"That's awesome!" Alden yelled in Tristan's ear. He'd actually asked if he could drink; Tristan had laughed and nodded, willing to let him tuck into her vodka until he vomited. He had to learn sometime.
He pounded on her shoulder each time a new star popped against the backdrop of the universe. Within five minutes, her shoulder was so sore she caught his hand mid-punch.
"So the student has become the master," Alden said. His grin softened. "This is cool, isn't it? Do you like it here?"
"Yeah," she said. "Do you?"
"Yeah."
"But?"
"But I wonder what else is out there."
"Some good, some bad." She rubbed her sore shoulder. "Did you have somewhere in mind?"
"Somewhere warm," Alden said. "Sunny."
"It's warm and sunny here."
He peered at her over his red plastic cup. He smelled of juice and liquor. "Somewhere so warm and sunny the girls have to wear bikinis."
Tristan rolled her eyes. "Lesson one of drinking: you're not half as cool as you think you are."
"Half of my cool is still all the cool."
"We'll talk later. You're missing the fireworks."
Colors streaked the sky. Smoke streamed on the wind. She smelled spent gunpowder. Five minutes later, they sent up the finale, a blistering set that crackled like a machine gun and glowed like lava. The crowd clapped and hugged and cheered.
Tristan stood on the banks a long time after the others had left. The old stars shimmered in the sky. She wanted to believe it was over. She glanced around to make sure she was alone, then spoke her parents' names. The words tasted foreign, the language of a place long lost to the careless jungle of time.
She turned from the river to find Alden before he made a fool of himself with the girls.
EPILOGUE
He rarely knew where they were going. The submarine ran largely on water; when he pressed how that was possible, Sebastian explained it needed combustible fuel, too—oil worked well enough—but it could roam for weeks between fill-ups. They only stopped at night, when it was too dark to make out the skyscrapers or the coast. Sometimes it was warm. Sometimes it was cold. Sometimes they let him come with them as they scuttled over the docks. The shore felt funny beneath his feet. Too still. Too silent. If he focused hard enough, he thought he could hear it asking to live.
Sebastian thumped his tentacle on the spongy wall. Ness glanced up.
"Landing tomorrow," Sebastian signed with two tentacles. For simpler subjects, they no longer had to use writing at all. "Come with?"
"Yes," Ness signed back. He grinned. "Fresh air. You smell."
"You worse," Sebastian gestured back. He turned and disappeared through the oval door.
The engines whispered through the moist floor. Ness let them lull him to sleep.
* * *
The ship was all loaded up. Food. Water. Guns. Clothes. Fishing rods. Plenty of homemade fuel. She untied from the dock and turned over the engine. Alden grinned against the sunlight bouncing from the bay.
A crew of freebooters had taken over Alcatraz and claimed possession of all waters in sight, but she'd bribed them weeks ago with equal quantities of gas and liquor. As she motored toward the red spires of the Golden Gate Bridge, the pirates shot rifles straight up in the air in salute. Alden stripped off his shirt, letting it flutter behind him in the wind. He'd put on some muscle.
"Trying to catch a tan for the girls?" she shouted over the wind and the engine.
He turned, blushing. "You should try it. It feels great."
"I am not taking off my shirt."
Alden blushed harder. "I mean, taste the wind."
Tristan laughed. "Is that what you call that?"
"It tastes different wherever you go. At Hanford, it's dusty. At Redding, it's gummy. Here, it's salty."
She stood from her chair, wind catching her hair. She glanced at the sails to ensure they remained firmly furled—she wasn't going to let them out them until they were clear of the coast—then took a deep breath. It tasted salty and cool, ancient yet ceaseless. She breathed again and the sun was warm on her face.
"Enough fun," she grinned. She dropped back into her seat. "This is your captain speaking."
Alden straightened. "Sir."
The shadow of the bridge swallowed them up. The motor purred through the hull. "Prepare to engage sails. We've got a long trip ahead of us. Estimated travel time: who the hell knows."
She throttled forward. The boat smashed through the waves. Gulls circled, cawed, dipped their slender white wings. The ocean spread to the curves of the world.
* * *
The engines went on whispering, but he could feel the sub slowing. Had it already been a day? He had no watch. Time was as fluid and unseen as the ocean beyond the windowless hull.
Sebastian appeared in the oval doorway. The ship lurched, beginning its ascent, and the alien braced three tentacles in the frameless portal.
"Still coming?" it signed.
Ness nodded. "Oil?"
Sebastian shook its bulbous head. "Friends taken. We take back."
"From humans?" Ness gestured.
"Yes. Problem?"
"No problem." Ness rolled from his alcove and stood on the rubbery floor.
Sebastian handed him one of the blunt black pistols. "J-A-P-A-N," it signed, letter by letter. "Been?"
"No."
"New things good." Sebastian's two sense-tentacles bobbed back and forth, a gesture of pleased anticipation. "Come."
Ness followed it through the humid tunnel. Another alien emerged behind them. Ness climbed behind Sebastian up the steep ramp. He could smell the brackish sea. Sebastian unzipped the wall and stepped out from the tower onto the sub's top deck. A beautiful mountain waited on the horizon, perfectly proportioned, crowned by heavy layers of snow painted pink by the last gasps of sunlight.
Sebastian still hadn't called him by the five-part tip-twitch that signed for "gutbrother." Ness knew it would come in time.
He checked his gun and jogged after Sebastian to the pier.
* * *
"Tristan!"
She stirred with a gasp. Her sweat stuck her to the sheet. The cabin was humid and hot, but she'd been dreaming about the man at the Walmart again, too. Each time she struck him, her fist had sunk into his skin as harmlessly as if he were made of dense feathers. However hard she punched him, he kept coming, walking nearer and nearer, lifting and lifting and lifting his gun.
"Tristan!"
"I'm coming." She pulled on her shirt and tromped upstairs. The sails snapped lightly, nicely trimmed. Waves beat against the hull. Alden stood at the front and pointed ahead, his grin as bright as the tropic sun.
A hazy green lump swelled on the horizon.
They'd been on the water so long the sand felt wrong. They'd weathered two storms. Lost one jib sail (she'd brought two spares). Seen sharks. Whales. Once, they thought they'd seen another boat, its sail a bright spot miles to the south, but it had disappeared before they could be sure.
Hawaii hadn't escaped the Panhandler either. She hadn't expected otherwise. She hadn't expected to step off the boat into a ready-made paradise, to be handed a drink with an umbrella by a handsome yet shy poolboy, who would then lead them to their upstairs suite. She knew they'd have to work for it. That it might take years of labor to attain a life of comfort. But it would be best here. Away from the jackals of Redding, free from the slavery of the tick-king of Better San Diego, separate even from the well-meaning anthill at Hanford—here was where they could raise their own home.
She stood in the sun, shorts dripping seawater. Waves tumbled up the beaches. Palms hissed in the constant wind.
"Well?" Tristan said. "Where do you want to set up camp?"
"The beach." Alden glanced over his tanned, freckled shoulder. "Can we?"
"Man, we can do whatever we want." Someone cried inland. Tristan hunched down, reaching for her pistol, then laughed at herself. It was just a bird, uncannily human. "Just keep your eyes
open."
The breakers rolled in one after another.
* * *
The man sat atop Chichen Itza and surveyed his jungle. Very green. Very jungly. Hot as all hell. That, too, was normal. He sometimes wondered why he'd stopped here. His reason had not been particularly wise or tactical; the monument had simply been too cool to pass by without stopping. He'd climbed up its outside, then found it had a staircase inside it, too, a stifling, steamy, terrifyingly steep rise that led to a blank wall. After he got out, he climbed back to the top to consider the jungle and shake off his claustrophobia.
Then he'd just sort of stayed. Even after the small people emerged to drive him away. (It had taken weeks to reach a detente with them.) Even after he discovered there were no rivers or proper streams in the peninsula, and that when it wasn't raining, he had to hoist buckets of water from foul-smelling and horrifyingly enormous sinkholes. He hadn't traveled on even after it turned out that it was never really not hot in this place.
Because seriously, the monument was just that cool.
He sat on the top step, shaded by the overhang, running his palms over the rough stone. He should think about going to the shore for a few days. Cool off. Catch and dry some fish. Grab some citrus. Ward off the ol' scurvy. The roads were clear; he could bike the twenty miles by sunset, easy. But it was so hot. He could wait till dusk, at least.
He napped a while. As he woke to scan the jungle and ensure the trees were in the right places, motion caught his eye. A woman strode across the grassy field. Straight for the pyramid he was enthroned upon. Too tall to be one of the locals. Not quite brown enough, either, though she had his rich tan beat. He got his laser out from under the stone bench and rested it on his knee.
The steps were comically steep. There were 91 of them on each of its four sides and every one felt like the one that would send you tumbling to a snapped neck. She steadied herself with her hands, breathing hard, sweat beading her lineless face. She was pretty. He doubted he was. As she climbed, she looked up several times, as if to check if he were still there.
Four steps below the flat top, she stopped, knelt, and shielded her eyes with the blade of her hand. "Are you the man who drove the enemy's ship into the sea?"
"Nope," he said.
"That is funny," she said. "Because yes, you are."
Walt swore and scowled down at the languid ball court. He'd thrown a tennis ball around there once before almost passing out from heat exhaustion. Impossible to get it through the stone hoops.
"Who told you?" he said. "The Maya?"
"Yes."
That information—conveyed largely through gestures, partly by bastardized Spanish—was what had convinced them to let him stay in the first place. He regretted it with sudden intensity.
"What do you want?"
"They're not gone, you know," said the woman. "The invaders."
"So what? They're grounded, aren't they? Sent to their room without dinner."
Her gaze didn't falter. "I don't know what you're talking about."
He gestured at the sky. "Their ship's gone. Most all the little ones, too. A few more years, all we'll have left is their big weird skulls."
She shook her head. Sweat pattered to the hot stone. "They're breeding. I need your help."
"You don't need my help," he snorted. "Anyone can shoot them. Anyway, I'm retired."
She climbed higher, reaching for his hand. "Please, sir."
"Come on. This isn't Indiana Jones. I'm not traipsing off into the jungle to save a village from the evil—"
"No village. Unless Los Angeles has shrunk considerably since I last saw it."
"You're American? You came all this way?"
She nodded. "And I need help."
"Oh." He scuffed his shoe, suddenly embarrassed by his delusions of being approached as a mysterious foreign king atop his lofty ziggurat. "Well, I'm a nice guy, once you get to know me. I'm not going to send you back without listening to what you came all this way to say."
She smiled. The jungle moved as it should. The sun beat down from the sky. She began her story.
Walt swore.
I:
FERAL
1
They found her under the pier wearing a pair of boots and the blood of the cat she'd just eaten raw. She had been watching a gecko sun itself on a rock—it was a pretty one, with a blue head and tail, and black spots down its whole body—and she was so absorbed in it that she didn't hear the people coming until the gecko looked up and ran away.
She grabbed her knife and sprinted through the pilings, weaving between clusters of barnacles that would scrape her skin down to the muscle, but the man caught her before she got to the safety of the open pipe sloping to the sea. She lunged with her knife, flaying his arm. White bone peeped beneath a sudden tide of blood.
It was her fondest memory of the first two years after the plague.
* * *
They asked her about it in a gentle, persistent way, the woman's mouth pursed, as if she just knew it would help.
Raina always said the same thing. "I don't remember."
"What about yesterday?" the woman said in a voice that was eager and somehow sad. It was the day after they found her and they'd had to tie her to the bed to keep her from running away. "Do you remember yesterday?"
"I was at the docks," she said. "I don't know."
"What about your family? Before the plague? Do you remember your mom? Her face? Her hair?"
Raina frowned at the white wall, pretending to try. "I don't know."
"Did you have a dad?"
The man leaned in and touched the woman's arm. "Kate. She's tired."
She breathed out in a rush, like a dog lying down for a nap. "Okay. It's okay, Raina. But can you try for me? Try to remember?"
Raina nodded, glancing up beneath her ragged bangs. "I'll try."
She didn't. After a while, the woman stopped asking. A while after that, Raina stopped trying to run away. She liked the new people. The man was kind and strong and smiled whenever he saw her. The woman was jittery like one of the little fish Raina had never been able to catch at the marina, and when she got confused she looked to the man instead of herself. But she was also patient and taught Raina lots of new things like how to properly patch her clothes and gut fish. Even when Raina got frustrated and threw the needle in the grass beside the house, the woman kept trying. Raina believed she always would.
Her dad taught her to sail with him and catch fish in great big nets. They ate every piece of meat except the heads. At first, Raina collected these and arranged them in careful ziggurats beside the dock. She liked the fish's little teeth, the looming stare of their empty sockets. And when you killed something, you took possession of it. She wanted to show the other fish they shouldn't be afraid of her nets. They would join lots of other fish that had already fed her. They would be happy together. She would look out for them.
And they looked out for her, too. Most of the time, their spirits were simply there with her, silent in the way the bricks that form a building are silent, but once in a while, they spoke up. Offered her suggestions. Wisdom. Strength. She would never kill just to gain this power from them, but surviving meant killing. And she was very good at surviving.
The man came to her and told her that it wasn't healthy or respectful to pile up the skulls in this way. Raina tried to explain how it let the fish stay in a school after they'd died, but the man—her new father—told her that it would attract predators. Parasites. She had to stop.
She stopped putting her skulls by the dock and brought them into the trees up the hill instead. Her new parents never noticed.
* * *
Her father leaned into the winch, grunting in that way of his; a rising tone of respectful effort she would always associate with wind and salt and swells. Water sluiced from the rope and dimpled the sea. At the western edge of the bay, sunlight played on the peaks of ten thousand tiny waves, shimmering closely, a school of light. A pelican wobbled on th
e breeze and banked from the boat.
Turn by turn, he hauled up the net, a drooping teardrop weighted down with wriggling silver bodies. He swung it over the deck, water spattering the time-worn wood. He released the pawl with a metallic clink. The net thumped wetly. Fish struggled inside the ropes. The man planted his hands on his hips and arched his back, grimacing, sun-lines crinkling his mouth and eyes.
Raina crabbed forward, club in hand, and took up the net, shaking fish across the deck in a slobbery, gasping spread. She kept her eyes sharp for rockfish. The other fish respected her as their master, but the rockfish were spiny and defiant.
It was an okay catch, a single crescent-tailed bonito flapping among a mess of croakers and surfperch. They'd snagged a plastic bag and a small squid, too. She stalked among the fish, clubbing them on the head with a sharp and bony crack. Slime and blood burst from her baton.
Finished, she sat back to catch her breath. Her father grinned and wiped his brow. A thin white scar ran the length of his forearm; the skin of his exposed armpit was as pale as the bellies of the brained fish. For a moment, she was reminded that he wasn't the father she'd been born to. He was a stranger. She had a club in her hand.
She grinned back and got out her knife and started cleaning, thumbing out the guts and chumming them over the rail. She layered the bodies in the cooler. They would probably eat most of the perch tonight. Her mom would curry the croakers to be eaten over the next day or two, the spices keeping the meat pure, disguising the taste if it went foul; she'd smoke or dry the rest, including the bass, which she'd probably barter to Wendell up the hill in exchange for more bread and eggplant. If she took them to the Dunemarket instead, these little fish could wind up carted across all corners of the valley, to the islands, to Disneyland. These little fish she'd just killed, eaten by distant strangers.
But released by her, their spirits would remain hers.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 71