Chapter Two: Deck Thirteen

By the end of her first week, Mari had learned three important things about attending school on the largest passenger ship ever built.

The first was that the ship did not care about her schedule. Mathematics 4 was on Deck 6 forward and Marine Science was on Deck 9 aft, and between them lay a quarter mile of corridors, two stairwells that looked identical and went entirely different places, and one elevator lobby where, at five minutes to every hour, several hundred students converged at once. She was late twice on Monday. By Thursday she had joined the small hard-eyed minority who took the crew stairs.

The second was that every classroom used to be something else, and the something else was still there if you looked. Marine Science met in what had been a seafood restaurant, and the lab benches stood where the raw bar used to be; you could still read TODAY'S CATCH in ghost letters on the wall behind the periodic table. The teacher suited the room. Dr. Hammond was tall and gray and precise, and on the first day she looked out at thirty first-years and said, "Let's be honest with one another. This school is a cruise line's apology tour with homework. That is not a criticism of you. You may still learn something." Then she taught the best class Mari had ever sat through, as if daring anyone to bring it up.

Navigation met in a converted cocktail lounge with the bar intact, which Mr. Okonkwo used as a chart table. He was broad and quiet and had been at sea longer than most of his students had been alive, and he taught dead reckoning the way other people told ghost stories, leaning in, voice low, as though the mathematics might overhear. Somebody asked him on Wednesday what ship he'd served on before this one. Something crossed his face, fast, and he said, "Several," and turned back to the chart, and nobody asked again.

And Literature met in an ordinary classroom with fairy lights strung over the whiteboard, and Literature was Ms. Winslow, and Ms. Winslow was, by unanimous vote of everyone who had ever taken her class, the reason the school worked.

She had silver-streaked hair and reading glasses on a chain, and she taught poetry like it was gossip about people she knew personally. That first week she gave them Tennyson, an old king who could not stay home from the sea, and read the ending aloud with the lights off and the wake glowing green past the windows: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Then she made them memorize it, the whole last stanza, and when the class groaned she smiled and said, "You're going to spend a year on the ocean. One day you'll want words that fit it. I'm giving you some now, for later."

Mari memorized it. Everyone did. It was that kind of class.

Not every class was that kind of class. Mathematics 4 met in what had been a champagne bar called the Crow's Nest, and the teacher, Mr. Feld, taught quadratics under a chandelier with the enthusiasm of a man reading a timetable aloud. He was not mysterious. He was not secretly anything. He had a laser pointer, a seating chart, and a policy about gum, and Mari spent his periods watching the sea change color in the mirrors behind the old bar and getting, to her own annoyance, quite good at quadratics.

There was PE on the sports deck, where the wind turned every ball game into a new sport with no rules yet. There was French, with films on Fridays. There was homework, actual homework, in quantities that shocked students who had assumed a school on a cruise ship would be a cruise. By the second Thursday Mari had a routine: crew stairs, window seat, library after dinner, notes in handwriting that got worse as the week went on. School, in other words. Exactly like school anywhere, except that when you looked up from the quadratics, the Atlantic was going by.

The third thing she learned was about the tenders.

On day four the Giant stopped. This was an event; the deep engine feeling that had lived in Mari's feet since Miami went quiet, and the whole school migrated to the rails to find Bermuda lying off the port side, low and green, with a town of white roofs stacked above a harbor too small by an order of magnitude for anything the size of them. So the ship anchored out, and boats came to her: supply lighters riding low with produce, a mail boat, a fuel barge, all of it swinging aboard on cranes while the students watched like it was sport.

One crate came up slow and careful, big as a car, stenciled with the name of an oceanographic institute. A woman in a sun hat directed the crane from the deck with small movements of one hand.

"Institute rotation," said Junie, appearing at the rail the way she appeared everywhere, mid-sentence. "Researchers. We've got a whole science wing where the fancy cabins used to be. The PhDs get the suites, their grad students get the good staterooms, and if you're lucky or brilliant they hire students as assistants, which is the best job on the ship, and before you ask, no, I don't have one, I have a different empire." She nodded at the crate. "That'll be a robot. It's usually a robot."

What Mari did not get, that day or the next, was Bermuda itself. Shore time at a tender stop was a lottery, two class groups drawn per stop, and the lists went up at breakfast: not hers. She stood at the rail instead and watched the lucky ones ride the tender in, life jackets orange against the green water, and discovered a new emotion, something between homesickness and theft, watching other people walk on land you couldn't.

"You get used to it," said Theo, who had materialized beside her with his flashlight on his belt, watching the boats the way other people watched fires. "Or you don't, and you learn the ship instead."

"Is that what you did?"

"The ship's better than Bermuda," said Theo. "Bermuda doesn't have a thirteenth deck."

She heard the whole legend that night, in the Boroughs common room, from a fourth-year with a Norwegian accent and the delivery of someone performing a duty he resented.

"It's idiotic," he began, which was how he began most things. "But fine. You count the decks on the elevator panel. Go on. Twelve, and then fourteen. Cruise ships never had a thirteen; passengers are superstitious, so the builders skipped the number. Except." He held up one finger. "Except the Giant is three hundred sixty meters of steel, and the refit sealed off more of her than they converted, and every one of those sealed spaces is on a deck with a number. So when you hear something moving where the plans say nothing is, and you will, the older students say it's on Deck Thirteen. The deck that isn't on the panel. Whatever the company wanted to hide, that's where they keep it." He sat back. "Which is superstitious garbage. The noises are thermal expansion."

"What noises?" said Mari.

The fourth-year looked pleased despite himself. "You'll hear," he said.

She heard two nights later.

It came up through the deck at a few minutes past two in the morning, from somewhere below and forward: a clank, and a pause, and a clank, patient and metallic, going on and on. Half the Boroughs heard it. By breakfast there were six recordings of it going around, all of them useless, all of them thrilling, and Junie's anonymous tip account, which Mari had learned was the ship's real newspaper, had eleven submissions titled some version of DECK 13??

The school's official answer arrived by lunchtime, posted on the class portal with the weariness of an administration that had answered it before: the sounds were thermal expansion of the hull, entirely normal, thank you for your attention to shipboard safety.

Theo read the notice twice and put his tray down with a click.

"It is not thermal expansion," he said. "I know every sound this ship makes. Expansion is a tick. Long, slow, one at a time, when the sun's been on the hull. That was rhythm. That was a machine sound, or a" He stopped, listening to the recording again with his eyes shut. "Effort," he said finally. "Effort, rest, effort. Like lifting."

"Like lifting," Mari repeated, and something clicked into the place in her mind where the unfit things lived, and fit. "Junie. What's behind that bulkhead?"

"According to the deck plan? Nothing. Sealed section."

"According to Theo?"

Theo was already smiling. It changed his whole face, that smile, from a boy who read manuals into a boy who owned the building.

"Want to see the real ship?" he said.

The real ship began behind a door on Deck 5 marked CREW ONLY, which Theo opened with a borrowed key and an apology to nobody, and it was another world folded inside the first one.

The corridors back there were narrow and white and honest: pipes overhead with their contents stenciled on them, frame numbers painted every few meters, the hum of the ship close enough to touch. Theo walked it like a landlord. That's the laundry main, don't touch it in winter. That's frame ninety, you can navigate by the frames when the corridors lie to you. Down here the decks between decks live, half-height spaces, cable runs; the plans call them voids, which is the funniest thing the plans say, because nothing on this ship is void, everything is full.

They went down a ladder and along and down again, past a drained pool with its depth markings intact, past a stack of deck chairs shrouded in plastic, past a set of double doors where, when Junie's flashlight hit the paint at an angle, you could read the ghost of the word CASINO under the white. Mari stopped and looked at that a moment. Painted over, like the plaque. The ship kept doing this, holding old words under new paint, and she was starting to understand that the paint wasn't decoration. The paint was a policy.

The clanking, when they finally came up under it, was very loud and completely unmysterious in character, which is to say it was exactly the sound of somebody working out.

Theo put his hand on a bulkhead door that the plans said led nowhere, and it opened onto light.

The old crew gym was small and low-ceilinged and alive: a rack of ancient weights, a bench patched with tape, a radio on the floor playing music with an accent, and in the middle of it, mid-lift, in a Marseille football shirt gone gray at the seams, the largest man Mari had ever seen indoors.

Everyone froze. The barbell went down with the clank they'd been hunting for three days.

"Okay," said the man, breathing hard, hands up, as though the three teenagers in the doorway were armed. "Okay. Before anyone says anything to anyone."

His name was Chef Baptiste, and he ran the galley, which Junie confirmed in a whisper meant he was one of the most important people on the entire ship, and at two in the morning he could not sleep, because at two in the morning it was dinnertime in Marseille and his whole family would be at his sister's table without him. So he came down here, where the crew of the old Giant had trained, and lifted weights to the radio station he'd grown up with, streamed across an ocean, until he was tired enough to stop thinking in French.

"The gym on Deck Fifteen has windows," he said, wiping his face, "and machines that beep, and it is full of teenagers at all hours, no offense. This one is mine. Or it was." He looked at them with resignation. "The Director will say it's against regulations to be down here. She will be right."

"Why would the Director hear about it?" said Mari.

Baptiste looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at all three of them, recalculating.

"You came down here at two in the morning," he said slowly, "through crew spaces, to find a noise everyone else was happy to call a ghost."

"We don't like ghosts," said Mari. "Ghosts are just facts nobody's checked."

Something happened in Baptiste's face then that would matter for the rest of the year, though none of them knew it yet: he decided they were his kind of people. "The galley," he said, "is never closed to serious persons. You understand me? Growing detectives require feeding." And he sent them back up the ladders with half a tray of profiteroles that had, he said, failed quality control, though nothing had ever been wrong with them at all.

They took the borrowed key back to the engine department office the next evening, and that was when the week put its real cargo quietly aboard.

Theo's father's office was a cabin lined with binders, and while Theo logged the key back into its cabinet, entirely lawful now that it was too late to matter, he pulled a long drawer to show off the thing he loved most: the refit blueprints, the whole conversion, restaurant to classroom, cabin block to laboratory, the largest school on Earth drawn in blue lines.

"Everything's here," he said. "Every change they made. You can see" and then he stopped talking, which for Theo, mid-blueprint, was an event.

At the aft end of the lowest sheets, where the old engine spaces ran, a whole section of the drawing simply wasn't. Not crossed out. Not marked SEALED, like the pool and the casino. The frame numbers ran up to it and stopped, and picked up again on the far side, and in between was a clean gray rectangle and one word: WITHHELD.

"That's not how we mark sealed spaces," Theo said quietly. "We mark them. This is" He touched the gray with one finger. "This came from Solara like this. Before the handover. Somebody took a razor to the record."

He asked his father about it at dinner, casually, the way you ask about a scar. Mari watched the chief engineer's face do a small, careful nothing.

"That section's pre-refit," his father said. "Not our paperwork," and he passed the bread, and that was that.

It should have been nothing. It was, officially, less than nothing: a gray box on a drawing of a ship where an old fire had once made a mess, decades before any of them were born, on a deck nobody visited. But Mari had a wall in her head where the unfit things hung, and that night she hung the gray box next to the painted plaque and the word CASINO ghosting through white, and stood back, and looked. Three things now. Three places where someone had made part of this ship illegible on purpose.

She didn't say any of that out loud. What she said, in the group chat Junie had created for the three of them, at seven minutes past eleven, was:

this chat needs a name

Theo replied: the gym was on deck 4. technically we solved a mystery. we should be a society or something

And Junie, who understood branding the way Theo understood bulkheads, replied with the two words that would end up on an official disciplinary document, a brass keyring, and, eventually, the door of a room with a lock: deck thirteen.

Mari was still smiling at her phone when it buzzed again. Not the chat this time. Junie had forwarded a submission from the tip account, received four minutes earlier, and her only comment was a single question mark.

It was a photograph, badly lit, of the aft service stair. Their stair. The one with the painted plaque, though the plaque wasn't in frame. The timestamp said 3:12 a.m., the night before last, while the three of them had been asleep with profiteroles on their consciences and the whole ship dark.

The caption said: Who else is awake down here?

Mari looked at it for a long time. Then she saved the photograph, and turned off her light, and lay listening to the ship, which ticked once, slow and metallic, somewhere far below.

Thermal expansion, probably.