The Flooded Earth

by Mardi McConnochie

  “What are we going to do?” said Annalie.

  “We’re going out the side door,” Will said.

  Instead of sailing directly for open water, which would have been the quickest way out of the Eddy, Will spun the wheel. The Sunfish plunged toward the weedy ruins of the drowned city. There were rat-runs through this labyrinth, secret pathways that would take you safely through the maze and out to sea. Get it right and you avoided the Admiralty and everything that came with them; get it wrong, and you could end up lost, aground.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” Annalie asked.

  “I know what I’m doing!” Will snapped.

  Annalie had to trust that he did.

  “But I might need you to help us fend off,” he added.

  Annalie grabbed an oar from a locker and hurried up to the prow to keep an eye out for anything that might loom up in their way.

  Will dropped the motor to a low growl and pushed cautiously forwards. The water here was as high as a house above the former street level; they crept between the skeletons of rooftops and the looming necks of streetlights, following the old streets, which in many places were choked with piled debris. These waterways were a maze, but Annalie noticed a dot of colored paint on a corner, and Will turned toward it; other openings had different-colored dots on them; these Will avoided. She realized someone had been through here and marked the way through the maze for those who knew what to look for. Somehow, Will had learned to read what these signs meant.

  They were still in the maze when the engine’s growl slowed and then stopped. She looked back at Will in dismay.

  “Out of juice,” he said.

  “Now what?”

  He squinted up at the sky. It was early afternoon, and the sun was strong, but the battery, they both knew, was slow to charge. “Well, we could wait,” he said. “Or we could try and sail out.”

  “There’s not much wind,” Annalie said.

  “No. Or much room to maneuver.”

  “But if we stay here we’re sitting ducks.”

  He raised his eyebrows at her. “Then we’d better give it a go then.”

  He’s actually enjoying this, Annalie thought.

  Will put the sails up, and they began to tack, carefully. Annalie stood braced at the bow, her oar at the ready. The boat inched forward. Below, she could see fish moving over darker objects beneath. Weed? Wreckage? Impossible to tell. The boat surged toward a wall; Will trimmed the sail while Annalie pushed with her oar. The end of the oar skidded off, and the boat kept moving toward the wall, but then at the last minute they corrected course.

  Another colored dot on a wall ahead; the boom swung, whistling past Annalie’s head; the sails flapped and caught; the boat turned.

  This space was even tighter than the last. Glancing back at Will, Annalie could see the tension on his face as he tried to control the movement of the boat.

  “There!” he shouted, pointing.

  Annalie spotted a huge shape looming out of the water, very close to their bow. She was on the wrong side; frantically she scrambled across to port, and jammed her oar in, pushing with all her strength. The object, rusted metal, might once have been a van. She pushed and she pushed, aware of the weight of the wind in the sails behind her; somehow she managed to exert just enough force—they slipped past unscathed.

  “Look!” Will said. “Open water!”

  They passed the last few ruinous buildings and sailed at last into the open sea.

  Annalie turned to Will. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “We made it!”

  “If we’re going to do this,” Will said, “you’re going to have to start having a little faith.”

  “Um—excuse me,” came a voice from behind them.

  Annalie and Will turned.

  There, entirely forgotten in all the excitement, stood Essie.

  The southern route

  “Oh,” Annalie said. “Essie.”

  For a moment no one knew quite what to say.

  “She’s not coming with us,” Will said.

  “Of course not,” Annalie said.

  It seemed quite obvious to both siblings that Essie could not come on the journey.

  “But what are we going to do with her?” Will said. “We can’t go back now. They’ll catch us.”

  “Yes, but—” Annalie began.

  “It seems to me,” Essie said, “that we should keep sailing until we can find a safe place to let me off.”

  “Like where?” asked Will skeptically.

  “You’ve probably got a better idea than me,” said Essie.

  “We can’t just leave you in some strange port by yourself,” Annalie said.

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll catch a train back to Pallas,” Essie said.

  Will nodded decisively. “Sounds like a plan then. Let’s get moving. We’re going south.”

  He was already turning the wheel as Annalie opened her mouth to protest. The sails filled. Annalie turned to Essie. “Sorry,” she said.

  Essie just waved her hand dismissively to indicate it was nothing, smiling a little too brightly.

  Annalie joined Will at the wheel. “What’s our plan then?” she asked.

  “Well—I thought we’d just go south as fast as we can, try and get clear of the pursuit ships,” Will said.

  “Can we outrun a pursuit ship if we see one?” Annalie asked.

  Will pulled a face. “Probably not.”

  “Maybe we should find somewhere to hide out for a little while,” Annalie suggested.

  “We’re not far from the mangroves,” Will said. “If we pulled in there we could hide out under the trees, work out what to do next.”

  Annalie nodded. “Sounds good.”

  They sailed on until they reached an estuary at the mouth of a large, meandering river. Will steered up one of the river’s many narrow branches and they dropped anchor where the tree cover was thickest.

  “This place stinks,” Essie said.

  “It’s an estuary,” Will said witheringly, “it’s what they all smell like.”

  Annalie swiftly changed the subject. “Have you been below? Do we have any supplies?”

  “Haven’t really had a chance to check the supplies,” Will said, “what with escaping from the Admiralty and everything.”

  The three of them went below decks.

  Essie looked around curiously—she had never been inside a boat like this before. It felt a little like stepping inside a doll’s house; it was very compact, but the more she looked, the more she saw how well organized it was. In the main room, which she later learned was called the saloon, there was a tiny kitchen and a little table and benches that could fold away when not in use. The walls were lined with cupboards, so everything had a place, although many of the cabinets were unlatched, and the floor was littered with things that had fallen out of them.

  “Where do you sleep?” asked Essie.

  The cabins were forward, one on each side. One contained two bunks, the other a double bed.

  “Spinner slept there,” Annalie said, indicating the double bed. “We have the bunks.”

  “Who gets the top bunk?”

  “We take it in turns,” Will said.

  “We have a roster,” Annalie explained. “To stop us fighting.”

  A further check of all the access hatches and compartments showed the Admiralty hadn’t destroyed anything on board, or prized open the skin of the boat to see whether there was anything hidden behind it. They had, however, been through every equipment locker, leaving them a jumbled mess, and must have taken anything they didn’t recognize or that looked homemade. There were a number of useful things that were missing, including a device Spinner had rigged up to extract freshwater from seawater. More seriously, the locker that had once held spare parts—for the engine, the steering
, the solar batteries, the wind turbines—had been emptied.

  “We’re going to have to replace those,” Will said, as they stood together looking into the empty locker, with its checklist still attached to the inside of the door.

  “And that’s going to be expensive,” Annalie said.

  Fortunately they had food and fresh water, although they would need to get more of both before they ventured out into the open ocean.

  They decided to spend the night hidden in the mangroves, and then begin their journey in the morning. As evening fell, Annalie got out Spinner’s sat nav and began bringing up charts.

  “The first thing we need to do is work out which route we’re going to take,” she said.

  “You know,” Will said, “you don’t actually have to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Come with me.”

  “I do,” Annalie said shortly.

  “You really don’t. I can do this. A lot’s changed while you’ve been away. Me and Spinner have been sailing together a lot, just the two of us. We’ve been getting along just fine without you.”

  Annalie went quiet then.

  “So you don’t have to feel bad about it. Go back to school. It’s obviously where you want to be—”

  “What’s obvious about it?” Annalie said.

  Will peered at her, surprised by her reaction. “You love your new school. You’re always going on to Spinner about how great it is.” Her weekly calls home had been full of all the amazing things she’d done that week. She’d visited museums and worked in state-of-the-art science labs. She’d been on a warship and a submarine. She took her swimming lessons at the same aquatic center where the Swimming World Championships were held. It had all sounded like bragging to Will, and it had made him feel left out and cross. It wasn’t that he wanted to go to an Admiralty college—hell no!—but there was something about seeing Annalie in that weird, stiff uniform, so far away from them and doing important fancy things, that made everything about home feel wrong. After a while, he’d gone to another room whenever he heard Spinner’s shell chime.

  “Well of course I did,” Annalie said. “How could I tell him anything different? He was desperate for me to go to Triumph. If I’d told him I was hating it, he just would have worried.”

  “You didn’t hate all of it, did you?” Essie asked, feeling a little hurt.

  “I reckon I enjoyed about as much of it as you did,” Annalie said dryly.

  “So you didn’t like it?” Will said. His expression was gradually brightening from hostility into surprise and relief.

  “Remember what you said when Spinner asked you whether you wanted to take the scholarship test too?”

  “Something like, “I’d rather gnaw my own hand off than go to a stupid snobby school like that”?”

  “Well you were right. It is a stupid snobby school,” Annalie said.

  Will laughed and punched her arm. “Told you, didn’t I?”

  “Actually it’s Dux’s leading stupid snobby school,” Essie said with a grin.

  Graham chimed in from his perch in the corner. “What snobby?”

  “A snob is someone who thinks they’re better than other people,” Annalie explained. “And they’re not afraid to let people know it.”

  “Bit like you, Graham,” Will said.

  “Graham not think he better,” he said loftily. “Graham know.”

  Annalie was looking at Will thoughtfully. “There was really nothing for you to be jealous about.”

  “I wasn’t jealous,” Will said.

  “Really?”

  “It just seemed like—”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that place was changing you.”

  “Into a snob?” Annalie asked, surprised by the thought. “Did I really seem that different?”

  “Getting to be.”

  “Well I’m not.”

  Will gave her a sly grin. “Yeah, I see that now. Just as annoying as ever.”

  Annalie narrowed her eyes at him, but the teasing felt comfortable now. “We should work out which route to take,” she said, turning back to the sat nav.

  There were two ways to reach the Moon Islands: the northern route and the southern route. Spinner had always taken the northern route, sailing out and across the inner sea, then traveling via the northern lands across and down to the Islands.

  “We know the northern route,” Annalie said thoughtfully. “If we’re going to do it by ourselves, it makes sense to go the way we already know.”

  “North route,” Graham said. “Special biscuit town.”

  One of their favorite stops on the northern route was the city of Violeta, where they made a kind of biscuit Graham particularly liked.

  “The southern route is quicker,” Will said.

  If you sailed south, you eventually came to the port city of Southaven, and the peninsula that was the southernmost point of Dux. Below this peninsula was open ocean. Roaring winds called the Furies blew from west to east and could send a boat rocketing from Southaven through the rough southern ocean until they reached the Moon Islands. The southern route was plagued by massive ocean storms, huge waves and very high winds. Because of the vast distances involved, it was also possible to overshoot and miss the Moon Islands entirely; if you ended up too far south, the oceans down there were huge and empty, there were dead patches and doldrums, and help was hard to come by.

  “It’s not quicker if you get wrecked,” Annalie said.

  “No wreck! Go north!” Graham ordered.

  “I bet Spinner’s going south,” Will said.

  The other major risk on the southern route was other boats. The Moon Islands were outside the Admiralty’s control—pirates, slavers, and criminals of every kind operated there, and it was dangerous to go unprotected.

  “If Spinner’s going the southern route,” Will continued, “we should go that way too. How else are we going to catch up with him?”

  Annalie looked at Will unhappily. She hated to think that they might go all that way and then miss him because they had taken too long. “But it’s so dangerous,” she said.

  “It’s not the worst time of year,” Will offered. “The winter storms won’t start for two more months.”

  “There can be storms any time,” Annalie said, but her mind was still working. “One reason the northern route is safer is because it’s Admiralty controlled almost the whole way.”

  “They’ll be watching out for the boat now,” Will agreed.

  “If they stop us, it’s all over,” Annalie said.

  “Oh, don’t go the southern route,” Essie said. “I saw a vid once about a family who went that way by accident and their boat was hijacked and the children were kidnapped.”

  “That was just a vid,” Will said.

  “It was based on a true story,” Essie said stoutly. “It happens.”

  “And worse things too,” Annalie said, “but I don’t really see that we’ve got a choice.”

  “Isn’t there another way? A less obvious northern way?” Essie asked. “I just hate to think of you guys going out there and just—I don’t know—disappearing.”

  “If anyone tried to kidnap us they’re going to be disappointed,” Will said, laughing. “It’s not like we’ve got anyone to pay our ransom.”

  “Okay,” Annalie said, “it looks like we’re going to Southaven. We’d better add wet weather gear to the shopping list.”

  A cure for seasickness

  They set out first thing the next morning. It was a beautiful day to be at sea. The sky was clear with a good wind and the ocean was deep and green and lovely.

  “This is what it’s all about,” Will said to Annalie as they rolled into the swell, a bigger swell than yesterday. This was the life he loved: being at sea, the sun on his face, the wind at his back. It fel
t good knowing that his sister was there again at his side, although he would never have admitted it to her.

  The decision to send them to separate schools had thrown him off balance. If anyone had asked him if he and his sister were especially close (twins, psychic connection, etc.) he would have laughed in their face. It wasn’t that he missed her when she went away. But her absence changed things. Growing up, he and Annalie had been treated the same. Spinner had expected them to do the same jobs round the house, pull their weight on the boat, help out in the workshop. The two of them had felt like equals. Annalie often had her nose in a book, whereas Will was always desperate to get outside, and their school reports had never exactly been comparable, but that didn’t seem to matter—until they turned eleven, and suddenly it did matter, and all Spinner could think about was getting Annalie into that posh school. Annalie, but not Will. He felt oddly cheated by the discovery that Spinner actually did care about academic achievement, as if all this time he’d been hiding something from him.

  The Spinner he’d grown up with was a practical man, good with his hands, who loved boats, and Will had wanted to live the same sort of life when he grew up: fixing things, being useful, and spending time on boats. Actually, spending a lot of time on boats. If he could figure out a way to spend all his time on the Sunfish and still make a living, he thought that would be just about perfect. But then Spinner sent Annalie away to live a different kind of life: big school, big city, perhaps university and the Admiralty at the end of it. And he’d begun to wonder whether he’d got it all wrong. He’d thought he was already living the best life imaginable. But what if he was mistaken?

  The humiliation and injustice of having his sister singled out for special treatment, while his own good qualities were ignored, had been tying him in knots all term. But he felt quite a bit better about it now that he knew she’d hated that school. It made him feel he’d been right about the place from the start: the people were all snobs and there were too many rules. It wasn’t the right kind of place for people like himself and his sister. They were better off living their own way, following their own path, back on the boat, the two of them again, equals.