Fathom (32 page)

“Has she told you that?” Bernice asked, sharply and suddenly interested.

“No, but she’s never misled me yet. She promised us peace and protection when the new order comes. Why isn’t that enough for you?”

“Why
is
it enough for you?” Bernice was getting flustered again, creeping up against the edge of what she meant and finding the precipice distressing. “Actually, I know why. It’s because you’ve been out for a hundred years.”

Bernice leaned forward, pushing the fabric napkin aside and accidentally
putting her elbow on the handle of her spoon. “José, you got to
live
. Look, how old were you when they took your ship?”

“I’m not sure exactly,” he said.

“Oh, come on. How do you not know how old you were? I know it was a long time ago, but really. You can do better than that. Give me a guess.”

“You want a guess?”

“Yes, please.”

A number popped into the edge of his memory. He didn’t know if it was right or not, but it was probably close. “I was . . . I was in my sixties.”

“See? That’s what I mean. You were
old
. You had a regular human lifetime behind you, and
then
—and then you got another hundred years on top of
that
. It’s easy for you to want the world to end; you’ve had plenty of time to see it.”

Her eyes welled up and José was stricken, having no idea at all whether to believe her. She’d never cried before, not that he’d seen, so he didn’t know if she could fake tears or if she would bother doing so. After all, the poor girl did have a point.

“I was nineteen. That’s all the years I got before this happened to me. Now it’s been another three or four, but still. That’s not as many as sixty.” She picked up the red napkin and dabbed at her eyes, then ran it along the underside of her nose.

“That’s . . .” He searched for an appropriate response but couldn’t find one that matched what he meant, so he said, “I never thought about it that way. I can see why it upsets you.”

The upward curl of her lip met a downward-dripping tear. “We
can’t
just let her turn everything upside down. Not now. Not when I’ve just gotten started.”

Again lacking a good response, José’s mind raced through options, alternatives, and distractions. She watched him think, with her wet blue eyes oozing sweetly and blinking themselves soggy.

Still on his guard, and still being careful, he said, “But what would you propose? We can’t—and I absolutely
won’t
—make any threatening move against her. Because she gave me this lifetime, she is within her rights to take it away.”

Bernice’s lips parted and closed, then parted again. “I’m not suggesting that we try to get rid of her or anything. I don’t know how we could, even if we wanted to. And I don’t want to. You’ve got to believe that, if you love me at all.”

“I do love you at all. I love you altogether,” he said, but he did not say that he believed her. “And I’m glad to hear you say that. Even if you believed that we would survive without her, and even if you did wish to be rid of her, I don’t know that there’s anything on earth that could accomplish the task. She is immortal, Bernice. We may be long-lived, but I’m reasonably sure that without her protection, we would die.”

The change in her face was meant to be subtle, but she was too eager. The smile blossomed before she could prevent it. It was a brilliant smile, and beautiful. It smoothed the tiny ripples on the surface of her lips and made their pretty shape all the more pronounced.

“She’s going to dump an awful lot of power into this thing,” Bernice tapped one flawlessly filed nail against the shell. “She said it would exhaust her, and that if it fails or breaks, it would take her another hundred years to gather the strength to try again. But she’s immortal. She has all the time in the world to sound this call, or whatever it is. Let the Leviathan sleep a little longer. Mother’s been around since time began, and we’ve barely lived. Is it so wrong and so crazy to want just a few years more?”

“What are you asking?” He leaned back in his chair, throwing up defenses that he knew she could tear down with a flick of her hand. “What, should we petition Mother for more time?”

“That would never work. She’s gone to all this trouble already.”

“My thoughts exactly.” He wanted to feel relieved. Bernice understood that there could be no negotiation and no assault. This was good; this was right. With those two options removed, there could be no—

“All we can do is trick her.”

Profound and pure silence dropped between them.

“You want . . . to . . .
trick
her?”

She nodded hard. “Not in a
bad
way, not in any way that’ll do her harm—I just want to inconvenience her a little. A thousand years, a hundred years, it’s nothing to her. She says so all the time. But it’d mean a lot to
me
.”

Dumbfounded, it was all José could do not to laugh in her face. “And how precisely do you propose we go about tricking an ancient creature who commands the power of the ocean?”

Bernice answered him with another question. “How much do you think she loves us?”

“Not enough to postpone the apocalypse on your whim.”

“What if it wasn’t a whim? What if you or I got hurt, badly, and she could either let us die or use some of her energy to heal us? What if it cost her just enough power that she’d have to wait a little while before bringing about the end of the world? That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it? Even if it only bought us another hundred years, I’d be happy with that. Wouldn’t you like another hundred years to wander around the world like this, with me? Think of the places we could go, and the things we could do.”

“But think of the things we’ll do when the new world is formed!” He forced himself to fight her on it, despite the way her plan was so fiendishly logical.

“I can’t fathom them, and neither can you. And I don’t want to spend the rest of eternity being a tourist in heaven when I haven’t had a chance to go poking around in hell.”

“You’re perfectly mad. I wouldn’t even know how to go about . . .
what, injuring you? Injuring myself? What kind of wound or illness could require such a drain from Mother to repair it?”

The old shrewdness was creeping up Bernice’s face, settling in her eyes and tightening the line of her jaw. “So you
do
think, if it came down to it, that Mother would risk a delay to save one of us.”

And then he said something awful, something that tipped the balance and sealed her victory; and he knew it before he’d finished speaking it aloud. He knew, as soon as the sentiment was spoken, that his lover had won the debate and that he would give her what she wanted.

“For love or ambition, it would not matter if she
wanted
to intervene for our welfare, she’d be compelled to repair
my
strength regardless—unless she wants to comb the seas for another like me. By her own design, the
Arcángel
will permit no other captain.”

Chance Encounters

M
ossfeaster left Nia and Sam at the outskirts of Ybor City. The creature dissolved itself into the ground and was gone in that fast, frightening way that always startled the two, no matter how many times they saw it happen. Nia had insisted on finding civilization and Sam needed to rest. He’d been awake and on the run for nearly twenty-four hours, and he was wilting.

“What are we
doing
?” he asked in a childish cry, dragging his feet and slapping his hands against his legs. “You’re already
wearing
clothes. Why are we looking for
more
?”

“I’m wearing a shirt, and if Mossfeaster wants us to move around town, I’m going to need to look more normal. I wish we had some proper money.”

“I have some proper money.”

“Not very much. You already counted it out. If we can find a spot, we can get you some breakfast, though. And once we find this Greek fellow, we’ll cash in these things.” She fondled the dirty string of pearls that wrapped around her left wrist. It was a very long necklace, not a bracelet; but when she looped it half a dozen times, it stayed in place like an exquisite cuff that nearly reached her elbow. On her other wrist, she wore a stack of silver bangles inlaid with mother-of-pearl and sapphires.

The opalescent beads and the metallic bands clicked together, tapping time as her arms swung back and forth. The creature had sworn that they were real, and that they came from one of
Gasparilla
’s chests out on Captiva. Even the cheapest dealer in stolen goods should offer hundreds of dollars for the collection.

Nia wasn’t sure what they’d need so much money for, but Mossfeaster had insisted upon it, and he’d insisted that they go to a Greek in Ybor City to get it.

“I already counted my money?”

“Yes,” she told him. “You did.”

He yawned. “I’m tired.”

“I know. We’ll find a place for you to take a nap, I swear, and we’ll find some clothes for me, and then we’ll go find this fence in town.”

“What?”

“Mossfeaster said we’d find him just off Seventh Avenue, in the Latin Quarter past the cigar factories. He gave me good directions,” she oversimplified. It would have taken too much effort to explain the way he’d planted them in her head, and the way they pulled at her so she felt like a homing pigeon again. “Hey, look.” She pointed at the end of the road. “Houses.”

“Heaven help us if anybody’s home,” he mumbled. “What do
you want to do, just go up and say, Hey, can we have some money and some clothes?”

“No, we’re going to steal some when we find some. But not here. Not from these places.” As they drew closer, Nia could see that the houses were low to the ground and unkempt; they were rough around the edges, tattered at the porches, and unpainted.

“Why not?”

“Because they won’t have anything worth taking,” she said, but what she meant was,
Because they can’t afford to lose what they have
.

The squat cracker-box houses reminded her too much of her grandmother’s farm and orchards. They looked like the places where the migrant hands would stay, at the fringe of the property or on the cusp of the town’s boundaries. Her grandmother had barely gotten by, so she could guess how little her employees got paid. There just wasn’t much money to go around.

When they walked, they stuck to the edge of the road, close to the trees.

Past the shacks and closer to town, the street names were better marked and the houses were larger. “We need to find one where nobody’s home,” Nia said to Sam, then realized that he’d fallen behind her. She stopped and waited for him to catch up, and she took his arm. “We’ll find a place for you to rest soon, I promise. But for now, please keep up with me.”

“I’m trying. I’m tired, and I’m hungry.”

Nia wasn’t tired. She wasn’t hungry.

“All right, fine. You see where I’m pointing?”

“Yes.”

“Through those trees, at the end of this next block. I’m going to go ahead and scout. You stay out of the yards and stick to the trees.”

“Fine.”

As she ran, the too-big boots flopped around her ankles. She stopped long enough to remove them and return to being barefoot. The scarf that held her hair back slipped down around her neck and her tangled, dreadlocked hair burst free and trailed behind her.

Her hair beat against her back and shoulders, terrible cables that glimmered as if there were strands of metal woven into their kinks and coils. Her naked feet slapped against the earth, pounding it and crushing anything that she stepped on; nothing scraped the soles and nothing cut her in the softer spots between her toes. She was remade, or unmade. She was something new and something stronger, something heavier.

It almost made her hysterical when she thought about it. This wasn’t how it worked, or it wasn’t how she’d always heard tell of it. When you die, you don’t freeze and stay; you become an angel or a ghost. You become light and beautiful. You don’t get heavier and more solid. You don’t get stronger and more ugly.

Ugly.

She didn’t like the word, and something inside her argued with it. Nia didn’t know what she looked like, not really. She hadn’t seen a mirror yet, so that became one more goal—find a mirror and see how bad the damage truly was.

The first house smelled like tea, fire, and cooking eggs. People were home, and making a late breakfast. Nia bypassed it and moved on to the next, but through the windows she could see someone dusting, so she skipped that house as well. Three or four homes down, she came to one that was conveniently offset and shuttered up. It was a large house, but not so large that it could be called a mansion, and it smelled like no one had been there for weeks. Nia pulled one of the shutters open and peered through the window, then pressed her ear against it. She heard nothing—not
the sound of late sleepers breathing, and not the bustle of a household in motion.

She continued to listen and sniff from the back of the house to the sides, though she stayed away from the front door.

But there was a rear entrance, out of sight of prying eyes. It was locked, but that meant nothing to Nia. She pulled at the lever until it snapped and burst free. She pushed her hand through the hole, popping the hardware, and she shoved on the door until the latch split and fell.