Slate helped us raise the dinghy, but he gasped when he helped me over the rail. “What happened?” He reached toward my face.
I pulled away from his hands, not wanting to be touched. “Just . . . fate.” I wiped my sleeve across my cheek—blood, thick and tacky. “It’s not mine.” I clenched my fists, suddenly angry. “What’s the use?” I shouted into the dark, my voice echoing in the cold stars. “Why do we bother if all we do is what was written a thousand years ago? What’s the point if we can’t try to change things?”
“Oh, Nixie.” My father reached out again and I let him; my rage had burned too hot and flamed out quickly. He stroked my cheek with the back of one finger. “I always knew one day you’d understand.”
Before we left the tomb, I emptied out a wine bottle and dipped the mouth carefully into the quicksilver. I knew mercury as a poison, but Qin had believed it was a cure-all, so I tucked the bottle away in my room, just in case I was ever brave enough—or desperate enough—to test it. I left Swag in his dry bucket and sent Kash back to the bilge to wait with the bottomless bag.
Then I took the helm.
The return passage was as gentle as a blessing. The foul air of the city of the dead was pushed aside by the fresh trade winds of the tropics. The still silver sea melted into moonlit waves, and the unchanging diamond ceiling lifted away to reveal the deep black velvet of the starry night. Here we were, back in paradise; Blake’s map had worked after all.
I sighed. Then I licked my teeth and spat. The miasma of rot had left a film all over my skin. Et in Arcadia, ego.
Slate stood beside me on the quarterdeck as we sailed, his face to the wind, his expression inscrutable. He had said nothing for hours: no instruction, no conversation . . . no praise. Finally I spoke. “Trouble, Captain?”
“What? No.” He clasped behind his back and walked toward the rail to stare at the sea. “No trouble at all. But I wonder . . .” He turned and came slowly back. “I wonder if you really needed that map.” He cocked his head, studying me. “This may be your native time.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Kashmir shift on his feet. I blinked. “My what?”
“You were born in . . . well, sixteen years ago or so. You belong in Hawaii. In 1884.”
“I belong here, Captain,” I said quickly. “Aboard the Temptation.” The response was almost automatic, and for the first time, something about it rang false in my ears.
“Nevertheless,” he said. “This may be what you find past the edge of every map. The place you return to again and again. This may be your home, whether you like it or not.” He watched me, as though waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say. I only stared out over the prow at the island as we approached. She waited for me, as patient as a mother.
We’d sighted a bay to the south of our position, and we pulled close enough to shore to drop an anchor. The north side of Oahu was lit by nothing but moonlight; if there were people living along the shore or in the deep valleys, they had long since put out their fires.
Somewhere, on the other side of the mountains, Blake was in his bed, his hands still stained with ink from the map he’d drawn. Was it only hours ago that I’d seen him? It felt like centuries.
After the ships were made secure, I stripped down to my underclothes and dove from the bow into the cool blue sea. The waves were silvered by the moon, but so different from the quicksilver sea of Qin’s dead kingdom. Diving in and out of the water, I felt entirely renewed.
Well, almost entirely. I couldn’t shake the sense there was something I’d missed in the tomb, a thought I’d almost had, a question I’d almost answered. I hated this feeling; my mind kept casting about and pulling up other thoughts in the process, and they swarmed around my head like flies.
I filled my lungs with air and rolled into a dead man’s float, my eyes closed, my ears below the waterline, trying to clear the distractions. I hadn’t seen Joss in the tomb, but she’d told me she had seen us. In 1866, when Slate first came to Honolulu, she must have recognized the ship, perhaps even before Slate came to her shop to sell his cargo . . . and to meet my mother. In 1884, Joss would soon be burying the crate, stuffed with the money she’d gotten from Mr. D, so she could uncover it in her youth. That, and a map of 1841. And an elixir as well, for her “condition.” She said she’d been poisoned; was it weeks of exposure to the mercury? Or had she lost hope just before our arrival?
Poisoned.
I remembered then the wharf rat I’d embarrassed by asking the meaning of hapai. Bubbles streamed slowly through my lips and up along my cheek.