“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Tarn.
“The people from that settlement wanted to join you, didn’t they,” Alice fired back. It wasn’t a question, either. “They wanted to join you, but elementals and non-elementals can’t coexist, right?”
“Some of them already had the Plague,” snapped Tarn.
“So? Nyla has the Plague now. Rose and Dennis too.”
“Enough!” Marin emerged from below deck, hands raised as if she were surrendering. “You want to know the truth? We chose to save ourselves, yes.”
“You killed them!”
“We killed no one. The Plague killed those people. We’re convenient scapegoats, that’s all. Always have been. Always will be.” Even from partway up the mast I could see that Marin was crying. “When my children die of this disease, you won’t see me running away. I won’t let them suffer alone through the last strikes of life.”
“But that’s your decision.” Alice remained insistent, but seeing Marin clearly affected her. “They’d made a decision too, and you stopped them from saving themselves. You can be as noble as you like for yourself, but you have blood on your hands, Marin. All of you do.”
Marin brushed her tears away. “Spoken like an enemy, Alice. But then, that’s not so surprising, I suppose. You were always going to show your true colors eventually.”
In the silence that followed I wondered what exactly Marin meant by that. And why Tarn didn’t say a word in Alice’s defense.
CHAPTER 15
Once we were through the inlet and on the open waters of the Pamlico Sound, the Guardians left us. Tarn went first, as Ananias took the wheel. Father followed her. It was impossible not to wonder if they were still trying to hide something from us.
From my position on the mast, Roanoke Island appeared as a hazy outline to the north. I climbed down the ladder and savored the feel of stable planks beneath me again.
“We should anchor off the southern tip,” said Ananias. “It’ll keep us out of sight of the pirates.”
Alice shook her head. “We’ll head for the eastern shore. Anchor off Shallowbag Bay.”
“Are you crazy?” I snapped. “The pirates will see us from Skeleton Town. They’ll know exactly where we are.”
“No, they won’t. They’ll see the ship, but we won’t be on it.” She waved her hand at a point in the distance. Maybe she was engaging her element and could already see that far. “When we pass under the bridge that connects Roanoke and Hatteras Islands, the columns will block the pirates’ view of the ship for a moment—long enough for us to jump overboard. While the pirates continue to watch the ship, we swim to shore. Then we circle around Skeleton Town and approach them from the rear. We’ll have the element of surprise.”
“We’ll be outnumbered,” warned Ananias.
“Surprise isn’t our only element,” Alice reminded him. “Our powers are strongest on Roanoke. Anyway, we’re not looking to fight the pirates. The plan is just to rescue your mother and grandmother . . . if Tessa’s still alive, I mean.”
First Alice had hidden the journal from me. Now she was deciding our next move as if no one’s opinion mattered except hers. I wasn’t in the mood to play along. “I suppose the ship will sail itself, right?”
Alice rolled her eyes. “Rose and Dennis and Nyla aren’t fit to come. Marin will want to stay with them. Between her and Tarn, anchoring the ship in Shallowbag Bay won’t be a problem.”
“And what if the pirates row out to the ship while we’re gone? Only Tarn and Marin are strong enough to put up any resistance.”
“They won’t need to resist at all. If Tarn sees the pirates coming, she’ll weigh anchor and Marin will use her element to move the ship away. In the meantime, we’ll have fewer men to deal with on the island. It’s a win-win.”
“What if the pirates shoot at them?”
“We’ll tell everyone to stay below deck.”
Ananias seemed convinced, but I wasn’t. “Even if we rescue Skya and Tessa, and somehow manage to avoid getting drawn into a fight—then what? We can’t set off on another voyage, Alice.”
“We won’t have to. To be honest, I don’t think the pirates are going to fight us at all. Not once they get an up-close reminder of what our elements can do.” Alice flared her nostrils. “Look, if you have a better plan to offer, Thom, then go ahead. I’m listening.” She waited a moment and raised her hand in mock salute. “Thought so.”
She turned on her heel and strode to the prow, where she could get an unobstructed view across the sound to Roanoke Island. I followed her. “How did you know that stuff about White’s expedition, Alice? About those men who drowned.”
The corner of her mouth twisted upward in a smirk. “I wondered when you were going to mention that.”
“Well?”
“You know perfectly well how I know. I read it in the third journal.”
I froze. Somehow it had never occurred to me that she’d admit it. “So where’s the journal now?”
“In the ocean. Best place for it. Trust me.”
I brought my fist down on the deck railing, which gave a low metallic clang. Then I flexed my fingers to make sure that nothing was broken.
She glanced at my hand from the corner of her eye. “I guess you want to hit me. Did you think the journal was yours, Thom? Is that what you thought?”
“Well, it sure wasn’t yours. You know how much Griffin wanted to read it. He could’ve pieced together the whole story of who we are.”
“Not who we are, Thom. Who we were. Anyway, it’s time we started looking forward, not backward.”
“Who says we can’t do both? Griffin deserves to know the truth.”
“The truth.” She snorted. “The truth is that the Guardians have lied to us for years, in more ways than we can probably ever know. And about more things than we can ever forgive.”
“That’s not good enough, Alice. Griffin wants details. After all he has been through, don’t you think he deserves that much?”
She ran dirty fingers across her chapped lips. She was staring at the sound, but her mind seemed to be elsewhere. When she spoke, her voice was gentler than before. “I thought Griffin was going to die, Thom.” She exhaled slowly. “I was so angry. We rescued him from Sumter, but the next morning he seemed sicker than ever. I thought we’d been wrong about him—that he wasn’t the solution after all. And, I don’t know if this makes sense, but . . . I didn’t want him to spend his last days reading that journal. You have to believe me—it would’ve raised more questions than it answered. Griffin could spend the rest of his life reading this stuff and never get to the bottom of it all. But you’re right: It wasn’t my place to keep the journal from him. I’m sorry. I was just so angry with all the lies, you know? They never end.”
An apology—another surprise. Alice had always been impetuous and mercurial, but I’d never had such a hard time reading her before. She was always the girl with a plan. So what was the endgame this time?
“I understand that you hate me right now,” she said.
“I don’t hate you.” It was the right thing to say—almost true, as well.
“Detest me, then. Loathe me. Whatever. You have more reasons to hate me than you even know.”
Another cryptic remark, almost like she was inviting me to delve deeper. But it was also an olive branch, and I had to take it. “You saved Griffin from Sumter,” I said. “After losing your sister and your father . . . you still risked everything for my brother, and I’m grateful for that.”
We were reverting to our usual roles: Alice, keeper of secrets; Thomas, peacemaker. Only, Alice didn’t seem reassured at all.
She pointed to the Roanoke–Hatteras bridge in the distance. “Remember a couple weeks ago when we went to spy on the pirates? How we kept to the shadow of the bridge?”
“How could I forget? I was petrified.
”
“You did well.”
“Only because you told me what to do,” I said honestly. “When Dare walked right by us on the beach, I almost screamed. Then he chopped that guy’s finger off, and stuck his own hands in the fire—”
“Dare scared me too. Back then, anyway.”
“Not so scary now he’s gone, is he?”
“No.” She chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “He doesn’t scare me anymore.”
She rolled her neck. Hands resting against the railing, she stared into the distance, eyes narrowed, element engaged. A few moments later, she shook her head slowly as if the element wasn’t working properly, or she didn’t believe what she thought she’d seen.
“What is it, Alice?”
She studied the surface of the water. “There’s something out there.”
I squinted in a vain attempt to see what she was seeing. “What is it?”
“A raft, I think. Yes, it’s definitely a raft.”
She pointed. Sure enough, there was something out there, though it was hardly more than a speck.
“Tell Ananias to steer due north,” she said, voice quiet and urgent.
Something about her tone made it clear that this was no ordinary raft. I ran back across the deck and showed Ananias where to point the prow.
“What’s out there?” he asked.
“A raft.”
Ananias spun the wheel to the right, and we lost speed as the ship turned. “Did she see anything on it?”
“Must’ve done. She wouldn’t have told us to shift course otherwise.”
Ananias pursed his lips. “I think it’s time you got Father. Tarn too. We’re on enemy water now.”
I shouted down the stairs for Father and Tarn to rejoin us. When I returned to Alice at the prow, I saw something on top of the raft. “Are those—”
“Bodies,” said Alice. “Three of them. . . . No, four.” She bit the knuckle of her thumb. “They’re not moving. Something’s not right.”
“What is it, Alice?”
She blinked twice and stared at the water again. Whatever she saw, she didn’t like it. She backed away from the rail and turned to leave.
“Where are you going?”
She looked at me, then at the steps leading below deck. I couldn’t tell what was playing out in her mind. “I need to tell . . .” She didn’t finish the thought, because just then, Father and Tarn emerged.
Finally I saw what she had seen: Four people on board the raft, and not one of them was moving. Three were turned away from us so that we couldn’t make out their faces, but one had her head tilted slightly toward us. And as her long gray hair was ruffled by the breeze, I knew exactly who it was.
Tessa. My grandmother.
I glanced back at Alice. She was watching me with a faraway expression. “There’s only one reason to stick four bodies on a raft and cast them off,” she said. “And we both know what it is.”
Yes, we did. I just couldn’t believe that Tessa might be dead so soon after I’d begun to know her.
“You realize what this means, don’t you?” she continued.
“They’re all dead.”
“More than that. The other three look like pirates, and I’m guessing they didn’t shoot each other. Which means there must be another killer on Roanoke Island.” Alice lowered her eyes, as if she was frightened by her own realization. “And I have a horrible feeling it’s Plague.”
CHAPTER 16
Neither Tarn nor my father wanted to check on Tessa, that much was clear. But Plague or no Plague, she was family, so we drew in the sails and coasted to a stop some distance from the raft.
Marin might have been able to manipulate the currents to draw us closer, but she was below deck tending to the sick. So Alice coiled a rope around her waist and dived into the gray-green water. She surfaced several yards from the ship and swam toward the raft.
There wasn’t room for her to climb aboard—the bodies had been packed on tightly and restrained with binds—so she tossed her rope across the raft and crawled around to the far side to retrieve it. She wrapped it back around her waist. Legs braced against the thick wooden side, she gave me a nod. Ananias and I began to pull in the rope, and Alice drove the raft slowly toward us.
Tessa was by herself to the left of the raft. The three pirates must have been dead when they were placed beside her; or close to death, anyway. Their limbs overlapped awkwardly. Even from several yards away I saw the telltale signs of Plague: dark lumps around their necks, and blackened fingers. It was hard to think of them as people at all—at least, until I scanned their faces and recognized one of them.
“It’s the old man from the beach,” I shouted.
Alice was grimacing from the strain of forcing the raft along, but she peered up at the figures.
“When we spied on the pirates at Hatteras, there was that old man,” I reminded her. “Seemed like Dare’s right-hand man.”
She placed both hands on the side of the raft and pulled herself up to get a better look. When she saw him and Tessa side by side, her expression shifted, as though their deaths were particularly meaningful for her.
Before I could ask Alice about it, Tarn drew alongside me. “We can’t bring them aboard,” she announced. “All we can do is offer blessings for safe passage.”
“Forget bringing them aboard,” I said. “What I want to know is: How did they die of Plague on Roanoke Island? There are no rats there.”
“There weren’t any rats there,” my father corrected. “But we’ve been gone a week.”
“Convenient timing for them to arrive,” said Ananias.
I huffed. “Not convenient at all. Not if we’re going to rescue our mother.”
Alice raised a hand for silence. She was staring at Tessa’s foot. Slowly, carefully, she placed a finger and thumb on Tessa’s bare big toe and pinched hard. The foot ticked sideways.
“She’s alive,” I shouted.
Alice was already untying the rope from her waist and spooling it around Tessa. “Get her up there,” she yelled. “Now.”
Tarn shook her head. “No way. She has Plague.”
“So have Rose and Dennis and Nyla. Are you going to throw them overboard?”
The stench of dead bodies drifted up on the warm breeze. The pirates weren’t bloated yet, but they would be soon.
Still Father hesitated. Being so close to Tessa was stirring up old memories—I could see it in his eyes. I understood it too.
When the Guardians had decided to rewrite our colony’s history, Tessa had been the lone holdout, the only person who refused to hide from the ugly events of the past. But instead of fighting for what she believed, Tessa had left the colony, choosing self-imposed exile as if it were the noble thing to do. A few months later Griffin had been born, Dare had taken our mother away, and Father was left to raise his three sons without any help. How different things might have been if Tessa had swallowed her pride and stayed.
Ananias and I began to drag Tessa up to the deck railing. Finally, reluctantly, Father joined us too. The rope slid easily over the metal. When Tessa was within reach, Father held her steady while Ananias and I heaved her on board. She collapsed onto the deck without a sound, skin bruised, clothes tattered, hair draped across her face like so much seaweed.
We helped Alice up next. She crawled across the planking and knelt beside Tessa.
“What are you doing, Alice?” cried Tarn. “She’s sick.”
Alice glared at her mother. “Sick, but not dead. So what’s she doing on that raft?”
Alice had always seemed suspicious of Tessa when we’d first encountered her back on Roanoke. Now she pressed her ear to the old woman’s mouth as though our survival rested on what the old woman might tell us. Finally Tessa mouthed something to her.
“Yes,” Alice encouraged her. “We kno
w about the solution.”
Tessa was clearly dehydrated, so I grabbed a water canister. Alice didn’t take it, though. Maybe she suspected that these would be Tessa’s last words, and we couldn’t afford to miss them.
Again Tessa opened her mouth. This time, Alice’s eyes grew wide. She was perfectly still for several moments. Then she sat back on her haunches.
I tipped a little water into Tessa’s mouth, but it dribbled out again. “We need to get her below deck. If we can’t get water and food into her, we’ll lose her.”
“Don’t you think we’re already carrying enough dead weight?” grumbled Tarn.
“I don’t think anyone’s dead yet. Although if it weren’t for Tessa, you’d be dead now. Or have you forgotten when you were trapped in the hold on Dare’s ship?”
Tarn didn’t say a word. Neither did Father. Ananias watched the old woman from several steps away. He hadn’t seen Tessa since he was a small boy.
“Come on,” said Father. “Let’s get her below.”
Ananias and Father lifted Tessa from the deck as if she weighed nothing. I was going to help them when I noticed Alice. She hadn’t moved. Barely seemed aware of us at all.
“What is it, Alice?” I asked. “What did Tessa say?”
Alice was still following the old woman with her eyes.
“What did she say?” I repeated, louder this time.
Alice’s hands were shaking. “She said: ‘Solution is . . . death.’”
Silence. Ananias and Father lowered Tessa back onto the deck.
I waited for someone to explain what it meant, or better still, to dismiss the words as the ramblings of a feverish woman. But when Father said, “She’s delusional,” I could tell he was worried.
“Alice,” I said softly, “are you all right?”
She startled, as if I’d woken her from a trance. “We need to get moving again,” she replied, like she hadn’t even heard the question. “We’ll be at the bridge in less than one strike. We need to eat and drink. We must get ready to disembark.”
“Disembark?” Ananias raised his hands. “Tessa got Plague on that island.”