Stranded (24 page)

Boucher stared at him with a dull menace. “Yeah? You guys saving leftovers for the cat?”

Connor was unmoved. “We only had to institute this rule recently. 'Til a couple of days ago, everyone had a real healthy appetite, and there
weren't
any leftovers.” He finished his last forkful and stood, picking up his own plate and Michael's. “You sure you're not hungry?” he asked before taking the food away. Michael snapped back into the present and nodded. Connor took the uneaten meal to the galley window.

“This has been real nice, MacAllister,” Brewster said. “But I'm starting to think this talk of others being aboard the ship is bullshit. We've been here over an hour and the only person on this rig I've seen is you. Where's the rest of the crew?”

Connor's lips went narrow and long again. He nodded toward Brewster's plate. “You just met one. How'd you like the second officer?” he asked.

Boucher shoved back from the table with sudden force, his screeching chair echoing in the dead silent room. Jack's and Kevin's mouths hung open in mute disbelief. Noah stared at his friend through slitted eyes searching for the sign it was all a joke. Brewster's expression remained impassive. Connor gave it another beat before allowing a sly smile to creep up his face. “Just kidding.… We'd never eat anyone who could pass the officer endorsement exam. Not even if he had feathers.” His eyes shifted toward the door. “A few of the men mustered in the rec room while y'all were eating. The ones with the energy to get out of bed, anyway. Y'all are welcome to head over.”

Brewster stood and stalked out of the room without saying a word. The rest of the men rose to follow him. Noah hadn't heard anyone moving around in the hall, but then, he and everyone else had been pretty intensely focused on the meal. A New Orleans second line might have marched through the middle of the dining room without him noticing. He scarfed down the last of his pasta and stood up. He took his plate to the galley window, following Connor's lead, and set it on the end of the serving ledge before following them across the hall.

The men waiting in the rec room all had the same shipwrecked look as Connor. Except they all, to a man, looked worse off than he was. Thin and wasted, every one wore an untrimmed beard and their unruly hair was greasy. They were conserving more than food. The
Arctic Promise
had been loaded with supplies intended for the oil workers. Not only drilling material like concrete and fuel, but food and water for their use and consumption. While Connor might have been hauling over supplies a sled load at a time, there was no way to get the water deep in the ship's hold to the platform. It was likely frozen solid in the tank. A person could live without food for much longer than it would take to die of dehydration. Even if they were drinking melted ice, that likely meant no shaving, and limited or no showers.

Noah stared, gape-mouthed, at the unfamiliar yet familiar men looking back at him. Every last one of them had a haunted look in their eyes from months of isolation. Or perhaps it was from seeing the versions of themselves who walked into the room, the same, but a few months younger. A lump grew in Noah's throat at the sight of the crew. Men he barely recognized resolved into familiarity with small postures and gestures particular to each of them.

Even Brewster seemed stunned into paralysis by the sight of the wasted men. If Noah's crew was shocked by what they saw, Connor's looked terrified by what they faced. Each man was staring at a past self, a vision of a lost point in time before abandonment and deprivation. As much as Noah's crew stood as a living reminder of all they'd lost, Connor's men foretold what awaited them. They stared across the room to look lingering death in the face.

Noah wondered how many of Connor's crew were completely unable to get out of bed, like Heath or Andrew. His thoughts turned to Felix and his already dwindling spirit flagged. The Niflheim was their only chance at long-term survival, especially if the
Arctic Promise
got nipped by the ice like Connor's ship had been. But he had no idea how they were going to get Felix from the
Promise
to the rig. The trip was going to kill him … if he wasn't dead already. He tucked that unbidden thought away, telling himself he had to assume Felix was alive, until he saw otherwise.

He moved cautiously toward the first man he recognized. The deckhand's resemblance resolved into perfect clarity as he stepped across the gulf between them. “Jack?” he said. Unlike the others, Jack Freeman had never been able to grow a beard. He had a passably devilish Van Dyke and patches of wispy hair peppering his cheeks. As a result, he was the most recognizable of all of them. His black tee overtop a white thermal shirt and skinny jeans were a constant uniform. All that changed was the band on the top layer: Balzac to The Damned to 45 Grave, and repeat. While they had all joked about Kevin being his twin, here was the real thing. Albeit an inexact duplicate, worn by hardship. The man was a vision of Jack's bleak future.

Mirror Jack's forehead wrinkled. “Who're you?” he asked. Noah let out a strangled laugh. This Jack didn't know him. On Noah's side of the mirror, they'd met after Connor died. In their reality, Noah was the one who'd been killed. The mirror Twins knew him in the same way his own Jack and Kevin knew Connor MacAllister: as a cautionary tale told to greenhorns standing on the weather deck for the first time. He struggled with the cognitive dissonance.
I can't be dead; I'm standing right here!
He imagined Connor having the exact same thoughts, staring at him as though he was reading his own headstone. Among their respective crews, the two of them were unique. They each lacked a reflection. Instead, they had each other's ghost.

Another man broke away from his crew and crossed the room toward one of Noah's shipmates. Like stepping out of a fog, the resemblance solidified as he came closer to his counterpart. Boucher stood his ground, arms at his sides, fists balled up against the approaching giant as if he was ready for a fight. The mirror man didn't try to touch him, but twisted his head to the side, exposing the nautical star tattoo on the side of his neck partially hidden behind a length of salt-and-pepper beard. Boucher's fingers floated up to his own mark. “How…? The fuck's going on?”

“Beats the shit outta me,” the other bosun said.

Kevin moved to confront his reflection, but the man backed away quickly, stumbling over a chair. “Don't touch me! Don't you fuckin' touch me!” The room erupted in a sudden burst of alarm as the men shouted out in confusion and panic, trying to protect one another from the unrealized fear of making contact with a twin.

A reflected crewmate—Henry—shoved Kevin back to his side of the room like a rough game of Red Rover. Noah's crew was not welcome over. Kevin responded with anger, swinging a fist and missing. Noah dragged him away before it devolved into an all-out brawl. The men hurled warnings and threats at one another in a din, invoking the imagined consequences of making contact with a copy of themselves: death, sudden extinction, and misshapen singularities. Noah and Connor tried to restore peace, appealing to the men to keep calm, only to be shouted down by their own crews, demanding answers in a room filled with questions.

Connor backed away as a pair of his shipmates pushed through to take control of the chaos. It took him a moment, but Noah eventually recognized them. Mickle and … Holden. A mirror of him anyway. Although wasted like the others, Holden stood straight and moved with more energy than anyone else in the room. With arms wide, he corralled his crew into the corner. Mirror Jack backed into the chess table, knocking it over and obliterating Noah's solitaire opening move.

“Chris?” Noah cried out. “You're alive.”

Holden turned, his face turned down in confusion. “Of course I am. What the hell else—” His face paled as he realized who he was speaking to. He shouted for everyone to shut up, quieting the room with his booming voice. Henry and Boucher, unable to completely silence themselves, merely hushed their conversation. Holden shot them both a withering look. He turned to face Noah. His mouth gaped open while he searched for what he wanted to say. Noah had never seen Holden at a loss for words. But then, he'd never seen a dead man walk before. Now, he'd seen two.

“I'm alive,” Holden said. “And so are you. I know why I'm surprised to be looking at
you,
but why do you seem so shocked to see me?”

Noah didn't want to vocalize it. Doubt and guilt filled his body as he worried that he hadn't actually left a dead body behind on the other
Arctic Promise,
but a living man. A man suffering and dying in the cold as a result of his negligence. Again. His rational mind told him he knew the truth, that he'd seen Holden die of hypothermia, and confirmed it. But an instinctive part of him only knew what he saw at that exact moment: Chris Holden standing tall. Taller than he had in days, as a matter of fact.

“You…” A long hiss of breath escaped his mouth as he tried to explain. Connor stepped in.

“We all have a twin, Chris. Well, most of us do. Me and Noah here don't because it seems we're both dead. Or neither of us is. I don't know. You—your copy—he had an accident on the ice … and didn't make it. Like us,” he said, pointing to himself and Noah, “There's only one of you.”

Chris furrowed his brow and searched Noah's crew with his eyes as if hoping his doppelgänger would stand up from behind a table and shout “April fools!”

“Bullshit. I'm not a copy.
You're
the copy!” Mirror Boucher shouted, stabbing a finger in the direction of his twin.

“That's enough of that,” Holden ordered. “We need to be rational while we figure out the explanation for all of this.”

Kevin lifted up his shirt, exposing a long, straight scar across the right side of his stomach. “You got one like it?” he asked. From the other side of the invisible line, the other Kevin pulled up the bottom of his tee-shirt, revealing his own long scar, the result of ignoring the symptoms of appendicitis until it was almost too late. “Almost killed me,” he said.

“Me too. It adhered to my guts and they had pull them out to scrape it off.” Normally Kevin laughed when telling the story of his near-fatal appendectomy, but not today. The mirror version of him appeared to take the close call more seriously.

“So, what is it, professor?” Henry asked Noah. “What's happening?”

Noah shrugged his shoulders. In his philosophy classes they'd talked about the best of all possible realities and “many worlds” theory, but most of what he'd read had gone over his head. The discussions in the classroom were dominated by people smarter and more engaged in the subject than he was. He was more inclined toward biology and ecological studies. Those subjects suited the way his mind worked. Structure and predictability were like a path through the wilderness. If he could learn the relationships between things, he could understand them. But uncertainty was nothing he'd ever been equipped to handle with any kind of proficiency. He'd tried to talk through those subjects with Abby when she offered to help him with the readings, but got frustrated when the idea he thought he had a foothold in collapsed beneath him. He walked out of those graduation requirements with C's and the satisfaction he'd never have to think about them again. Biology, environmental science—those were things you encountered in the real world. Not philosophy. He couldn't explain what was happening any better than he could do a trapeze act with the bosun's chair. Still, he tried.

“Not everything is the same,” he said. “It's not a perfectly parallel universe. Some things are different.”

“Like what?” Boucher asked.

“Like me and Connor. In his world I died, but since then things are happening to us like we were the same person.” He pointed to the butterfly tape holding the cut over his eye closed.

Connor got the idea, pointed to his own scar and said, “I got that cut when William tried to free the ship from the ice. I wasn't holding on and I fell.”

“I got mine in the storm. But it happened more or less the same way. Same scar, slightly different cause. Anyone else notice anything different?”

“Who gives a shit what's the same and what's different? What good does it do us?” Brewster said. “We can do your little activity book games and see if the teacher in picture B is holding up three fingers instead of two, but it doesn't help us get out of here, does it? I want to try the phones.”

“That's the reason we left the ship,” Noah said. “We were hoping to find a working radio we could use to call for a medevac.”

“Us too. We tried to call the company first thing when we got here,” Connor said. “But the radio and the sat phones are dead as disco.”

“You try fixing them?” Boucher asked.

“What do you think? Gear's in fine shape. It just ain't working. At first we didn't think it was a big deal. The company might write off a ship lost at sea, but we thought there'd be no way in hell they'd zero out the books on a drilling platform. A place like this costs something like six hundred million just to build. Between that and the money they're losing every day this beast ain't drilling, you'd think they'd come sniffing around. Our lives might not mean shit to the company, but their dollars do. We thought we'd wait out the weather and when they come back to reopen, grab a ride home. But help ain't comin'.” He opened his mouth to say something else but snapped it shut, biting off his next words before he could utter them.

“What about the crew? I mean the original Niflheim crew. What happened to them?” Noah asked.

Connor shook his head. “Gone before we got here. They didn't leave a note.”

Noah's shoulders slumped. A vision of the Niflheim crew wandering off across the ice sparked in his mind. He pushed the thought down. There was enough trouble in this world without dreaming up more.