After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  “Well, God will save us.”

  “If there is a god, he has a different idea of goodness than we do.”

  I could tell Behir was listening to them as he turned his glass in circles on the bar in front of us. He seemed so young. I wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how.

  “You remember seeing that bird?” he asked, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Bird?”

  “Let out of the cage on that raider’s ship?”

  I nodded.

  “I asked Abran about it later. He said raiders are using homing pigeons now. To communicate with other ships or ports after they’ve made a conquest.”

  This hit me like a wave and I rocked on my stool. Would the colony in the Valley be able to send out a message to the rest of the Lost Abbots before we killed the guards left behind? Would the Lost Abbots return before we could set up defenses?

  Behir shook his head and went on. “Apparently they train them to fly between their ships. Abran said they shoot them dead above other ships because the bird won’t land. Doesn’t recognize a ship not part of their fleet and gets confused. They call it ‘dropping a message.’” Behir paused and rubbed his thumb on his cup. “With them communicating, it will be so much harder to hide from them—” Behir’s voice almost cracked and I took his hand.

  “We don’t need to hide from anyone,” I said, stuffing down my own fears. I took a deep breath and assumed that calm and in-control expression I so often put on when Pearl was with me. I squeezed his hand once and drew my hand back. “We won’t need to hide because we will fortify the Valley.”

  It surprised me that I believed what I said. I saw it now in my mind’s eye—all of us working together to build something. Abran’s vision was infectious. While I had thought I was above the idealism of it, here I was, secretly yearning for what he was trying to accomplish.

  Behir nodded and grinned at me. “You’re right,” he said. He drank the dregs in his cup, the scent of elderberry and bark wafting toward me. “I think I’m going to head back to the ship. Almost everyone is back there.”

  I nodded. “I’ll be there soon,” I said, wanting suddenly to be alone, as if some barrier had been crossed and I now wanted to go back behind it.

  “I almost forgot.” Behir pulled something out of his pocket and set it on the bar in front of me. It was a pair of small snakeskin gloves. “I bought them for Pearl. For going north. She—she reminds me of my little sister. I guess I just wanted her to have something nice.”

  I touched them with the tips of my fingers, the skin surprisingly soft. “Thank you,” I said.

  These people deserve to know where they’re going, I thought as Behir left the saloon. I pushed the gloves away from me and dropped my head in my hands.

  Chapter 29

  That night I walked along the dark hallway to Abran’s room. Over the last few weeks I still visited Abran at night, though infrequently and without warning. Abran seemed so distracted with sailing the ship through these new waters that he no longer asked that we tell the crew about us. I was beginning to feel that if I stopped visiting him at night I wouldn’t miss it. But it was the only private place I could try to convince him to stop for the hidden medicine.

  As I stood at his door, my knuckles light on the wood, I thought of Daniel in the mangroves, the way his beard brushed my forehead when I lay my head on his chest.

  Abran opened the door and I smelled whiskey on his breath. He closed the door behind me, careful that it didn’t make a noise. He even moved cautiously back to his bed, looking over his shoulder at me like I was a stranger.

  A half-drunk bottle of whiskey sat on his bedside box, tipping to the right on the uneven surface. It wasn’t the same jug of whiskey we kept in the storage room and brought up to the cabin for celebrations. Perhaps he bought it with his two extra coins in Wharton. I didn’t want to consider the possibility that he had been skimming our trades and had used the extra money to purchase alcohol for himself.

  “You’ll have to pace yourself if it’ll last the Atlantic crossing,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted and teasing, but an edge crept into my voice.

  “Hopefully we’ll all last the Atlantic crossing,” he said. He collapsed on the bed, lying on his back, hand over his eyes.

  “What is it?” I asked. He was making me nervous. I couldn’t convince him to stop for the medicine if he was already feeling anxious and defeated. His small room reeked of sweat and liquor, of nights with no sleep, turning over and over in a small bed as the waves thrashed against the sides of the ship.

  “Wharton was my brother’s favorite post. Reminded him of home, I think.” Abran sat up in bed, a line between his brows, his mouth pressed into a firm line. I could tell he was about to collapse and I gritted my teeth in impatience. The tension fell from his face as he began to sob, dropping his forehead to his palms.

  I sat next to him and folded him into my arms, rubbing his shoulder and whispering into his hair, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  After a moment, he leaned back from me. “It was my fault.”

  I shook my head. “No, it wasn’t.”

  “It was. It was our plan, but it . . .” Abran looked around the room, stunned and lost. “Our plan was to steal their supplies while the ship was docked and the crew was on shore, drinking and finding whores. It was only a few miles from here. We were going to hide the resources we stole up the mountainside. The plan was to set one of the ship’s small boats free, to drift with the current, as a decoy, so the crew would follow it when they returned to the ship.”

  Abran grew quiet and neither of us spoke for some time. The sea seemed to build a wall of noise around us, thundering against the wood, the ship creaking in the night. Then Abran continued, “Jonas went back on the ship to free a slave kept down in the hull. We fought about it. I didn’t want him to do it, the slave wasn’t . . . wasn’t well anymore and it could put us in more danger. But Jonas went down below while I lowered the boat and released it into the water. Then I went back up the mountainside to hide, waiting for Jonas to join me. But screams filled the air. The slave was screaming and hollering and attacking Jonas. Probably thought Jonas was going to execute him or something. Couldn’t understand he was being set free. Then it was silent. I thought Jonas had knocked the slave out to quiet him. I was just about to come out of hiding, go back to the ship, when I saw a few of our crewmates coming down the dock, toward the ship.”

  Abran sank his head into his hands. “I watched, thinking to Jonas, Get away, get away. I wasn’t sure if he was still on the ship or had slipped away. It was dark. I couldn’t see. A couple of men finally dragged him up from the hull—I think he was unconscious—the slave must have knocked him out. One draped him over the gunwale and the other blew his head off. They flipped his legs over and he fell into the sea.”

  An echo of grief shuddered through me. No wonder Abran was as frightened as he was driven, I thought. I reached for Abran’s wrist, pulling his hand from his face, and put my palm in his. “You couldn’t have stopped it.”

  “I could have.” Abran pulled his hand away and shook his head. “No sense now. No sense in anything now.”

  I felt him slipping away from me, so I reached out and shook him. “Abran, stop. The whole crew is depending on you. We have things to worry about here and now.” I told him what the shopkeeper in Wharton had told me, not just about the epidemic, but about how the Lost Abbots used biological warfare to make the Valley a colony. My whole body went rigid; my tongue felt stuck in my mouth. I felt fear like a piece of metal I couldn’t swallow. We had nowhere else to go. He couldn’t change our route now, I told myself.

  Abran listened glumly, without any apparent shock or concern. “I’ve heard of that. Biological warfare.”

  I had held my breath while he spoke and now let it out in a quick exhale. I leaned back from him, watching his face. Once again, he reminded me of Jacob, the way he sat hunched forward, defeated and disinterested. Whenever things got stressful Ja
cob would check out, slowly closing himself off. “You could lose everything you’ve worked for,” I said carefully.

  “There will always be something,” Abran said, reaching for the bottle on the table. He took a swig and I resisted the urge to grab the bottle from him and fling it against the wall. Adrenaline buzzed in my veins. It was too abstract for him. Had he lost too much to care anymore? Was this an episode he’d pass through, or was this a different side of him I hadn’t seen before?

  “Did you know?” he asked. “About it being a colony?”

  “Of course not,” I lied. “But it isn’t a base. Not like Wharton is now. It’s only a colony. They’ll only have left a few guards behind. What we really need is the antibiotics.”

  “Yeah, you said that.” Abran stood up and paced the room.

  “Do you still have the coordinates?”

  Abran nodded. “A little island just south of Broken Tree, our last port before we cross the Atlantic. It’s called Ruenlock.”

  “And they aren’t using it as a base?”

  “They never use hiding places as bases. But sometimes they return to hiding places, to restock or pick up resources to trade.” Abran paused. “But even that is unlikely at this place. Our Lily Black ship broke apart a year after I left, killed half its members, got a new captain. I heard all about it from a friend in Apple Falls. After that breakup there’s no telling if they still kept the coordinates of all their hiding places. They certainly aren’t leaving people behind to guard in each hiding place. But also, no telling if it hasn’t already been found and ransacked by someone else.”

  “We could put it up for a vote.” I had the sneaking suspicion that Abran only put things up for a vote when he felt certain the crew would vote in favor of what he already wanted.

  “Last time I messed with raiders’ resources my brother got killed. Because I didn’t know how to handle it. It doesn’t go like you’d expect. You can’t understand.”

  “Everyone could get sick. We need to still try—”

  Abran shook his head. “The weather will be getting worse the closer we get to winter. We can’t lose any time on extra stops. Those winter storms up north . . .” Abran shuddered. He was more scared of the crossing than I’d thought. He sat on the bed next to me and put his arm around me.

  “Aren’t you concerned? Aren’t you worried about the crew being exposed? And the colony?” I asked. I had been prepared for him to threaten changing our destination; I hadn’t been prepared for this apathy. I realized as I stared at him that I wasn’t just worried about Pearl getting sick; I was worried about the whole crew. Worried that this crew needed someone who wasn’t going to disappear on them when they needed a leader. If he isn’t going to tell them, I need to, I thought. A wave of nausea rolled over me. What if they refused to sail to the Valley?

  Abran turned his bloodshot eyes on me. “Hon, there’s something around every corner. I’m done trying to be ready for it.”

  He slipped his hand under my shirt, fingers finding my breast. His grasp was drunken and rough, his mind elsewhere, my body between his hands like a toy. It was the first time I didn’t want him touching me. He grabbed my chin and turned my face toward his and I pushed him back.

  He reached for my wrist and I jumped up from the bed. I grabbed his whiskey bottle and flung it against the wall. The shards littered the floor in a melody like wind chimes on a front porch.

  “You’re not the only one on this ship,” I said.

  Abran fixed his eyes on me, black and glittering in the candlelight. “Neither are you, sweetheart.”

  Chapter 30

  I avoided Abran after that evening and we didn’t speak again about the epidemic in the Valley. Two days later we celebrated Sedna’s fourth birthday. Marjan was preparing a menu of smoked cod, potatoes, collard greens, peaches, and beans. Everyone kept finding excuses to walk through the cabin to get a smell of the food cooking in the kitchen. We’d been on a strict diet of salted fish and sauerkraut and we all were ready to taste something different.

  Marjan stepped out of the kitchen to look at the canned goods in the storage room in the hull, leaving Pearl and me with a bucket of potatoes to peel.

  “What does Row look like?” Pearl asked, soon as Marjan left the kitchen. Normally she asked me questions about Row when we lingered in the quarters in the morning, after everyone had gotten started on the morning chores.

  “A bit like me,” I said. “Dark hair, eyes like the sea.”

  “And does she like snakes?” Pearl asked.

  Marjan walked in and smiled at us in her absent, kind way. “Forgot the towels for laundry. Stinking up this whole kitchen with mold.”

  I didn’t respond to Pearl’s question so she nudged me with a potato and said, “Well, does she?”

  “Honey, just one second,” I told her, pretending to be carefully cutting rot out of a potato.

  Marjan bustled out of the kitchen with a stack of wet, moldy towels.

  “Pearl, we need to keep Row just to ourselves,” I said. “She’s our secret.”

  When Pearl looked at me I expected to find surprise or curiosity in her look, to ask why in a high voice, but instead I found a certain, sure expression that said, I already know she’s supposed to be a secret. She wore a slight teasing grin, like she’d been needling me and enjoying my anxiety.

  “Do you know why she’s a secret, Pearl?”

  “We’re going to get her. And it’s dangerous there, so no one can know.”

  I stared at her. She’d always known we were traveling to rescue Row, ever since that day on the cliff. But at what point did she realize we were deceiving the crew? Had my anxiety about the crossing let her know how dangerous it was? Had she heard me talking with Daniel in the mangroves after I’d found out about the epidemic?

  She returned to peeling her potato with sure, swift strokes of her knife, a pleased look still curling her lips in a slight smile. Sometimes, when I saw the woman in her, I was frightened. She’d be stronger, more willful than I. I was teaching her to deceive, and she was learning my lessons well. I was teaching her how to make it in this world.

  Marjan came back into the kitchen with a few cans in hand and shooed us out of the kitchen, telling us she wanted to finish up by herself.

  The evening cooled, and by the time we reentered the cabin the kerosene lanterns had already been lit. The smell of fresh-baked bread felt warm and enveloping as we stepped out of the wind. A platter of cod with a tomato and peach salsa sat in the middle of the table, smelling bright and sweet.

  Before we sat down to eat, Marjan pulled back the curtain to the kitchen and stepped forward carrying a small cake on a platter. She had a candle stuck in the middle, one of the old ones from before the floods, with a pink swirl wrapping around from base to tip.

  She sat it on the table in front of me and said, “You said Pearl was born in the fall. I figured today is as good as any to celebrate. Children deserve to have their birthdays celebrated.”

  I was stunned and couldn’t speak. I didn’t remember when I’d mentioned Pearl’s birthday being in the fall, but Marjan had remembered. Both my girls had been born in the fall, but I’d never known what day Pearl had been born on.

  Pearl beamed up at her and thanked her and then looked at the cake, a wide smile fixed on her face, her hands clasped together. She’d never seen a cake before. Its glaze of frosting glistened under the kerosene lamp and I smelled the unmistakable scent of flour and sugar and egg and wondered how Marjan had pulled it off when we only had flour and no eggs or sugar.

  “Happy Birthday!” the chorus came up around Pearl and she gripped her palms tighter together, her nose wrinkled in delight. She was buoyed by the attention, but I felt that my skin had been pulled back from the muscle. Sudden bright pain filled me at this display of affection by the people I was betraying. I couldn’t do both, I realized. I couldn’t be part of this crew and also betray them.

  I remembered Row’s last birthday I celebrated with her. S
he was turning five and my mother had also made a cake without enough ingredients. It was slightly sunken in the middle, but it still tasted sweet. The icing was pink and Row swiped some from the top and licked her finger.

  The rain had stopped briefly, and we all gathered at the window, hungry to see sky without clouds. A rainbow stretched behind our neighbor’s house and into the dark sky, and then it faded, just as quickly as it appeared. And I’d thought then how each moment snaps shut, faster than the shutter of a camera.

  Everyone had returned to the table and gathered around Row and sung to her. She beamed and giggled and clapped her hands and I felt so proud of us. I had looked around at each of their faces—Grandfather, Mother, Jacob, and Row—and had thought how much we needed each other. How sticking together was our only hope.

  Marjan placed a hand on my shoulder and I forced a smile back at her. I looked around the small circle formed around Pearl and me, searching each of their faces. They were clapping and smiling, Wayne stomping his foot in rhythm with the birthday song, Behir stepping forward to give Pearl a teasing pinch on the arm.

  The song finished with a cheer and several hugs, each person stepping forward to wish Pearl a happy birthday and to say how happy they were that she was on Sedna with them. She kept nodding and giggling, drunk on their affection. Everyone began sitting down except me, chair legs scraping the wood floors and their chatter dying to a low murmur. In the quiet before Marjan began serving the food I felt that Sedna was tilting, but it was just me, clutching the chair in front of me, almost losing my balance.

  These people have treated you like family, I thought numbly. How had I not realized it until now?

  Because you didn’t want to, I thought. Because of what you have to do if they aren’t strangers, if you owe each other something.

  I looked around at them, thinking of everyone they’d lost. Jessa’s baby. Abran’s brother. Wayne’s wife. Marjan’s husband and children.

  I thought of losing Grandfather and how until I’d joined Sedna it’d been so long since I felt that I could sleep at night, that I wasn’t the only one responsible for everything. I remembered the emptiness in the pit of my stomach when I knew I wouldn’t listen to another human voice until Pearl learned to speak, those long days of her crying and babbling and silence, madness always lurking right at the edge of my mind.