There was only one passage Meryl could think of which went all the way up to the top decks, and which passengers never, ever saw. So when she was sure Evie had locked the heavy bunk room door behind her, Meryl sent Milly down to the loading docks before she herself headed toward the kitchens.
Meryl had never actually seen the kitchen dumbwaiters, but she knew that they were how food was transported up to the top decks of the steamer, and she figured she could ride one up to B-deck with relative ease (as opposed to another harrowing journey on foot).
The halls between the bunk room and the kitchens were empty and silent, and Meryl was glad to arrive there without running afoul of any stray BadLads.
The oven fires burned all night and the light from the flames bounced off metal cooking surfaces and cupboards of the kitchen until the whole place was lit with a bright, flickering glow. It didn't take long for Meryl to find the dumbwaiters set in the rear of the room, and they were considerably larger than she had imagined. She had expected to be sardine-cramped inside the dumbwaiter car, curled up almost fetal, but she could practically stand in there.
Unfortunately, Meryl quickly discovered that the dumbwaiters were hand-crank operated, which meant she had no way to control it once she was inside the car. She kicked herself for not expecting this, and wished she had brought Milly here first to help her, before sending the younger woman to find their luggage.
"Shit," hissed Meryl, scowling fiercely. She dreaded having to make her way up to B-deck again by some complicated series of ladders and hallways—always with the risk she would take a wrong turning and end up lost, or land right in the laps of a random group of hijackers.
Unless...
Technically, the dumbwaiter passageway still led all the way to the top decks; it was just that Meryl couldn't ride it up. But she could still climb it.
It wasn't a terribly appealing plan, but it was a plan nonetheless.
Meryl used the hand-crank to lower the dumbwaiter car past the opening in the kitchen wall, until she could see only the heavy cable disappearing up into the darkness of the dumbwaiter shaft. She briefly considered just cutting the counterweight free and letting it carry her up the whole way instead of having to climb, but she thought she better not risk it in case she needed to get back down this way.
Tentatively, Meryl crawled through the opening and eased her way onto the dumbwaiter car. When she was sure it would hold her weight, she stood and looked up into the near pitch-black shaft above her. There seemed to be no end to it. She sighed resignedly, and started climbing the cable up into the dark.
The glow from the kitchen fires faded away below her as she got higher, but light shone through the cracks of the dumbwaiter door at each deck, and Meryl counted each faint square outline as she climbed.
Every few minutes or so the steamer would lurch one way or another, making the cable whip dizzyingly back and forth, nearly knocking Meryl loose. She held desperately tightly to the cable each time, and she was relieved to finally reach what she was absolutely-almost-certainly-sure was B-deck. When she reached out with one hand to push the door open, it didn't budge.
Fuck.
Did the doors lock? Meryl hadn't noticed when she had opened the one in the kitchen. She feverishly hoped it was just stuck, and pounded on the door with her fist. Her feet were clamped tightly on the cable and her legs were shaking with exhaustion by now.
Finally she climbed up almost another two yarz and took a death-grip on the cable with both hands before letting go with her feet to kick at the door. Once, twice, three times, and finally with the fourth kick the door burst open. Meryl wrapped her legs quickly around the cable again, heart racing in her chest, and climbed back down.
Meryl transferred both hands to the open door frame and let her feet dangle free, hanging there with her front pressed against the cold metal side of the shaft. She took a deep breath through her nose and pulled herself up and through the open door, tumbling to the floor on the other side.
Taking a moment to catch her breath properly—it had been a fairly stressful ascent—Meryl looked around the room she had, for lack of a better word, landed in.
It was just a large square space with a broad table at the center, where Meryl assumed any incoming food could be arranged and plated to carry out to the steamer's passengers. There were two doors along each of the three walls not occupied by the dumbwaiter opening, and each door had a small placard attached at roughly Meryl-eye-level (as opposed to Milly- or Vash-eye-level). Meryl approached one door carefully, quietly, near enough to read the numbers etched into each placard.
ROOMS B- 261-280
"No way," Meryl whispered, astonished. It couldn't possibly be this easy—nothing was ever this easy. The next door was marked, ROOMS B- 241-260, and the next, ROOMS B- 221-240.
The last on her left read, ROOMS B- 201-220.
Vash was in 219.
"No way!" she said again.
Meryl pressed her ear to the door, not sure what she was hoping to hear, but the only noise seemed to be quite a ways in the distance. She wondered if the BadLads had already swept through this area; if they had started at the top deck, this hall would certainly be cleared out by now.
Dropping onto hands and knees, Meryl flattened herself to the carpet and tried to see through the crack between the door and the floor. All she could see was a sliver of empty hallway and she decided to try opening the door, just half an ich, to see where it would lead.
The knob turned silently and Meryl peeked carefully out. She recognized the hall outside from earlier (that was Vash's room at the end!), but now it was quiet and empty and all the doors were closed. Meryl's only real hope was that Vash might still be hiding in his room, waiting for the chance to sneak out unnoticed. Or, as was more likely in his case, to burst out right in the middle of everything in a grand Idiot entrance.
Not for the first time, Meryl wished she had any clue how Vash's mind really worked.
Deciding she had better make a break for it while the coast was clear, Meryl opened the door enough to peer around at the mouth of the hall and into the main deck area beyond. She couldn't see anyone, hijackers or passengers alike, and sneaked quickly toward Vash's room, staying low and tight to the wall.
The door was locked.
Of course it was.
Voices suddenly sounded more loudly at the other end of the hall, coming nearer, and Meryl panicked, frozen. And then she remembered—another stroke of good luck!—the bobby pin still tucked behind her ear.
She hurriedly twisted the bobby pin apart at the mid-point, giving her two halves and a passable imitation set of lock picks. With no time for finesse, Meryl knelt in front of the door handle and jammed the bent half into the bottom of the keyhole, twisting the lock as far as it would go. The second half of the pick went straight into the lock and starting raking the pins inside with as much care as she could manage.
"Come on, come on," hissed Meryl, partly to the lock and partly to herself. She was several years out of practice, and this was just going to come down to blind luck. "Goddamn it, give," she demanded, giving ever-so-slightly more torque to the bottom pick. One more hasty rake of the pins and, miraculously, the lock clicked open.
Meryl dived forward into the room and abandoned the makeshift lock picks as she closed the door behind her, breathing a quick sigh of relief. She glanced around, impressed at the size and décor of the first-class rooms (despite the situation), but didn't see Vash.
"Vash?" she called quietly. "It's me, we gotta get out of here."
When there was no reply, Meryl stood and crossed the room to the wardrobe, pulling one door open and leaning fully inside it to check the interior. "Vash?" She ran into the attached bathroom and found it similarly empty. Finally Meryl dropped to all fours and looked under the bed. She thought she could see moonslight glinting in two green eyes in the dark.
"There you are," she hissed, annoyed. "What are you waiting for?" Meryl stood quickly and ran back to crouch by the door, chancing a brief glance into the hall. "Come on, it's clear, let's go!"
When she looked back, Vash hadn't emerged from under the bed and she scowled.
"What, are you stuck?" Meryl demanded. She grabbed the edge of the bed frame and pulled it away from the wall. It was heavier than she had expected—maybe he was stuck—and the feet scraped loudly across the floor. Her efforts had only moved the bed about a foot and a half, and she scrambled over the mattress on all fours. "Christ," she muttered. "Do I have to come down there and get you myself?"
Meryl looked down into the shadowy gap between bed frame and wall, hissing, "Vash!"
After a moment she could see more clearly in the darkness and she recognized vaguely the shape of Vash's body, lying on its side with all his spindly limbs sprawled limp and lifeless across the floor.
Suddenly Meryl was scared. "Wait—Vash?"
She reached down and shook him roughly by the shoulder. He didn't rouse.
"Whoa, whoa whoa whoa," said Meryl, panicking. "Vash? Vash!" She scrambled down to the floor, struggling to roll Vash onto his back in the limited space, straddling him across the hips just to fit them both between the bed frame and the wall. His head lolled from his shoulders and she took his face in her hands.
"Whoa, hey—wake up," she demanded, slapping her palm repeatedly against his cheek. "Vash? Can you hear me?" Meryl bent low over him, turning her ear to listen for breath. Almost at once she realized she could already smell his breath, coming soft and shallow and sweet, and she let her nose touch his for a moment just for the comfort of inhaling that familiar scent.
Meryl closed her eyes and gave a quiet sigh of relief to know Vash was still breathing, at least. She drew back to look down at him again, just as someone burst through the door behind her.
Meryl ducked down hurriedly, hiding below the height of the mattress. There wasn't much room left to be had between them, but she flattened herself across Vash's body, trying to see out from under the bed. Her cheek was pressed tight to his forehead and she waited, frozen, trying not to fidget as Vash's bristly hair tickled her nose.
"I swear, I heard something," said the man who had entered. He was shouting back to another man in the hallway outside. Meryl hoped that in the near-dark the man wouldn't notice the small gap between the bed and the wall.
From her vantage point under the bed, Meryl watched the man's dirty white boots stomp into the small bathroom, heard the curtain drawn sharply aside. Then the boots crossed the room to the half-open wardrobe and the second door was flung open wide.
And then the boots approached the bed.
Meryl swallowed hard and held her breath, watching the man step closer. She expected him to stoop down at any second and see them, but instead he suddenly planted one foot hard on the edge of the bed and shoved it back against the wall.
Meryl tensed, crouching even closer to protect Vash's body, but the bed frame still hit her shoulder and she felt the rough edge tear apart the fabric of her shirt and rip into her skin as it passed over them.
She had cried out in surprise and pain, briefly, cutting it short through gritted teeth. The feet of the bed had scraped across the floor again and the frame had hit the wall with a resounding crash! and Meryl hoped they had made enough combined noise to cover the sound.
For a long moment, she bit her lips tightly together, praying she hadn't been heard.
Then the man got down on one knee and put one white-gloved hand flat on the floor. The second hand that appeared was holding an automatic rifle, pointing into the darkness under the bed.
Shit.
Meryl turned her face back to Vash's, trying to condense herself as tightly as possible over his body, hoping maybe she could shield him, if...
She shut her eyes tight and waited.
"NYAO!"
"Fuck!"
Meryl looked up so quickly she hit her head painfully on the underside of the bed, but she managed to do it in time to see Kuroneko leap out from the shadows, from somewhere under the bed Meryl hadn't noticed. He clawed fiercely at the man's hands before streaking across the floor toward the door. The man scrambled up to his feet and Meryl gasped as he opened fire on the cat. The gun spat out a dozen rounds, and the shell casings fell to the floor and rolled under the bed, one of them burning the bare skin of Meryl's leg. She cringed away from it, pulling herself further onto Vash's chest again.
Other people down the hall were shouting now, and the man stomped out of the room, still swearing profusely.
"Just some fucking cat," he snarled, and he slammed the door shut behind him.
Meryl's heart was racing like mad and she took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to calm down again after the last few minutes' panic. When her chest expanded for the inhale it forced her shoulder against the bed again and the new injury stung painfully. She tried to ignore it.
She had hoped the gunfire might have woken Vash, but he hadn't made any sign of noticing it. She could still smell his breath, though, so at least the situation hadn't gotten worse.
Now Meryl was sandwiched pretty tightly between Vash's chest and the bed above them, and it took a few minutes to actually wriggle free and down to the floor, during which time she ended up getting a lot more friendly with Vash's body than she would have otherwise—well, otherwise intended, anyway.
God, he is fit everywhere.
Meryl's cheeks burned, and for one moment she was actually glad Vash wasn't awake. But then she was on the floor next to him and he was still stubbornly unconscious when she needed his help.
"Damn it, Vash," she whispered, scowling uselessly at his unmoving features.
It dawned on her suddenly that she had never actually seen Vash like this before, just so still and silent—two things she rarely saw in him anyway, much less at once. It was so strange to see him without seeing the man in red or the Idiot all over his face, and just see him calm. And for some reason she waited a long moment to really look at him.
God, he's gorgeous.
"Aw, fuck," muttered Meryl, clenching her eyes shut and turning away, furious for even thinking it that loudly.
Feeling embarrassed and ridiculous and angry all at once, she looked back to Vash and slapped him hard across the face, hissing, "Wake up, you Idiot, I need you!" When he still didn't wake, she gritted her teeth and rolled onto her stomach, crawling away from Vash and out from under the bed, saying, "I don't know how you ended up like this, but I bet you deserved it."
Meryl got to her feet, stood in the middle of the room, and fretted.
She didn't know what to do. She had counted on having Vash as an ally in this, and now... Chewing on the tip of her thumb, Meryl glanced around the room, thinking hard. She couldn't get out the way she'd come in, not after all the fuss with the cat; she could still hear the BadLads at the other end of the hall, and she didn't even want to risk opening the door just to look out. That left only one other option, and she looked resignedly up at the partially exposed air vent in the ceiling.
"Great," she muttered.
Meryl retrieved the bobby-pin-turned-lock-pick from the floor by the door and held the pieces in her teeth as she clambered up to stand on the top of the clothes dresser below the air vent. She could only just reach the metal grate that would lead to the air ducts above, but she managed to slide one half of the bobby pin into the flat-head groove of one of the screws. It took ages to get the first screw out, and then another hundred years or so to remove the second.
Bending the grate open was faster than taking the time to remove all four screws, and Meryl hauled herself up into the air ducts, trying not to cut herself on the sharp edges of the vent. Bending the grate back into place as best she could, Meryl tried to get her bearings.
She hadn't really grown much since sixteen, so the air ducts were only as cramped as she remembered. She could still move pretty freely, on hands and knees, without making too much noise. She had always been volunteered to run errands like this, as the smallest, through (or into) areas usually off-limits to people of her pay grade. Her size had always put her in the strangest situations, able to reach things others couldn't, squeeze into places others couldn't. It had made Meryl a useful commodity back then, but it was annoying as hell.
Now she remembered how damn cold it was, crawling through these stupid tin-foil tunnels, and Meryl wished she was wearing something more than her nightshirt. But she knew where she was going, or at least she was pretty sure, and she made good progress heading aft.
Until she turned a corner and ran head-first into someone else.
Both of them gave a little grunt of surprise and pain, each knocked backward slightly by the collision with the other, and by the time the stars had cleared from her vision Meryl could see the faint shadow of the other person scrambling away in the opposite direction.
"Hey, wait!" she hissed, hurrying after them so quickly Meryl knew she would be making too much noise. "What the hell—who are you? Get back here!" Meryl caught up and seized one leg of the person's trousers, yanking back, hard.
"Get off me!"
It was just a boy, Meryl realized, young enough that his voice cracked when he yelled at her. He lashed out, kicking at her, and Meryl let go as the heel of his shoe contacted squarely with her fading black eye.
"Fuck!" she hissed, stopping her pursuit to sit back on her heels and press both hands over her face. "Shit-fuck!" It was very literally blinding pain, and the ache remained there, throbbing, even after she managed to open both eyes again and blink away tears. The boy was gone, and though she could still hear him scrambling awkwardly away, his jarring movements echoing through the thin metal air ducts, Meryl had more important things to do than follow him.
She needed to find Milly, and fast.
Continuing aft, Meryl abruptly discovered she didn't know the airways quite as well as she remembered; the metal surface below her had suddenly disappeared in a sharp slope and she was falling, half sliding and half tumbling down a steep chute at a dizzying rate.
The salmon sandwich she'd had for dinner was dangerously close to making a reappearance when the slope of the chute finally lessened and began to level out. Meryl had no idea how far she had fallen—it felt like iles!—and was relieved to be finally sliding to a halt on her belly. She rolled over and lay flat on her back for a few minutes, just breathing slowly and trying not to throw up. When her insides had finally settled, she returned to all fours and started crawling forward again.
Meryl had absently noticed the force of the air flowing toward her was growing stronger, but didn't stop to think about the implications until the floor disappeared beneath her hands again and she was only barely able to stop herself falling forward and out into one of the large, vertical shafts that ran the whole height of the steamer—and more importantly, from falling into the spinning blades of the massive fan that was pushing the cold air all the way to the uppermost decks.
Adrenaline was making Meryl's heart pound quadruple-time and she scrambled back several yarz in a matter of moments, but this time the nausea won out and she retched, wiping her mouth on her sleeve as she caught her breath again.
Fuck this.
She must have fallen far enough that none of the BadLads would still be looking around these levels for passengers, so she found her way to the nearest legitimate access panel, where steamer crew were able to get in to make any needed repairs or adjustments, and let herself out.
Some of her earlier good luck seemed restored as Meryl found herself back down near the loading dock where she and Milly had boarded earlier that day. When she made her way toward the storage units near the rear of the steamer, Meryl was alarmed to find every one of them standing open. When she looked into the first, it was obvious someone had searched it, leaving things in total disarray.
Oh no...
Meryl ran, as panicked now as she had been when she found Vash unconscious, and slid to a halt in front of the storage unit where she and Milly had left their luggage.
"Mil—shit!"
Meryl had come face to face with one of the BadLads and she dived sideways into the adjacent storage unit. She was scrambling to hide behind a row of smaller storage lockers when she heard the man shout, "Ma'am, wait!" She sat with her back to the cold metal of the lockers, bewildered.
"Ma'am, it's me!" said the man.
Meryl didn't have a goddamn clue what was going on and she wasn't going to move until she figured it out. But—what the hell?
"Meryl Elizabeth Stryfe, get out here," the man demanded, and Meryl gasped. What—how the fuck—what the hell?
Meryl finally hazarded the best guess she could and took a quick peek around the lockers and toward the open door of the storage unit. It was definitely one of the BadLads standing there, wearing the bulky black suit with three neon stripes on each massive shoulder, but he was holding Milly's stun-gun.
"Milly?" she called, finally.
"How else would I know your name?" said the man, sounding annoyed. "Mr. Bernadelli makes me do the filing when Karen is gone!"
That convinced her. Meryl came out from hiding and the person in the suit waved cheerfully at her.
"Hi, Ma'am!" he said.
Meryl smiled, finally, and reached out to remove the suit's gas-mask faceplate.
"Oh, thanks!" said Milly, in her own voice, now unaltered by the faceplate, and she beamed at Meryl. "I didn't know how to do that..."
"What happened?" asked Meryl, laughing, handing Milly the faceplate.
"Two of these men came down searching the warehouses," said Milly. "I got them with my stun-gun, and put on one of their suits in case more of them came looking." Then she frowned, saying, "It's really stuffy in here, though."
"That was a really good idea, Milly," Meryl said, suddenly realizing they could use the suits to move about the steamer without attracting attention. "We can use them as camouflage."
Milly beamed even more brightly at Meryl, clearly pleased to have been of such help.
"But there's only two," Milly said, now frowning. "What about Mr. Vash?"
Meryl's sudden delight in finding this new plan ebbed away and she felt the smile slide from her face. Milly looked at her uncertainly, and Meryl shook her head.
"We're on our own," she said, grimly.