“Wonderful.” She sighed.
Wes wiped his forehead with his glove and peered over the railing to study the long ugly gash on the side of his boat. “Luckily it didn’t hit the inner hull.”
“Otherwise?”
“We’d be sunk, literally,” Shakes said cheerfully. “But don’t worry, that hasn’t happened yet.”
“Good thing I don’t charge by the mile or you’d be in trouble,” Wes said, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.
Nat started to laugh, but her laughter quickly turned into a cough. She buried her face in the crook of her arm. “Well, it’s not a perfume store, that’s for sure.”
Wes sighed. The trashbergs smelled even worse than the ocean, and the thought of extending the trip even farther would be a challenge for everyone, but he couldn’t let it sink their spirits. “Looks bad, but we can patch it up, can’t we, Shakes?” Wes asked.
“Not like we haven’t before.” Shakes nodded. “We’ll get right on it.” He stared at Nat. “Hey—you look different,” he said. “What is it?” He squinted at her face.
“My eyes,” she said shyly. “You can’t see the difference? Really?”
“Our friend Shakes is colorblind.” Wes winked. “It’s all right, Farouk will fill him in,” he said, as the youngest boy openly gaped at Nat, but said nothing.
“Come on, don’t stare,” Shakes said, pulling Farouk away so they could return to the bridge, leaving Wes and Nat on the deck. As the boat drifted out of the trashberg’s shadow, they were able to see the full extent of the garbage mountain.
“It’s endless,” Nat whispered, fascinated by the immense ziggurat of rot and decay and discards in front of her.
“Continents of junk,” Wes said.
Nat shook her head, troubled by the sight of all that waste. The world was irretrievably broken, filled with refuse, from Garbage Country to the poisoned oceans, and the rest was an uninhabitable frozen nether land; what kind of place was this to grow up in? What kind of world had they been born into? “Is it like this—everywhere—in all the waters? Surely in some places the waters are clear?” she asked hopefully.
Wes narrowed his eyes. “Maybe. If the Blue is real.” He removed the locator from his pocket and began to punch in a new course on the blinking green screen. He had nabbed the satellite phone from an abandoned LTV a few years back in garbage land. It was military-grade and had the ability to track and plot a course from live satellite data. If he was caught using or trying to sell the thing, it would mean his head, but he kept it for emergencies. “We’ll have to go way out of our way to dodge ’em. Some are ten or fifteen miles across and there’re bigger ones swirling all around.”
As the boat plowed slowly through the churning waters, the surf was wilder on the far side of the junk mountain, and dark, filthy water rose in waves and washed over the deck again.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Wes said, holding out his hand to help her avoid stepping in the toxic wash.
She took his hand and they picked their way down to the lower cabins. “I’ll take you up on your offer, if you don’t mind,” she said, as they walked down the stairs and he let go of her hand. “To move, I mean.”
Wes nodded. “Sure.”
Nat watched him silently, wondering what would have happened if the ship hadn’t hit that trashberg . . . if they had been able to . . . if he had . . . what difference did it make? At least he hadn’t tossed her overboard when he found out the truth about her. Wasn’t that enough? What did she want with him anyway? She couldn’t be feeling what she was feeling, if she was even feeling anything for him.
Even so, she moved her meager possessions over to his cabin. Instead of hammocks, the captain’s quarters had a real bed. One bed. One small bed. “Um, Wes?” she asked.
“Yeah?” he asked, pulling off his boots and sweater, so that his T-shirt pulled up above his belt and for a brief moment she saw the hard muscles on his stomach.
“Never mind.” She put her stuff away in the hold and climbed into the bed, making sure to stay all the way to the right side so that she was almost falling off.
“I’m not going to try anything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said, sounding amused.
“Who said I’m worried?” she said, as he scooted in next to her. Their bodies were only inches away from each other, and when she turned to him, their faces were so close on the pillow they were almost touching.
“Good night,” he whispered.
“Sleep well.” She smiled and closed her eyes. They were sheltered from the toxic wash, but down below, the rocking of the ship was worse. She leaned over the edge of the bed and dry-heaved. If there was any thought of romance right now, it just went out the porthole.
“Here,” Wes said, handing her a metal bracelet. “Strap it on. Helps with seasickness.”
Nat wiped her mouth and accepted it with a grateful smile. Her stomach fluttered, which had nothing to do with the sea. “Thanks.”
“It’s not as pretty as that good-luck charm you’re wearing, but it should do the trick,” he said.
Good-luck charm?
He meant the stone she was wearing. She didn’t say a word, but she was troubled. Wes was not Daran. But she couldn’t be certain . . . did he want to keep her safe? Or did he just want the stone?
26
INCHING ALONG THROUGH THE MURKY water was like wading through tar, sticky and scummy, while the smell of rotting garbage permeated the air. The days felt like weeks. Each day was the same as the one before it: gray skies, dark water, along with the rhythmic drone of the waves lapping against the sides of the boat.
The crew spent the time playing with their handhelds, drinking too much moonshine, blasting their metal reggae, bored and listless. Nat gave the brothers a wide berth and they kept to themselves anyhow, hanging around the isolated areas of the ship, whispering to each other. Once in a while she would hear them whoop and wondered what they were doing. She noticed Zedric shooting her apologetic glances every now and then, while Daran was a ghost; whatever Wes had said to him had worked. He couldn’t even glance in her direction. She was glad to see his hand was still bandaged. Burnt.
She assumed Wes told Shakes and Farouk about her since they didn’t ask her any questions, or maybe, like Wes, they didn’t care that she was marked, at least that’s what she hoped; she gathered they were too busy trying to keep the ship together to pay attention. Wes didn’t say anything more about the stone she wore, and she didn’t bring it up. The boys filled their days repairing the hull, patching the hole by welding a few layers of steel plate that Wes kept in the storage room just for this type of eventuality.
Nat found there was little respite to be had; when she was down in the sleeping holds the rocking of the ship made her ill, and when she was up on deck the smell was worse. The crew took to wearing bandannas over their noses like bandits, and Nat was glad she had remembered to bring her silk scarf from home. It still smelled like the bottle of perfume she’d left on her dresser, although she didn’t know if that even helped, since after a while she began to associate the sweet smell of jasmine with the putrid stink of decrepitude.
The mood among the soldiers was grim, after the adrenaline rush of saving the ship and their skins had subsided. The crew was touchy and grouchy: Daran and Zedric were resentful on top of it, and even Shakes, who seemed a cheerful soul, was often jumpy and irritable. Since the voyage was going to take twice as long as they’d planned, their rations were even more meager than they had expected. Everyone was seasick and hungry, and after a few days Nat learned to live with a throbbing headache and light-headedness.
That morning, she found Shakes at the galley kitchen, munching on a piece of bark.
“Can I have a piece?” she asked.
Shakes nodded, handing her a twig. “It helps with the cravings,” he said.
Earlier, Wes had allowed everyone one quarter of a steak-and-egg-pancake breakfast wrap. He cut the thing in sixths and let it
warm on the engine cover for half an hour before doling it out. That was it. While they ate, Nat told them that back before the floods, fat was a sign of poverty, and the rich flashed their status by going on extreme diets—juice “cleanses” and spa vacations where they paid for the privilege of not eating. None of them believed her.
She crunched the piece of wood in her mouth and spit it out. “How can you eat this?” She coughed.
Shakes smiled. “You’ll do anything to survive.” He took the bark back, his hands trembling a little.
Nat opened a can of Nutri. There was enough in the storeroom for centuries. She took a sip, tasting the flat, lukewarm liquid.
She watched as Shakes’s hand jittered holding the bark, fluttering nervously like a hummingbird’s wings.
“Do you take anything for that?” she asked. “I heard they’ve got a new drug now that helps with the shaking from frostblight.”
“Oh, this?” Shakes asked, lifting his hand up and watching it tremble. “I don’t have FB like the boss. I’ve had this since I was a baby.”
“Wait—Wes has frostblight?” she asked.
“Yeah, you haven’t noticed? His eyes bother him sometimes,” Shakes said.
“I hadn’t.” She felt an ache for Wes, now that she knew. It’s not a disease, he’d said, about being marked. No, not like his. “I’m sorry for thinking you have it.” Nat was embarrassed.
“No, don’t be. It’s an easy mistake.” Shakes smiled.
“What happened? Wes told me your story was a doozy.”
“It is. He tell you I have a brother?”
“No.”
“I do. An older one. Patrick. Our ’rents were good people. Rule-following civilians, not like us,” he said, smiling. “They got a license for both of their kids. They wanted more than one. Expensive, but they could afford it. They wanted Pat to have a sibling, a playmate. One day there was a knock on the door.
“It turns out Mom filled out part of the license application wrong. Secondary offspring license denied. I was illegal, and not a citizen. You know how it goes, the country gets low on a quota and they start looking for excuses to collect. Who knows if Mom ever actually made that error. But it didn’t matter, Population Control was on the case. I was three, four months old? I’m not sure. Anyway, the repo man grabbed me and made for the door, while Mom grabbed my other leg and the two of them get into tug of war right there on the balcony. They’re pushing and pulling and somehow the guy drops me, and I hit my head right on the concrete. Bam!”
She covered her mouth in horror, but Shakes only grinned, clearly enjoying the story.
“I start to convulse, right, and the repo man freaks out; they can sell babies on the black markets for good money, just another way to keep the war machine going, but no one wants a defective one. They don’t want me anymore, they tell Mom and Dad. They don’t even apologize, and they stick them with the hospital bill, too.”
“Ouch.”
“My parents didn’t care—they got to keep me.” Shakes smiled. “Course it bankrupted them, which is why I had to volunteer.”
“That’s horrible,” Nat said quietly.
“That’s life.” He didn’t seem too perturbed. “I get blackouts, too, sometimes seizures; everyone thinks it’s just frostblight, so I get to pass as normal.”
“Not sure ‘normal’ is the right word.” Nat smiled.
He chuckled. “Many won’t disagree with you there.”
“So are your folks still around?” she asked.
“Just my dad,” Shakes said.
“Are you guys close?” she asked. She knew she was prodding, but she was always curious about the people who still had parents.
“Not really.” Shakes grimaced and tossed the twig into the bin. “We never were, I guess, since he never forgave my mom.”
“For dropping you?”
“For having me,” he said. “He’s not a bad guy, but you know how it is.”
She didn’t, but she nodded sympathetically “So they tried to take you away—like they did Wes’s sister.”
“Wes’s sister?”
“He said they took her away because his parents hadn’t applied for the second-child license.”
“That what he told you about Eliza?”
“Yeah.”
Shakes didn’t say anything. He only looked confused. “But I thought . . .”
“Thought what?”
“That they got a pass on it. You know, the law makes an exception in their case. Because Eliza and Wes . . . they were twins.”
“Huh.” She didn’t know what to say to that.
“He always told me that . . .”
“That what?”
Shakes tossed the twig away. “Nothing. Forget I said anything,” he said, looking nervous.
She saw his discomfort and changed the subject. “So what are you guys going to do after this?”
“After we drop you off? Go back to working casino security I guess. Maybe by then, they’ll have forgiven old Wesson.”
Nat smiled. “Thanks for the bark.”
“Anytime,” Shakes said, giving her a salute.
27
DARAN WAS TRYING TO TAKE THE STONE, and she was struggling, but this time, there was no escape, and he was jeering at her, and laughing, and she was so cold, so cold, and there was nothing she could do, the fire would not start, and the little white bird was dead, and there was no one to help, no one to break down the door, she was all alone, and he would take it away from her and then he would toss her overboard to die, and she was angry, so angry, but there was nothing, she could do nothing, and she was weak and helpless, furious and frightened and she was calling . . . calling out . . . and there was a terrible noise, screeching . . .
Wailing . . .
She awoke to the sound of loud shrieking echoing through the cabin walls. Nat fought through the haze of sleep and saw Wes standing, paralyzed in the middle of the room, shirtless in his pajama bottoms, listening.
“What is it?” she whispered. It was a long, high screech, a ghostly howling, unearthly, like the sound in her dream. She was cold, so cold, like in her dream, so cold.
Wes shook his head and pulled on a sweater, and she followed him as they walked out of the room to find the rest of the crew standing stock-still outside their quarters, listening to that strange, horrible sound.
“Wailer,” said Zedric, his voice cracking.
The shrieking continued, and Nat thought Zedric was right, there was something about the sound that felt like grief, the sound of keening—later, she would liken it to the moans of a mother who had lost her child—it was a whining, a doubled-down sort of pain.
“Wailer. Like funeral wailers,” Nat said, thinking of the elaborate funeral rites that had become the norm for those who could afford it, where professional mourners were hired to wail and cry and pull their hair to show the level of wealth and the depth of bereavement of the family. The more elaborate the show of grief, the more expensive. Like everything nowadays, it was a tradition that started in the Xian and trickled out to the rest of the remaining world.
Nat had worked as a mourner once, walking in front of the funeral casket of a high-level casino boss; she’d learned the tricks to faking a good cry—a few drops of Nutri to start the tears flowing, then a little imagination—and she was soon sobbing away. It wasn’t that hard to tap into the sadness she carried inside. The pit boss who’d hired her was impressed, offered her a steady gig as a griever, but she was done. She’d been emotionally exhausted after the experience, had wrung her soul dry for some exec who didn’t care that his staff had to pay the cost of their own uniforms and housing from their tiny paychecks.
“It’s out there,” Zedric repeated, then crossed himself. “Coming to get us—”
Daran smacked his brother on the head. “Get a hold of yourself, man!” He turned angrily to Nat. “I told you—I told you that bird would call it! That bird was a bad omen!”
Even Shakes and Farouk looked ner
vous, but Wes scrunched up his face with disdain. “Wailer’s just another bogeyman story. To keep people out of the waters.”
“Just because no one’s seen it doesn’t mean it don’t exist,” Zedric said sullenly.
“You’re right, people have only heard the cries.” Wes nodded. “The wailer is a myth as old as this dead sea.”
“What is it?” Nat asked.
“Some kind of animal, they say, like a dinosaur, a Loch Ness thing, although it would be a miracle if there’s anything that’s survived in this ocean.” Wes mimicked drinking a glass of water. “If you swallowed a pint of that poisoned water every day, you’d screech like that, too.”
The sound continued to grow louder, and Nat thought she could make out words in the awful noise, that the wailing made sense somehow, that it was communicating, sending a message across the ocean. Then it was silent, and Nat held her breath, hoping it would go away.
The sound was so familiar . . .
“And if it’s not an animal, what is it then?” she asked.
“People. Dead people,” Wes explained. “Some say the wailer’s a phantom of all the spirits of those that have been taken by the black waters. The pilgrims the slavers deceived and dumped, or the souls of the slaves that were tossed overboard when they were of no use to their masters anymore, or they didn’t fetch a good price at the flesh markets. They’re trapped together, cursed to haunt the dead oceans forever.”
Nat shuddered at the thought. So the wailer was just another type of thriller—except one that could swim. So why did she feel as if she could understand it then—almost as if she felt its pain? She began to shiver violently, her teeth began to chatter, and she felt as if she might faint.
“Nat—what’s wrong?” Wes asked, and he held her, rubbing her arms with his, enveloping her in his embrace. “You’re shaking . . . you should go back to sleep.”
They stiffened as the air filled with long, low moans, echoing off the cold water. The screams grew in volume, and the sounds were no longer far away, but louder, closer and closer.
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