I’d known for years how to use a compass or read the stars. But now, as I stood alone in front of the drafting table where the two maps lay side by side—on my left, where we were; on my right, where we were going—I didn’t know up from down, much less east from west. My eyes slid from one map to the next: from the blue Pacific under the open sky, to the silver sea deep beneath a man-made mountain. Right off the edge of paradise and into the afterlife, as long as I didn’t steer us into some kind of purgatory.
I took a deep breath, then another, trying to calm my nerves. The smell of the maps and the books—the ink and the paper—helped me relax, and my hand went to the pearl at my throat. I bent my head and studied the map of the emperor’s tomb, turning the lines on the page into a shoreline in my head, the shore I would expect to see through the fog.
“It will be there,” Slate had said to me. “And sort of . . . not there. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I’d replied. “And no.”
“Smart ass.” And he had reached out to ruffle my hair, like he used to when I was little.
But the memory of our conversation, that rare closeness, was cold comfort. I shivered then; the air actually was colder. I had to get to the helm. I took one last look at the two maps and left the cabin, but I paused in the open door.
The sky that had been so blue not an hour before had faded to a tea-stained gray, and the sunlight, once golden, had the aged tint you see before a thunderstorm. The Margin was coming up fast.
I threw a last glance back over the stern, at the little island disappearing. Would I see her shores again? If Blake had chosen to thwart the Hawaiian League, I might never return. Against the biting chill of the stiff breeze, I wrapped myself in the memory of our kiss—my first—and walked toward the helm.
Slate watched me warily as I approached, and it was several moments before he stood aside and let me take the wheel. My palms were slippery on the brass, which was still warm from his grip. I wiped my hands on my trousers and grasped the wheel again. Almost immediately, wisps of fog drifted up like steam from the steely water, the air thickening like churned cream.
I heard Slate catch his breath. Goose bumps skittered across my forearms as I kept our course steady into the mist until it swallowed us completely. Would it lift again, or would we join the other ships—the Flying Dutchman or the Mary Celeste—and journey without end, ghosts in the fog?
The wind dropped, then gusted, then dropped again for a long minute. Suddenly it was back, whipping through my hair and lashing it against my cheeks. I couldn’t see more than thirty feet ahead in the swirling fog, but the sea was calm, almost eerily so. I squinted as light flickered far away in the clouds, followed, half a minute later, by sullen, distant thunder and the taste of metal on my tongue. The wind snapped in the jib, and I tensed. Then my father put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
I gritted my teeth and tightened my grip on the wheel, still staring into the pearly mist off the bow. As my eyes slid across the insubstantial gray horizon, I became aware of an odd unspooling in the center of my chest, an incongruous, lighthearted feeling that made me want to laugh. At first it was gentle, a tug and a flutter, upward like the rope on the kite I’d flown those years ago, and my body trembled as would the needle of a compass seeking north. Was this the draw of the faraway shore? Then came the counterpoint, a nauseating sinking in my gut, down like a fish on a line, and as we sailed farther into the Margins, the drag deepened like the haul of the anchor on its chain. But still something drew me forward, and in the center, I stretched like the sails in a gale wind.
Sweat broke out on my forehead, and I swallowed bile. The muscles in my back grew taut and my spine creaked as I tried to catch my breath; the pain in my chest was unbearable, and I thought I would start to fray like a rope. What was holding me back? I knew the answer before the question had finished forming, and I pushed the thought of Blake from my mind, letting that anchor drop away, down, down, until there was nothing behind me and I was unmoored in the current pulling me onward as steadily as time.
“Can’t see a thing!” Rotgut called from the lookout, but suddenly I could. Through a break in the fog, a shoreline, vague but there, as though I were seeing a picture beneath a sheet of vellum. I blinked twice, and my eyes refocused. It was like that optical illusion where you hold a tube against the side of your hand and you can see a hole right through your palm, clear as day and yet impossible at the same time.
I gave the wheel a quarter turn, and the ship creaked and dipped. “Do you see it?” I called, my heart pounding faster.
“Nothing yet!” Rotgut said. His voice sounded very distant; I could no longer see him in the fog.
A few drops of rain hit my cheeks. The sun dimmed in the sky, and the deck seesawed. Lights flickered at the edge of my vision, and I thought I heard the far-off groan of a mast under full sail. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kash working alone to trim our main, hauling down on the hawser, straining against the swelling sheet. Bee was somewhere up near the bow, invisible in the fog. “Slate—”
“I’m going.”