A Daughter of No Nation

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “I do believe her about Romeo and a suicide pact … you say she’s panicked,” Verena said.

  “Do we swing her by … what island was it?”

  “Tibbon’s Wash. Tibbs, sometimes. From the port side,” Parrish said. “No, it’s too far.”

  Sophie chewed on that. “Be a shame if the boy of her dreams did himself in before they had a chance to outgrow the infatuation naturally.”

  “There’s nothing natural about falling out of love.” Parrish frowned. “Her partners will have made for the Fleet, to sell the snow vulture’s eggs. We’ll hope to catch them and send a message on to Tibbon’s Wash. But…”

  “But what?”

  “Corsetta is sunstruck,” Parrish said. “She may yet die.”

  Her suspicion of Corsetta, paired with the adolescent high drama of it all, had made Sophie forget, momentarily that they were talking about a gravely wounded teenager. “We’ll bring her through it,” she vowed.

  He smiled, ducking his head in agreement he might not have truly felt.

  * * *

  She spent the night watching the patient, keeping her hydrated and comfortable. Corsetta half-woke, periodically, moaning in her own language. Mostly it was a mishmash of her boyfriend’s name and mournful protests—in her dreams, Sophie thought, her fear that the faraway boy would indeed kill himself was fully realized.

  Do your parents know where you are? Are they worried?

  The bruise behind her left ear was a black welt, colorful and knotty under her hair, a swelling profound enough to make her moan when she turned her head. Sophie had read that half the danger with such blows came on the opposite side of the skull—that when you got hit, your brain bounced, mashing up against the bone. If you had a hematoma, that was where it would be. Was that why her right eye was bloodshot?

  If it was, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. There were no books on brain surgery lying about.

  The cat—Tonio had named it Banana—appeared once or twice to nose at Corsetta, further giving the lie to her claim to be unconnected to the derelict. It hissed at Sophie, mooched at the bowl of broth, then vanished again.

  If you excluded potential brain damage, Corsetta’s worst injury was to the backs of her hands and forearms. They’d been exposed to the sun the whole time she’d clung to that log, and the burns were terrible. If they became infected, she’d be facing double amputation.

  At least nobody had forbidden Sophie her cache of drugs.

  By morning, Corsetta was sleeping more easily and Verena had come to relieve her. “How’s she doing?”

  Sophie handed her the amoxycillin and said, “I’m giving her a couple pills every six hours with broth.”

  “We’ll be Fleetside by nightfall. You should sleep.”

  “Yeah,” she said, but despite the fact that she’d been sitting by a sickbed in a near torpor for hours, she was suddenly keyed up and alert. Her gaze fell on a empty cabinet strapped to the wall. “Did Gale’s books get moved—are they in Parrish’s cabin?”

  “We gave them away,” Verena said. “You’re not supposed to be snooping, remember?”

  “I was hoping for something on treating burns in the Middle Ages.”

  “The antibiotics and that leftover salve are probably the best thing,” Verena said, yawning.

  Feeling frustrated, she headed back to the fore crew quarters.

  Come on, Sofe, an inner voice—Bram’s voice—urged. You gonna let them stop us after you worked so hard to prepare?

  She cracked open the hatch of her temporary quarters. It was clean and spare, with a walk-in closet and a double bunk, a dresser, and a tiny writing desk. The bosun, Sweet, was sleeping on the top bunk.

  Sophie’s bag was neatly stowed under the bed.

  A map of the world, with its hundreds of tiny islands, was barely visible in the dim light from the lantern in the corridor. She lay a finger on it, thinking about the neat, hand-drawn map in Bram’s room.

  His work’s nicer, she thought. The sense of missing him was both an ache and, somehow, pleasant.

  She went up to the main deck and checked the skies. They were nice and clear, all the undeniably familiar constellations present and accounted for.

  “Morning, Kir,” said the helmsman, Beal, politely.

  “Hi,” she said. “Um, are we making good time?”

  A nod. “See there? It’s the Cairn Sistrienne lighthouse.”

  “We’re how far off it?”

  He squinted, quoting distance and direction.

  She memorized the numbers. “Dawn’s how soon?”

  “Two hours and fifteen, Kir.”

  “And,” Cly’s letter had said it was past the solstice, “how long since midsummer?”

  “Eighteen dawns.”

  Ha, she thought, by our calendar, it’s July ninth, then. “I bet you’ve got a sextant, haven’t you?”

  He handed it over without a second thought.

  Since her first visit to Stormwrack, Sophie had spent considerable time working on her low-tech sailing skills; practically the only times she’d left dry land were to hitch rides on tall ships. She and Bram had practiced figuring out latitude and longitude the old-fashioned way. Now she took a sight on the North Star’s position and its distance from the moon. Thanking the crewman, she made her way back to her cabin.

  The little writing desk had one nub of a pencil, two fountain pens, and an old ballpoint from a gas station in San Francisco. There was no paper, but Cly had enclosed a few blank sheets with his letter.

  She sat, took a second to recall the navigational math she’d recently acquired, and started calculating.

  Figuring out where she was on Stormwrack itself was no great trick: people were only too happy to stick a pin on a chart for you, and if you could get a good look at the sky, you could calculate your location easily enough. But Stormwrack and Earth—Erstwhile, she heard Parrish reminding her—had identical moons and the same night sky, and approximately the same rate of rotation. As far as Sophie could tell, this world was home—the same planet, in other words. But was it a parallel dimension or simply a different time?

  Would her world become this one, or was this some sort of an alternate?

  With the information she and Bram had gathered on the last trip, they had already figured out that the Stormwrackers’ measurement of latitude hadn’t changed. The position of the equator was fixed, and you could only be so far north or south. The question was longitude: on Earth, it was counted from zero from the prime meridian, which passed through Greenwich in England. Here …

  She scratched through the math, double-checked it, and stared up at the chart on the wall.

  “North Atlantic.” She breathed. “Northwater is in the North Atlantic.”

  She felt a surge of pride as she looked it over. Verena could stop her from carrying cameras and computers from world to world. She could hide Gale’s library, but she couldn’t stop her from memorizing facts or making deductions. With one landmark pinpointed, she could work out the location of the great nations and everything else.

  Where’s this lighthouse Beal mentioned? She found the spot the helmsman had indicated, Nightjar’s actual location near Cairn Sistrienne. Then she mentally superimposed the map of Earth overtop. Zero longitude here definitely wasn’t located in England—in fact, it was at another lighthouse, on a nation called Verdanii. Her mother’s home island.

  That puts the Verdanii capital, Moscasipay, in the middle of where North America should be. Sophie put her hand on the edge of the map’s biggest island.

  Sylvanna’s east and south of Verdanii. In terms of latitude and longitude, it’s near … would that be about Tennessee?

  Sylvanna was close to its nearest neighbor, far closer than most islands—possibly even within swimming distance, depending on the currents. Haversham, she read. There was a narrow and knotty-looking passage between the two, dotted with little points that might have been islets or an indication of a border.

  She s
pent a few minutes polishing up her notes and then memorizing the numbers. She only needed a few fixed points for Bram. He could do all this comparison and calculation on a finer scale.

  When she turned back to the writing desk and her page of math, words were scrawling themselves across the bottom of the page in a heavy, not-at-all-pretty hand.

  WHAT ARE YOU DOING? STOP AT ONCE!

  She pulled up to the desk, looked at her stub of pencil, and wrote: Cly?

  GOOD MORNING, DAUGHTER! scratched itself across the page. WHERE ARE YOU?

  Was there any point in concealing their position? No. She felt a weird rush of relief—for once, she didn’t have to keep any secrets. PASSING THE CAIRN SISTRIENNE LIGHT.

  SO CLOSE! ARE YOU WELL?

  FINE. YOU? She was writing in tiny letters, to save the paper she’d half-covered in calculations, and was suddenly conscious that they were wasting their limited bandwidth on pleasantries.

  “Dammit,” she whispered. “Why didn’t someone tell me the blank pages were for texting? Wait, I know: because Verena has orders to sabotage me at every turn.”

  IN GOOD HEALTH AND SPIRITS. SO PLEASED YOU HAVE RETURNED!

  She couldn’t help but smile. Her birth mother, Beatrice, had been violently unhappy when Sophie had approached her. Cly had been all warmth from the beginning.

  WILL YOU COME TO SYLVANNA?

  All warmth … and more than a little pushy.

  THINKING ABOUT IT, she wrote. TALK WHEN I GET TO FLEET, OK?

  OF COURSE. DON’T WASTE THE MESSAGEPLY.

  ONE THING, she added. CREW OF A SHIP AT THIS POSITION TOSSED A GIRL OVERBOARD 3 DAYS AGO, NAME OF CORSETTA FROM TIBBON’S WASH. SEE IF THEY’VE REACHED FLEET?

  MY WORD ON IT. SAFE SEAS, DAUGHTER. The last word was crammed in the corner, filling the last bit of blank space, which saved her the dilemma of how to sign off.

  CYA L8R? LUV SOPHIE? SAFE SEAS BACK ATCHA?

  She looked at the remaining blank page, but Cly had obviously decided to save it.

  By dawn they were seeing wakelights, the small illuminated buoys that spellscribes dropped in the water behind the Fleet, marking its passage for anyone seeking to meet them. The lights were protein globes that floated on the water’s surface, alight with bioluminescent sculptures, glowing roses, a horse, a dancer.

  Parrish had given the order to bend every sail, catching every breath of wind to get them to the Fleet as fast as possible, the better to catch Corsetta’s would-be killers before they could sail for home. Sophie told him about the page of paper at breakfast, filling him and Verena in on her conversation with Cly, watching their faces carefully to see what they might betray.

  Parrish’s mind, at least, was on Corsetta. “Good thinking. His Honor should be able to have them questioned.”

  “Not detained?” Sophie asked.

  “I suspect Corsetta isn’t telling the whole truth. If the brother, Montaro, is convincing…”

  “They should give her the benefit of the doubt,” Verena said. “She’s half-dead down there.”

  “She’s not telling us the truth,” Sophie put in. “She and the cat were both on the derelict.”

  “So one lie means she deserves to be thrown overboard?”

  “Of course not. But it does mean she might not have a boyfriend, or—”

  “No. She’s definitely in love,” Parrish said.

  Whatever that means, thought Sophie. “You can tell that just by looking at her?”

  “Is it her sincerity you doubt, or is it the idea of love itself that troubles you?”

  “Excuse me.” Verena all but jumped to her feet, leaving her plate half-touched and all but slamming the galley hatch. Parrish looked after her, faintly surprised.

  Sophie addressed herself to her breakfast. She was pretty sure she knew where the sudden sulk had come from: Verena’s crush on Parrish was blindingly visible to everyone except, possibly, Parrish himself.

  Every time the topic of romance comes up, we’re gonna be walking on eggshells.

  And she felt a little breakable now, to be honest. She’d thought Parrish might be interested in her, this spring, and she’d thought about him more than she might have guessed during her six-month exile in San Francisco. Now, being here, with a teenage romance suffocating in the aft cabin under the weight of whatever crime Corsetta had committed, and Verena abovedecks, pining and jealous, she was remembering a dozen reasons why Parrish was a bad idea.

  Shake it off, she told herself. What are you gonna do, bring him home to Mom and Dad?

  Parrish ran a hand along his chin, looking thinky. “You’ve learned to use a sextant.”

  “I was hoping to come back.”

  “To meet your family.”

  “And so I could … explore, you know.” Could she explain, in any way he’d understand, how important a discovery the existence of Stormwrack might be?

  Before she could frame the words, he asked, “What about knot tying?”

  “Of course. You’ll have to tell me what you call them—we have our own names for everything.” Then, for no reason she could think of, she said, “Verena said you got rid of the books.”

  “Convenor Gracechild’s orders about leaving research material lying in your path were, unfortunately, detailed and explicit.”

  “What does she think I’m going to learn?”

  “Obviously, I can’t say.” He continued: “Gale’s will left the library to a school on Zingoasis. Most of her possessions went to starboard communities with little wealth.”

  The cook brought a selection of savory cakes to the table. They seemed to finish a lot of meals on board this way, with unsweetened scones that had a bit of chocolate and pepper, or orange, turmeric-scented breadsticks. She wondered if that was a Fleet convention or something to do with the cook’s home culture.

  She scooped one up, burned her fingertips—straight from the oven!—and dropped it again. Parrish’s gaze was making her uncomfortable.

  “You say you lost the medic?”

  “Richler returned to his home nation.”

  “And your bosun’s gone?”

  He nodded. “Gale’s death was a significant change. The crew is adjusting. I meant to ask if you’d continue to serve as our medical officer while you’re aboard.”

  “If I’m the best choice, sure. But I’m no doctor.”

  “Understood. How’s Bram?”

  Ha. Changing the subject. She sensed disquiet there, something unsaid. What had made the medic quit?

  “Bram’s good,” she said. “Busy. And then she thought: Parrish won’t tell tales about Cly, and probably asking about Sylvanna would constitute espionage or something.

  But before she could get in a question, Parrish said, “Sophie, I’ve been wondering…”

  “Yes?”

  “The other night, on Erstwhile, you argued with your parents about … my Anglay has deficits, but it sounded like a combat class.”

  “Women’s self-defense,” she said, trying not to remember her parents’ faces as she drove away. “So?”

  “Are you learning to duel?”

  She burst out laughing. “Can you see me trying to hold my own in a sword fight?”

  The relief on his face might have been insulting. Verena had fought a practice match with a duelist on Erinth, and the two of them had been like something out of a martial arts movie. Verena’s opponent had been magical—what was the term? A transform—he’d been covered in flames and used them to fight.

  And Verena was on the amateur circuit. Sophie had seen Cly go through a magically altered opponent like a wood chipper through Styrofoam.

  She fought an urge to squirm in her seat. How to explain? “It’s—”

  She’d been about to say, “It’s stupid,” but she’d promised Bram she’d break that habit.

  “I did a lot of studying,” she said, beginning again. “Celestial navigation, a bunch of math I was just okay on. The knots, and I’ve been swimming, running, biking…”

&nb
sp; “Excellent preparation.”

  “The self-defense class was … okay, not a whim, exactly. It was obvious, before, that things happen here. Violence.”

  “Gale’s murder,” he said. “John Coine’s attacks on Bram and yourself.”

  “I don’t have the slightest illusion that I could ever be a fighter.”

  “Don’t underrate yourself,” he said. “You’re athletic and have excellent reflexes. I wouldn’t have said ‘never’—”

  “Okay. But how much time would I have to spend practicing, just to be as good a fighter as, say, Verena?”

  “Hours. Every day, hours.”

  “For years. That’s not a good use of my time. I’m a photographer and a biologist.”

  “Then why take a combat course at all?”

  “All the things I like to do—climbing, diving, hiking,” she said, “your life depends on the people you’re with. You trust yourself to ropes someone else fixed to a rock wall. If your oxygen mix goes off and your dive partner doesn’t notice, you’re toast. Cooperation equals survival, you know?”

  He nodded. “A duty to your crew, we say.”

  “If all of us are going to end up in the occasional … brawl? Dustup?”

  “Brawl.” It was an English word.… He repeated it, apparently just to savor the sound.

  “I don’t want to fold like a sack of laundry whenever you and Verena find yourselves in trouble. I don’t want to be a liability. So I was … I dunno, trying to get comfortable with hitting people.” She remembered punching practice in the community center. Commit, commit, commit.

  It was so removed from the reality of fighting, in this world, that she half-expected him to laugh. Instead, he broke out one of those dazzling, movie-star smiles.

  “You’ve given a good deal of thought to what might be required, were you to stay here.”

  She opened her mouth to answer and felt anew the surge of guilt over her mom and dad, and that competing sense of weirdness. As Bram had put it: What the hell, Sofe, are you really gonna move to a backwater Narnia without CAT scans or DNA sequencing or the Internet?

  “Stormwrack’s not as violent as all that, if it helps,” Parrish said. “Fleet society has become very civilized since the Cessation.”