Daniel had to be a relative of that man—it wasn’t just that they looked similar, it was the way they looked at each other across the length of the ship and the dock. With familiarity and recognition. I wondered if anyone else had noticed. The look they gave each other was almost a kind of bartering, like something would be exchanged. And Daniel had offered to give himself up.
I thought of how Daniel pored over maps and sometimes hid his notes when I entered the cabin. I remembered Harjo, how startled he had seemed to be found talking to a stranger. How he’d disappear into saloons alone, as if he were secretly gathering information. Abran had been right. Daniel was hiding something. For all his talk of how hard it was to track someone, had we been tracking the Lily Black all this time?
He had to know how dangerous that was. But maybe he didn’t care. My blood quickened in rage at this thought. I needed to catch Daniel when he was alone and confront him about it.
Sedna was darker without Behir on it. We always relied on him for his wit and warmth, his refusal to be bleak even when the earth cast misfortune upon us. When a whirlpool ripped a net full of fish from the downrigger. When the sky flattened and pounded us with rain and wind.
Marjan stayed in Abran’s room and he stayed in the quarters for a month. We delivered food to her and she sometimes requested visitors, but otherwise she made herself scarce about the ship, slipping away from us like a ghost.
Then one day she came up to the cabin for breakfast, her presence somehow brighter and refined, like she was a blade sharpened in the fire and pounded into a new shape. I found myself wanting to be close to her, to simply stand beside her and clean fish in the kitchen, or scan the water at the gunwale for mountaintops when we were close to coasts. Normally I couldn’t get far enough away from people who had lost someone. It was like remembering a nightmare when you wanted to forget it. But somehow this was different. I wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder.
Maybe it was because I loved her enough to sit with her, her grief like a third person in the room, palpable, with a shape of its own. A shape that I knew would change over time, evolving as only grief could.
Or maybe I wanted to comfort her as penance to ease my guilt. We wouldn’t have been in Broken Tree without all that came before, all the turns we had taken at my bidding.
The night after we lost Behir I dreamed that I was drowning. The water around me was dark and it kept rising and I kept swimming and it kept rising, the surface pulling away from me. My fingers kept reaching for the sunlight at the surface and I swam until my lungs almost burst, my legs knotted and weak. Pearl shook me awake right when I thought I’d stop trying and let myself drift to the black bottom.
That night Pearl didn’t sleep at all but tucked herself into the corner of the bed and leaned against the wall. Her hair was wild and curly around her face and she looked like a doll on a forgotten shelf. I reached out to touch her cheek and she blinked but otherwise didn’t move, her chest rising and falling faintly, like an animal in hibernation, not fully awake or asleep. I wrapped her in my arms and rocked her as I had when she was only a baby.
She shouldn’t have seen it, she shouldn’t have seen it, I kept thinking.
A few days after Behir died I found Abran alone in the quarters. Everyone else had gone up to the cabin for breakfast and Abran sat on his temporary bunk, trying to tie a rag around his injured hand. A candle sent a dull glow across half his arm and then tempered out into darkness.
“What happened at Broken Tree?” I asked softly.
“What do you think happened?” Abran spat on the floor and leaned forward, trying to knot the bandage by pulling the fabric with his teeth and other hand. The rag slipped from his teeth and unraveled and he flung his good hand out across the small table, sending the candle flying.
The flame went out when it hit the floor. I didn’t say anything. Wax dripped onto the floor. I picked up the candle and placed it back on the table.
“I hope no one else heard you talking about where we’re going,” I said.
“Why? You worried we won’t go there anymore?”
I squatted in front of him and took his injured hand in both my hands.
“No,” I said. It was too late to turn back, too late to try to find somewhere else. The whole crew was weary to settle. And Abran’s confidence was slipping. He’d sail us straight into hell if it made him look stalwart. He watched me bandage his hand, his eyes lost and clouded, barely the man I’d visited at night. I remembered what Marjan had said about him months ago when I first joined Sedna. That sometimes the pressure could get to him. Was this what she meant? Had he done all this before? I thought of how scared he was of the Lily Black, how haunted by his brother’s death. I pitied him, yet my pity was stretched thin. I needed him to be who I thought he was.
I pulled the bandage tight and he winced in pain.
“You pull yourself together,” I said softly.
“Or what?” Abran asked. “You gonna lead a mutiny?”
I yanked the bandage so tight that blood stained through and Abran ripped his hand from mine.
“You’re not acting like a captain. It’s not a mutiny when there’s no captain,” I said.
Chapter 39
Later that day I found Daniel in the cabin after hours, working on calculations. He had been avoiding everyone, even Pearl and me. A candle flickered on the table next to him. I wondered if he had asked Abran if we could work late and use light, or if he was ignoring the rule. I guessed the latter.
Daniel didn’t look up when I came in, but I sensed he knew it was me.
“Thought you’d be in bed,” he said.
The air had a sulfur smell, a pungent odor that seemed both green as life and black as decay. We had to be passing over mountaintops, thick with algae and plankton and new growth, plants that hadn’t yet been named.
“Is he a relative? Father? Uncle?” I asked.
Daniel kept scribbling on his notepad, but I saw the muscles in his neck tense. He picked up the sextant, measured a space on the map, and set it back down.
“What I want to know,” I continued, “is if we were following them.” I tried to keep my voice steady, but I heard it quiver as though it came from someone else.
Daniel paused in his writing. He leaned back in his chair, dropped his pencil, and stretched his fingers out in front of him on the table.
I felt a wave of fury pass through me, shaking me in my bones. I couldn’t trust him. He was like all the rest. I curled my hands into fists at my sides. My skin felt warm to my own touch. Sedna groaned against a wave and tilted to the side, then righted herself. “Now Behir is gone and they’ll follow us to the Valley.”
Daniel dropped his head in his hands and cursed. “It’s too far. Not worth it to them.” But I could tell he didn’t believe this.
“Not worth it? All I’ve heard is how they execute anyone who betrays them.” I stopped short, remembering my promise to Abran.
“They want more colonies,” I said, switching tack. “They could decide to take the Valley from the Lost Abbots and take us down along the way. You acted like you wanted to keep us safe, not take risks—all the while you were leading us to danger, sailing straight into it.” My voice rose and shook, and I restrained myself from leaping forward and hitting him.
“You and Pearl were never supposed to get involved,” he said.
He stood up and turned to me and shook his head. His face was creased in anguish, his eyes bright and intent. I could feel he wanted to reach out and touch me. To comfort me. To be comforted. A cascade of fury built up in me, like a flame slowly crawling up my spine.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Sorry?” I lunged at him and pushed him. He stumbled backward. I pushed him again. “How could you?” I pushed him again and again until his back was up against the wall. “After I pulled you out of the water? And now—this whole time—” I punched his chest, pummeling him with both fists. He caught my wrists and held them.
&nbs
p; I twisted free of his grip and stepped back from him. I almost felt calmer. Attacking him eased my anger, but it wasn’t just that. Beneath my rage was relief—relief that I could blame someone else, that Behir’s death wasn’t all my fault. I needed to escape the clutches of guilt the way a fish needs to escape the net.
“Were you leading us to them?” I asked again. “Were you repaying a debt?”
“No.” Daniel shook his head and rubbed his face with the palm of his hand. “Yes. I mean, somewhat.”
When I clenched my fists again he held up his hands.
“My older brother. I was tracking him . . . hunting him.”
Daniel was silent; I waited for him to go on.
“He was in the navy years before. When the floods got worse and the world was breaking up, he always talked about how new nations would form. He wanted to be part of it, to protect people. He had all these principles about how people should be and what their place was.” A grimace tightened Daniel’s face. “Wanted to make sure I knew my place, which was beneath him. Jackson . . . he seemed almost excited about everything falling apart. Like he knew in this new world he’d have a bigger hand in it all. Hammering something of his own out of the chaos.”
Daniel paused, and a roll of thunder split the silence. Lightning flashed and Daniel flared before me.
“Jackson fought in the Mediterranean War with this commander—Clarence Axon. Jackson was like a son to him. Axon had already started the Lily Black—they were a private military group the U.S. had hired to help in the war. Once the war was over Axon wanted to make Jackson captain of one of his ships. So Jackson came back home to get my mom and me, to take us with him.”
Daniel paused again. I could tell he was deciding how much to tell me.
“Things got bad between him and my mom. We owned a boat we were going to use to escape, and Jackson stole it during the night, just disappeared. But he didn’t take just the boat. He knew I’d stored all her insulin on the boat, so he took all that, too. He knew my mom would die without it, and he left me to nurse her to death. At first, I didn’t try to find him, but then Marianne died and soon after I ran across him in a port. It was like an awakening. I . . . I tried to kill him then and there.”
Lightning flared and Sedna shook in the clutch of a wave. Daniel ran a hand over his face and looked away. I thought of Daniel’s impulsive wrath, the story he’d told me of killing his old crew after they raped Marianne.
“He promised if I tried that again, if I came after him, he’d end me. Before I met you, I heard he was making colonies in the northeast, so I wanted to head there.”
“When I saved you, you mean,” I snapped.
“I thought I’d be able to track him at a port and do it quietly. No one else was supposed to get involved.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said. “And so am I for trusting you. How are you supposed to take out the captain of a Lily Black ship and no one else gets involved?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t . . . for all I knew, he’d take me out first. That part didn’t matter as much. It’s—it’s about looking someone in the eye and saying, you did this.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. I, too, had longed to face Jacob and hold him accountable. To speak what I knew was true and make him hear it. But I pushed this aside and held on to my anger.
“Here I thought you were helping me. That you wanted to protect Pearl—”
“I do want—”
“Shut up. Did you track him at each port we stopped at?”
“I asked around—people in taverns and shops. Some said they had been in Wharton but were moving farther north, around Broken Tree.”
“So we stopped there instead of Brighton,” I said. Brighton was a small trading post south of Broken Tree that we passed in favor of docking at Broken Tree. At the time Daniel had claimed he’d heard of typhoons hitting Brighton during that season. “How in the world did you think you wouldn’t bring us into it?”
Guilt tightened the lines in Daniel’s face. His body seemed to sag, his joints going limp, his shoulders folding forward. He ran his hand over his face. “I was hoping I could contain it. I hoped.”
“You used me,” I said. This knowledge felt like a burn I kept rediscovering on my body, surprised by the pain each time it brushed against something else. “You wanted the vote for the Valley as much as I did. Because you knew you could steer us closer to him.”
When Daniel didn’t say anything, I hurried on. “If the Lily Black hadn’t been in the northeast, would you have agreed to come with me? To help me?”
Sedna rocked with another wave and the candle on the table began sliding near the edge. Daniel stepped forward and picked it up. The flame sent shadows dancing against the cabin walls.
“No,” Daniel said softly, closing his eyes as he said the word. “Not then. I wouldn’t have. But who I am now, yes, I would. I want to be with you and Pearl. But I also want that part of my life from before finished, tucked away. I can’t . . . I can’t reconcile it. It’s like two halves of one life, and I don’t know how to connect them.”
I thought of all the times my life seemed to break away into a new direction. My father’s suicide, my mother’s death, Jacob taking Row, my grandfather’s death, boarding Sedna. Myself fluid as water, changing shape with each event. But also not, some hard undefinable center in me, like a stone, that was neither altered nor touched by fate.
The wind howled and water pounded against Sedna. It felt like the whole world was trying to break into our small ship and tear us apart.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” Daniel said.
“Good, I’m not going to.”
Daniel glared at me, set the candle back on the table, and crossed his arms.
“I’m surprised how judgmental you are, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Given the chance you’d take revenge. On Jacob.”
“Of course I want a reckoning. But what does that matter? He’s dead.”
“You don’t have to forgive me. But you understand. I know you do,” Daniel said. “You understand the need to set things right and move forward.”
“I understand that we are about to set off on the longest crossing of our lives and that we don’t know if we’ll be followed. I understand that we just lost—” My voice caught and I swallowed. I tried to say his name, but my throat kept closing up.
Daniel stepped forward, his arms out toward me, but I jammed my hand into his chest, pushing him away.
“Pearl shouldn’t have seen that,” I said, my voice finally breaking, my shoulders heaving in a sob. “What if it broke something in her?”
I began shaking. Sedna lurched sideways and I almost fell to the floor, but Daniel caught me. He held me by my arms, keeping distance between us, settling me on my feet.
“Nothing is broken in her,” he said. He placed his thumb at the bottom of my chin and tilted my face up to his. “And what happened. That’s not on you. That’s on me. That will always be on me. I will carry it.”
He wiped a tear from my face with his thumb and I stepped away. The sobs kept coming and I felt like I couldn’t breathe, so I made for the door, anxious for the wind to scour me clean. I paused in the doorway to look back at him.
He stood where I’d left him, in front of the candle, a soft glow fanned out behind him. I could only see his silhouette, his whole body made of shadow.
Chapter 40
It hadn’t rained for days and our cistern held only a few inches of water, so we went on water rations. We all were dehydrated, wandering about the deck, licking cracked lips, blinking dry eyes. There were more squabbles and bickering, people stomping away from one another, shooting cold glances across the breakfast table. Losing Behir at the beginning of crossing the Atlantic didn’t just break our hearts, it felt like some ill omen hovering over us, ready to drop from the sky and swallow us up.
The goat contracted some illness, sores peppering her throat, red and blistering under
her fur. She began wasting away in wild-eyed pain, wailing at night, skittering away from our touch during the day. Thomas finally put her out of her misery and cleaned up her pen, returning it to just another part of the deck, but the outline remained, scratches from her hooves on the wood deck. We debated whether or not the meat would be safe to eat but we finally agreed not to risk it. We couldn’t afford a sick crew on top of our troubles. But I did skin her and tan the hide before we dropped her body overboard. Nights were growing colder, and Pearl could use it as an extra blanket.
Thomas and Wayne built a second canoe to replace the one we’d lost at Ruenlock. This one was smaller but would still work as a tender to shore.
After trolling for fish and catching nothing, I hauled in the lines, checked the baits, and strung a few more lines. Weather had been calm the past week, but soon we would be entering what sailors called Tempest’s Trail, a passage in the North Atlantic that was known for heavy winds and rain. More ships lay at the bottom of that part of the sea than I wanted to know. The rain would be good for the cistern, but we feared how well Sedna would handle the winds.
While I was fishing Abran crossed the deck from the hatch to the cabin, glancing at me, the expression on his face dark and preoccupied. When I went into the cabin to drop off some tackle I heard him speaking sharply to Marjan.
He saw me loading boxes on the shelves and said, “Do you mind?”
Marjan held a list and stirred a pot over the stove. The scent of fish curdled my stomach.
I left the cabin and returned to trolling. Daniel stood near the bow, binoculars up to his face, scanning the horizon. I knew he was searching for any signs of the Lily Black. I’d found him up in the rigging just yesterday with the binoculars. We hadn’t seen anyone for the past week; we hadn’t even passed another ship. But the isolation didn’t erase the feeling that they could be following us.
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