by Jordan Rivet
Esther fought her way through the wind to the salvage apparatus, her boots clinging to the rough deck. Twenty-foot swells buffeted the ship, constantly forcing her to shift her balance. She hoped to spot some useful material before Judith’s people took over. She needed metals that weren’t corroded and brittle. Her latest idea would make the behemoth of a desalination system more energy efficient, but Judith was stonewalling her, especially after what happened last time.
The salvage apparatus was primitive, a series of cables and ropes attached to a modified winch used to hoist debris out of the sea. The hooks, nooses, and magnets on the cables could be tossed after any prize that floated into their path. In the early days, it had been easier to pick materials off the surface. After the disaster, the volatile weather patterns wreaked havoc on coastal towns, washing their contents, their resources, and their populations into the deep. Even now there was wreckage to be found on the water, and they had to be ready for it. Of course, salvaging was safer on a calm day, but sometimes storms threw treasures their way. Once, the waves had dumped an entire case of canned vegetables onto the bow, missing Bernadette by about six inches. Esther’s mouth watered as she remembered those few bites of canned corn. She’d felt nearly delirious eating something that wasn’t seaweed or some sea creature.
Unfortunately, the salvage apparatus was already in use. A small, wiry man was busy unhooking the cable from a curved piece of metal that might have been the hull of a small boat. He saw her coming.
“Not for you, Esther. Not after last time. Judith’s orders.”
Manny was another original crew member of the Catalina. He’d left the Philippines to work for the cruise line, guaranteed money good enough to send extra home to his family. He’d only been aboard a few months before the Catalina became a survival vessel. These days, he was Judith’s right-hand man.
“Come on,” Esther pleaded. “Just let me have a look. Judith won’t let me use parts from the stores anymore.”
Manny shook his head, flinging water from his curls. “Fish the stuff out of the sea yourself, and maybe you’ll get to keep it.”
“I only need a bit,” she pressed.
“This is community property now,” Manny said. Sweat and seawater pooled in the deep scar above his right eyebrow, a memorial of their escape from the land.
Esther edged around him, stepping in time to the rolling of the ship. Sure enough, a row of rivets the precise size she needed lined the scrap. It didn’t look like it had been in the sea for very long. The rivets shone against the steel without a hint of rust or corrosion. Could someone somewhere be manufacturing new steel? That seemed unlikely.
“Please, Manny. Frank thinks I’m onto something.”
Manny hesitated, appearing to reconsider. Frank Fordham would always be respected for developing their freshwater system, no matter how much the infighting affected everyone else. Esther wanted to show that her contributions to the ship were just as valuable as his.
Manny seemed about to relent when a shrill voice split through the wind behind them.
“What do you think you’re doing? You’re not on duty.”
Judith, ash blond and authoritarian, teetered over to them. A tall woman in her late thirties, Judith was the acting captain of the Catalina, though she wasn’t a sailor, and the mayor, though she wielded power like a dictator.
Rust, Esther thought. Too late. “I’m just taking a look,” she said.
“After what you pulled last time?” The sea spray had slicked Judith’s normally carefully maintained hair to her chin. “I’ve told you before: you can’t keep ‘experimenting’ with community resources.”
“That was an accident, okay?” Why do people have to keep bringing that up? “Besides, these rivets don’t have another immediate use. Please, Manny.” She turned her back on Judith.
“Manny.” Judith’s voice was sharp, like the edge of an oyster shell. Manny would do whatever she wanted.
“Don’t worry, Judith. This piece is for storage.” Manny had finished unhooking the steel from the cable.
“There’s gotta be more than enough of that stuff in storage by now,” Esther said. “What are you going to use it for anyway?”
Manny ignored her. The rivets glinted in a flash of lightning. They would be perfect. Esther was having problems controlling the pressure levels and she needed something new to hold everything together. She had been so close. She sighed as Manny dragged the scrap away.
Judith studied Esther, birch-white hands on her bony hips. “You should be sleeping when you’re not on duty. And I told you to stop messing around with the salvage. We can’t afford to sacrifice more resources to your experiments.”
Esther ignored her. She stepped over to the railing and hooked herself to it so she wouldn’t have to put all her attention into staying firmly planted on board. She scanned the darkness below, hoping for a bit of storm debris that she could use. Salt water drenched her clothes and pasted her hair to her goggles.
Judith shouted above the wind. “Esther, everyone in the community needs to do their part.”
“Go away, Judith,” Esther muttered. She had to restrain herself from voicing her dissent loud enough for Judith to hear her above the howling of the wind. “I’m sure you have something better to do, you corroded old sea hag.”
Judith didn’t hear her, and Esther was almost sorry about that.
“It’ll be poor for morale if you don’t follow the routines,” Judith said. “You, better than anyone, should know how important the routines are, considering who your father is.”
Esther glared at her and then continued to search the water for any sign of metal. She’d be happy for fiberglass or plastic too, for that matter. Every little bit helped. She shouldn’t have to fight Judith at every turn just to get something that could help everyone in the long run—if her ideas ever worked, that is.
“Esther, are you listening to me?” Judith snapped her fingers, then stumbled sideways as a particularly large swell crashed into the ship.
Esther gripped the cold railing. The wave broke and tumbled against the steep hull beneath her.
“Not really,” Esther said under her breath.
“We will talk about this tomorrow. It seems we need to revisit the terms of your probation.” She wobbled back toward the makeshift door.
“Can’t wait,” Esther said, staying at the railing.
She wished it didn’t matter what Judith said. The Catalina was supposed to be a democracy, but these days it was impossible to get any real work done without Judith’s blessing. Esther needed freedom to experiment, to prove she wasn’t just wasting time and materials. So what if she sometimes smashed things up in the name of progress? She was on the brink of a discovery. She could feel it.
Chapter 3—Neal’s Tower
The sun came up in a riot of blues, purples, and grays. The ash wasn’t visible anymore, but the clouds over the seas were never still, never normal, or at least what normal used to be. Esther and her father, Simon, were lucky to have a tiny porthole interrupting their yellowed wall. She could watch the sunrise struggling to break through the fog. The sea changed colors too, from gray to indigo to green, still choppy after the storm.
Esther sat on the edge of her narrow bunk, rubbing the salt from her eyes. Her bed folded down from the wall and was covered in a thin blanket and a sheet that had once been periwinkle blue. She pulled her boots back on, still wearing the stiff jeans she’d put on the night before. She hadn’t even salvaged anything useful, despite her long watch. She should have stayed in bed.
A few feet away Esther’s father slept with his back to her, snoring gently. They had shared the tiny crew’s cabin for sixteen years. Bigger families than theirs occupied the staterooms, some now holding three generations. It wasn’t easy to share such close quarters with her father. When Esther was a teenager, all she had wanted was space. She’d found solace in the engine room, tinkering with parts and assisting the engineers. She grew to love the inner workin
gs of the ship, and it gave her something to do far away from her father.
Simon mumbled in his sleep, and Esther watched him for a moment. She and Simon got along better after she learned to spend as much time as possible outside of the cabin. Now, though, she wished they spent more time together. He hadn’t been himself lately, and she was concerned.
As a frightened six-year-old, she had clung to her father, her tiny hand perpetually in his. They helped each other through their sadness, through their fear, through the loss of her mother and sister. On the day the slumbering volcano deep beneath Wyoming blew, Simon had been walking Esther to school while her mother took her sister to a dentist appointment on the other side of town. Simon and Esther had decided to take a detour along the San Diego boardwalk.
She remembered the day. It had been sunny. The morning sky hanging over the harbor was so pristine, so perfect. Esther had thought in her six-year-old way that it was the same blue as one of the Easter eggs her big sister had brought home from school. She’d been carrying a purple backpack, eating an apple pastry from a stand on the boardwalk, and chattering to her dad about the birthday party she would attend that weekend. She’d asked solemnly if he thought she looked like a boy when she wore shorts. Her dad had patted her right on the top of her head and laughed. She missed the sound of his laugh.
They’d been too far away to hear the volcanic blast, but they saw the cloud of ash and sulfur, the poison and darkness, thundering toward them. It had been Esther’s idea to flee to the ship, some lucky stray thought that made her point a silent, sticky finger at the Catalina sitting in the dock. Simon took one look at the sky, picked her up, and ran.
They’d joined other runners. The ship’s security guards had abandoned their metal detectors and luggage scanners at the first sign of the descending disaster. A few of the paid-up passengers and a skeleton crew were already on board. Esther and her dad had dashed up the gangway with hundreds of others, looking for some way to escape the ash cloud. The old captain had jumped into action, pulling the ship away from the dock and sailing it around the bend of the harbor and as far away from land as they could go.
Esther left the cabin and closed the door gently, careful not to wake her father. These days he spent too much time in their cabin or hiding out in some corner, scribbling away at his graph-paper ledger. It was the only blank book he’d been able to get his hands on lately. It’s all Judith’s fault, she thought. Her father was so strong. He didn’t deserve to be pushed aside like this.
Esther jogged down the main staircase and grabbed a roll of fried seaweed from the Atlantis Dining Hall, which was already buzzing with people chatting about the storm. She couldn’t see Judith, but she wanted to avoid the inevitable lecture for as long as possible. She took her breakfast topside and lingered on the main deck for a while, breathing the salt air and watching the pure blue breaks in the clouds. The sky seemed clearer lately, she thought, but immediately pushed down the hope that rose with the thought. There was no going back. Better to focus on the practical, tangible things.
But Esther felt restless. She wanted more than the same routines, the same worries, even the same seaweed breakfast. The frying gave the food a satisfying crunch, but inside it was the same rubbery texture as most of their meals since the last canned vegetables had been cracked open. Esther spit out a shell fragment that had made its way into her roll and watched it fall until it was indistinguishable from the white foam beneath her.
She glanced back at the sloping edge of the Catalina and spotted Judith emerging from the starboard entrance. Rust. Esther ducked behind an exhaust vent and darted portside. She’d hide out with her friend Neal until her shift began. Judith wouldn’t bother her while she was on duty.
Neal’s perch was in the broadcast center jutting above the bridge. From here, he managed whatever communication was possible with ships around the New Pacific. They depended on radio because the satellites in the earth’s atmosphere no longer functioned reliably.
She climbed the ladder past the bridge to the broadcast center, which everyone called Neal’s Tower. A few flakes of white paint still clung to it like barnacles. She pushed open the trapdoor.
“Made it through the night?” she called.
Neal jumped back in his chair and yanked his headset off his ears. There was a permanent dent in his mousy brown hair from the band. “Esther—gotta go, adios—hey, Esther. Yeah, all’s well up here.” A pink tinge spread through Neal’s cheeks.
“No need to look so surprised.”
“Oh, I was just . . . glad to see you, Es.”
Neal tapped a switch on his control panel and swiveled from side to side in his chair a bit too casually. Neal was perpetually laid-back. From his faded T-shirt down to his orange bowling shoes, he always looked casual, but today he seemed distracted.
The broadcast center had a wide desk filled with now-defunct computers facing the tall windows. Neal slept on a cot in the corner, and he’d removed some of the broken equipment to make room for a few belongings. A handmade mobile hung from the ceiling with cutouts from old magazines featuring extinct sports, and a small collection of maps were scattered across the floor. This was Neal’s sanctuary.
Esther hoisted herself onto a long-silent computer console and sat cross-legged. “Nice rider that was,” she said. “Had a bit of drama with the old pump. Cally managed to screw things up, but fortunately I checked up on her.”
“What?” Neal said. “Oh yeah, the storm. Wasn’t too bad. I got good intel on that one and knew it wouldn’t be a drowner.”
Neal swiveled around in his chair to adjust a knob.
“Missed a chance to get some extra parts, though,” Esther said. “Judith’s on my case.”
Neal frowned. “When did things get so bad between you two? You used to hero-worship her.”
Esther shrugged. “Not my fault she turned out like this.”
She jumped off the console and paced across the floor—three steps forward, three steps back.
“What did she do?” Neal asked.
“I almost talked Manny into giving me some of the salvage, but then Judith turned up, chirping about duty and community. Now she wants to have a talk about my probation. She better not put me on bilge duty.”
“It’s a shame she doesn’t mean all that duty stuff,” Neal said. “She just wants to control everybody.”
“Well, I’ve about had it.”
Esther leaned on the console and looked out to sea. The horizon was distinct, a rare separation of sea and sky. She sometimes envied Neal his windowed perch above the ship. It was an eagle’s nest with a view only interrupted by the hodgepodge of windmills behind them. The sun was almost visible. “You ever think about leaving, Neal?” Esther asked.
“My tower? I come down to eat sometimes. You’d know that if you weren’t always in the desal room, tinkering with Frank.”
“I mean the Catalina. You ever think about leave leaving? There are other ships out there,” Esther said. Neal was quiet. “The process is a pain, but it might be worth it to get away from The Judith Show.”
“What about your dad?” Neal said quietly.
“I know.”
Esther loved her father for his wisdom, his patience, the way he made her feel safe in the midst of catastrophe. But as she faced her adult years, she yearned for independence, for a change that didn’t seem to be on the horizon for her. She wanted to test her ideas and her abilities somewhere besides this floating small town. She loved fiddling and asking questions and experimenting, but there was only so far she could get on her own. There were other ships out there surviving as they did: tankers, battleships, cargo vessels that had been repurposed when the land rejected them. If Judith wouldn’t let her prove herself here, maybe she could do it somewhere else.
Esther turned to face Neal. “If things were the way they used to be,” she said, “if we still lived in California, I’d have gone off to college and then started my own life by now. My dad would understand. And I c
ould always come back.” But if she left now, the Catalina would be lost in the vastness of the sea. Perhaps they’d meet again, but it could take years. She hesitated, unsure whether to voice the idea that had been growing in her since the night before. “I’ve also been thinking about land,” she said.
“Land?” Neal scoffed. “You want to die of starvation? Drowning would be a hundred times better.”
He was probably right. Sixteen years ago, if Esther had stayed on land their fate would have been worse than drowning. The ash cloud from the volcanic blast had spread, choking and heavy, as the Catalina ran. They had tried to travel to Asia, to seek refuge on the shores of Japan or even the Philippines. But as they sailed, the world changed beyond recognition. The ash filled the atmosphere, wreaking havoc on weather patterns and decimating the world’s food supplies. Where the ash and poisonous gases didn’t spread, drought and famine did. The sea revolted, sending surge after surge up coastlines across the world, obliterating whole cities in a whirl of water and sound. Island populations didn’t have a chance: Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines. Communications were disrupted across the globe as the ash blocked out satellites and waves toppled communications towers. But the people huddled in the hallways and cabins of the cruise ship didn’t yet know the extent of the devastation.
By the time they reached the shores of China, the borders were slammed shut. Voices crackling over the old-fashioned radio waves reported that the famine had been so extensive the Chinese government was refusing to admit stragglers from the Americas. They shut themselves in to starve, bury, and mourn.
And then the Catalina drifted. They faced treacherous coastlines and almost certain starvation inland, so the sea became their refuge. They modified the ship to help it weather the storms and learned to harvest the waters for sustenance. Food was scarce, but it was still more plentiful than what had survived the more extreme temperature changes on land. People left now and again, joining the crews of passing vessels, beginning futile searches for lost loved ones. A few jumped into the sea. No one could blame them. But still, 1,003 survivors remained. And somewhere, perhaps, land waited.