Blue Sea Burning (28 page)

In the predawn gloom, I could see a crowd moving toward me. Skeletons, walking ghosts.

Except for the three in the middle. My friends.

There was no urgency to the way they moved. Just exhaustion.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We won,” said Kira.

The Last Plan

“WHERE ARE STAIRS
to ship?” The Okalu leader's name was Iko, and he was getting impatient.

“It's not important now,” said Millicent, for at least the third time. “The rest of the pirates are—”

“We go to ship first.”

“The pirates are in the town!” She was losing her temper.

Iko stopped walking and held up his hand. The few hundred hollow-eyed Okalu on the road behind him—many of them loaded down with jugs of water and sacks of half-spoiled food from the mine's storehouses—came to a stop as well. So did the rest of us.

Iko placed his hands on his hips and stared down at Millicent. Even with his body half wasted from starvation, he was an imposing figure.

“First we load ship,” he said. “Food and water. Then we go to town.”

“You can leave the supplies by the road and get them later! We have to hurry—”

“
No.
We go to ship first.”

Millicent clenched her teeth. “Kira—”

Kira traded words in Okalu with Iko. I tried to read their tone of voice, but neither one was giving much away.

Finally, Kira turned back to Millicent.

“They have to see the ship. To make sure it is there, with the oars, like we said.”

“Then they'll help us? Like they promised?”

Kira sighed.

“There are fifty pirates left!” Millicent's voice shook. Dawn was breaking and we hadn't slept or eaten since the day before.

“Maybe not fifty,” Guts muttered. Millicent and Kira both looked at him.

“Maybe just forty,” he said.

“Kira, they
have
to promise us they'll help!” She turned to Iko. “You
have
to!”

He stared at her, unblinking. “We go to ship,” he said. “Or we do not help.” He waved his hand toward the side of the road. We were close enough to the cliff that I could see ocean through the trees.

“Is close. You show us.”

Kira spoke to Iko again in Okalu.

“I'm not taking them to the ship if they're not going to help us!” Millicent insisted.

Iko replied to Kira. She nodded.

“They will help,” she told Millicent.

“I need a promise!”

Iko's mouth split into a grin. “Okay, girl. Promise. Now take us to ship.”

BY THE TIME
we reached the stairs, sunrise had turned the sky the same eerie reddish orange we'd seen at sunset. The stairs were so well hidden that without Millicent showing the way, I could've walked past the spot a dozen times without seeing it, and I'd been there twice before.

Once she showed them the entrance, Iko gestured to his men. The ones closest to him began to file down the steps—not just the men who were carrying food and water, but all of them.

“Wait—you're just dropping off the food!”

“They see the ship,” said Iko.

“They don't
all
need to see it! STOP!”

She pushed in front of them, blocking the way to the stairs.

“Millicent . . . ,” Kira began.

“They lied, didn't they?” Millicent's eyes blazed as she glared at Iko. “You
lied
to me!”

His lip curled in a snarl. “What are lies, to the children of slave men?”

“They fought bravely—” Kira began.

“The fight's not over!
We saved them!
” Millicent had one of Guts's pistols in her hand.

She started to raise it.

Everyone moved at once. There was a brief, ugly scuffle, during which both Millicent and a couple of Okalu nearly went over the edge of the cliff. But when it was over, Kira and I were holding Millicent back while the Okalu continued to file down the stairs.

She was in tears, and curses were coming out of her mouth with such a vengeance that even Guts looked a little shocked.

Iko stood between us and the Okalu, staring at Millicent as she raged helplessly at him.

Eventually, she wore herself out and sank to the ground in defeat. I sat down next to her and rubbed her back, because I didn't know what else to do.

The last of the Okalu filed past Iko and disappeared down the steps. Before he turned to follow them, he asked Kira a question.

Her brow furrowed with doubt. She looked down at Millicent and me. Then at Guts.

Guts understood what was going through her head. “Gonna go with 'em?”

Millicent looked up. Her red-rimmed eyes met Kira's.

Kira turned to Iko and shook her head.

“Ka folay,”
she said.

He nodded.
“Ka folay.”
Then he was gone, leaving the four of us alone on the cliff top.

THE OKALU WEREN'T
what you'd call experienced sailors. We sat on a rock at the edge of the cliff, eating leftover biscuits we'd brought from Edgartown and watching the slave ship blunder into every rock outcropping in sight as forty men who'd probably never held an oar in their lives tried to maneuver out of the cove and into the open sea.

I wasn't too worried for them. They'd get the hang of it soon enough. And as long as they could keep the ship pointed west, the New Lands were too big to miss.

The job we'd been left with was a lot harder.

How were the four of us going to stop Ripper's fifty pirates from murdering everyone on the island?

I tried to think, but my brain wasn't good for much. It had been too long since I'd slept.

“It's not supposed to happen this way,” Millicent muttered. “You're not supposed to save two hundred people's lives and then just have them run off on you. It's not fair! If this was a book, I'd throw it across the room.”

A book.

How
would
they do it in a book?

“Basingstroke!”

Millicent looked at me. “What about it?”

“Remember when James was being chased by that squad of cavalry?” I asked her. “And he tricked them into plunging off a cliff? Well, we've got a cliff.”

“The pirates aren't a cavalry,” she said, sounding irritated. “And there's too many of them. You might be able to trick two people into falling off a cliff. You can't trick fifty.”

“Could be just forty,” said Guts.

“My point stands,” said Millicent, with a roll of her eyes.

“Wot's that mean?”

“Forget the cliff,” I said. “What I mean is—we've got to trick them somehow.”

“Trick them into what?” Kira asked.

“I don't know. Locking themselves up or something.”

“Where?”

“The silver mine,” said Millicent.

“None of them buildings gonna hold forty pirates for long.”

“What about the mine itself?”

“How would you close it off?” I asked. “It's not like a mine has a front door you can lock.”

We were all silent for a moment, thinking.

Suddenly, Guts's whole upper body jerked to life in a massive twitch.

“Blow it up!”

“What?”

“Got black powder! Up at that mine! Sun's up now, we can find it. Get all the — pirates inside the mine and blow the entrance! Bottle 'em up!”

Millicent perked up. “How do we get them up there?”

Guts snorted. “Where all the
pudda
silver is!”

She hurried to her feet. “Let's go. Quickly!”

THE BLACK POWDER
was right where the Okalu said it would be, in a storehouse near the mouth of the mine. There were half a dozen short kegs of it, along with several spools of fuses.

But just looking at the mine's entrance, we knew the plan would never work. It was too enormous. No matter how much powder we detonated, we'd never be able to seal the whole thing shut.

Then Millicent came up with another idea.

“The temple ruins,” she said.

“What?”

“The Temple of the Sunrise. Where the Okalu used to hold the Marriage of the Sun.”

“Mata Kala,” said Kira.

Millicent nodded. “Right. What's left of it is just around the mountain.”

“But it's a ruin,” I said.

“There's a chamber. Underground. With a long tunnel leading in. It's perfect. There's room enough in the chamber for at least fifty people. And the tunnel's narrow—if we set a charge at the entrance, we can collapse it with no problem.”

“How do we get the pirates in there?”

“Same way as the mine—we'll tell them that's where the silver is.”

“Why would there be a hoard of silver inside the temple?”

Millicent cocked an eyebrow at me. “In a secret underground chamber? Under an abandoned ruin on the side of a mountain? If you knew pirates were invading your island, where
else
would you put your silver?”

HAULING THE BLACK POWDER
to the temple ruins was a challenge. It took three hours and the help of the most agreeable mule we could find in the mine's stable—who wasn't very agreeable at all, except compared with the rest of the mules, none of whom would even leave their stalls.

The mule let us load him up without much fuss, but once we started for the temple, he had an annoying habit of stopping in his tracks every few minutes, with a look on his face like he couldn't remember why he was crossing a mountainside with a few hundred pounds of explosives strapped to his back.

When he stopped like that, the only thing that could get him moving again was a smack on the butt, which made everybody nervous on account of the explosives, but which we had to do so many times that Millicent decided we should name him Smack.

It was midday by the time we got Smack across the rocky lower face of Mount Majestic, and Mata Kala—the Temple of the Sunrise—came into view atop a ridge about a quarter mile below us. There wasn't much left of it except a wide foundation, strewn with broken chunks of what used to be massive columns.

Viewed from above, it didn't look like much—but as we came around the side and got a view of it from below the front steps, the way most people would have seen it coming up the ridge, I got a sense of how awesome it must have been in its prime.