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Samuel’s eyes take a moment to adjust to the darkness of the cargo hold and, despite his hurry, he stops to let them. He’s used to the process by now --- after all, he and the others have spent enough time on the sea to develop plenty of experience with the shadow-drenched lower decks --- and yet he’s certain he’ll never feel remotely comfortable with it either. There is simply too much uncertainty contained in those uncomfortable few seconds where the world is dark and anything can happen, too much that he can’t account for past the boundaries of what he can see. It reminds Samuel of missing the final step on a staircase and feeling that plummeting sensation of vanished balance right after. Of the hatch to the satellite closing, leaving them with no way out past the bullets ripping through the air and no light to lead them forward.
He’d at least known the satellite. This is territory entirely too uncharted for comfort.
His blood burns, the need for haste thrumming through his veins in time to the pounding of his heart, and he’s almost glad that AJ’s office was so dark --- that his eyes adjust to the darkness more quickly than usual as a result --- except that the thought is merely a reminder of why he’s so concerned in the first place. The memory of the captain hunched over his own desk won’t go away; it floats in the formless darkness before Samuel instead, renewing his absolute certainty that something is very wrong, that he has to warn someone before things get even worse.
When his eyes clear enough to see, it’s Margaret they find first.
This, too, has become a common occurrence during their adventures, albeit a much more pleasant one. How many times has darkness descended, only to be driven away by her radiance --- the literal, yes, and the metaphorical too --- until everything returns to feeling right again? How many times has he found himself lost, only to find her in the darkness and know his way once more? For so long, it had only been him and Rose, each an anchor for the other through whatever storm might have found them, and yet Margaret has joined them seamlessly, a guiding light in more ways than one.
It’s enough to send relief flooding through him --- tension not entirely gone, but at least buried --- and he hastens down the steps until he’s reached her. His hand finds her arm before he can think about it, urgency overriding whatever sense of distant propriety might have kept him at arm’s length. “Margaret, listen: I think there’s something wrong with the captain, and I don’t know what that means but I’m worried.”
She turns, looking at him over her shoulder, refined as ever and moving too slowly for the urgency he feels. (More likely, she’s acting normal and he’s the one going too quickly. That must be it. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.) Her head tilts, brow furrowing gently. “Oh?”
“Yeah.” He nods, with what might be too much vigour. It’s instinct, like enough conviction will persuade her that the madness of his fears aren’t merely the paranoid ramblings of a landlubber fallen to superstition after too long at sea, or maybe because his brain is moving quickly enough that he needs his body to follow suit or else he’ll shake apart. “Captain Griffin, he… Something seemed wrong with him. Like-–” He thinks back to evenings at the paper stand, to the stories he’d read so many times as to almost have them memorised. Remembers reading Jekyll and Hyde and trying to picture what the aftermath of such a transformation might look like. Thinks that he might well know, now. “Like he was different. Hunched over, pale like he’d seen a ghost --- or become one, maybe --- and his eyes, Margaret–- It was like no one was home.”
“Samuel–-”
“I know how it sounds.” He’s not sure if she actually sounds as sceptical as he thinks or if he’s projecting, but he can’t find it in him to wait and see. “But you know how fierce he always looks, and this was… vacant.” He’d never seen those eyes so lifeless, lacking the fire that had been apparent from the moment they’d met him with Morgan as their guide. And that too: “He didn’t even know that Morgan had left for the ghost ship, but you and I were both there when he told Morgan to leave. AJ wouldn’t make that mistake, not with his attention to detail. And–-” Will she think him mad? Rose had, before. Is he mad? “Something he said. It was… familiar.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Margaret?” It dawns on him then that she’s not really looking at him. She faces the hold instead, attention diverted from his worries by the items they’d retrieved from the ghost ship. He can’t see what’s drawing her eyes but he tries anyway, entirely too uncertain about what she might find familiar in a stack of wood and an empty book, and looks back at her when he fails. “What is it?”
“The Traveller.” He wishes he could see her expression better, so he could try to guess what she might be thinking, but he can’t, so he waits and listens instead. “She knew. All along, she’s known.”
“Known what?”
She looks up, then, eyes bright with fervour and then brighter with Radiance. “It’s been calling me, Samuel. Since we found that ship. And it’s stronger than ever here, in this cargo hold. The answers are in front of me.” She’s looking at the wood again, the journal, and they seem normal to him but she stares at them like water in a desert, like temptation incarnate, salvation itself. “These items are meant to help me understand.”
“Understand?” Samuel blinks, adjusts his glasses like that might make those everyday objects seem a little less everyday. (It doesn’t.) Picks up the journal and flips through its pages, just in case they’ve spontaneously filled themselves, and then closes it again when they’re just as blank as before. “Understand what?”
She smiles: peaceful, composed. Her arms lift from her sides, floating forward less like she’s moving them than like the air itself is bearing them aloft. She’s glowing, with all the breathtaking brilliance the Radiance brings, the light draping itself along her fingers and running molten across her skin. “Who I am,” she says, and then her hands touch the wood itself and the room burns.
The beam of wood itself glows: her power enveloping it, filling it, shining from it. Samuel blinks again, less by choice than from the need to shield his eyes, but then the light goes bright enough even through his eyelids that he keeps them closed until the room’s dark normality returns. He has to blink away starbursts when he finally opens them again, the glow’s final remnants present only as a scintillating after-burn cascading across his vision.
That, too, fades, eventually, and his eyes find Margaret again as soon as they’re able: a compass drawn north. Her smile is still present, but there’s quiet wonder present in the quirk of it now, and in her still-glowing eyes as well. She’s looking at her hands, cupped loosely in the air before her, and the fascination broadcast in every subtle shift of her expression is almost divine.
She’s been looking for answers for so long; he is truly glad that she seems to have found them.
Only once he can tear his eyes away from her does he realise that the wood itself has… changed. It had been pretty enough before --- he certainly understood why people might make furniture out of it, anyway --- but this saps his newly regained breath from his lungs with the sheer wonder of it. The surface grain is shot through with veins of shining gold, thin and almost glowing in the darkness, and Samuel has seen many wondrous things on this journey of theirs, but nothing more so than this. It shouldn’t be possible, but it happened before his very eyes so he can’t very well deny it either.
It pulls a laugh from him, and he can just make out Margaret laughing as well. For a moment, his worries about the captain fade, wiped away by the awe of a miracle worked right in front of him. His smile doesn’t fade, taints his words instead. “I knew you could do it,” he says, and means it. (It’s not the full truth only because he could never have presumed this possible, yet he’s certain: if anyone could do it, it’d be Margaret.)
“Oh, we’re not done yet.”
“What?” He tears his eyes from the wood, finds hers as well as he can in the face of the liquid moonlight swimming there. “What do you mean?”
She reaches out a hand, her long, delicate fingers splayed gently in the air. It looks human again, no different from how she usually is, and he spares a moment to marvel at the fact that it had been glowing mere seconds earlier. “The captain’s journal, Samuel.” She smiles his way, the look as reassuring as it always is, and he feels still calmer as sees it. “Give it to me.”
“Why?” He looks down at the book, feels the soft weathering of its cover beneath his fingers. It’s an ever-comforting sensation, to have a book in his hands, and even more so a notebook ready to replace his own as it grows ever more full, but he’s not sure why Margaret might want it. “It’s empty.”
He can’t read the look in her eyes --- can barely look at them when they glow so brightly --- but she’s smiling and he can at least take comfort in the familiarity of that. “Think, Samuel. What is paper made of?”
Oh. That makes sense. (So why the urge to keep it?) “Wood!”
“Exactly.” She stretches her hand out further: open and reaching, insistent. “Give me the journal, Samuel.”
He does.
She closes her eyes again, concentrating, and the glow surrounds her once more. He wonders if it’s brighter this time or if he’s making up how dark the rest of the room seems in comparison, but then the room goes bright enough that his eyes slam closed again. He wonders what he’ll see when he opens them again --- what spectacle he’d see if he looked right then, if he let his eyes fizzle out on her brilliance the way he half wants to let them --- and crams his eyes closed even tighter to resist the temptation.
Eventually, the light dims, then fades away to the normal illumination from the flickering candle nearby, and Samuel cracks open an eye to see what miracle she has worked now. He gets a glimpse of a word --- bright and gilded against the book’s cover --- just as Margaret reads it aloud. “Antikythera.” He can hear her grin in her voice, and it brings one of his own to his lips even as he wonders how she knows the proper way to pronounce it.
That grin falters in time to the guttering of the candle, extinguishes completely when the light vanishes altogether.
“Margaret?” It’s the satellite all over again, that same destabilising rush of sudden, all-consuming darkness, and he reaches out for her again like he had back then. “Are you alright?” No answer floats out of the darkness. His hands contact nothing but thin air. “Margaret?!”
“I’m here, Samuel.”
She sounds calm, and that stabilises him a little, but his hands are still empty and he needs to know if she’s okay before he’ll be able to relax. “Where are you? I can’t see anything.”
“I know. It’s alright,” she says, and her voice is placid as ever. “I can.”
“What happened? To the candle, that is?” He doesn’t get an answer immediately, and his thoughts are coursing with too much rapidity for him to wait. “And the book: Antikythera, what does it mean?”
“It means that I remember, Mister Stratford.” She laughs, a quiet thing lying just under her breath, and he can’t fight the sudden, odd sense that something has changed. “I remember everything.”
Even with the darkness --- even with his own uncertainty about what is going on and what it means for them --- he can’t help smiling. “That’s great!”
“Yes. It is.”
She doesn’t elaborate. His hands are still empty. “Are you okay?”
“I have my answers. What I’ve sought all this time.” Her voice turns hard, frigid in a way he’s never heard. (He’d thought the aftermath of their hoax was bad, when shattered trust hung between them and whatever relationship they’d been building seemed irreparable. This was worse.) “What they tried to keep from me.” He can’t see her face. For the first time, he isn’t sure he wants to. Her voice has cleared before she speaks again. “I have it back now.”
“They?” It’s still too dark for him to see, and that only emphasises the smell of smoke rising into the air from that blown-out candle. He feels his hand thump against the wood before him, then skims it along the wood’s surface as he tries to find her hand. “Margaret, I can’t find you. What’s going on?”
“Do you remember, Samuel, when I told you that I felt… removed from this world? As though I were merely watching the world from a distance?”
He nods, and knows, somehow, instinctively, that she can see it. “Of course.” He remembered every word she’d said that day, tinged with the guilt --- the shame --- he’d felt hearing it.
“I have been.” She laughs, and it sounds far more bitter than anything he’s ever heard from her before. “I thought something --- some part of me --- had been lost. I was wrong.” He hears footsteps, her shoes striking the rough hewn boards underfoot, but he can’t tell where she is, or even where she’s going. “It was stolen. Do you have any idea what that’s like, Samuel? To have a piece of yourself ripped away, pulled from you with enough force to break something?”
Samuel thinks of Rose. Of how it would feel for her to be gone, vanished, taken. It’s the closest comparison he can imagine. “No.”
“No,” Margaret agrees, from somewhere in the depths of the shadow. “You don’t. I do. And it’s terrible, Samuel. A gaping hole that cannot be filled.” There’s pain in her voice, thick and choking and accompanied by an anger that floods the room. “I asked you, once, how it ends. It ends here. Now.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice is closer now, floating from the darkness like she’s mere inches away, and yet he still can’t tell where she is. He stops trying, lets himself trust that things will become clear if only he waits, and yet it feels like an uphill battle because he’s not sure things will. “What they? What did they take?”
“They took me. They took… This.” For a second, the darkness splits around the familiar glow of her Radiance, her eyes two pinpricks of light in the gloom. He smiles at the sight --- one he’s grown used to in their time travelling together, one that has never failed to be a source of comfort --- and he watches, waiting for that liquid glow to spread, to seep from her skin as it always does until the room glows cerulean with it.
It doesn’t.
The light falters instead. Its brilliance freezes. Jolts. Mere moments pass before the glow begins to dim, and it does so not in the usual manner --- with the light simply fading, bit by bit, until her eyes are back to normal --- but as if it is being taken over. A swarming darkness floods through it, like the shadows themselves have come alive and are consuming the Radiance, and it doesn’t stop with the mere absence of illumination; things go much further than that, until her eyes look less like beacons in the unknown and more like black holes deeper even than the darkness surrounding them. They pull at the shadows around her, sapping the murk from the air and drawing it closer, draping it around her shoulders like a cloak, as much of a mantle as the Radiance had once been.
Somehow, it leaves the room light enough that Samuel can see again --- not well, but with enough clarity to make out her shape, to see her face well enough to try and read it --- and yet he’s not filled with relief as he might have been not long ago. It’s fear, instead, and he thinks of the captain’s odd behaviour, of how certain he’d been that bad things were on the horizon. He was right, he can’t help but suppose, even if he’d never anticipated this. “Margaret? What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“I’ve haven’t been better in years.” She smiling the same way she had been earlier, before things changed in a way he can’t define, but, this time, it sends a chill down his spine. (Was it always so sinister? So… off?) “This is who I am, Samuel. It has taken me until now to truly remember, to break through what Sia and the others tried to do, but now…” She lifts a hand, and he watches as the shadows --- dark and foggy --- play about her fingers. “They can’t stop me.”
“Who’s Sia?”
“You would know her as the Traveller.” Margaret looks his way, eyes still dark, head tilted at an angle that feels entirely too unnatural. “And she tried to keep me from myself, but she didn’t succeed.” She walks towards Samuel, her gait as confident as ever and yet oddly unnatural too, like she’s relearning the process as she enacts it. “I must say, Samuel: I’m very grateful to you for your assistance.” She reaches out, trails the flat edges of her fingernails along the side of his face, and his skin crawls with the motion. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Done what?” He still can’t look away, can’t tear his eyes from her any more than he could before the darkness fell, and he hates himself a little for it. “Margaret, I don’t understand–”
“Remembered, of course.” Her expression floods with quiet incredulity, then, perhaps a soft kind of mocking. “Oh, that’s right: you don’t know.” She laughs, lets her hand drop as she turns and walks away. “There was a war, and I chose a side. According to some, I made the wrong choice, and so my memories were stripped from me. A reset, you might say: of my character, of my past. Of my abilities.” The shadows shift again, undulating in the air around her, and his stomach twists at the sight. It feels wrong --- doesn’t feel like Margaret, not as he’s come to know her --- and yet, in many ways, it’s just as captivating as the Radiance had once been. “It was merely… a delay and a torment, and both are over now.”
Betrayal sits heavy in Samuel’s gut, and he pulls in a ragged breath that makes abundantly clear how tightly panic has seized him. He pulls in another, then another: tries to approach as close to a normal rhythm as possible. Margaret had spoken of her devastation upon finding out that their hoax was a lie --- how she’d let herself trust and been burned for it, how the ground had dropped out from under her the moment she’d heard the truth --- and he’d never truly realised what it would feel like.
Now, he understands it entirely.
“Was it all a lie?”
“No.” She shakes her head, that same quiet smile tilting her lips, and he can’t look at it any longer but he can’t look away either. “You must understand, Samuel, that I truly knew almost none of this when we first met. I had merely a feeling, bone-deep and soul-bound, that I was missing something. I simply hadn’t realised what it was.”
He pulls in a breath, tries to stabilise himself with it, but it doesn’t work, especially not with his heart loud in his ears. “When you became our patron–-”
She shrugs, and the shadows move with her. “A happy coincidence. It is fortunate that the Sentinel resorted to such methods to quell their petty jealousies. Would everything have worked out the same way without their intervention? Would I be here today with you, with this journal, had they not driven you to me in the first place? Curious, truly.” She smiles at him again, and he stores it away in his memory the same way he always does, before his brain catches up and reminds him that things have irrevocably shifted again. “It’s something to consider, isn’t it?”
“And the captain?” He thinks of the shadows in Griffin’s office, of how dark the place had been compared to the last time he’d been there. He hadn’t thought anything of it at first, but now he remembers that almost-sentient fog over the ocean, the shadows now draped along Margaret’s shoulders, and he knows that they’re connected. “What did you do to him?”
“That wasn’t me. It can’t have been. The pieces have been before me for so long, but I only just put them together.” She lifts her hand, gestures at the wood and its gently glowing gold. “Sia intended this to help return me to the righteous path, the fool.” Samuel has never heard Margaret sneer before, but now he knows the shape of it, and the look in her eyes as she does. “She’s always been too naive for her own good. Too willing to believe the best in people. To believe the best in me.” Her scoff is light, airy. She still sounds like herself, and that twists something inside Samuel more than if she’d seemed an entirely different person. “She’s… misguided. Arrogant, to think she could pick and choose which memories would return and which wouldn’t.”
Samuel thinks of Rose, on the already-dangerous ghost ship. Of Herschel, somewhere above him. Of Morgan and the other sailors they’ve come to know, innocent of whatever large-scale battle is playing out around them. “What are you going to do?”
“To you?” Her quiet smile flickers back into place, and he wonders if it’s real. “Nothing.” She reaches towards him again, fingertips skimming along his hairline, down his cheek. “I really am rather fond of you, you know. And you’ve brought me here. Given me this-–” She lifts the journal, flashes its newly gold-embossed cover at him. Antikythera. He still doesn’t know what it means. “–-even if you don’t know what it is. I am nothing if not willing to pay my debts.”
“Rose?” His breath catches again, and he doesn’t know how things have spiralled so far that he’s worried about his family’s fate at the hands of someone who’d once been part of that unit, but he can theorise later. “John?”
Her hand lifts, silencing him. “They are insignificant. I have no reason to harm them.”
It’s more relieving than the situation merits, but his family is safe and that matters more to him than most. “What does Antikythera mean?”
“It’s the ship. Her name.” Margaret’s head tilts in the direction of the ghost ship, and he follows her gaze even as he has no way of seeing the vessel itself. “More significant to us than you know.”
“Us?”
She laughs, as musical as ever, and it shouldn’t still sound like Margaret --- not when she’s changed so much --- but it does. “You didn’t think it was just me, did you?” Another chiming laugh. “Oh, no, Samuel, there are many of us. I’m sure our good captain has met another of my kind and, oh–-” She smiles and claps her hands, the almost childish joy of it contrasting entirely too sharply with the pits of darkness that her eyes have become. “A reunion! I wonder who it might be. Shall we go find out?”
He looks at her, and she isn’t Margaret but, at the same time, she is. He doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know how to speak around the utter upheaval of everything he’s known, everything he’s trusted. Doesn’t think he really has a choice in the matter. And so he simply nods, unsure what other options he has. “Okay.”
“Splendid.” Margaret smiles, reaches out again. Her hand slips past his arm, manipulates it until his elbow’s bent enough for hers to twine around it, a mockery of proper etiquette. She gestures with her other hand, and her smile --- as soft and subtle as ever, but with just a hint of teeth --- is the last thing he sees as her shadows blanket the room. “Shall we?”
Apparently they shall.