“It’s not true,” Ross croaked as they drew closer. “He did this to you; he’s the one who brought you here. Adam? Adam!” If Adam was there, he did not answer.
“Ignore this kanshu cabrón,” said Luc as he brushed by. “On my island, this is what we do to traitors.”
“No,” Ross said. “I’m not…”
The Shorelings gave him wide berth as they passed. Some looked at him. Most kept their eyes down. The old woman was now carried by a man who told her quietly, “It’s going to be all right.”
“Please!” Ross tried to shout, though his voice was only a rasp. “Was there another guy with you, Adam Baker? He’s my age. Dark … hair … Wait. Did anyone see him?”
“Some of the sick got left behind,” mumbled a man near the back of the pack. When he looked up, Ross was taken aback. His skin was fair and, though dirty, barely touched by the sun. He wore a tattered suit, not unlike Ross’s Center uniform.
The man was not a Shoreling. He had to have come from above the cliffline. Ross couldn’t think of why he might be here now.
“Where?” Ross’s voice cracked. Marin had told him Adam had been hurt. Something about his leg. And then an officer had beat him up.
“Out there,” said the man.
“That guy’s a pirate,” said Ross, pointing to Luc. “You can’t believe him. You can’t—”
The punch came out of nowhere, a hard, solid hit to Ross’s gut. All air was shoved out through his windpipe, and he sunk to his knees, mouth gaping. For one long moment Ross felt like he had when he’d been trapped in the iceberg underwater: desperate and frozen. And then the smallest breath slipped through.
When he looked up, one of the men who worked with Luc was laughing. Red, he’d heard someone say. Still laughing, he turned, and followed the rest of the Shorelings, who trailed Luc like a bunch of punished children.
Ross looked to the trash fields, but though he searched until his eyes watered, he could not see Adam.
* * *
The rain came, thick and heavy, drenching Ross’s torn, dirty clothes. It didn’t sting or itch as it had just a few days ago. He suspected the layers of salt and dirt coating his skin served as some kind of barrier, and tried to count the days since his last shower.
Four. He’d showered before he’d told his parents what had happened in the riots. And if that had been four days ago, that meant today was Saturday, and in two days half of Noram would be gathered in the park at the harbor, preparing to send off hundreds of people to Pacifica.
He had to get out of here. Warn them. Do something.
He could not die chained to a pole.
A figure appeared through the misty rain, coming his way. He recognized the swagger in Marin’s walk before she was close enough to make out the details of her face. She walked with the kind of confidence he’d always pretended to have, and he would have given anything to borrow just a little bit of it now.
Her hair was covered by the hood of a soaked, long-sleeved shirt, which stuck to her chest and curved waist. At her hips, a thick belt held up loose, gray-green pants, rolled up just over the tops of her lace-up boots. She stuck out in this place like a flower growing in the crack of a sidewalk, and seeing her brought a punch to his chest.
“Don’t be stupid, Marin!” called a guard who was watching from beneath the shelter of the nearest shack, thirty feet away. His voice was muffled by the ping of rain against the plastic and metal that covered this entire island.
Marin shot him what Ross guessed was a very rude gesture. “You want him to die before we get paid?”
The guard didn’t move. Either he agreed with her, or his threat had been out of obligation only.
She was carrying a canteen in one hand and a wad of cloth in the other. When she came close, Ross stared at the water, unable to voice how much he wanted it.
Without a word, she lifted it to his lips. Liquid pooled in his mouth and poured out the sides, but he gulped and gulped, feeling the pounding in the base of his skull instantly lessen.
“Easy,” she said. “It’ll come back up if you go too fast.”
“What took you so long?” he gasped.
She gave him another drink, narrowing her gaze. “Good to see you, Marin. So glad you came for a visit.”
He kept drinking.
“They didn’t trust me enough to trust you. I had to improvise,” she said. “I came as soon as I could. Had to wait for the right kind of distraction.”
She was still with him, still on his side.
“The prisoners…” He swallowed, and then cringed. She was right. His stomach turned, then settled. “They’re here.”
“Keep it down,” she said. And then, after a quick look around, “I know. It’s the ones they arrested in the riots. They’re at the tavern now. Some of them have been sitting in cells for months.” She gave him another sip, and when he tilted his head back, rain made tracks down his face.
“They said some might still be out there in the trash. Adam…”
“You can’t worry about Adam now.”
Ross blinked back the water in his eyes.
“You have to worry about you,” she said. “Just you, got it?”
He didn’t. He’d come here for Adam. If his friend was hurt, dying, because of his father, Ross would never forgive himself.
She was unrolling the fabric, sheltering it between their bodies from the sheets of rain. Inside was bread, something black and charred he didn’t want to think about, and grayish rice.
He reached for it, but the chain didn’t stretch. Instead of moving it closer to his hands, she pinched off a piece of bread and placed it in his open mouth. Her fingertips brushed his lips. Her round brown eyes stayed on his.
“Tougher than you look, terreno,” she said.
She inched closer, so that his back took the brunt of the rain and his chest sheltered her from the guard’s watchful gaze. As she fed him, he felt his strength returning, and with it came renewed determination.
He was going to get out of here, one way or another.
The cloth was empty now. He could feel it brush along his forearms. Marin’s fingertips followed, the sensation so different than the cloth and the rain. She was warm, and soft, and though her body hid her hands, he still looked down, staring at the wild curls that escaped her hood.
A pinch on his wrist made him jump.
She hissed. “Don’t move.”
It was then that he realized she was working on freeing his metal cuffs. That she had keys in her hand.
His lips cracked as he grinned. He knew she had a plan.
“Behind you, out in the gomi fields, there’s a shed with smoke coming out of a pipe in the window,” she said quickly.
“I’ve seen it.” Luc had come from that place yesterday to tell Ross he was on borrowed time.
“If you keep going in that direction, you’ll hit a cove. It’s quiet. No one ever leaves their ship there because of the storms.”
“All right.”
“You’ll have to keep low. There’s always a guy outside that shed keeping watch, and he’s always got a lot of hardware. He sees you, you’re done, got it?”
“I got it.” He would make a wide arc through the trash field. If Adam was out here, hopefully he wouldn’t be too hard to find.
“I’m working on a boat. I’ll meet you there soon as I can.”
Working on. Which meant stealing in Marin language. He found he didn’t much care.
“What about the guard behind me?” asked Ross.
“After I get these off, I’ll take care of him. You run. The others are all distracted with the new Shorelings, but they’ll figure it out soon enough. I hope you’re fast.”
“I am.”
She swore. “One of these has to work.”
Tilting his head back, he saw that she had a whole handful of mismatched keys and was switching to the next one.
“That … doesn’t look good,” he said, forcing himself to be still even as he wanted
to tear the pole out of the ground.
“Neither will I when Luc finds out I lifted his key ring,” she said grimly.
He thought of what she’d risked, imagined her hurt. If his hands were free, he’d defend her if it came to that.
But he also could feel the guard behind him and hear raised voices less than a mile away. Luc struck him as the kind of man who didn’t make foolish mistakes, and Marin seemed well aware of how lethal he was. Suddenly escaping in broad daylight felt like a very flimsy plan.
The doubt returned again, heavy and cold in his chest.
“Thought you might not be coming back,” he said quietly.
She glanced up, measuring the truth in his face. There was disappointment in her eyes, and a huff of breath from her lips.
“Don’t say you gave up on me.”
The words were light, but they still stung.
“He told me your dad left you before. When you were a kid.”
She went still. Her grip tightened on his wrist and then pulled back. It took only a moment for her to return to the task. “He doesn’t know anything.”
“It’s okay.”
It wasn’t—nothing was—but right then he needed her to know that she could trust him just as much as he had trusted her. That it didn’t matter who her family was, or what they’d done. She was better than this.
Because if she did, maybe he did too.
Her head bowed forward, her spine rounding. There was a brokenness inside her, and he felt it echo within his own rib cage.
“It’s okay,” he said again, softer now.
She moved to the next key.
“When I was twelve he took me out to see the space shuttle.” She wiped the water from her eyes with the back of her wrist. “We stayed out all night looking for it. He told me he saw it, up in the sky, and that one day I could get a spot on one just like it and get out of here.” She lifted a shoulder. “I knew he was lying, but I didn’t care. His lies were better than the truth.”
He’d sometimes thought the same about his own father, though he rarely talked about anything as nice as that.
“A boat showed up before dawn,” she continued. “Traffickers from the Oil Nation. They’d gotten turned around in a storm. The crew had washed out. Just three men were left, and they were half dead.”
The rain faded into the sounds of the water, lapping against a ghostly ship.
“They had fuel on board. A lot of it. Probably doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, but it’s gold out here. There was enough to power generators, charge our radios, and still gas up every motor on every boat. It was the biggest haul I’d ever seen.”
When she took a breath, her shoulders shook, and without thinking, Ross took a step closer.
“I was poking around below deck when I saw them. These kids, hiding in the dark. They hadn’t eaten for a week. They just … looked at me.” She shook her head. “Like I was going to save them or something.”
Ross’s body felt like lead.
She switched to a new key.
“My dad wanted to push them over. The crew … all of them. Just take the haul and sink the boat.” Her hands were shaking, and she made fists to steady them. “We brought the kids above deck. They didn’t even fight when we tied them together.”
Another key.
“My dad, he wanted me to sink them, but I couldn’t. We fought about it. He tried to take over, but I blocked his way. He said, Move, Marin, and I said we could just take the fuel and leave and not tell anyone, but he said it’d be cruel to let them die that way. I wanted to bring them back to Careytown, tell the other captains, but he said they’d never, ever forget that I was soft. If I was a corsario, like him, then I needed to act like it. It’ll be quick, he said. One breath in, and it’ll all be over.”
She was talking faster and faster, the words almost blending together. It was as if he were watching water, spraying free from a broken pipe.
“He tried to shove by me, nicked me with his blade, this stupid knife with a bone handle. Got me right across the belly. I told him I’d tell everyone what he’d done, and he said he’d never taken me for the type to stab someone in the back. The chest maybe, but not the back.”
She squared her shoulders.
“I pushed him, and he fell, and it was over. Just like that. He hit his head, and then went into the water, right after those crewmen he’d pushed overboard. By the time I jumped in to get him, he was already gone.”
“What…” He swallowed. “What happened to the kids?”
“I sailed them to the mainland. Took them to the library and gave them to Gloria—she looks out for the people in the docks. She found a place for them and let me stay on.”
Ross didn’t know what to say. He could only think of how her brother had said Marin was pathetic, and that she’d followed her father around like a mouse.
“You wanted my secret, there it is. I killed my dad when I was twelve and let everyone think he ran like a coward.”
The cuffs came free with a pop, and he jumped, having momentarily forgotten what she was doing.
“When I say,” she said, her tone unchanged. “Run.”
The crescendo of his heartbeat pounded in his chest, a reminder of every time he’d stood on a treadmill waiting for a race to begin. But those runs had been nothing compared to this. Every experience, every feeling he’d ever felt, they were just practice before he’d met Marin.
“Go,” she said, as calmly as she might have said goodbye.
He made it three steps, and then slammed to a halt, finally seeing what she had seen.
Four men stood outside the shack. Japan and Greenhorn had joined the guard, along with the pirate who’d found them in the wreckage—Luc’s right-hand man. A half smile twisted Picker’s lips, pulling at the rough skin of his cheeks. At the sight of the gun in his hand, anger seared through Ross’s veins, overruling any fear, any sense of logic. His vision compressed. He returned to Marin’s side, shoulders bunched.
“What are you doing?” she muttered. “Go.”
She meant to fight them alone. That wasn’t going to happen.
“Together again,” said Picker. “Thought that might be the case.”
“Luc wants to see him,” said Marin. “I was bringing him in.”
“Luc’s been waiting for you to make a move since you stole the keys,” said Picker.
Marin’s breath whistled out between her teeth.
“Take the terreno to the Señora,” said Picker. “Marin and me need to talk.”
“No,” said Ross.
“No?” asked Picker when he didn’t follow it up with anything.
Marin glanced at Ross. “You’re crazy.”
“I’m fast,” he said. “How about you?”
She gave a single nod. The trash fields. Running and hiding was their best chance, just as long as they didn’t get shot on the way.
“Now,” he said.
He grabbed her wrist, knowing before they took their first step it was hopeless.
They caught Marin first. And in the end, he surrendered, just so they’d stop kicking her.
CHAPTER 25
PICKER SHOVED the barrel of his gun between Marin’s shoulder blades, urging her to pick up the pace.
“I don’t have all day,” he said.
She slowed down. If his plan was to kill her, she wasn’t going to make it easy.
Their path was treacherous; the ground, uneven and slippery. Shredded plastic bags and pieces of rubber floated in the dirty puddles, and each step had to be considered. There were thin spots in the gomi, places where the water beneath had churned away the trash below, and left the top layer deceivably thin. Bocas, they’d called them when she was little. One wrong step, and the island would swallow you whole.
“Pretty stupid bringing me out here alone,” she said. “Soon as I get my hands free I’m punching you right in the—”
He shoved her forward, and she tripped, catching herself just before she fell. Her wris
ts were bound behind her with twine so tight it made her fingers tingle with numbness. It threw off her balance, and reminded her with every pained breath of where he’d kicked her in the ribs.
“I’ll remember you did that,” she said.
“A little late to keep score,” he said. “The game’s over, Marin. You lost.”
She shook her head. He was wrong. She was keeping a running tally of every stupid move he’d made. Every time he’d looked at Ross like he was weak, every time they’d shoved him and kicked him since she’d brought him to this cursed place. He would pay for it all, and so would Luc, because Ross was hers in a way that they never would be. She wasn’t sure when it had happened, but sometime between the Armament and the storm, he’d been seared into the part of her that made her her. Not corsario, not Shoreling, but something more.
This was not over until she said it was over.
“He sent you to do his dirty work, huh? After all I did for him?”
“That’s about right.”
A small part of her had hoped Picker had just planned on delivering a message. The larger part had known the truth since she’d seen him come out from that shack with Japan and Tech. Luc wanted her dead, maybe because she was freeing Ross, maybe because he thought she’d pose a threat to him. Whatever the case, it didn’t matter now. He was busy with the Shorelings, and Marin’s time had run out.
As they trudged through the trash, Careytown disappearing behind the hills, she wondered grimly where they’d brought Ross. A potent fury shook through her when she thought of Luc laying into him, punishing him for what she’d done.
She had to find him, and steal a boat, and get as far away from this place as possible. Thinking about it loosened something inside of her, like a string tied too tightly. She felt untethered. Free.
Dangerous.
“What’s he giving you for doing this?” she asked. “More tar? Listen, Picker. You let me out of this and I’ll get you all the tar you want. I can make it, you know. Pulls a nice price on the mainland.”
“That’s far enough,” said Picker. Her abrupt stop had landed her in a shallow puddle that soaked through the cracks in the toes of her boots. Rain slashed across her back as she hesitated. They couldn’t be stopping so soon. She needed more time to think. For a moment, she considered running, but she wouldn’t get far tied up like this.