, he decided.
The bread was safe, at least, wrapped up in a rag he'd found in the hold, part of which he'd ripped off to change the bandage on his side. Usually he waited until the middle of the night to sneak about, but today it had been unavoidable. They would reach Duba before nightfall, and he had to be ready by then. He'd hole up in the gun crate to hitch a ride with the Mapaches to Ha'il, and work something out from there. He did remember, with a stab of guilt, that he'd promised to meet up with the Captain in Duba, but it couldn't be helped. He would try to send a message of some kind, when he could.
His wits recovered, Tintin straightened up and made his way through what was now a familiar tangle of passageways, back to the hold where his crate waited for him. He rounded the last corner, not ten metres from safety, when footsteps echoed down the corridor behind him. A bolt of panic lifting his feet, Tintin sprinted down the last stretch and jumped into the hold, looking left and right for somewhere to hide as the heavy boots got closer. There were two different echoes, one of them a wheedling Australian accent tripping over his own feet.
"I'm sorry, boss, she ran 'inta the lieutenant's mess, I couldn't follow 'er-"
The other's steps were quick, purposeful. "I understand that, you numbskull, but she shouldn't have been in my study in the first… Oh, never mind," Macarthur growled as he stepped into the hold.
Flattened against the wall beside the entryway, Tintin held onto the door handle for dear life, keeping the door in front of him. He heard the Australian henchman tumble in soon after, not before bumping his head on the doorframe.
"Ow…"
Tintin could almost hear Macarthur rolling his eyes.
"Close the door," he ordered.
Crumbs.
Tintin ran his hand along the wall beside him, desperate, before he hit something. A switch. He flicked it down right as the Australian grabbed the door. The lights, set in rows across the ceiling, flickered off, and the room was plunged into darkness.
"What the…" The thug took a step back, while Tintin darted around him, eyes adjusting quick enough to make out the shape of his crate before he dove into it and pulled the lid over his head. He thanked the clumsy henchman for masking his noise with frantic, blind smacking at the wall.
"How peculiar, I wasn't aware that the door looked so much like the light switch," Macarthur spat.
"I didn't do it boss, honest, I-"
"Just shut up and find the switch, and be quick about it."
The lights came back on overhead, and the door slammed shut. Tintin tried to keep his breathing shallow, hugging the bread to his chest. He watched through the slats of the box as the henchman's thick legs came up to the table, hesitant, where Macarthur stood, fiddling with whatever he'd set down.
"What'd you 'ave to go in here for, anyways?"
"Well, my study is no longer safe from a certain foolish girl, and I have to listen to this broadcast somewh- don't. Touch. That."
Tintin blinked. There was only one girl on the ship. What was Monique doing in Macarthur's study?
He kept grumbling, "That girl is a certified nuisance. If only I could've given her the same 'adieu' I gave her reporter friend… Ah, well."
The henchman started to say something, but was hushed by the buzz of static, screeching in and out as Macarthur turned the frequency. A radio, thought Tintin, cocking an ear as the static settled down, and a voice picked itself out from the hum.
"Wha… it's gibberish," the henchman said after a minute.
Macarthur shushed him. "It's Arabic, you imbecile. Be quiet, the English version of the broadcast will come through shortly."
The Arabic voice stopped, and after a pause, another voice began.
"This program has been interrupted to bring you an important bulletin from Ha'il. This morning the palace of Sahib Muhammad Kalahn, owner of the oil company Ricaco, was declared unsafe and evacuated after an alleged accident that occurred on the grounds last night."
"Accident?" Macarthur's henchman repeated. "Was that part of the pla-"
"Silence."
The radio droned on. "Four men died in the accident, and have been identified as visiting scientists Dr. Arnold Renshaw, Dr. Ned Blooms, Dr. Otis Park, and Dr. Louis Abbey. Sahib Kalahn issued a statement this morning, declaring the men were working for him, but withheld the details of their employment. One member of the team, Dr. Cezar Dudek, is missing and may still be inside the palace. A full investigation of the grounds is postponed until the area is declared safe. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming."
The radio shut off with a click. Macarthur drummed his fingers on the table top. His henchman, out of either befuddlement or wisdom, stayed quiet.
"So that's it, then." Macarthur's fingers stopped. "Dudek's cracked at last."
"But how did the other scientists die?" The henchman wanted to know. "Did they blow up in their own bomb?"
"No, you dimwit. It's not that kind of bomb."
"You mean the kind that explodes?"
Macarthur sighed heavily. "I mean, it destroys in other ways. It… oh, why am I trying to explain this to you? Anyway, it doesn't matter what it does, we just have to make sure it gets out of there safely. I don't know what possessed Dudek to pull this little stunt, but I know how to fix it." His voice lowered, talking more to himself. "I will have his precious 'project,' even if I have to take it from him myself."
His heels scraped the floor as he turned, and addressed his henchman, "Perry, tell Capitán Garcia I want a message broadcast over the entire ship. We're moving plans ahead a day early. They must be ready in Ha'il by tomorrow at sundown, whatever it takes." There was a pause. "Well? Get to it, then!"
Perry scrambled out of the room. Macarthur lingered a moment longer, then picked up his radio and flicked off the light. He strode from the room as he shut the door behind him, in one fluid movement.
Tintin let the silence settle over him, grateful for it as his mind raced, his thoughts tripping over each other. The entire time he'd been working on the case it had seemed like there was something missing, a crucial piece of the puzzle, and here it was, staring him in the face. This project of Dudek's was what the businessman had been after all along, and he was about to use the Mapaches' "coup" as a distraction to swoop in and get it. It was brilliantly simple, Tintin had to admit. And yet, there was a soft spot in the plan, and that was Dr. Dudek himself.
The key was getting to the scientist before Macarthur did. Then Tintin could… well, he'd figure out the details later. He'd also have to uncover Macarthur's treachery to the Mapaches somehow, stopping their pseudo-takeover before it could begin. Perhaps he could find some incriminating evidence in their headquarters in Ha'il, assuming that's where the guns would end up. But how to find Dudek and stop the Mapaches, at once?
Tintin settled back into the crate, in the space he'd carved out among the MP-44's. He was wide awake now, thinking about Dudek and the bomb that didn't explode, and the fact that he really needed to be two places at once, without the Captain, who would be stuck in Duba. Tintin could almost relax into his own flurry of ideas and questions. He could survive the wait like this, as long as he didn't fall asleep.
Sleep was an invitation for dreams, and he couldn't take any more dreams of her. Macarthur's so-called nuisance. She felt so much closer now, her short, desperate breaths echoing off the walls. Soft footsteps, about to collide with his. Who had she been crying for?
Tintin sighed. Who am I kidding?
It was going to be a long wait.
Okay, now that you've read it, confession time: I am having a hard time connecting with this story again, after such a long time away from it. I don't know if you guys are feeling that too, reading it, but I just can't seem to find my rhythm. So if this chapter seemed... well, not my best, then you're right, and I'm truly sorry. Hopefully I can lure my muse back soon. It didn't help that this wasn't the most exciting chapter ever, but crucial nonetheless, which is why I'll be writing like a madman (madwoman? whatever) to get the next chapter up soon, before everyone forgets the things I slipped into this chapter to set up the next ones. Consider this the calm before the storm, because the next chapter sparks the race to the finish, and I do hope you'll be along for the ride.
Which reminds me! If a review strikes you, feedback for this chapter would be so helpful; what worked, what didn't, what you thought about Monique's reaction to the events of last chapter... Anything you have to say, I would love to hear. Seriously. I would love it so much, in fact, that I'd give you some fresh, buttery shortbread, straight out of the virtual oven. Mmm... *dusts crumbs off keyboard* I hope to be putting up the next chapter soon, but until then, merry Deswember to all! (I'm wearing a sweater every day of this month to celebrate. Join the movement!) Catch you guys later! ;)