by Jordan Rivet
The previous day, she had gone back to the other hatch of the cargo hold and tried to force it open. But without access to tools, she’d failed. The engine room was occupied around the clock, and there was no way for her to sneak through. She thought of her own slapdash operation back home. Cally would let anyone traipse through the Catalina’s engine room without a second thought. Esther probably would have allowed it too.
She wondered about what the engine room boss had said. The captains needed to grant permission to go through the hold. Could she convince them to let her look at the supplies? She was hardly a threat to them, no matter what they were up to.
Esther had also gone back to the bridge and talked to Reuben for a while, but he’d had no word of the Catalina on the radio. Reuben thought this meant the Catalina hadn’t survived, but Esther refused to believe that. They would contact the Catalina somehow, and by the time they did she would have found a way to get the desal supplies. Then all she’d have to do was get the supplies to the ship, wherever it was.
Esther slept on a tiny couch in the powder room behind the theater. The couch smelled like grease paint and mildew but was reasonably comfortable. The room had been a wreck of jumbled costumes and headdresses when Paris brought her there the previous day. She’d cleaned it up as best she could and used a green velvet cape as a blanket. It was a shame such good material was being used for costumes and nothing else.
Throughout the night, she listened to horn blasts from other ships meeting up in the darkness. Each time Esther imagined it was the Catalina, that she could dart up to the deck and see her father waving to her over the railings. But each time the sound was wrong.
Fear was a constant presence now, like seasickness in the pit of her stomach. The waiting, not knowing, was torturous.
Early in the morning she hobbled on her sore foot to the main deck to join scores of Mist residents as they watched the Galaxy ships drift into view on the horizon. The assorted bandages and limps, evidence of the traumatic storm, made the crowd look humbler than it had before. Their voices were hushed, more solemn, as they watched the ships grow large around them.
Throughout the morning, the big cruise liners arranged themselves into the same formation they’d adopted at the previous location. The process was excruciatingly slow. A few smaller vessels zipped amongst the ships, guiding the behemoths into position. There was no sign of the Catalina.
David, his blond hair nearly white in the sunshine, made the rounds on deck and spoke reassuringly to the residents. Esther avoided his gaze. He’d come to ask her to stay in his cabin at dinner the previous evening. “I’m not trying to pressure you into anything. I swear,” he’d said. “You’ll be more comfortable. I’ll sleep on the floor.” She had refused, unless he would help her convince the captains to send help for the Catalina. Apparently, he’d been going against their wishes by taking her to the hold last night. Why was he withdrawing his help now that the Catalina’s situation was even more precarious?
She felt confused about what had happened between them. Her attraction to David had surprised her. She didn’t trust him, especially now that she’d seen him morph back into the perfect captains’ spokesman yesterday. And yet she wanted to wrap her arms around his waist, to feel his lips on her forehead, to have him look at her the way he had just before he’d kissed her for the first time. She buried these feelings deep beneath her determination to help the Catalina.
As the Flotilla took shape around them, Esther joined Paris on the lido deck. One of the bridges had been salvaged and repaired the previous day. It would link with the Crystal Galaxy, where Paris and Marianna lived. Marianna would be the best person to help her contact Neal on the Catalina. She was working on establishing a base station that would connect to other ships via rogue satellites. She must have information about where the ships fled during the storm. She would help.
As the bridge settled between the ships, David stepped to the front of the crowd. He’d found a new loudspeaker, and he made a brief speech about supporting the work crews. “We all need to do our part to ensure that these good people have the space and assistance they need to rebuild our community,” he finished. “We will have two lanes on this bridge to allow some of the Crystal residents to board the Mist. Stay to your right, and please proceed slowly. We ask everyone to return as soon as possible to their ship of residence. The captains will conduct a full count of all the people in their charge. May you find all your loved ones in good health.”
He stepped aside, allowing the throng to surge forward. He nodded at people as they passed, greeting many by name.
When Esther and Paris reached the bridge, David touched her arm. “Esther, I want to help you. Will you come back to the Mist tonight, if the Catalina hasn’t turned up by then?”
She studied him, trying to see past his smooth spokesman’s face. There was something more to him beneath the veneer, something she’d glimpsed that night. But she’d made too many mistakes already. She couldn’t let her feelings—whatever they were—get in the way of helping the Catalina. He was a complication she could do without.
“I’m going to talk to Marianna. She’ll help me get in touch with Neal and find the Catalina. I don’t need you.”
David sighed and stepped back. “Good luck, Esther. I hope I’ll see you again.”
She said nothing and limped onto the bridge. Beneath her feet, a pair of small boats zipped between the steep hulls of the two cruise ships. Seaweed dredged up by the storm was piled on their prows. A new scratch as long as an orca scarred the hull of the Crystal a few feet above the waterline. Men in harnesses hung from the decks and worked to repair it. Esther watched them as she crossed the bridge.
Then she stepped onto the deck and bumped straight into Neal. “Rust and salt!” she yelped.
“Esther? What are you doing here?” he said, the first to recover from the shock.
“Me?” Esther squawked. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be manning the radios on the Catalina!”
People knocked into her as they stepped off the bridge. She barely noticed.
“I . . . I stayed late on the Crystal, after the show.”
Neal shifted his weight from foot to foot, tugging at the tie he’d worn to the cabaret, which now hung loosely around his neck. Marianna stood just behind him, her eyes on Paris.
“You stayed late? Neal, you have a responsibility to keep the Catalina in contact with other ships. They’re floating loose with no way to call for help! How could you be so stupid?”
It wasn’t fair to be angry with him, but throughout the night she’d been focused on getting to the Crystal and getting in contact with Neal. She had imagined him swiveling in his chair in the broadcast tower, headset around his ears. That hope had been her lifeline. She was happy he was alive, but she did not want to see him here now.
“Me?” Neal said, face alternating between pink and white. “What about you? What on earth possessed you to stay on the Mist?”
“Excuse me, Nelson, were you spending the night with my wife?” Paris spoke softly, but his words silenced them.
“Paris,” Marianna said, reaching out to touch him.
The crowd broke around them as people hugged each other, laughing and calling out names, comparing battle scars.
He stiffened. “I know the two of you have been keeping company.” Esther could barely hear Paris’s voice now. His words were meant for Marianna alone. She didn’t respond.
Esther and Neal looked uncomfortably between the two. They seemed to be communicating through eye contact alone.
When she couldn’t stand the silence any longer, Esther cleared her throat. “Thanks for all your help yesterday, Paris. Neal and I should get to the satellite station and try to contact the Catalina. You two can talk.”
She’d do anything to avoid another fraught scene.
Paris shook his head, his gray curls dancing on his forehead. “No, you need Marianna’s help. She can’t have had time to show Norbert all h
er tricks.”
“Will we talk later, mi amor?” Marianna said.
“Please don’t call me that.”
He pushed back through the crowds toward the bridge and crossed back over to the Mist.
Now Neal and Marianna were gazing at each other, oblivious to the chaos around them. Esther clapped Neal on the shoulder to snap him out of it. “Let’s go see this satellite thingy of yours. What do you know of the Catalina’s position?”
Marianna led the way through the crowds as Neal filled her in. They’d clocked the Catalina heading south on radar before a disruption knocked out the system. That was the previous afternoon. She could be anywhere by now.
“How long do you think it’ll take the Catalina to figure out you’re not manning the comms?” Esther asked.
Neal shook his head, breaking himself out of what was surely another morose train of thought. “Not long at all, but they’ll be limited to radio. No one else has put in the same amount of time with the satellite system. They’d have encountered the disruption and may have given up. We’ll need to bounce the message through other ships with radio, unless the skip is in.”
“Any idea how much fuel they have left?”
“Not much. At least they can’t have gotten very far away,” he said. He paused until Marianna had moved out of earshot. “We didn’t do anything, you know. We were just talking when the storm hit. I swear.”
Esther frowned. She felt bad for her friend and worse for not wanting to talk to him about it. Even if he and Marianna hadn’t done anything, they were obviously embroiled in a complicated emotional attachment. She hoped to avoid those from now on.
“Look,” she said. “I think we have bigger things to worry about right now.”
“Esther! Esther!”
As they reached the starboard deck, someone called to them through the crowd. Esther pivoted on her good foot to see Dax running toward them. He wore a slim-fitting sweater with wide maroon and gray stripes. His hair stood out in every direction.
“Have you heard from Cally?”
“Did she stay on the Galaxy last night? I’ll kill her.”
“No, she was on the ferry on her way home,” Dax said, gripping his hair in both fists and staring wildly at her. “I don’t know if she made it back to the Catalina before the storm hit.”
Esther’s heart dropped. “There was a ferry of Catalinans in the storm?”
“It was the last load of the night,” Dax said, still out of breath. “They were headed back to the ship after the cabaret so they wouldn’t have to walk across all the bridges.”
Esther’s first attempt to speak failed. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Who else was on the ferry?”
“I don’t know. All I care about is Cally. I’m in love with her, Esther! I’ll kill myself if she’s drowned!”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Esther forced herself to sound cheery. It was like turning a rusty bolt without a wrench. “Come with us. We’re going to contact the Catalina right now.” She turned to Neal. “Did you see my father last night?”
“No. I’m sure he was on the ship. He wouldn’t have been on that ferry.”
But she could tell that Neal too was picturing the faces of their friends, wondering which ones might now be at the bottom of the sea. She felt like a whirlpool had opened in her gut. She ignored it, shoving it away just as she pushed away the pain in her foot.
They made their way through the interior of the Crystal and up to the satellite station located behind the bridge. The station, with its eclectic assortment of control consoles and antennas, was relatively quiet. There was a large table in the center of the room and a cot in the corner, not unlike the one Neal lived on back on the Catalina.
Neal and Marianna got to work quickly on the panel of computers, sending out calls for information about the Catalina via radio periodically while they tried to ping the satellites. Esther occupied herself with consoling Dax. It gave her a task, something to keep her mind off her father, Cally, and the ferry that might be resting on the seafloor.
Dax slumped onto the cot. “It’s all my fault! I invited her to see the dumb cabaret show. I just wanted to do something special for her. What if she’s dead, Esther?”
“She’s not dead.” Esther sat down beside him and eased off her bowling shoe.
Dax was working himself into a frenzy. His voice cracked. “But what if she is? I’ve never felt this way about someone before.”
“We’ll find them.”
Esther inspected the stitches in her foot. The wound didn’t look infected. The nurse had been carrying a pocketful of travel-size Neosporin tubes. This cut would heal faster than some of the other injuries she’d sustained in her work. She didn’t have any painkillers, though, and her foot throbbed.
Dax leapt up and paced back and forth across the tower. “I should have taken her for a quiet dinner on the Crown instead. Those finish early. She’d have been home before the first gust of wind. But I had to do something glamorous. I’m so stupid. I just wanted to kiss her.” He sat back down on the cot, still tugging at the spikes in his hair.
Esther took pity on him. “She loved the cabaret. It’s just her type of thing. Better than a quiet—wait a minute. You go to dinners on the Crown?”
“Yeah, my parents live there. My mom was a director on the cruise line before. The captains entertain select groups all the time. I thought it would be boring for Cally to meet all those stuffy people.”
“Can anyone go to one of these dinners?” Esther stared intently at the floor, as if she were sketching out a diagram with her lost pocketknife.
“No. You have to be invited specially, unless you’re a regular.”
“And your parents are regulars?”
“Yeah.” Dax watched the beam of light sweeping around in a circle on one of the screens, looking dejected.
“Would you be able to get me in?” Esther asked. A plan was taking shape.
“You?”
“I want to talk to the captains,” she said.
“They’re not the friendliest dudes.”
“But they’d be in the room?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all I need. When’s the next dinner?” Esther sat a little straighter and reached for her shoe. The fist that had been crushing her stomach eased a little.
“They’ll have one tonight to celebrate the reunion of the Galaxy. Why do you want to meet the captains so much?” Dax flopped back, deflating like a burst weather balloon.
“I want to convince them to send a search party after the Catalina. She’s nearly out of fuel and water. They won’t survive long without help, even if we do get her on the satellite.”
“Out of water?” Dax would know how dire that was, having lived on the ships for most of his life.
“The desalination system is still broken.”
“The whole thing?”
Esther gave a quick nod. “They can make do for a while, but not without fuel.”
Dax stood and paced before her, tugging at his hair, fiddling with the pockets of his sweater. “I don’t know, Esther. The captains aren’t very helpful.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Esther said. “You’re on the Guest Services welcome team. You were falling all over yourselves to help us when we arrived. Why should now be any different?”
Marianna pulled her headset down around her neck, capturing her thick hair like a bonnet. “Don’t you see, Esther? They were trying to entice you to stay with the Galaxy.”
“I know that. They said anyone was welcome to stay. I considered it myself,” Esther said. Somehow, now that the Catalina had been swept away, all she could think about was getting back to it. Had she really been so determined to leave?
“You don’t understand.” Marianna’s liquid brown eyes bored into her. “The Flotilla is like a great big Venus flytrap. The captains welcome in anyone who comes across their path, then consume their resources and their people. They want your ship. They’d dis
mantle the Catalina and use it as scrap metal for their own ships. Your little group would barely be noticed in the Flotilla, and you certainly wouldn’t be joining the elite. Most of you would be doing menial labor, adding to the captains’ great empire. They don’t care about helping anyone unless they’ll get something out of it.”
“Why don’t people just leave? Turn in their chips and join the Amsterdam?” Esther asked.
“Officially, they can,” Marianna said. “But lately when people try, they’ve been told their chips are worth far less oil than they thought, so they can’t afford to take the leap. People who complain about it have been demoted for minor infractions or forced out of their cabins to live on the cargo ships. Some people get away, but most are too scared of what’s going on in the rest of the world. The Galaxy has been their haven, and they’re afraid to go.”
Dax opened and closed his mouth a few times, but he didn’t contradict Marianna. So the Galaxy, with all its talk of starting a new civilization and welcoming in strangers, was an illusion. They were just another scared group of people living on ships and looking out only for themselves. Judith had been right to be suspicious. And as far as Esther knew, they were almost out of oil too. Eventually, the whole charade would come crashing down.
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” Neal said. He had yanked off his headset as well.
Marianna frowned. “Perhaps I was a bit selfish. I wanted you to stay.” Her musical voice was quiet, like a tinkling wind chime.
Neal threw up his hands. “I thought this place was special. Some kind of paradise. That was all a lie?”
Esther listened dully, feeling the tight pinch of betrayal.
“I’m sorry,” Marianna said.
“What else have you been keeping from me?” Neal asked.
“Neal.”
Dax looked back and forth amongst the three of them, clearly not understanding the subtext. Esther wished she didn’t understand it either.
Finally, Dax said, “So . . . do you want to go to the party or not?”
Chapter 21—The Galaxy Crown