by Carrie Patel
“Then it’s safest to say Lin and Arnault will end up on the Continent, right where you want them.” Malone regarded Geist, whose expression might as well have been chiseled from stone. “Except that’s not what you want, is it?”
“Roman Arnault possesses something imposant.” Geist straightened his lapels to mask his irritation. “It is regrettable for the wrong people to encounter him first.”
Malone suspected he was talking about access to the vault, but she wasn’t ready to tip her hand just yet. Let Geist believe she knew less than she did.
But Salazar wasn’t yet satisfied. “What’s Arnault got that you all want so badly?”
Geist plucked at the end of his goatee. “A key. To a gran cache. It is difficult to explain, but you would not desire the wrong persons to be having it.”
“Who are the wrong people?” Malone asked. For all she knew, Geist was one of them.
“Persons who detest you. They would destruct you simply because you are different. Und because their histories demand it.”
“For all we know, you could be one of them,” Salazar said, thinking along the same lines as Malone.
“Then I would not trouble myself to avise you of them. Und I certainment would not waste my time on civil conversation.” He smiled.
“Why do you care?” Malone asked.
He turned a sharp gaze on her. “Why did you? You continued in Recoletta.”
He was right. Worse, she felt the old conviction kindling inside her.
Salazar folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “If you’re saying there’s a foreign army looking to invade, know they wouldn’t find it so easy.”
Geist laughed bitterly. “I arrive to you in an airship. You illume your homes with candles. How hard do you esteem it will be?”
Salazar snorted. “You’d still have to get your people over here.”
“Und as you observed, we have been doing that for a very long time.” He folded his hands. “We must find Roman Arnault, und we must do it in avance of our rivals.”
“You already know where he’s going,” Malone said.
He dabbed at his forehead with his napkin. “The Continent is stark big. It is easy to lose someone.”
“So we follow Salvage. Watch where they make landfall.” That much was obvious.
Geist gave her a smile – a real one. Salazar was shaking his head.
“What?” Malone asked.
“We,” Geist repeated.
The hunt for Roman Arnault was still her case. She wasn’t sure when, but at some point during dinner, she’d realized that much. And as much as she hated to admit it, Lachesse was right – the mess they were in now was her responsibility as much as it was anyone’s. And she couldn’t leave it to Geist, whom she hardly trusted, or Lachesse, whom she trusted even less.
She looked around the table, surrounded by honest friends and good food.
It had been a lovely dream.
Salazar sighed. “I’ll see you’re well provisioned. Sounds like it’ll be a long time before we see each other again.”
“Most kind,” Geist said, again with the uncomfortable smile.
Malone realized something else, too. She’d been aching to get out of Dominari Hall and to sink her teeth into a case again. And now, she had the greatest manhunt of her life before her and a warm trail leading her across the sea.
Chapter 14
Decks
A combination of Jane’s own grit, Leyal’s gingiber, and directions from a few dozen strangers had finally brought her across the maze of Salvage to the Albatross. She’d arrived with painfully warm skin, a dry mouth, and a thrice-emptied stomach, but she arrived.
And she’d done so with feet that were surer on Salvage’s rocking decks and an ear that was growing better attuned to the floating city’s strange patois. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been avoiding the confusion of human interaction until she began asking directions of nearly everyone in sight.
It felt good to have her bearings again.
The Albatross was a big ship, sitting low in the water and belching thick clouds of smoke into the sky. Moorings lashed it to its neighbors on all sides, but only three wide gangways led from it to any of the adjacent decks. A whistle shrieked, marking the shift change. She waited, observing the flurry of activity and looking for Roman. The workers leaving the Albatross were covered in grease and soot, yet none of that obscured the qualities that made Roman distinct in her mind. She watched for the rhythm of his limp, the cut of his hair, his prowling way of scanning a crowd with his chin pointed down.
The workers cleared, the shift change ended, and Jane settled in to await the next one.
She watched the natives navigate their city with catlike grace and listened to the bellmen as they marched across the decks, ringing their namesakes and calling out the day’s news. Once or twice, she caught a glimpse of something on the horizon – distant behemoths that leapt from the waves only to disappear beneath them again. No one else seemed to pay any mind.
The sun beat down overhead, warming Jane’s scalp and shoulders past the point of anything pleasant. Her skin and clothes were filthy from the tide of workers brushing past her. But she waited.
When the whistle squealed again, she was ready.
The men and women pouring out of the Albatross looked the same as those from the previous shift. They trudged forward, exhausted but eager to leave.
Some were a little taller, some broader in the shoulder. Some moved faster, and others were too tired. The minutes ticked by, and they all still looked the same.
All except the one coming down the far gangplank, walking with a poorly disguised limp.
She tightened her grip on the railing and held herself there a few seconds longer, until she was sure the down-angled chin and prowling gait could belong to no one else.
Then, she took off.
The flaw in her plan, which she was just beginning to appreciate, was that Roman was almost off the gangplank before she recognized him. He would just now be stepping onto the next deck, which was still two decks away from her, and there was no telling where he would head afterwards.
Jane squeezed and elbowed her way through the crowd. Unfortunately, workers disembarking from the Albatross were just as determined to leave the place as she was to approach it.
But she squirmed, darted, and apologized her way down the gangplank and across the next deck, where of course Roman was nowhere to be found.
It was hard to stand still among the workers, most of whom stood head and shoulders above her. She was pushed toward another gangplank and swept along it to another broad deck, where the workers began to disperse.
She heard a man’s voice behind her. “Too small to be an oiler, she,” he said. “But all covered in corruption just the same.”
It struck her then – Roman couldn’t have gone farther than the nearest salt ship. All she had to do was follow his shift mates headed in the same direction.
“Where’s the salt ship?” Jane asked, turning.
Four workers all pointed in unison. If there was one thing any Salvager knew, it was where to get clean.
“Conestoga, she is called,” said another man. “No offending, but you’re gonna need the bottom deck.” The others nodded.
“Graces,” she said, hurrying ahead.
She continued up the gangway, through the plodding, creaking, chattering afternoon traffic. She reached the deck of a long ship. “Conestoga” was painted on the side.
Sure enough, three figures were hauling buckets up the side of the boat, their sun-darkened necks glistening and bent under squeaking pulleys. Jane continued past them and into the hold below.
The floors were slick and the air heavy with the musk of the bathers. The hold was a wide open space filled with sloshing troughs and strung with makeshift privacy screens – stained canvas sheets and tasseled silk hangings. They swayed with the movement of the boat, warping the shadows of the people moving behind them.
; Jane found an unattended basin and splashed water over her arms, careful to let the runoff drip to the floor grating rather than back into the basin. When she wiped at her face, she was surprised to see her palms come away black.
This would be a bigger task than she’d expected.
She grabbed a handful of sand from a bin next to the basin and scoured her arms, face, and neck. It stung her sun-abused skin. She would never have believed something like sand could make her feel clean, but it beat the soot, grease, and sweat she was scraping off herself. Besides, there was something about a little discomfort that made both washing and penitence feel all the more effective.
Clearing her skin seemed to clear her head, too. As she patted her face and arms dry on the cotton sheet hanging next to her – trying not to think about how many other bathers had already soiled it today – she looked down at the grating between her feet and saw movement. Reaching limbs and sodden hair, flashing in the light filtering through the floor.
Jane returned to the stairs and descended another level, keeping a careful grip on the railing. The steps were slick and streaked with black, and a heavy odor rose from the lower level.
Suddenly, the comment about the bottom deck made sense. That was where all the oilers and engine ship crew cleaned up.
The light was poorer on the lower deck, filtered through the hatching of the grates above and through the scores of people moving across it. Which was just as well, because the men and women washing up here stripped themselves almost – in some cases completely – to the nude, scrubbing themselves with the quiet concentration born of ritual and exhaustion.
The deck was crowded – much more than the one above, especially since no one seemed that concerned about privacy screens. With any luck, Roman would be down here.
Jane hoped he’d be easier to recognize when he wasn’t covered in soot.
She squeezed past the dripping bathers, trying to scan the room without being too obvious. If she knew anything about Roman, though, he’d have his back to a wall and his eyes on the crowd.
So she made her way toward the wall on her left and began working her way back.
She’d almost made it halfway across the deck when a voice behind her rose above the splashing and muttering. “Oye.”
Jane pretended not to hear it.
“You. Companyera,” the voice came again, louder and more insistent. The bathers in front of Jane ignored her and continued their ablutions.
Meanwhile, footsteps, heavy and wet, plodded behind her.
Jane turned. In front of her was one of the tallest women she’d ever seen, naked but for a thin white undergarment around her waist, and that was nearly transparent with water. She crossed her arms over a chest like a carriage front. Jane couldn’t help but notice that her head was almost level with it.
“Deck’s for oilers. You wanna clean, go arriba,” the woman said.
Jane glanced around, searching for any focal point but the muscled breasts in front of her, and sorely wished she had a coating of soot to hide the blush that was surely rising in her face.
Something squelched next to her, sounding like the fear welling in her chest. But it was only a man kneading his dirty shirt in the basin, frowning into the gray, opaque water.
He plunged himself in to the elbows, and some of the water spilled out, slopping onto Jane’s shoes.
“I’m checking the water,” Jane said. “Gonna need some fresh.”
The big woman grunted. “I always tell ‘em so. We go through it double-fast.”
“Naturally,” Jane said, already backing away.
“Ee get us some fresh,” the woman said.
Before Jane had a chance to ask what she meant, the woman bent – giving Jane a sudden and surprising view – and hoisted an armful of filthy towels and sheets.
Which she dropped into Jane’s arms.
And what was an armful for the larger woman was several for Jane – it piled up to her face, and she had to hold it to her chest to keep it from spilling onto the floor.
The woman folded her arms again and smiled.
“I’ll see what else needs collecting,” Jane said, averting her face from the foulness. She left before the other woman could get any new ideas.
The bundle of fabric smelled like week-old goat’s milk and looked like it had been trampled by half the population of Salvage, but at least the other bathers parted way for her.
She tried to tell herself she’d handled worse before, but she knew that was a lie. So she focused on the faces in the crowd, and the accents in the murmuring voices, and the cooling drip and splash of clean water from the grating above.
Jane found him in the corner. He was scrubbing his shoulders with handfuls of sand and watching the crowd through a curtain of wet hair.
Gray rivulets of water ran down his arms and torso, crossing pink welts and red lines. In the week since they’d been picked up, he’d started to return to himself, filling out the expanse between his broad shoulders once more.
She was suddenly grateful for the cooling splash of water dripping from above.
Roman glanced up. His eyes found hers around the armful of filthy towels, and his smile was both sudden and surprised.
“If you’d told me you were coming, I would have cleaned up sooner,” he said. A charmingly ridiculous smile played at the corners of his mouth.
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” she said. She was starting to think she’d arrived at just the right time, anyhow.
He gave her a quick up and down. “I take it you’re not here for a salt bath.”
Remembering her actual purpose sobered her up. “Actually, I came to talk,” she said as casually as she could.
His grin faded as though he heard the worry in her tone. “Two minutes,” he said. “Meet me topside.”
Jane headed back toward the stairs, clearing her path with the armful of towels. She left them by the stairs in what felt like a small but satisfying act of defiance.
He emerged into the afternoon light after a couple of interminable minutes. His ragged shirt – the same one she’d last seen him in, she was sure – was already stained and torn from his brief time on Salvage, yet he was looking like himself again. The bruises on his face had mostly faded away, and even his patchy beard did little to disguise him.
It was all she could do to peel her gaze away from him to scan the decks for anyone else watching.
“Already?” he asked, following her eyes.
The message Jane had intercepted had her paranoid about who might be watching, but there was no such thing as privacy on Salvage – not when bathing was a communal activity. The best she could hope for was to disappear into the crowd. Fortunately, a galley was as good a place for that as any.
Galleys, at least, weren’t hard to find. One simply had to follow the aromas of frying fish.
They found one just a couple of decks over from the salt ship. It didn’t have a cabin, only a series of rippling canvas sunshades crowned with smoke from dozens of cook fires. Men and women stood over them, their voices raised over the hiss of the oil and the snapping of the awnings.
And the place was even more crowded than the other packed boats. Fish and vegetables, caught fresh from the sea and grown on dirt-layered farm decks, sizzled and spat from grills and pans.
Of the many things Jane still didn’t understand about Salvage, one was the food economy. She’d seen a dozen boats like this one all around the fleet, and whether they’d been intended as kitchens or just ended up that way, Jane couldn’t say. But when she’d asked about food her first few days on Salvage, she’d been pointed to decks like these as if the rest should be self-explanatory. And when she’d picked a square of chewy flat bread topped with a fried gull’s egg from a baking stone, no one had asked for her money.
As best she could tell, the people tending the cook fires worked on those boats the way she worked on the Nossa Senhora. It was simply another job that people were assigned and that they showed up to do, not beca
use there was pay in it but simply because it kept the city running.
They dunked their hands in the saltwater basin near the gangplank. Even though their collars were still damp and their skin bright and sticky from the baths they’d just taken, they washed their hands because no Salvager would touch food otherwise.
Roman took a deep breath of the savory scents around them. He muscled through the crowd to the nearest stove and returned with a cross between a fish and a snake.
Two somethings.
“I found a message,” Jane said, taking her portion.
With that, she explained her work on the Nossa Senhora and the message she’d found that morning.
“What did it say?” Roman asked.
Jane closed her eyes and pictured the scrap of paper in her hand and the then-live pigeon cradled in her arm. “Kennedy agitates. Refuses petition to interrogate the bounty. Demands privilege of salvage. Avise.”
Roman raised his eyebrows. “Advise?”
“Probably.” It was hard to know exactly what Salvagers’ words meant, but it was easy to get close enough. “What do you think?”
“I think the eel is better hot,” he said, pointing to the cooling twist of meat in her hand.
Jane considered the scorchmark-crusted flesh and took a bite. Salvagers seasoned their food as if eating it were a dare. She couldn’t understand why, except that maybe their burning tongues distracted their heads and stomachs from the rocking and sloshing of the world around them.
“I’m worried this means someone’s searching for you. Maybe both of us,” Jane said quickly, as if spitting the words out might make them less likely to be true.
Roman looked at her, picking his teeth with a bone. “How so?”
“What else could it mean to ‘interrogate the bounty’? We were picked up just a week ago. Whoever this Kennedy is, maybe he–”
“Kennedy’s not a person,” Roman said, selecting a long, fried tuber from a sun-warmed plate. “It’s a ship.”
“Are you sure?”
“How many Salvagers have you met with names like ‘Kennedy’? They’re all Leyal, Honor, Fey, Coraj, and what have you,” he said.