She hopped over the siding and peeled away the tarp that covered the front. Beneath, he caught sight of a wheel. At least that looked intact. Maybe this thing really sailed after all.
She bent beneath it, opening a wooden door to a compartment, and for a flash of a second he saw the curve of her back, and the taper of her thighs, and nearly slipped into the cove.
“Now or never, terreno,” she called.
Gritting his teeth, he climbed over the siding, holding on tight to the edge as the water roiled beneath him. He was soaked to the bone, no part of him not wet. He’d never in his life been outside so long without an umbrella.
Lightning struck above the cliffline, and he ducked, an old remembered terror ricocheting out to his limbs.
He hated storms.
“Hey!” Someone was running down the steps—a man wearing yellow overalls. Ross squinted through the rain, holding his hand up to shield his eyes.
The man had a pole. Or a gun.
Definitely a gun. One of the old, long ones. A rifle.
“Someone’s coming,” Ross said. “Hey. Hey! Marin!”
“Where you think you’re going?” The man’s voice boomed through the rain. “You owe me docking fees!”
“He looks mad,” said Ross. “How much do you owe him?”
“Close to what you’re going to owe me,” she said as she lunged by Ross to the engine. “I meant to pay him. I kind of meant to pay him. You understand.”
“Not really,” he said.
“Mierda,” she hissed. With more force than he would have thought wise, she swung back her leg and kicked the metal. The engine dropped, hitting the oily water with a splash. He looked over the edge, sure the debris beneath would catch in the propellers.
“Come on, girl.” She grabbed the chain, then gave a small cry of pain and switched to the other hand. He remembered that her wrist had been dislocated only last night, and stepped forward to help, but she shoved him away.
She gave the chain a heave, and the motor sputtered.
“No, no, no,” she chanted. “Not today.”
He spared a quick glance up. The man in the yellow overalls had made it onto their section of the pier and was coming fast, shotgun swinging with the motion of his arm.
Using both hands, Marin grabbed the chain and jerked back hard, teeth bared. The motor rumbled to life, and when she spun to grab the steering wheel, she tripped over Ross.
Falling on her hands and knees, she scrambled up, just before the boat cracked into one beside it. The mast gave a groan as they pitched sideways, and from within the cabinets came the rolling and thunking of objects tumbling out of place. Reaching the wheel, Marin gave it a hard yank, still on her knees. The ship rocked, groaned, and righted itself.
She steered for open waters, the man’s curses ringing in Ross’s ears. He didn’t fire his gun; it was raised to the sky above him.
Marin gave a whoop and a final, victorious wave, then hoisted the sail, one-armed, and let the wind sweep them toward Sacramento Bay.
CHAPTER 15
A BLACK, terrifying thrill pulsed through Marin’s body. Returning to the library with a fistful of money from tar would buy them a few weeks—only long enough to make some more. Returning with two hundred thousand credits would change their lives forever.
No more sleeping on a cot in the storage room. No more kids crying themselves to sleep with empty bellies. They’d be flush.
It might even be enough to buy her way home. To make the other captains on her island forget what she’d done.
The thought took her so by surprise that she laughed at it. And then promptly stopped laughing when she considered it might actually work.
Her people survived on tithing, contributions made to their supply hall through the summer to the start of the rainy season. From the time she’d been able to walk, she’d been sent into the gomi to find things they could use. Bottles. Plastic. Twine. The older she got, the more she was expected to bring to the table. She thought of those tithes now. Scrap metal from a dump up north. The log of all the motors she’d cleaned and fixed. Most of her ship work had involved thieving—supply runs to the mainland with her dad, raiding clinics south of Old San Fran for medicine. Twice, when she was eleven, she’d joined crews that had overtaken bigger, land-hugging freighters on the northern horn of the Oil Nation, but the people had all escaped in emergency speedboats before she’d set eyes on them.
Soft, Luc had called her when she’d returned to Careytown, the only town on the island where the people lived.
Absently her hand crossed her ribs, to touch the scar that would forever remind her otherwise. No, she wasn’t soft. She was the worst of them all.
But with this much money, maybe they’d see past that. For the first time in five long years, she imagined herself striding into Careytown, imagined the shock on Luc’s face when she took her seat at the captain’s table.
You are a corsario, her father had said.
She just had to find the vice president’s son first.
“So where are we going?”
Her head snapped in Ross’s direction, but she avoided his bright, wary eyes. His hair was already curling a little. The rain had straightened it, but here, in the humid breeze, the waves were springing back. Her hair was doing the same, and the fact that they had this stupid thing in common annoyed her.
“Not far,” she said, nerves tingling in her chest. In the five years she’d been on the mainland, she’d only taken her ship, the Déchet, out through the bay to hunt for supplies trapped in the gomi along the coast. She hadn’t ventured past the California Islands for fear of tempting the Armament. But now she would take the risk. It was worth it for the payout.
More than she missed her home, more than she missed her own mother, she missed the open sea.
“To the islands?” He pulled up the lid of one of the side compartments, peering inside as though there might be a rotting animal within.
“Hey.” She snapped her fingers. “Look, don’t touch. Just because you think you own everything, doesn’t mean you actually do.”
He dropped the lid, holding his hands up in surrender.
“A little past the islands,” she muttered.
“How much? Near Pacifica?” His voice thinned.
Her thoughts shot to Hiro and his packed suitcase. How he wanted a better life, and thought some made-up island would grant it. She focused on what he’d told her about the oil rig. That’s where they would look for Adam.
One hundred thousand credits if he wasn’t there.
Two if he was.
Either way, she could pay Gloria and take the rest to the captains. Just imagining Luc’s face when she docked, rich enough to feed them all for years, was enough to make her giddy.
“Twenty miles off the coast. At an old oil rig.” There were nine in total stretching down the coast, but this was the closest and as good a starting place as any. “Relax. I said I’d take you. I’ll take you.”
With one eye on the shoreline, she swiped the rain from her eyes and checked the provisions stowed behind the wheel in the bow’s compartments. Three cans fruit compote. One can corn. One jug of water. It was enough to last her two days, and she kept it here for emergencies, in case the mainland was no longer a safe place to hide. She’d always felt guilty hiding it from Gloria, but now it wouldn’t matter. They’d soon have enough food to feed the entire docks.
In the next compartment were extra lines and a small canvas sack holding twine, thick needles, a hunk of wax, matches, and a thinning roll of duct tape. They’d been tossed around when she’d launched, and she righted them now.
She became a machine, removing the tarps that covered the beams, attaching the halyard to the head of the main sail, winding the slack lines in a figure eight around her elbow and the heel of her hand. She climbed onto the bench along the side of the cockpit, hoisted the main sail up the mast, and unfurled the jib. Returning to the deck, she lifted the motor so it wouldn’t catch any debris,
but she could feel the larger pieces clatter against the front of the hull. She’d reinforced it with aluminum just for this reason, but that didn’t make her less wary. If something sharp punched through, they’d be sunk.
Her eyes lifted to the black sails, a smudge against the gray sky. They needed to hurry. It wasn’t just any passenger sitting on the back of her deck—it was the president’s son, and if they were caught, no one would believe he’d asked a corsario to take him anywhere. It was just a matter of time before men like the one who’d shot her—like Tersley—would come for him.
“Come on, wind,” she murmured, and, as if in answer, a light breeze picked up, carrying with it the salty mist of the open water. The sails above her luffed, then filled like a balloon, rounding away from the gentle pressure. The boat rocked and then steadied, and gave in to the pull that carried them away.
“Who taught you to sail?” he asked.
“My dad.”
“Is he a freighter captain or something?”
She paused, just for a moment. “Or something.”
He scowled.
Beside the compass she’d mounted on the wheel was a small GPS. Like the rest of the Déchet, she’d built it with her own hands, pieced it together with broken navigation equipment that had been cast aside. It took a couple shakes, but she was finally able to turn it on. She typed in the coordinates for the California Islands, remembering how her father told stories about the sailors of the old days who navigated by the stars.
The stars were shy these days. Most nights they stayed hidden beneath the clouds, lost in the fog.
They were only fifteen nautical miles out, but the persistent fog in this area was killing her visibility. She peered toward the horizon, but saw only gray.
“Did Adam say anything when you saw him? Did he look all right?”
Marin turned and eyed Ross curiously, struck by how worried he seemed to be. She wondered if Adam had something Ross needed, or owed him money. It seemed impossible that they were just friends.
Kanshu didn’t have friends. They were like pirates; they just collected enemies.
“What is it about him?” she asked, training her eyes on the horizon. “Adam. You two…” She waggled her eyebrows at him.
“No.” He blew out a tense breath. “Why does everyone think that?”
She planted a fist on her hip. “Because you’re here. You don’t do all this for someone who isn’t important.”
“Well, he is, just not like that.”
He pulled at his hair, making it stick out to the side.
She turned away.
“He was hurt,” she said. “He couldn’t run.”
Ross’s chin snapped up. “How hurt?”
“A nasty slice on his leg from the riots. We were hiding when the patrol came; they roughed him up some more.”
His back rounded, and for some stupid reason she found herself wishing she could tell him something to make him feel better.
“He could have given me up, but he didn’t. Pretty stand-up thing to do, if you ask me.”
A piece of debris clunked against the siding, making Ross jump to his feet.
“What is that?” he asked, gripping the seat as he stared down at the water.
“Iceberg.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. “Ice?”
She sighed. “No.”
Marin had never seen real ice. The last of it had melted eighty years before she was born. “It’s trash that clings together and floats through the ocean.” Icebergs were dangerous. Often, they dragged huge deposits of debris beneath them, some of it sharp as knives, some of it loose enough to tear up an engine. She glanced to hers now, to make sure it had been completely lifted from the water.
“Oh.”
A wave caught the starboard side, so tiny she barely shifted her weight. It practically threw Ross overboard, and he lowered himself to a side compartment.
Terrenos.
He sat down again.
“My dad told me to look out for him,” he said after a moment.
“Your dad.” It was strange to hear anyone call the president dad. “What’s he like?”
Ross was quiet for a while.
“Important.”
She rolled her eyes. If he wasn’t paying her so much, she would have told him she didn’t need the reminder that he was so much better than her.
“I figured that one out myself,” she said.
“He’s … busy.” Ross scratched his head impatiently. “He’s got a lot of responsibility.”
“Sure. Arresting Shorelings and tossing them out to sea is a lot of work.”
He straightened. “He’s not a bad guy.”
“How do you know? He’s the president. He can do whatever he wants.”
“But that doesn’t mean that he does.” Ross groaned. “Look, if he’s sending Shorelings out to sea, there has to be a reason for it.”
Heat seared just under her skin. Was that what the terrenos who’d sent her grandfather out to sea had said? Someone, somewhere, must have a reason.
“So what is the reason then? Why’s he letting la limpieza pack up the rioters? Most of them haven’t done anything wrong.” She thought of the Lu boys, sitting at the library with the other orphaned kids.
“I don’t know,” he said, staring off into the fog. “He never tells me anything. If he was doing something wrong, I’d probably hear it from the news, same as everybody else.”
This she understood, more than she cared to admit. All her life she’d stood in the shadows of captains, waiting to be noticed, fighting to be treated as an equal. By the time she was eight, she could dress a ship quicker than Luc, but he still got picked for crews over her. It wasn’t until she’d fled to the mainland that she’d finally been seen for what she was worth. But even then she wasn’t a Shoreling. Not really.
She knew what it was like to be on the outside.
He ran his hands down the side of his face. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
She turned to find him standing, gripping the boom with both hands, and a little green, but upright. His cheeks and hands had never seen the rashes from bad water, or the burns from the sun, and looking at them made Marin aware of her own skin, red brown, like clay, and crossed with tiny scars. Where she was from, that was a measure of pride, because it meant she was strong, unsheltered, and unafraid. But she doubted he measured worth the same way.
Her eyes lowered down over his chest, pausing where his shirt had hiked up a little over his left hip. The gray sky highlighted a wedge of skin just above his belt, pebbled with goosebumps. She stared, just for a moment, before the curiosity turned to shame.
He would not make her soft. This was business only. A few hours on a boat together couldn’t erase generations of betrayal.
Just as she was turning away, a foghorn blared through the mist. The deep sound vibrated the hull, shaking her all the way down to her bones. Beside her, Ross clapped his hands over his ears.
“THIS IS THE ALLIANCE ARMAMENT,” boomed a disembodied voice. “ARE YOU IN DISTRESS?”
Marin’s heart gripped in her chest. Had he done this? Were they tracking him? She looked to the comm at his wrist. No, this couldn’t be happening. She’d expected things to get tricky outside the islands, but they hadn’t even left the bay yet.
“Did you call them?” she asked.
“No!” He flashed the comm before her, showing the blank face. Just because it looked off didn’t mean he didn’t have something up his sleeve.
Moving fast, she climbed onto the raised siding, one hand steady on the line. The mist was thick, clinging to her skin and her eyelashes as she squinted behind her into the gloom.
“Where are you?” she muttered.
“Is this because of the docking fees?” Ross’s face was horrified.
She silenced him with a wave of her hand, and for one long moment they listened, hearing nothing more than the lap of the water against the hull and the beat of their own hearts.
r /> The white boat split the fog a mile downwind, boasting Noram’s flag on the hull. Two rectangular sails, stacked one atop the other, carried it toward them. Neither was as large as her mainsail, telling her that this vessel relied mostly on a motor, one that couldn’t be used with so much trash in the water. If they’d been on the open ocean, she had no doubt her boat could outrun the other.
But they weren’t on the ocean.
Stupid her for taking her eyes off the horizon. Stupid her for wasting time talking to him when she should have been sailing hard for that oil rig.
She glanced behind her into the mist. If she’d lit her headlamp, she might have been able to see the chain of islands that separated the bay from the Pacific, but she hadn’t, because she’d wanted to avoid drawing unneeded attention. Now it hardly mattered. The Armament had found her, and even if it was by dumb luck, she’d be lucky if they threw her in prison once they discovered who she had with her.
For a moment she considered making a trade. Telling them she had Ross, and if they wanted him, they could pay her handsomely. But who was she kidding? That wouldn’t work. They had her in firepower, manpower, and every other kind of power that didn’t involve a big sail. She had to make a break for it.
She checked her GPS, seeing the small outline of green islands four miles ahead of her blinking red dot. If she could reach them and navigate through, she might be able to lose the Armament on the open waterways.
Unless their friends were already waiting on the other side.
“THIS IS THE ALLIANCE ARMAMENT. THERE IS A WEATHER ADVISORY IN EFFECT. ARE YOU IN DISTRESS?”
It was possible they didn’t know she had Ross. If she lowered sails, he might be able to talk them out of this, explain why she was here. Maybe they’d take him and let her go.
She didn’t believe that for a second.
“Don’t stop,” Ross said, surprising her. “If they catch us, the deal’s off.”
She gaped at him for a full second.
“What are you running from?” she asked. The Armament worked for his father, which meant he shouldn’t have been afraid of them.
“Take me to where they took Adam,” he ordered.