The deck plummets without warning, and we both cling to the railing.
I breathe spray and blink salt out of my eyes, and Bianca is blurrier than ever. My longing feels so intense it’s more like raw panic. This could be our last moment alive, and I feel nauseous, and I don’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I wanted to spare you, I didn’t want to hurt you.” I have to talk much too loud just to be heard over this wind. “I thought, I don’t know, I thought you deserved to be free, and live your life, and you would have so many other people who cared about you, and you would just forget about me eventually.”
The ocean erupts with gray foam. I think I glimpse dark shapes far beneath the surface, but they’re gone before I can be sure.
The wind surges, but over the boat’s terrible creaking I hear Bianca’s voice. “How could you think I would just move on and find new friends, after what they did to you? How could you even think that? When they took you, they tore a hole in my—”
A wave strikes almost hard enough to flip the boat over and sprays both of us with freezing water. Drenched and gripping the railing with raised knuckles, Bianca still stares at me, tears mixing with the seawater on her face. Every inch of me is soaked, and I’m sure the next wave will snatch me into the depths.
The wind subsides again, by some mercy. For a moment, I have a clear view of the shadowed icebergs on one side, the geysers on the other, and the moon and stars above.
“You’re the most alive person I ever met,” I say, eyes burning, chest closing up. “I was sure you would find a way to keep going. I knew you were going to amaze everybody, with or without me.”
Everything else on the ship holds steady for a moment, but Bianca still clutches the rail and sways with the echoes of turbulence. “Maybe if you’d trusted me, I wouldn’t have been so stupid. But I trusted the wrong person.” She glances at Mouth, who’s too far away to hear us. “And now a lot of good people are dead, and my heart is just this rotten pile. Why couldn’t you have just come back to me sooner? Why couldn’t you come back to me—”
She breaks into sobs and lets go of the railing to hug herself as her shoulders rise and fall. The Resourceful Couriers are busy watching the ocean, so nobody sees me put my arm around Bianca. She stares at me, like she still can’t look at me without reliving my execution and everything that followed.
Then Bianca puts her face on my neck and sobs so hard it feels like she’ll shake herself to pieces. My grip is strong enough to hold her up, and to encompass her crying jag.
* * *
“Storm!” Kendrick shouts. “Storm coming!”
I hear the typhoon, without seeing. The roaring starts low and hoarse, then gets louder and shriller. The shrieking feels as though it’s inside my own head.
The Resourceful Couriers rush to cover the sled and the precious cargo as much as possible with their last tarpaulins. Everyone secures themselves to the deck with ropes and chains, and Bianca and I imitate them. I try to wrap my bracelet with some loose twine, though I don’t know if it’s prone to water damage. Alyssa stays put, trying to keep the ship on course.
Bianca has tied a thick rope around her waist, but the rope snaps and she careens down the wet planks, toward the rail. Her mouth is open, but I can’t hear her.
Part of me gets lost in the memory of tumbling down the Old Mother, but then the part that stays hyperfocused in a crisis takes over. I grab her just in time, and hold on to her with all my strength. I still have a chain slung around my belt, lashed to one of the deck’s attachment points.
“I am not letting you fall,” I say, though Bianca probably can’t hear. Her face is pale, her eyes wide and nostrils flared. “I am never letting go, ever again,” I say louder, in her ear, over the screaming wind.
The boat shakes almost onto one side, and she almost slips away, but I tighten my hold.
“I’m here,” I say. “You’re safe. I’ve got you. I’m going to keep holding on for as long as I have arms. You’re safe in my love.”
I keep saying these things as the winds wrench the ship one way, and then the other. A million jets of water knock us flat on the deck and try to wash us off the ship altogether.
“I will never again let you out of my sight,” I say as the front of the skiff draws upward, like a foot kicking a ball. “I’ll guard you while you sleep.” The hull makes a cracking sound and the motors sputter. “I’ve got you. You’re safe in my love.”
The storm falls away, and we can hear and see again. The sea and sky shimmer—blues and greens and reds that leave afterimages even when I close my eyes—because we’ve drifted too close to the day. The wall of steam soars ahead of us: taller than mountains, wider than cities. I can’t look at the white churn without squinting, and my face feels burnt. Alyssa isn’t sure she can steer, with all this damage to the undercarriage, but she fights with the controls until we turn away from the cauldron. The engine sputters. I’m startled to be alive. I was sure that “love” would be the final word I ever spoke.
I don’t know if Bianca heard anything I said, and I’m scared to look at her face. I hear her disentangle herself from the railing while I keep my eyes on the simmering ocean and the dark clouds congregating over the waves in the distance. Bianca moves closer, and then her hand reaches out and touches mine. I turn to face her.
The pure white light of day, filtered through steam, bathes Bianca’s face. Her eyes are all pupil, opaque with tears, and her hair looks electric. She smiles at me, still weeping softly, and takes several gusts of warm sea air in through her mouth. Her hand remains on top of mine as we veer back into the middle of the ocean and the air turns damp and chilly once more.
mouth
The pirates sounded their horn just as the skiff got back on course, tearing through the air like a bison’s attack cry. Fucking pirates. They approached in three tiny fishing boats, with barbed hooks made of rusted iron attached to the gunk-smeared prows. Seven or eight scrawny people to a boat, some of them holding rifles or harpoon guns. Their floating jack-knives could outmaneuver the skiff even without storm damage, and they moved in a pincer formation that they must have practiced.
“We’re gonna be surrounded,” Reynold said. “Are you guys seeing this?”
“We see it,” Kendrick grunted.
“Those attachments on the front are sharp enough to rip a giant chunk out of our hull,” Alyssa said. “If they get us with one of those, we’ve got a long swim ahead.”
Mouth raised her own rifle and tried taking a shot at the main ship, the one in the center, but her aim was for shit with these unruly waves. She couldn’t stop remembering how Alyssa had accused her of caring more about ghosts than the people around her. There had to be some way Mouth could prove that she had everyone’s back, just like always.
These pirates were just stupid fishing people who’d overfished their shore, so they’d turned to other ways of surviving. The Couriers’ skiff must have been the first vessel to cross their path in ages, and Mouth pictured them rushing to bolt these corroded abominations onto their sturdiest trawlers.
“So what do we do? Maybe if we surrender they’ll just take a cut of our cargo and let us go,” Reynold said.
Alyssa shook her head. “They’ll take everything. Ships don’t come along often enough to make it worth just collecting a tariff.” She looked at the three boats, bobbing in and out of view, and seemed to reach a decision. “Everybody hold your junk, and if you need to scream, do it in your own head.”
Alyssa gave a little smile, like someone hatching a prank, and wrenched the controls so the skiff swerved toward the ice. The ship listed so far it seemed about to flip over, and the railing seemed about to buckle under Mouth’s weight. Then they flattened out again and sailed into near darkness, with just a tiny glow to orient them.
* * *
A dense mist rose from the freezing water and turned everyone into an outline, like a reflection in a plate-glass window. You couldn’t see the ice crags in the skiff’s feeble lights until they were dead ahead. Alyssa kept jerking the rudder to and fro, and the boat quaked.
The sound of a thousand men grinding their teeth came from beneath. “We’re going to need a new hull,” said Yulya.
“The hull will make it,” Kendrick said. “Remember how carefully Omar maintained that undercarriage? We can handle this.”
“If we can just keep it level, we can slip past them,” Alyssa muttered.