Pacifica

by Kristen Simmons

  “They’ll never make it.” But Luc’s cold, twisting smile told Marin that this had been the plan all along. The people she’d seen in the riots, who’d been hauled into the vans—they had been shoved out of the picture, sent away to disappear.

  “No,” said Ross again. He’d grown pale. “You’re wrong. The president would never allow this.” He was shaking his head, but seemed to have accepted this just as Marin had.

  As she looked at the faces around her, she knew the wheels had already been set in motion. Luc had bought the other captains by taking money from the mainland, and now the Shorelings were coming here. To Careytown. To the home she’d done everything to return to.

  She had to do something. Unless she quickly made Ross important, Luc would kill them both.

  “He’s the president’s son,” she said. “He’s Ross Torres, and I stole him so we could sell him back for a big payout.”

  Luc lifted his chin. Whispers rose around her, like the hush of a breeze.

  “Whatever Noram’s president paid you for the Shorelings, he’ll pay twice for his son, I promise you that.”

  “What are you doing?” Ross hissed.

  She ignored him.

  “You snared the president’s son?” asked Luc. She couldn’t tell if he was impressed, or infuriated that she’d blown his big plan.

  “That’s right,” she said. “If you would’ve just listened, I would have told you that when I first got here. I want back in, Luc. I think this more than covers my tithe.”

  He scratched his chin.

  “How do I know it’s really him?” asked Luc.

  “Talk to him. Send someone out to check the Armament frequencies,” she said. “I’m sure they’re reporting him missing by now.”

  “Marin…” Ross faltered when she faced him. It was the disbelief in his eyes that nearly broke her. “You said—”

  “I know what I said,” she interrupted. “I lied.”

  Silence settled over the fire pit. After a moment, Luc tapped the flat side of his knife against his thigh.

  “Take him to the post,” he said. “Bring him water. I need to think.”

  Picker and Greenhorn grabbed Ross, and when he shook free, Japan and another pirate called Red joined in. She forced herself to look pleased as Luc moved forward and cut her hands free with his knife, but didn’t breathe easier until he tucked it back into its sheath.

  “Marin,” Ross said one final time. “You’re selling me to this tyrant?”

  She rubbed her wrists, feeling her fingertips prickle as the blood flowed back to them.

  “He may be a tyrant,” she said, “but he’s also my brother, so watch your mouth.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THE METAL cuffs scraped Ross’s wrists as he tried to work his hands free. He’d been fastened to a pole ten feet high that stuck out of the ground at an angle. It was rusted from the acid in the rain, but the ring where the old handcuffs were attached was still strong.

  He pressed his teeth together and pulled, leaning the weight of his body back against his bindings. The men who’d brought him here—the corsarios—had disappeared. The one with the missing arm, who’d been in the boat that had found him, had brought a mug of yellow-tinged water and set it in the dirt at Ross’s feet. He couldn’t reach it with the cuffs on, and had stopped trying, because every time he looked at it his throat felt even dryer.

  Behind him, a group of townspeople leered. For the first hour, he’d faced them, gaze darting between each sneering face. It was only Marin’s brother’s orders that he not be harmed that kept them from coming closer. For that, at least, he was thankful, because he felt certain they would beat him to a pulp if given the chance.

  They called him “cabrón,” and “son of the devil,” and talked, with a little too much detail, about cutting off certain body parts.

  After a while, he’d turned away and tried to shut them out.

  He pressed his forehead against the post, breathing in, every inch of his damp clothes chafing against his itchy, salt-covered skin. Each breath made his stomach twist in hunger. The ground seemed to move beneath his feet. He felt like he’d never stop swaying.

  Even now he couldn’t believe Marin had betrayed him. Maybe he’d been suspicious before the storm, but after, things had changed. You didn’t survive something like that together and just walk away. This had to be part of her plan.

  But this place was like nothing he’d ever known. It made the docks look like a dream. And these people were her people. Their leader was her brother. She’d called this place home.

  It was somehow worst of all that he hadn’t found Adam.

  The breeze changed, and with it came a rotten stench that made him gag and cover his nose in the crook of his arm. His gaze lifted to the gomi fields—at least he thought he’d heard someone call them that. Miles and miles of trash, stretching as far as the eye could see. Hills and meadows and valleys of shiny metal shards and plastic bottles and clothes and cans and nets. It was like looking into a garbage incinerator before pressing the button that made what was inside disappear. His ears were filled with the buzzing of insects. His stomach turned.

  Movement pulled his gaze to his right, where a shack a hundred yards away sat just inside the border of the trash field. It looked to be made mostly of rubber tires, and from the roof spiraled delicate tendrils of white smoke. A man was walking from it in Ross’s direction, his black shirt sticking to his narrow chest. A matching scarf covered half his face, and as he drew closer, he pulled it up over his dark hair.

  Luc walked to him, stopping so close that Ross could see the beads of sweat dripping down his brow and smell the sickening burnt-sugar stench on his clothes.

  “I see you’re all settled in,” he said, as if Ross had just been taken to a room at a fancy hotel.

  “Let me go,” said Ross, squaring his shoulders as best he could. “And this will turn out better for you.”

  He couldn’t look at the pirate without seeing him shoving Marin to the ground, and it made his blood boil.

  Luc grinned, and it felt like a dare. “Is that a threat, young Mr. Torres?”

  Ross didn’t care to be called “young” by someone who couldn’t be more than a few years older than him.

  “Just the truth,” he said.

  Luc looked mildly impressed. He rested his wrists on the guns on his hips. He seemed to be alone, but a few men had pulled from the group behind and were lurking in the shadows of the last building on the road. It felt reminiscent of the locker room, a million miles away, where Marcus Pruitt and the Gomez brothers had waited to teach him a lesson.

  “Where’s Marin?” Ross asked.

  “Miss her already?”

  If she was working an angle, he didn’t want to appear too eager.

  “Not exactly.”

  Luc’s mouth formed a small o. “Broke your heart, did she? How’d she get you out here, anyway?”

  Ross remembered jumping aboard her ship, eager to find Adam. Shooting the lock on the Armament brig door. He’d done this. She hadn’t pushed him into anything.

  “I see,” said Luc, taking his silence as an answer. “Tell me, did you think she loved you?”

  It took a moment for his intent to sink in.

  “No.” Ross shook his head. “I mean … It wasn’t like that.”

  Luc chuckled, a low, disbelieving sound. “Don’t take it too hard. She’s soft that way. Always been desperate for a little warmth. You should have seen her with our dad, following on his heels like a hungry mouse.” He sighed. “Pathetic.”

  Ross’s shoulders bunched on her behalf. He’d call Marin a lot of things, but pathetic was not one of them.

  “Surprised she came back before him, even after all this time. But he’ll turn up. He always does.”

  “Thought he was doing a job for the Japanese,” said Ross, looking away.

  He broke into laughter. “She really worked you, didn’t she? I’ve got to say, I’m kind of impressed.”

>   Ross’s face heated.

  “Aww.” Luc squeezed his shoulder, and when he jerked away Luc didn’t seem to notice. “Don’t take it so personal. She lies. That’s what she does. She learned from the best, you know.” He chuckled. “Once, our dear old dad took Marin to the mainland for supplies and forgot about her. Two weeks later he came back and there she was, in the same spot on the dock. Told her something about the Armament chasing him, and being swallowed by a shark. Or maybe it was a whale.” He laughed. “I forget.”

  Ross’s fists were clenched. He could still hear the smile in Marin’s voice when she’d told him that story. The man who’d done what Luc described could not be the same person who brought home ice wrapped in a blanket.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” Luc said wistfully, staring off into the trash fields. “But growing up, this was my playground. Mind the bocas, though. Thin spots in the island. Hungry little mouths. When I was six, I fell straight through, all the way to the water below. Had I not been strong, I never would have made it through the night.”

  Ross shuddered, thinking of being trapped underwater in what Marin had called an iceberg. He couldn’t imagine spending the night even half submerged.

  “There’s water below?” he asked, trying to sound curious, even while his hands continued to work at the cuffs.

  “Of course,” said Luc. “What did you think? We were built on a mountain?”

  Ross supposed he had. That’s what islands were, weren’t they?

  “I hadn’t thought much about it,” he admitted. “I guess I’d heard that Pacifica was man-made.”

  “Oh, it was man-made, all right.”

  Luc turned to face him, and Ross’s eyes fell on his “86” tattoo, in bold black script across his throat. It was huge compared to Marin’s small marking.

  “What do you think happens to the trash you throw away?” Luc asked.

  “It’s burned,” said Ross, feeling his face heat.

  “It’s burned, he says.” Luc laughed again, clearly enjoying being the one with all the information. “It can’t all be burned. It comes out to sea. Your people love having things for a little while, and when they tire of them, they become mine.” He opened his arms to the field of trash.

  Ross had seen the trash in the Sacramento Bay, and Donner Cove, but he couldn’t imagine standing atop one of Marin’s icebergs, much less building a town on it.

  “How is this possible?” asked Ross.

  Luc crouched low, hands spread inches above the red mud. Not mud, now that Ross was looking, but tiny pieces of plastic sand.

  “Do you feel it moving?” asked Luc.

  Ross nodded.

  “Some call it the gyre. The cesspool, more like it. Right here is where the warm water from the south dances with the cool water from the north. They spin and spin and spin, catching all the trash the currents drag away from the mainland.”

  “This island is made of trash,” Ross said.

  “And it’s trash that lives aboard it,” said Luc, coming close enough that Ross could smell his foul breath. “Ever since the Original Eighty-Six were named traitors and sent here to suffer.”

  The other man’s cold truths blended with the story of the Original 86 Marin had told him on her boat. Noram knew the 86 were here and had done nothing. Ross was a prisoner of the 86 because they’d done nothing. And now Noram was about do the same thing they’d done before: dump their trash in the ocean and pretend it didn’t exist.

  “How many people live here?” Ross asked weakly.

  “A hundred and eleven souls. Well, soon to be six hundred and eleven, give or take a few dozen rioters.”

  It felt too impossible to be a reality, even as he stood here on a floating island of garbage. An overwhelming need to tell someone, to expose Pacifica for what it was, clawed up within him, but who could he tell? The media? Adam’s father? People needed to know what was happening, to stay away from the transports coming here. He thought of the blackouts Adam had mentioned before they’d gone to the riots. The crushed pipes and broken water mains. Were those real problems? Was erosion even an issue?

  But Ross could do nothing. He was a prisoner, chained to a pole. His father had worked on this bill for years, had supported it publicly nearly every day since it was announced. It made Ross sick to think that his dad had known the Shorelings were facing this fate. The president’s job was to protect the citizens of the Alliance. That he could send them to exile, under the watch of pirates, made him more of a tyrant than Luc.

  “The prisoners from Noram’s riots, the ones being sent out to sea—are they coming here as well?” It felt wrong to hope for such a thing, but he did.

  “Of course,” said Luc. “The new generation of Noram’s traitors. They should already be here. I suppose the storm may have got them.”

  Ross’s hands jerked against his chains. Adam was in the same storm he and Marin had been in. For the first time he considered that Adam might not make it through this. The storm had already shown him that he might not.

  For some time Luc said nothing, then he gave a contented sigh.

  “All the coin in the world won’t make up for what your people have done to mine,” he said quietly. “I’d see your head on a stake before I’d see you sent back home.”

  At these words, Ross felt an icy breath blow across every nerve.

  “What happens now?” he asked.

  “Now I tell your father I have you, and I kill you where he can watch.”

  With that, Luc turned and made his way toward the shed, where the smoke twisted into the sky.

  CHAPTER 23

  MARIN STOOD at the waxed curtain that led to her home, one trembling hand an inch away from pushing it aside. She’d been given food and drink, even new boots, which Greenhorn had taken off his own feet as they’d gathered in the tavern. They were a little big and clunky, but better than walking barefoot.

  She was a hero. She’d captured the son of the empire they’d been raised to hate. Soon she would be rich, and respected. She’d have a boat, bigger and better than the Déchet—maybe even better than the Señora—and a crew loyal to her. Some had already asked to be on it.

  They’d all wanted to hear a story, something as wild and dangerous as the truth itself had been, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell it.

  When she’d been little, she’d dreamed of this moment, but now that it was here, she just felt empty. Ross was tied to the pole on the gomi fields—a prisoner. Gloria and the others were running out of food. Soon the docks would find themselves without a doctor, because Hiro was packing his bags to come here.

  Needing a break from the others, she brushed aside the curtain and stepped into her mother’s house, aware of the man loitering outside that Luc had sent to follow her. The bottom floor was composed entirely of a kitchen, a small, dark space, buzzing with flies. Sticking out from the far wall was a smooth, clean countertop that took up so much room she had to sidestep to get around it. At the other end was a stone hearth, and atop it, a cauldron big enough to fit a full-grown man. A window had been cut into the plastic wall above the chopping block, but the breeze was blocked by the house behind.

  Her father had read to her at this counter. Her mother had made her mend small machines there. Yet as she ran her fingertips over the smooth plastic she felt nothing. The room seemed smaller than it ever had in her childhood.

  “Hello?” Marin called.

  Seema emerged from the pantry, shadowed in the far corner, cradling cans in her arms. She must have heard the soles of Marin’s damp boots squeak across the floor, but she hadn’t shown herself until now.

  “Maman.” The word came out like a croak. Her mother was angry, that much was obvious. But as accustomed as she’d been to the woman’s hard moods, she didn’t understand why.

  After five years, she at least deserved a hello.

  “So,” Seema said. “You bagged yourself the president’s son. Congratulations.”

  Her mother didn’t look up as she
began stacking cans of corn mash on the countertop in preparation for dinnertime.

  “You don’t sound too excited,” said Marin carefully. She couldn’t help wondering if her mother was disappointed that she’d returned, and not her father. If she’d prayed for him all these years to come back. If she’d ever prayed for Marin.

  Seema snorted and turned away. “Is it a scam?”

  She wished it were a scam. That Ross wasn’t anybody important. Of course, it was that importance that was keeping him alive right now—that prevented him from being tossed out to the gomi fields or thrown off the edge of a dock. She drummed her fingers on her thighs.

  “No.” She cleared her throat. “A lot’s changed around here.”

  The cans slammed on the counter.

  A lot hadn’t changed too. Her mother had never been particularly warm.

  “Luc didn’t even call the other captains when I offered my tithe,” she continued.

  “The council’s done,” Seema said. “The other captains follow his orders.”

  Marin chewed on her bottom lip. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Her grandfather and the Original 86 had set up the council for a reason, so that they could make decisions together, as a group. That way one person wouldn’t get out of control and do something stupid, like repeat history by bringing a bunch of unwilling Shorelings to an island in the middle of nowhere.

  “Why did he do it?” Marin asked. “He hates the terrenos. We all do.”

  Seema looked at her now, one brow cocked.

  “We all used to,” she said, in a way that made Marin think of Ross, made her heart squeeze as she thought of him chained to that post. She had to get him out of here, but she couldn’t even approach him with Luc’s man on her heels. If she did find a way to sneak past him, she didn’t even have a boat for them to make a decent run for it.