There are two small photographs, not in frames but tucked haphazardly into the bamboo trim on the wall. I recognize Spaceship Earth, the iconic geodesic sphere at Epcot Center, in the background of one: Rex stands with a petite brunette, holding a little girl in a princess costume. The other picture is of a newborn, facedown on a scale, so freshly acquainted with the world its skin hasn’t yet been wiped clean.
I gather my courage. “Even if we don’t understand why, he’s standing up for what he thinks is right—isn’t that the very thing we’re fighting for? He may not want to help us, but he definitely doesn’t want to die, even if he says he’s willing to.” My voice shakes, but I steady it. They’re all still listening for now, and I might not get another chance to speak. “He’s trying to live with integrity here. I think we should at least let him keep that.”
Rex’s face is unreadable. You’d think that after a stranger went out of her way to speak up on a person’s behalf, said person would at least acknowledge it.
He doesn’t.
But Lonan does. He doesn’t move his blade from Rex’s throat, but there are pinpricks of compassion in his eyes when they meet mine.
“I’m going to give you one last chance to answer,” Lonan says. “If you refuse to help us, we will not kill you, but we will leave you to starve until someone discovers you’ve been locked on the lowest deck. I have extensive navigational experience—all I’m asking for are the coordinates, and any pertinent information regarding security.” His eyes are still locked on mine. “If you do help us—and if all goes as planned—we’ll do all we can to keep you alive. We will also do our best to reunite you with your family. What is your answer, Captain?”
Tears are the last thing I expect to see on a man with samurai-sword biceps, but today is a day where expectations are as worthless as the bank accounts in our fallen economy.
“Bring me the nautical charts,” he says. “I’ll do it.”
Lonan and Cass stay with the captain and his first mate. No more, and no less, than the four of them at all times—these are the terms we all agree to.
This leaves Phoenix, Pellegrin, and me alone on the main deck. We stretch out on the thick-cushioned benches and sleep, we raid the refrigerator for its bottled water, we eat our fill of precut mango and pineapple, we drop crumbs from all the crackers we eat.
We also take turns freshening up in the bathroom—it is the first private bathroom I’ve been inside since before the war. I scrub layers of salt and sand and dirt from my skin, tame my hair into a tight fishtail braid like Emma always wore.
The mirror holds me hostage: not for the scrapes, or the bruises, or the way my shoulders are bonier than before, but for my mother, who stares back at me. I look more like her than I ever knew. I stare into my features—her features—for so long Pellegrin comes to check on me. Like if I stare hard enough for long enough, I can bring her back. Have a whole family again, at the end of this war. Go back to Before.
Her ghost, my memories: they aren’t enough.
But it isn’t like they ever were.
I collect myself, leave the mirror behind.
Phoenix sleeps, deeply, on one of the main deck’s cushioned benches. I head for the back of the boat, where Pellegrin sits alone, on the same sectional where I slept on Lonan’s shoulder.
“I’ve been wondering,” I say, sinking onto the cushion beside him. “You and my father have been so careful about all of this . . . but that, upstairs, was the opposite of careful.”
Dawn will break soon. The sky is light enough now to see the plume of white trailing behind us as our yacht slices across the water. Pellegrin stares at it.
“We can’t keep our secrets forever,” he says. “Ava and Gray have been awake for hours now, for sure. Your father and I intentionally waited until his next shift began before putting pressure on the crew about our navigational intent.”
“But won’t Ava see what happened up there when she goes back over the footage? That you lied to Rex?”
“Her next shift won’t begin for another few hours,” he says. “And actually, that was no lie. Zhornov is expecting us, but for security reasons, he rarely allows anyone but the construction team and his own personal staff to set foot on the island.”
“But why wouldn’t the captain know about it? It doesn’t make sense to keep it from him.”
“Makes sense when you consider how easily captains can be bought,” he says. “You saw it with your own eyes—he’s only out for himself, doesn’t want to suffer. If even he doesn’t know when he’s scheduled for an island run, he can’t spill intel to people who try to slice it out of him. It’s for his own good, really.”
I don’t say what I’m thinking: that the most ruthless may slice anyway, unconvinced that he truly has nothing to spill.
“So, Ava and Gray,” I say, in an attempt to focus on things less bloody. “They know about all of this?”
Pellegrin exhales, long and loud. “Your father told Ava the truth—not the whole truth, but the version Zhornov knows—because she’s the sort who makes everything her business even if it isn’t, and often jumps to wrong conclusions. But officially, she’s not supposed to be in the loop.” He looks away, looks like he wants to say something else but then thinks better of it.
“What?” I ask. “If there’s something I need to know, just say it.”
He bites his lower lip, but still doesn’t speak. “Ava,” he finally says—then pauses—“is loyal to a fault, and one of the sharpest people I’ve ever met. She’s suspected for a while that we are up to something, and she’s right, which is why your father was as open as was wise with her. But he suspects Ava knows she hasn’t been told the full truth—and that’s a potential problem.” Because the full truth reveals Dad as a disloyal, defective Wolf, he doesn’t have to add.
“Dad can’t tell her the full truth,” I say, working it out, “without everything falling apart.”
He nods. “And Ava won’t go to Zhornov with her suspicions, because she wasn’t granted clearance to know about the meeting in the first place,” he says. “Which means she will most definitely take matters into her own hands if she thinks she has reason to.”
“Like . . . what, though? What does she think we’re going to do?”
But even as I say the words, I know. It’s what all of us wish we could do, what we most certainly would do if it would make any real and lasting effect on the war besides simply reducing the kingpins from five to four.
A tiny sliver of fire bursts through the horizon to our left. It is the most unadorned sunrise I’ve ever seen, no clouds, no birds, no pageantry of any sort. The sun simply climbs the sky and settles into place, silently devouring all lingering darkness.
“Something a lot darker than what we’ve actually planned” is all he says, and my stomach twists.
This is how it will be when we turn the war: we will be like the sun.
EIGHTY-TWO
PHOENIX WAKES WITH a start and cradles his head in his hands.
“Make it stop,” he groans. His wavy red hair is tied in a knot at his neck, except where the shorter pieces have fallen out to frame his face. “Her voice is too loud. Make. It. Stop.”
Pellegrin is asleep, has been for about twenty minutes now. He slept only for short stretches at a time, off and on, all night. I’d rather not wake him if I don’t have to.