Queens of the Sea and Sky 7

Brianna sat. She just… she tried to think it over.

None of it fit. But it had to.  

“I feel like I've just… I was thinking so many things that were wrong.” She raked her hands through her hair. “Do I… I thought I knew things. About the world. About you.” Brianna shook her head and let out all her air. “I- I assumed that you were either some heiress on the voyage, taking a pleasure trip, or that you were part of the entertainment. And the dancing- that really fit with the second thing. I thought I was going to be able to look at the passenger manifest and figure out who you were, or at least what name you traveled under. And then be able to find your name from you.”

But that appeared to have gone right out the window, to fall about 11 stories into the enormous lake below.

'I don't like this. I don't like any of this. It doesn't make sense and I don't like it, I want to not know this. Jesus.'

Red didn't seem any more composed. She was pacing back and forth over a 10-foot stretch of floor, an unhappy lion. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her sides, constraining her dress. Oh, it had changed. She was wearing clothes that Brianna had never seen before. Something loose, that hit mid calf. It looked like it was a lightweight material from the way it hung in the air behind her when she turned.

Probably some kind of dancing dress. Nowhere near to something a modern ballerina might wear.  

A really good costume technician might be able to pin it down to a time period based on the cut, but Brianna had gotten through the mandatory course on how to do buttons and clasps and then gotten right out of the technical theater department. So it was hard for her to put a date on it. And there was no way to know when Red had been alive, given that apparently she had never had any connection to the ships in the first place.

She sighed.  

'She didn't know she was dead. I think she's having a worse night than I am. I shouldn't be the one complaining.'

“I'm sorry.” She pulled her hands down her face, feeling useless and stupid. “I'm sorry. Red, are you… Are you okay?”

The ghost stopped in her tracks. She was facing away at that point. Slowly, she turned her upper body to make eye contact. She looked utterly hopeless. Her eyes were so dark that they looked like dots of paint on an otherwise penciled canvas.

Her heart ached.

“You've never looked so pale.” Brianna held out her hands. She wasn't sure what she was offering but Red only hesitated a moment. She seemed to know.

Red crossed the distance between them and stopped so that she was right at Brianna's knees. She put her hands in Brianna's and squeezed.

She inhaled shakily. She leaned her head forward into Red's chest. One of those cold hands slipped out of her grasp. Brianna reached for it but it was gone. It settled in her hair, where she could feel fingertips running over her scalp.  Red had nails so short that Brianna couldn't feel them but the feeling still sent shivers down her neck.

Ah. She swallowed. She moved so that she was clasping Red's cold little hand with both of hers.  

“Do you, uh. Want to know about the ship?” Brianna asked. “The world now?”

Red paused, her icy hand on Brianna's scalp. She was careful to be gentle.

She felt like the answer was yes. Brianna cleared her throat. “Well, uh. I thought that you were… There's a lot of ghosts on this ship. Like, more than anywhere else in the world that isn't a graveyard, and it's kind of a museum and tourist attraction. Part of their thing is that the shipwreck is kind of a mystery. It was actually two ships, although they only reproduced the glamorous one for some reason.” She cleared her throat. “A couple hundred years ago, a cruise ship with hundreds of passengers sank off the coast of Italy. The reason why is disputed. A lot of the passengers were rescued by a nearby merchant ship, which would have been the end of it except that ship sank too. I think… just about everyone from the first ship died. Witnesses said that it was the ghost of the first ship that rose up from the mist and sank the second ship.”

Red's chest moved in a way that-  

“Are you laughing?” Brianna asked incredulously. She would have pulled her head back to give the other woman a dirty look but she was getting her scalp massaged. “Excuse me, I am telling a very spooky story here.”

Red patted her head as if to say yes, yes, do go on. Her chest shook once more.

Brianna sniffed. “Anyway. I've heard that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation involving how water density changes at different temperatures, which would make the ship sink and then have it become more buoyant than the water when it got moved along by the current. In that theory of events, the first ship got pushed along the path of the rescue one, came up out of the water, and crashed into it while the crew was panicking.”

Oh.

“I can feel your chest vibrate,” Brianna marveled. “Are you talking?”

It stopped, maybe as Red remembered that talking was useless. Hmm. The next movement really made it seem like Red was giving a long sigh. The hand slipped out of her hair and stroked over her cheek. Reluctantly, Brianna sat back up and rubbed at the hand she still held in hers.

Red cocked her head to the side. She looked a lot better than she had before, so… it would probably be a good idea to keep talking.

Right. “Personally, I prefer a supernatural explanation,” Brianna said blithely. “Probably the ship sank because of gross incompetence, but some helpful sea monster pushed it back up into the second ship, trying to return it to the owners. Or maybe some witch drowned when it sank the first time and cursed everyone who made it off, and her dying wish was to keep everyone else from surviving what she hadn't.”

Red's unimpressed expression was golden, so she hurried for another theory.

“Could have been a cover-up,” Brianna said, and uhh… “There weren't any ships in the first place and management is actually putting people in costumes and then killing them so that their historical-looking ghosts can bring in more tourists. Oh, or maybe the whole thing was a different kind of conspiracy. Someone attacked the first ship and sank it, to get back at someone aboard or as an act of war, and the mysterious circumstances of the first ship going down and the ghost story for the second are just a way to avoid talking about the fact that, like, the Brazilian navy actually sank it. Does Brazil have a navy?” She trailed off, genuinely wondering if that would be the hole to sink her theory. She didn't recall ever hearing about Brazil doing something bad in the international realm.

Red ducked her head and showed her palms. It probably meant 'I don't know' but Brianna was tempted to read it as a denial of complicity in naval warfare.

“Anyway.” Brianna twisted to yawn into her shoulder for a second. “Sorry. Anyway, I work here. You probably guessed that, but I work as a lounge singer. It's to add color and atmosphere to the tours that go through here- you know, make it seem like they are wandering through the ship as it was when it was all grand and glamorous. But currently the owners want to expand things, so I'm only doing that part-time and another girl does the earlier shifts. They're looking into having a big weekly event where VIPs can dine in the ballroom of this ship, while various entertainment performs. I'm going to be part of that, so I'm learning the repertoire they want me to have while they work on wiring up the space and figuring out how to advertise and bill the events to maximize profit.”

Red's mouth popped open in comprehension. She nodded her head twice and then her lips tugged up on the left side into a lopsided smile. She seemed to laugh.

“It's a pretty good job. You did entertainment too, right?”  

She nodded in response. Her eyes were sparkling- god, she looked like a different person than the ghost who had been unpleasantly surprised to realize she was dead ten minutes ago. It was probably illegal to be that pretty.

Brianna swallowed and glanced down. “Where did you study?” she wondered. “From childhood, I imagine. in- I should bring a map,” she decided. “That would make things easier. Sorry. I, uh. I took vocal lessons in high school. I started singing the same way anyone else does, I guess. As a kid in church and in elementary school. I tried university and thought I would go study something practical and do theater studies for fun, but um. I'm not cut out for school. So I worked while I tried to make a career happen, went to a lot of auditions, and just… kind of fell into this job.”

A finger tilted her chin back up. Red looked fascinated. Her lips moved. Brianna watched them very closely, but she didn't know what they were saying at all. “Are you asking about… singing? Work? School? Okay, school,” she confirmed when Red nodded. “Elementary, high school, university- all of them? Oh, wow.” She sat back, wondering where to start. It was weird to think of having to explain the educational system. She was pretty sure that some kind of standardized education was the case pretty much everywhere and had been for a long time.

They stayed that way and Brianna talked about the world until Red began flickering. Her hand began disappearing, there and gone and gone, there, gone for good. Gone for the night, at least, which might as well be forever.

Brianna let her hands fall to her legs.  

Her throat was sore from talking but- “I want to talk to Imile,” she said. Her voice was rough and too loud in the deserted rooms.

Imile was smart. Like, she was book-smart. And she had a lot of resources. They could probably get a lot further on understanding why Red was unique and where she had come from, now that they weren't working under the wrong idea about her attachment to the ship.

She crossed her legs and held onto the arches of her feet, thinking it all over. It would probably be kind of rude to go knock on Imile's door. It was- she checked her wrist- almost one in the morning. Imile had probably gone back to her room when she'd left at 11. She was asleep.

'I wonder how busy she will be at work tomorrow.'

Imile kept regular office hours, Brianna was pretty sure. From 9am to 5pm, and then she did… mysterious things before she came to check in on the ballroom work at 8 and rehearse at 9pm.

'She probably eats dinner and relaxes from 5 to 8. That's what I would do.'  

Imile seemed busy enough that Brianna hated to interrupt that, so… maybe she could stop by with coffee during the workday and see if Imile had some time to talk.

Plan adopted, Brianna made her way to bed and had slightly embarrassing dreams that she was still talking to Red, only this time she could hear her voice. Something about it surprised her- maybe the voice didn't seem to fit?  

She laid awake in bed in the morning for a while, frowning and trying to remember what had been off about the voice. Why would a voice seem off enough to break her suspension of disbelief in a dream?

Huh.

Miho looked over from where she was sitting cross-legged on her bed. “Good morning, sleeping beauty.” She had a novel in her hands- oh, no, it was something about the last election cycle.

Brianna managed to smile back. “Morning.” She pulled a pillow back over her head and accidentally fell back to sleep. The next time she woke up, Miho was gone.

It was late morning when she finally hauled herself out of bed, so she went directly to the employee lounge to scroll through her phone and search for some information. She dug out a notepad and took notes on the most general facts of ballet history and current schools. If she'd had access to a printer she would have found a map, but that seemed… ugh. Well. She pulled up a map of Europe and did her best to sketch it out. It didn't have to be great to be recognizable, right?

'Except that the countries are probably not the same as they were when she was alive. Borders move around a lot, don't they?'

She leaned back and examined her lumpy Europe. She'd sort of forgotten to leave space for the Scandanavian countries and had to flatten them to fit on the page.

It was still better than nothing.

...Probably.

A grumbling stomach brought her to the kitchens around noon, where she found Brendan cradling his head in his hands. She glanced around the room, outright surprised to find him sitting on the edge of things when people were bustling around. “Hey, Brendan? You alright?”

His head shot up. He looked directly at her, confused. “You're especially mellifluous today.”

She looked at him a second later, as if giving him a chance to decide to say something a little more normal. Apparently that was what he was going with. “Uh. Okay. Thank you.”

Brendan made a face and stood up. “Sorry, I've been easily distracted lately. Drifting a bit. I might be coming down with something.” He shook his head like a dog. “I'm here, I'm here.” An older woman washing vegetables in the huge sinks gave him an uncharitable look and then fixed her eyes back to her work.

Brianna gave the stranger a hard look, but she was too busy working to see it. She turned her attention back to Brendan. “Maybe you should take the day off.”

He laughed. “I should,” Brendan agreed. He looked around the room slowly.  

It looked to her like he was trying to remember what was going on. She shifted from foot to foot, frowning. “Come on. Who do you need to tell that you're taking sick hours?”

Brendan blinked at her. He didn't say anything.

“Okay, then.” Brianna scanned the room, trying to pick out who was management by clothes style. She wanted to find someone who was dressed differently, or more formally- no good. They all looked about the same. She gave it up and went to get the attention of the closest person. He was working quickly to pull bread from an oven, so she hovered behind and twisted her hands together.

“Speak.” The balding man pulled efficiently, stacking hot loaves on wire. He didn't turn to look at her.

Brianna hooked a thumb at Brendan even though the man couldn't see. “My friend seems sick. Brendan? I think that he needs to go home and lay down.”

The older man grunted. He shut the oven with a final sound and then pulled off his mitts. Only then he turned to look at her. He had a puffy, red face and an unimpressed expression. “Brendan? He has been getting weirder and weirder. Jumping at nothing and ignoring when someone is talking to him directly.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “That is not like him at all,” Brianna said. “If anything, his vice is leaning towards being too talkative.”

“Huh.” The cook cast a skeptical look behind her. “Well, he isn't being a lot of help anyway. Get him some rest, would you? I'll let Sharelle know.”

She gave him a smile, but it was probably as flat as it felt. “Thank you. I'll do that.” She turned around and- Brendan had already sat back down. He hadn't found anything to do.

For someone who really liked to feel that he was doing the most important thing in the room, that was unusual behavior.

“You are getting weird,” she told him in an undertone. Once again, he was very responsive to her voice, blinking alert and giving his attention directly to her. He started to drift after a second or two of silence, so she tested it. “Come on, let's go. Up, up, up.” And her hunch was right- as long as she was talking, he seemed to find it easier to focus on her. She kept a running commentary about pretty much nothing and steered him to the employee health clinic.  

She left him there in the care of a nurse and went back to the dining room to get something to eat. She had initially planned to bring something with her to Imile's office, but actually that plan was a little flawed. Imile would already have lunch plans of some sort and wouldn't need a coffee and sweets at 1 pm. Brianna pocketed some baked goods anyway, because those would all be gone or put away by the time she came back. She killed time until three and then made her way to imile's office.

The same receptionist as before looked up when she entered. He gave her a nod. “Good afternoon. Are you here to make an appointment?”  

Brianna put her hands behind her back and shook her head. “It's nothing official. I just wanted to stop by and say hello to Imile if she had a few minutes to chat.”

To his credit, he didn't look surprised for long. He blinked quickly. “I see.” The man glanced down at the datebook over his keyboard. “She's in a teleconference now, but it is scheduled to be over in about twenty minutes. Would you like to wait?”

She nodded, pleased. “That would be good. Thanks.” Brianna glanced at the waiting area and picked a seat near the reading materials.

“Look at yesterday's paper,” the receptionist advised. There was a smile in his voice. “There's a story on the front page that Imile and I enjoyed.”

Brianna rustled around to find it. When she did, she pulled it up and scanned the headlines. Something about a politician accused of connection to money laundering, a house fire out on the west side of town, and record numbers of complaints to the city council about supposedly unfair tickets. That last one sounded terribly dull except that the accompanying photo showed what looked like a body laying down behind police lines. So she read the article.  

It, uh. It was probably the one he was talking about.

“Are they kidding?” she asked, incredulous. Brianna sat back, shaking her head. “That is unreasonable.”

The secretary made an acknowledging hum. “The one about everyone getting fined for running a red light?”

“I think running the light made some sense.” Brianna scanned back for the quote, there was a truly funny line from city council- and that wasn't something you said often, was it?

“I might run a red light if there was a zombie coming up the road behind me,” the receptionist agreed. He huffed a laugh. All the while, the sounds of typing kept up. “But the city spokesman, defending the parking official's decision to ticket everyone who declined to wait out the light- I enjoyed that line.”

“The existence of a pedestrian, no matter their physical characteristics, is no excuse for disobeying road rules,” Brianna read back. She scoffed, shaking her head. “Amazing. A pedestrian. I suppose it isn't wrong, while somehow completely missing the point.”

“I felt it was hewing impressively close to a perfect example of comprehending the letter of the law with no understanding of the spirit of the law,” he agreed. “Given that road rules exist for safety reasons.”

She hummed. “There's nothing in here about the necromancer that did it,” Brianna said to herself. She flipped to the next page, just in case. “Not even a mention that the zombie had obviously been raised by someone, which is a crime. It's just a preexisting fact- the zombie who was in downtown traffic yesterday. Like, he might have been on his way to work as well or something.”

“Well, that's just not as interesting as traffic concerns,” he said. His tone was so serious that for a moment she wasn't sure if he was joking. “The crime that compelled drivers to act in an unsafe manner isn't the important part.”

“I guess not.” Brianna looked up at the ceiling for a moment and took a deep breath. “People are exhausting sometimes.”

The faint clicks of typing increased in speed. “Mm.” He took a few seconds to respond. “Well, at least we are up here and they're down there. I've never seen a zombie or a politician up here. Sometimes a rogue banker finds his way in, though.”

She made a sympathetic sound.  

“It's alright, we turn them around quickly enough.” He was staring directly at his screen. It cast a slight blue over his face. It made him look a little bit washed out, despite warm-toned skin that definitely had not come from tanning. “We have a stick we use to poke them back so we don't need to get terribly close.” His dark hair was perfectly styled, and he was wearing a light gray vest with green stripes. He very much looked like he worked with Imile. As a fellow model.

Brianna was pretty sure she knew why Imile had picked this person to be her coworker. He had a similar sense of humor, he dressed sharp, and he could work while carrying on banter.

'Is everyone Imile knows this put-together? Why is she my friend? I am a mess. Did I actually remember to comb my hair before I left this morning?'

Surreptitiously, she ran her fingers through her hair. Didn't seem to be full of tangles or too messy.

She found a fashion magazine and spent some time looking at tall, pale people wearing improbably large coats. That didn't even seem comfortable. Or maybe it was, maybe it felt like you were wearing a tailored blanket cape everywhere. Then again, the ladies were wearing heels with their big coats, and those definitely weren't designed for comfort.

The door opened. Brianna glanced up to see that the receptionist was leaning into Imile's office. He said something in an undertone that she couldn't understand. Then he stepped back and looked to her. “You can go in now.”

She flashed him a smile. “Great, thanks.” She almost forgot the pilfered baked goods on a chair and had to turn back for them. She stepped into Imile's office and let the door close behind her.

Imile was sitting in front of the desk, in one of the comfortable chairs intended for guests. She cast Brianna a pleased, bewildered look. “Brianna. This is a surprise.” She flexed a foot, which Brianna only noticed because her legs were crossed. The body language must have been habit and not skirt-induced modesty, because she was wearing jeans and socks. From the waist up, she was dressed to the nines with a suit jacket and statement jewelry.  

“I come bearing snacks.” Brianna held up the package she had wrapped in fabric to disguise what was inside plastic wrap.  

Imile cocked her head to the side. “Well, before you said that I was going to expel you from the window, but now I suppose you can stay.”

“That's the spirit,” Brianna agreed cheerfully. She took the closest chair and unwrapped her package to reveal cookies, two bar desserts, and one enormous chocolate muffin. “I stole these from the kitchen, because I'm a bad person.”

“As one does.” Imile leaned forward and snagged a bar. She held to nearly to her lips, visually examining it. “Is this... chocolate and peanut butter? With some kind of cereal?” Her tone went up in a clear question about the type of person who used processed, puffed rice in desserts.

“Us peasants sure like our breakfast cereals,” Brianna agreed. She waved. “Go on, you'll like it.”

Imile gave her an indulgent look and set the treat down on the desk. “I'd like drinks. Coffee?”

“A whole bunch.”

Imile stood and -oh, she had a coffee maker directly in her office. That was handy. She made them each a cup and pulled out creamer.  

“Sugar?” Brianna asked, because Imile was going to sit back down.

The older woman shook her head and sank down. “I ran out last night and didn't replace it yet, because I don't take sugar in mine.”

“Ah.” Brianna considered it and then put a gratuitous amount of cream in her cup. “That's fine, then.”

Imile looked like she was judging, but she didn't say anything as Brianna opened and emptied 4 creamers into her cup. She took one creamer and then started sipping. “Is this a purely social call?”

She opened her mouth  and only then thought about it. “I guess that it is,” Brianna said, not entirely certain. “I wanted to tell you about last night, after you left.”

“Ah.” China clinked when Imile rested her cup on the saucer. “Go on.”

Brianna started breaking apart a cookie. “The Red Lady came by after you left, at the usual time,” she started. Imile hummed acknowledgment. “I showed her the photo of those shoes and she definitely reacted to them. After she saw it, her clothes changed. And she was upset, actually.” Brianna grimaced. “She didn't seem to understand that she was dead.”

Imile's eyebrows climbed up. “That must not be a fun surprise.”

“And I wasn't particularly tactful about it,” Brianna admitted. “Because I thought she already knew and had come to terms with it.”

Imile winced. She brought her coffee cup in front of her face to shield from that secondhand awkwardness.

Brianna put some cookie pieces in her mouth and shrugged one shoulder. But Imile didn't show any sign of wanting to take a turn talking, so she swallowed quickly. “It came out- she didn't know about the ship. Had no idea she was on a ship, doesn't think she died on a ship. And yes, she didn't know that she was dead in the first place so maybe that isn't strong evidence but, I mean- I think if she's right, that might go a ways towards explaining her disorientation?”

It took a while for Imile to respond. It was hard to read anything from her face or tone．”So, you think that the ghost was never one of the passengers?”

She shrugged because it sounded crazy, but, yeah. “It would explain why it was so hard to find her name on the passenger manifest.”

Imile leaned back in her chair and pursed her lips. “Yes.” She sounded unhappy. “It would.”

The phone on Imile's desk rang. Imile gave it a sharp look. She raised her voice. “Kalil, is it someone I want to talk to?” she called out.

From the waiting room, she could hear the bland response, “It's your brother.”

Imile gave Kalil an unimpressed look through the wall and then seemed to remember Brianna. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I really ought to take this. I'll try to make it short.”

“No, go ahead.” Brianna gestured towards the phone. “If it looks like it's more than hellos, I'll excuse myself.”

Imile flashed her a thankful smile and picked up the phone. “Yes?” She immediately looked stressed. A line formed on her forehead as she listened. “Yes, but-” Imile's jaw tightened. “Yes, I am aware. As I said, I want to re-examine the viability of the project, and certainly push back the timeline. Yes- yes, I know.” She crossed her arms.

Brianna grimaced and began gathering up her things.  

Imile didn't seem to notice. She stood and began pacing. “The staffing issue- I disagree. Actually, I think-”

Brianna backed to the door and waved. Imile half-heartedly waved back, scowling into the phone as her brother cut off whatever she was trying to say. Brianna let the door shut quietly and turned to meet Kalil's knowing eye.

His jaw tilted upwards. “I wouldn't step in that conversation either,” Kalil murmured. Then he ducked his head, pulled some papers out of a drawer, and started making sharp marks in pen. “Thank you for stopping by. I'm sure she appreciated the thought.”

She gave him a weak smile and then thought to offer a cookie. “I brought snacks,” Brianna said, sounding underwhelming to her own ears.

Kalil glanced up, zeroed in on the proffered treats, and took the smallest one with a movement not unlike a snake striking. She didn't actually see him extend or pull back his arm- she just knew he had because fabric moved and suddenly he was holding a cookie. “Thank you, I appreciate it.”

Brianna gave the sweets she was still holding a perturbed look, checking to make sure one really was missing. Huh. “No problem.” She let herself out of the office.

At loose ends, she considered what to do in the hour she had free until she needed to go do a half-shift singing. She tried to check back in on Brendan, but he wasn't in the health center anymore, and she didn't know where his room was. He wasn't in the recreation area either, so she gave it up for the day. She'd find him tomorrow and ask what was going on.