The Ship Beyond Time (The Girl from Everywhere #2)
By: Heidi Heilig
Nix crossed the deck and slid down the ladder to find Rotgut while I finished up the last few stitches on the sail. Then I went below to my own cabin, changing into a new white shirt and smoothing my hair under my best Panama hat. A quick check of my teeth in my shard of mirror, and a few cloves in my pocket for my breath, and I was out the door, where I found Mr. Hart standing at the bottom of the hatch.
He glanced at me with hollow eyes, but he did not go up, nor did he stand aside; he only shifted in his borrowed shoes. “I overheard Miss Song saying she was on her way to Chinatown,” he said at last.
“Ah.” I kept my face still. But Honolulu’s Chinatown was where the two of them had met. Did he hope New York’s modern version would be something like home? I sighed; perhaps the fates were telling me that discretion was the better part of valor this day. I doffed my hat to them, and set it back down on Mr. Hart’s head. He raised an eyebrow, surprised, but I clapped him on the shoulder. “A gentleman without a hat is like a thief without his lock picks. Viens, allez!”
We found Nix above, and she glanced from me to Mr. Hart, her eyes lingering on my hat. On her lips, was that a smile? They say generosity is its own reward, but her approval was even sweeter.
Together we walked down the sun-drenched sidewalks of Brooklyn. New Yorkers considered it rude to walk three abreast, so I let Nix lead, falling in stride with Mr. Hart. She was still distracted, so I kept an eye on him.
Though I’d spent the last three years sailing from unlikely scenario to improbable adventure, one of the strangest circumstances yet was becoming Mr. Hart’s keeper. Still, I had to admire his composure in the busy streets. While he blushed at young people in deconstructed summer fashion—and in the hot fug underground, I could see the pulse under his jaw as the train roared into the station—by the time we reached Chinatown, awe had replaced the terror. Standing on the corner of Canal Street, he stared down the length of it, toward the water. “Is that the Brooklyn Bridge, there?”
“The Manhattan Bridge,” Nix corrected. “The Brooklyn Bridge is maybe half a mile south.”
“They say it’s a marvel of engineering, and the longest suspension bridge in the world.”
“It was the longest when it opened, back in 1883,” Nix began. I elbowed her in the ribs before she named for him each successive bridge that had taken the title. It was bound to be an interesting side trip through history, but not, perhaps, for someone still reeling from a similar journey.
“Maybe we can walk back to Brooklyn,” I suggested—not only for him. The walk over the bridge was reportedly a lovely one, very romantic. Less so, perhaps, with Mr. Hart along, but beggars couldn’t always choose. “There’s time.”
Nix nodded, and Mr. Hart smiled. Then he took a deep breath through his nose, taking in the dock smell of fish and oil, and the warm scent of summer. “I could almost imagine being back in 1884, if I were to close my eyes.” A car honked; he startled. “And my ears.”
“If you close your mouth, I could imagine you back there too,” I teased with a grin; his eyebrow went up, but so did the corners of his lips.
We meandered through the crowd to a bakery on Mott, where Nix filled two boxes with little confections—custards and cheesecakes and miniature pies. But, leaving the bakery, she turned north again, away from the bridge. “Amira? Where are we going?”
“One more errand,” she threw back over her shoulder as she wove between a DVD seller and a passel of pale tourists. “It won’t take long.”
She moved quickly, as though she could escape the fact that she hadn’t really answered my question, stopping a few doors up at a shop selling trinkets and baby turtles. The windows were plastered over with hand-lettered signs on neon paper, written in both English and Chinese: PHONE CASE, BELTS, T-SHIRTS THREE FOR TEN. What errand did she have?
“Wait here,” she said, slipping her cell phone from her back pocket and touching the screen. I tried to get a glimpse over her shoulder, but all I saw was a picture of the captain’s tattoos.
Mr. Hart watched her go, as did I. “Wait here,” I told him after a moment.
“The hell I will,” he replied, so we both walked into the shop.
She was standing before a counter at the end of a narrow aisle, her back to us; I could tell she was tense by the set of her shoulders. Behind the counter, an old man sat on a folding stool wearing a mint-green shirt—a terrible color under the fluorescent lights. “Your fortune?” he said, loud enough to be heard over the blare of the portable TV on a shelf beside him. “I’ll tell you!”
“No, no.” She stabbed the screen of her cell with one finger; she’d set it down on the counter. “I need you to read this fortune.”
I chewed the clove on my tongue—a fortune? The pieces were starting to come together. But the old man had already taken a blue plastic basket from below the counter. When he tipped the contents onto the glass, I saw they were bones. “Hmm,” he said to Nix, not even bothering to look at the vertebrae as they came to rest. “Your heart is pulling you in two directions!”