Pacifica

  “Now we’re all friends,” Seema said bitterly. “All it took was a little coin.”

  Marin snorted. She doubted it was a little money. Her people had always hated terrenos—Luc had learned how from their father, and their father from his, the great Finn Carey. That kind of hate couldn’t be washed away without a significant payout.

  “Who made the deal?” she asked, thinking of Ross’s father. It would have to be someone high up the mainland food chain.

  If it was the president, turning Ross in as her prisoner may have been a very bad idea.

  “I don’t know.” Seema returned to stacking cans. “Someone at oil rig four. That’s all he said.”

  Marin’s thoughts shifted to the military boat where she’d been thrown in the brig, and the attack on the converted station, number seven. The oil rigs ran along the length of the coast, numbered from one to nine, south to north, twenty miles off land. When she’d been young, her father had ransacked number five, somewhere near San Fran. Four must have been just south of that.

  “Why are they paying him?” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “They didn’t pay anyone when they dumped the Eighty-Six here.”

  “No one was here to stop them before.”

  It didn’t make sense to Marin. If Noram wanted to, they could destroy this entire island and everyone on it. Why make payments to Luc if they could bring him down in seconds with a fleet of Armament soldiers? No, Noram wasn’t afraid of Luc, or anyone else in Careytown. Something else was going on.

  “What’s he doing with that money anyway?” asked Marin. “Buying a lifetime supply of new boots? A new boiler to make his precious tar? I sure haven’t seen anything around here fixed up.”

  Seema returned to the pantry for more cans. “Paying off the Oilers, I guess.”

  “The Oilers?” The only deal they’d ever made with the Oil Nation was for their sailors to keep quiet while they were being robbed.

  “That’s right,” said Seema, sounding tired. “He’s got more than one deal in the works. His crew’s been to the SAF six times since last summer.”

  “For what?”

  “Hardware maybe. I don’t know, ask Picker. They move all the crates to the armory, and then he stays in there for three days doing inventory after they return.”

  Hardware. Luc was using the money from the mainland to buy guns from the Oil Nation. They’d never engaged in this sort of business before—at least, not that she’d known of. These were big, broad sweeps across half the world. The kinds of things that didn’t leave you hiding in the fog on an island of trash, but exposed to anyone and everyone.

  “He’s worried the Shorelings are going to fight back,” she said. It wouldn’t have been the first time it had happened.

  She pictured it then, a bloody war in the gomi fields. The Shorelings rising to the edge of Careytown and getting slaughtered by a line of armed corsarios. Maybe it was the heat, but the kitchen seemed to be growing smaller by the second.

  Seema flattened her hands on the counter. “If you’re done with the questions, get out of my kitchen. I have things to do.”

  For a flash, Marin remembered the last moments on the Déchet, when it was clear they would capsize. Ross had wrapped his arms so tightly around her, smashing her between his chest and the steering wheel. She could hardly breathe then, just as she could hardly breathe now remembering it. After all she’d been through, she wanted her own mother to hold her like that. Just once.

  Even if she didn’t deserve it.

  Guilt settled in Marin’s stomach, old and remembered. She had never been enough for her mother. She would never be enough. In that moment she didn’t care what Luc was planning. She wanted to board the first boat and get as far away as possible.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t bring him home,” she said.

  Seema went still. She turned to face Marin, her brown eyes hard and the lines around her mouth deeply etched.

  “Your father was a menteur.”

  “He never lied to me.”

  “Yes, he did,” she said. “He lied to you when he told you scrapping and killing and digging through the gomi was the best it ever got.”

  Marin shook her head, tried to push past, but now Seema moved closer, blocking her path to the door.

  “He left you because he couldn’t live with that lie,” she said. “He knew one day you’d see through it. Through him. And he wouldn’t survive it when you did.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “It’s the truth. Wherever he is, let him rot there.”

  “How can you say that?” Marin snapped, feeling her guilt and shame finally burst free. “He was all I had. He made me who I am.” She pressed a hand against her chest, feeling the sting of a lingering bruise where she’d been shot. “And now they’ll give me a boat, and a crew. He would have been proud.”

  “And what will that pride get you?” Seema’s voice broke. Her eyes had changed. She was smaller now, thin and fragile and pleading. Her hands were open, her lips trembling. “Marin, you don’t want a ship and a crew. You want a home and a family. It’s what you’ve always wanted.”

  Marin took a step back, her own chest quaking.

  “I lied to you too,” her mother said. “Because I never told you that you were better than him. Better than all of this. Maybe if I had, you would have stayed away.”

  Marin could hardly breathe. She needed to get out of this tiny space. She and Seema didn’t do this. They couldn’t. What little relationship they had would crumble under the pressure of these kinds of words.

  “I guess I’m not,” she whispered.

  She pushed outside, wondering, as she shoved her way through the crowds toward the water, where she belonged if she didn’t belong here, and who she was if not a corsario.

  * * *

  As the night turned black, she found herself outside a mud building triple the size of her mother’s kitchen, staring at an armed guard who was too busy sharpening his knives to see her lurking in the shadows.

  In town, people were starting to get rowdy. She could hear their voices from the tavern and the Blue Lady, brash and wild from drinking, and ached to be closer to the one person she couldn’t.

  Ross.

  She could still feel eyes on her back; someone had been tracking her every move since she’d left the tavern. Luc didn’t trust her, and she didn’t blame him.

  She wasn’t so sure she trusted herself anymore.

  Her thoughts returned to Ross, as they seemed to more and more with each hour that passed. The color on his face from the sun. The way he’d moved on her ship, clumsy but determined. How he’d fought beside her in the storm, and stayed with her until the end.

  The way his heart had sounded beneath her ear when they’d held on to each other in the Déchet’s wreckage.

  The feel of his fingertips on the small of her back.

  Somehow he had become the safest place on this entire island.

  Her mother had been right, and it felt like someone had stuck a knife straight into her heart. A ship and a crew wouldn’t fill the space between her ribs. What she wanted was a father who came home. A mother who smiled when she walked into the room. A brother who cared if she drowned.

  A boy who trusted her enough to let her take him into the middle of a storm.

  She walked past the armory down the road, toward the hill that would lead to the docks. Instead of continuing on to the water, she doubled back into an alley, and scaled the support beam of the Salt Room, where extra moonfish were stored in barrels for the rainy season. Swiftly, and as quietly as she could, she hopped across the slippery, slanted roofs to the armory.

  Crawling on her hands and knees, she made her way to the vent and peered into the slots. The room was dark as the bottom of the sea. She hissed in frustration.

  A light shined from over her shoulder, and with a squeak, she flipped onto her back, the hard grates of the roof digging into her spine. Her hand flew to the knife handle that stuck out from her pocket
, something she’d taken off one of the sailors at the tavern.

  “Take a look, soeur,” said Luc, standing over her.

  Sister. As if they were ever more than competition, fighting for crews, and rations, and tithes.

  She said nothing, and didn’t move, so he lowered the small lantern toward the vent. Unable to stop herself, she turned and peered through the slanted hole into the room below.

  Her mother had been right. The room was filled with hardware. Not just a few guns, as she’d seen when she’d snuck a peek from time to time over the years, but enough for every person in Careytown to have their own arsenal. Stacks of rifles leaning against the walls, knives in a box by the corner, crates marked “ammunition,” and plastic tubs of handheld firearms. There were so many weapons in that room, there was hardly enough space to walk. It slowed the blood in Marin’s veins, until it felt like sludge was pumping through her heart.

  Luc sat beside her on the rooftop, his feet hanging over the edge. The ground was ten feet below. The guard below looked up and gave Luc a small wave.

  Marin’s body went stiff. Sitting this close, relaxed as he was, suggested a comfort with each other that didn’t exist.

  “What is all this?” she asked, still trying to process the weapons below them, and the deal with the Oilers, and just what he was planning.

  “Power,” he said.

  “To fight the Shorelings?”

  He smiled, and it was clear that any more questions would be met with the same answer.

  “Tech found a signal,” he said, referring to the gangly redhead who manned the island’s only radio. It was ancient, and in Marin’s youth it had only worked about a quarter of the time.

  “Armament is broadcasting a missing person report for a Ross Torres, though they suspect Shorelings killed him in some kind of battle.”

  He raised a brow in Marin’s direction, but she didn’t explain. He leaned back on straight arms, and Marin’s gaze shifted from the twin guns tucked in his ratty belt to the ring of keys that peeked out from his hip pocket. One of them must have been to the shack where he made the tar, though it was hardly necessary with the armed guard he kept posted there.

  Another might be for Ross’s handcuffs.

  From this height, they could see the water, and both stared out over the rooftops to where the black sky and sea merged at the horizon.

  “You did good,” he said.

  There was a time she would have given anything for him to notice her, but now the compliment felt misplaced. It shamed her that she’d done something worthy of his praise.

  “I didn’t do it for you.”

  He chuckled.

  Her brother preyed on weakness, and revealing her anger would have shown Luc another point in which to stick his knife.

  “Tell me about your adventures,” he said. “Where have you been all this time?”

  “The mainland,” she said. “I told you.”

  “Is it as bad as they say? Riots and soldiers and all the rest?”

  She gave a reluctant nod, remembering the fire, and the shouts, and Ross picking her up off the pavement.

  For a while neither of them spoke.

  “This deal with the terrenos is going to destroy us,” she said. “The island can’t support five hundred more hungry bellies. There aren’t enough jobs for them, not enough scrap metal to build ships. They won’t all be corsarios.”

  He twisted his hair into a scraggly knot.

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “This deal changes everything. It fixes everything.”

  “For who? You?”

  He picked at his teeth. “When you left, I was glad. You were always too noble for this place.”

  Anger swirled inside her, black and angry as storm clouds and thunder.

  “But I underestimated you,” he said. “You’re more corsario than I thought.”

  She felt sick. When she stood, she slipped on the rooftop and fell against his side, braced against his hip. Their shoulders bumped, their knees cracked together. Fumbling, she righted herself while he only laughed.

  “Been too long since you felt the ground move,” he said. “Welcome home, Marin.”

  Her shoulder twitched. She shoved away, sickened by the sweet smell of tar in his greasy hair, and his rotting teeth, and every inch of his charred soul.

  He patted her shoulder. “You get it in your head to do the right thing with Torres, I’ll cut his throat. I’ll leave him there until the gulls peck out his eyes. This deal with the mainland is too important. If you ruin it, he’ll pay.”

  There was no further discussion. He swung down from the rooftop, leaving her to face the coming night, and she stood trembling in his wake, his ring of keys tucked tightly in her fist.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE THIRST made Ross crazy. As each moment passed, it grew more unbearable, an unscratchable itch that tickled his throat to the point of torture. It tore away his thoughts of Marin and Luc, of this island of trash, until all that remained were his aching veins, and his cramping muscles, and his dry, swollen throat. The people watching only laughed, and then gradually disappeared, because leaving him alone seemed to be a greater punishment than any insult they could throw his way. Soon, the only one left was Japan, sitting on a bench in the shadows thirty feet away, staring at him with one creepy eye.

  After too long the thirst took control of his brain, and wild splashes of color appeared before his eyes. A ship tossed around by a sea. A cliff between himself and his home. Marin, her arms wrapped around his neck, her mouth against his ear.

  “Hold on,” she whispered.

  He dreamed she held a dirty cup to his peeling lips, and when he drank he coughed and sputtered and shook with relief.

  Hold on.

  When he opened his eyes, he was hunched over his knees, his hands numb, his wrists still fastened in the cuffs above his shoulders.

  The cup beside him was empty.

  Marin was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  At sunrise he was woken by the metallic hum of a nearby generator. The sound cracked through his pounding headache, making him wince, and long for water and a soft bed. He was quickly distracted by the crunching sound of footsteps, emanating from the trash field beyond the wall of mist. Immediately he went back to work on the cuffs; the previous day’s struggle had done a number on his wrists. They were scabbed and tender, and the skin that peeked out was purple and bruised. He tried to pull his hands through the metal rings, but as the seconds wore on he became more frantic.

  People were coming; Ross could hear their voices now. As he watched, Luc appeared from the fog, leading half a dozen other corsarios down the red mud street from town. He searched for Marin, but she wasn’t there.

  In the back of his brain a voice whispered that she had done this to him. That he was only ever a payout.

  He shoved it away. He’d trusted her this far. He had to believe she still had a plan.

  But if she didn’t, or if it fell through, he had to be ready.

  The guard who had replaced Japan fell off the bench and startled himself awake. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and then jolted up when he saw Luc.

  “Here we go,” Ross muttered to himself. Using the dead weight of his arms within the cuffs, he pulled himself upright, wavering a little as the world spun. Though his lungs seemed unable to pull in a full breath, he grasped the post to steady himself and lifted his chin.

  He would make himself indispensable. He had to figure out what they wanted, and then offer it to them. That was the only way he was going to keep himself alive.

  But Luc and the others passed as if Ross were invisible. They followed the line of the trash fields in the opposite direction of the shack where Luc had gone yesterday, and waited beside a tower of rubber tires.

  Through the mist came a long dark shape, snaking between the hills. A cold terror rose in Ross’s chest—the kind of fear that belongs to the things you can’t name, like the memories from nightmares.
As it moved closer, Ross backed away, as far as his arms would stretch, until he could go no farther. Behind him, the townspeople had gathered again, though they too had forgotten him. They were all looking at that great, dark shape.

  “This all of them?” he heard a woman ask.

  “Nah,” said another. “Just the troublemakers.”

  Ross realized then what he was looking at. Squinting, he could make out more than just the shadows in the morning gloom now. They were people, moving in two parallel lines, toward where Luc and the others waited. There were a few others in the front, guiding them, but the rest of them appeared to be linked together. It took a moment to realize that they were bound that way.

  It occurred to him that they might be the people he’d been chasing. The prisoners from the riots. Adam. Luc had said they’d come here too, though they might have been lost in the storm.

  His throat, already thick, felt like it was swelling.

  They drew closer. Men. Women. Teenagers, some his age. An old woman who could barely keep up. The girl beside her practically carried her with each step.

  He wanted to look away, but couldn’t. His father had taken part in this, and by association, he felt responsible. There had to be fifty of them. Fifty prisoners who’d been brought here from the mainland.

  Relocation would bring at least five hundred more. He didn’t know how many people had been added since the new spots had opened up.

  He searched every face for Adam, but he wasn’t there.

  Luc motioned them forward to where he stood. He climbed to the top of the tires and waved his arms, and when he did, they stopped.

  “My friends, you have come a long way,” he called. “I know, because my people came here the same way. We mean you no harm, not like the kanshu who brought you here.” With this, he pointed at Ross, who wilted under the weight of fifty gazes. “In the coming days there will be much to talk about, but for now, rest. Eat. What is ours, we share with you.”

  Fury boiled in his gut. The guy who’d threatened his life and dragged his own sister through the mud had now turned around to throw a welcome party for fifty fugitives.