“No,” the captain said, but his voice cracked. “No. The boy asked to stay.”
“And you said yes?”
Slate twitched one shoulder in a half shrug. “He saved your life. How could I send him away?”
He still hadn’t unfolded the map, so I took it back and unfolded it myself. I opened my mouth again, but it took several long moments before the air would leave my lungs. “This one won’t work any better than the others,” I said at last. He took a breath, as if about to speak, and I hurried on before my cowardice caught up with me. “At least . . . at least not as long as I’m on the ship. I’m already there.”
I went to the table. It was easier to talk when I couldn’t see his face. “You can’t go to a place where you exist. Joss told me. It’s something about Navigating. That’s likely why none of the others worked. For you to go back, we need to part ways.” I laid the old map down over the new map of Hawaii, the father’s over the son’s. “She wouldn’t tell me whether or not you’d be able to change the past. So I suppose my leaving is a gamble for both of us.” Slate whispered something. I turned back to him. “What?”
He cleared his throat and spoke again. “I said, don’t go.”
“Slate.” I ran my hands through my hair, then dropped them to my sides; it was a gesture I’d picked up from him. “You’re not listening.”
“I am, Nixie. I wasn’t before, but I am now. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You have to, Slate. You have to choose. You can’t have both.”
“I—I am choosing. I can’t . . . I don’t want to—I am choosing you.”
“I don’t believe you. You say that now, but in a few days—”
“No, I swear to you—”
“Slate!” He snapped his mouth shut, and Billie startled too, her ears perked, suspicious. I paid her no mind; I unclenched my fists, trying to breathe, and gestured to the box on the floor. It was battered now, the lid askew, one hinge bent. “I know you, Captain. I know about inevitability. This is an addiction. You won’t stop.”
“Everything comes to an end,” he said softly, in an echo of what Joss had told me weeks before.
“Yes. We were nearly killed, Slate.”
“Nixie, I would never—”
“But you did. We were all nearly killed, and if it wasn’t for your obsession, none of us would have been there in the first place. In fact, if it weren’t for your obsession . . .” My voice trailed off. He wasn’t meeting my eyes, but there was a look on his face, and my mind was racing again. Everything comes to an end, it was true . . . Joss had said so much that day.
There is always a sacrifice. Slate had told me much the same thing in the carriage; sometimes you have to let something go to take hold of something else. I had thought he was talking about me.
Joss’s sacrifice, I knew. It was like the myth of the phoenix; if not for her fiery death in 1886, she never could have risen from the ashes and gone back to 1841, to start a life, to have her daughter—my mother—to introduce Lin to the captain.
But to escape Qin’s tomb, she had needed us to deliver the map of the aftermath of the fire. My father could never have made that trip; he hadn’t grown up steeped in the mythologies that made it possible for me to bring us to the emperor’s mausoleum. Besides, I had done it—had already done it, Joss had said.
Of course, if we hadn’t needed the soldiers to help with the robbery, I’d never have taken us to the tomb. If I hadn’t gone to the tomb, Joss would never have escaped. If she’d never escaped . . . I stared at the map. “If not for your obsession,” I said to my father, “I wouldn’t be here at all.”
He gave me a pained smile, more like a grimace than a grin. Then he put his hand on the map and traced the bloodstain at the edge. It cut right through the name at the corner. The silence between us was infinitely deep. “It does work, you know,” he said then. “Eventually.”
“What does?”
“This map, 1868.”
“Dad—”
“At least, Joss thinks so.” I must have looked surprised, because he laughed, short and bitter. “It was years ago. She told me my future. My fate. I didn’t really take her seriously until—well.” His eyes were far away, but he tapped his finger on the map. “She says I’ll spend my last months there.”
“Your last months?”
“In the time before I . . . arrived. To take you aboard the ship. She said I die of an overdose, believe it or not.” He laughed again, like it was funny.
“Do you believe it?”
His smile twisted. “Sometimes.”
I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat; everything Joss had told me about my future, she had seen in her past. We were both quiet for a moment. It was nearly impossible to force myself to speak, but I had promised to let him go. “Do you want to try it?”