Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

you write this a lot?”
    “Every day.” He paused at the end of a page, finally looked up. “On an expedition, keeping a journal is more important than all else—we learn that from the very first.”
    “In scientist school?”
    “That’s different—that’s the university. But everyone who applies for expedition funds is required to take courses teaching them to survive. That is where they stress the journal. Partially, because wedon’t have to rely on memory when we record our data, but it also leaves a record of the steps we’ve taken. Everything we learn about exploring, about surviving—one of the most critical is making certain the journal survives, even if we don’t.”
    “It’s more important than a life?”
    “No. I left mine behind, after all.” His gaze fell to the page again. The ink had almost dried. “Death isn’t uncommon among naturalists. There’s tremendous value in knowing where they went…where they might have stepped wrongly.”
    “So someone else doesn’t do the same thing?”
    “Or so that someone can try it again, but in a different way.” His thumb brushed over the page. “Perhaps my work is all I’ll leave behind. Perhaps I’ll never be able to report what I’ve found here or what I might discover in the future. Perhaps I’ll never come to any grand conclusions or make any great discoveries. But if it adds to something, if someone else can use my work to reach another goal, to make another discovery, my journey won’t be in vain.”
    Her heart caught. Once, when wondering why he chased volcanoes, she’d hoped that he wasn’t like Sigurd the Deceiver, but what he spoke of resembled those old stories very much—not in an old way, but a new one.
    “So these journals are like epics of scientific study.”
    He grinned with her, but nodded. “I have my heroes.”
    “You make me want to be a naturalist.”
    “The pay isn’t as much as a stoker’s.”
    Gold was fine, undoubtedly. “But it must be quite something to matter. To be a part of something bigger, despite the risk. I think you all must be very brave.”
    “Or lucky.” A flush rose on his neck. “You matter, Annika.”
    “Oh, certainly. Nobody else can shovel coal.”
    “Anyone can chase volcanoes, too. I don’t know anyone else who can drive a troll.”
    “We were both lucky tonight, then.” She smiled at him, thenlooked down at his notes. She wished he had his journal—she’d have learned shorthand just to read about what he’d done and where he’d been. “Do you write everything?”
    “Almost.”
    And if they found his journal, the men at the camp could read it now. Sudden alarm made her glance up. “Did you write about Hannasvik?”
    His gaze locked with hers. “No.”
    “Why leave it out? It wasn’t your secret.”
    “But it’s personal—not for the world.”
    “Will you write of di Fiore?”
    “I already have.”
    “And the troll?”
    “I only said that it was a machine we used to escape.”
    “And the watchman?”
    “Yes.”
    His expression didn’t change, but she remembered how he’d gathered his breath before, the hardness of his jaw afterward.
    “Have you ever killed anyone before?” she wondered.
    “No.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She should have been bolder, offered to do it. Maybe with the troll.
    No. If they’d been in the troll, they wouldn’t have had to kill anyone. They would already have been safe.
    “I’m sorry, too.” He opened his steel fingers, looked at them. “I never think of it as a weapon. I know others do when they see me. They think about how easily I could snap a neck—how easily I could snap their necks. They’re right. I wish it had been more difficult,” he said softly. “More like what it felt.”
    Her throat ached. “If it had been, he could have raised an alarm. We’d be dead.”
    “I know. I don’t regret it. I’d do it again.” He closed his fist. “I’m just sorry that I had to.”
    She nodded, glanced down at the page. “Is that what you wrote?”
    “Not the part about how people see me.”
    All of them idiots. “It’s too personal?”
    “Yes. And I wrote that I’m not the same man. I recognized the threat, I knew what had to be done…yet I hoped to think of any other way to get us both across that clearing without raising any alarm. Knowing that I couldn’t find another way takes something from me. Almost everything I’ve read or heard said that I’m supposed to feel powerful now: I killed a man. I