Page 135 of The Girl Out of Time
It was a wider, seemingly endless corridor, and after a second, the memory from long ago clicked into place. This was where she’d come from, before she got disoriented in a maze of smaller hallways. “Thank you!”
She ran in the pointed direction, spirits lifting as the water grew shallower. Seconds dragged by in eternity, with only her footsteps as company, now pounding on the wooden floor. She passed the crew staircase she remembered from before; and closed and open doors to the crew quarters—bathrooms with their lines of sinks and mirrors, cabins with steel-framed double beds, abandoned to silence. When she’d been out on the promenade deck, the length of the ship was perfectly fitting for awalk. Down here, it was never ending, and if the hallway wasn’t obviously straight, she’d have thought she was going in circles.
A pale, rock-like object about a foot across lay on the floor, a splattering of smaller white bits leading up to it. She squinted at it as she approached, bending over. The chunk reminded her of the unpolished aquamarine she’d seen in the British Museum: a perfect icy blue and sheer white with a rough surface. She touched it, then drew her hand back at the searing cold.
Ice.What the hell was going on? Oh, and she’d forgotten to ask that man. He only mentioned an evacuation.
She stared at the chunk of ice for a moment more—how strange, this little similarity between her two lives—then focused back on her task, and resumed her run.
After an eternity more, new voices greeted her, and she hurried toward the sounds of life. There was no large, open common room on this side, but the hallway bent around several sets of stairs filled with people. Oh, people! How happy she was to see them again. Even if it was chaos; even if men yelled and women scampered around and children cried.
The crowd was concentrated at the staircase. Several people craned their necks to look above, but nobody moved. “Hey,” a man on the stairs yelled. “Get going, will ya?”
Frustrated responses, both male and female, were shouted from above, the scene resembling a fervent exchange at a market.
“Theo!” Emmeline scanned the crowd. So many dark heads, so many gray and brown jackets—
“Emmeline?” One head, about halfway up the staircase, turned.
“Theo!” She tried to move past a few passengers, but with a strict, “Hey, wait in line,” they held her back.
Theo jostled toward her instead, disrupting the tightly woven crowd. Once he got free of the last few people pushing toward the staircase, Emmeline leaped into his arms, covering him with kisses.
“You remember me,” he said.
She looked into his eyes. Theo, and Leon. One and the same. “I remember you. I know you now.” She kissed him again; on the lips, on the cheeks, on his nose. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry I’m late, or that I sent you here too early.”
“I’m not,” he said, smiling as he held her face. “Up to this night, it’s been quite entertaining.”
“What’s happening?”
“They say we’ve struck an iceberg. I don’t know—I was in my cabin, and water started leaking in. Stewards came to tell us to get ready, that we’re going to board the lifeboats, but not to worry, it’s only a precaution.”
The chunk of ice. The water filling the other side of the ship, growing deeper by the second. This didn’t feel like a precaution.
“My family,” she said. “I need to find them.”
Theo looked up the stairs. “I’m sure your family was alerted, as well. We’ll find them on deck. But nobody’s come told us how to get to the boats. Only that we should gather upstairs, in the smoking room.”
Emmeline was about to say, “I know where to go,” but a frantic look around stopped the words from leaving her lips.Didshe know? She knew where the boats were, when she’d been walking along the promenade—but that was an entire ship’s maze away from them, and she had no clue how to get to it from here.
Her feet quivered; perhaps from the cold, but also from the nerves. She didn’t like being down here. That long abandoned hallway and its implications made her nauseous, and a feeling deep in her gut whispered toher they shouldn’t wait for someone to come and give them instructions. They shouldn’t lose any more time.
Hold on—she knew one exit out of here. The crew staircase. “Come!” She grabbed Theo’s hand and pulled him toward the hallway. “I know another way out. We can get to the grand staircase. It’ll be easier from there.”
Theo let her lead the way, and back into the gloom they went. Past the doors again, past the chunk of ice, and there! The staircase. She swung around the railing. “Down here! We can get through the linen closets to the Turkish baths, and from there, it’s straight up to—” As she rushed down the stairs, water came to greet her. But this one was worse. Not just a few inches; the stairs disappeared into several feet of bottle-green void.
Theo stopped behind her. “How far is it to the baths?”
If only she could remember—but it was almost a year ago now, and when she’d last made her way through here, she was pushing forward in anger without taking much heed of where or how she was going. “I don’t know. At least an entire hallway. Two.”
He stepped into the water, up to his knees, and shivered. Emmeline pulled him back. “No, you can’t go. We have to find another way.”
They backed out, returning to the corridor. Should they go back to the aft staircases? But by now, they’d be even worse off. More people would’ve gotten in line before them, and they’d already been at the back. Emmeline glanced around, biting her lip. “What about the crew? How do they get out?”
Theo’s eyes widened. “The emergency exits. By the funnels. I saw crewmen checking them a few days ago.” He tried the other doors, yanking on the handles one by one. She followed him down the tilted hallway even as water started licking at their feet again.
“This one.” The door in question was a smaller one, offset from the floor by about a foot. An electric light beside it blinked white, illuminating a single silver knob without a visible keyhole. Theo pulled, but it didn’t give.
