The Far Dawn (19 page)

“My nephew is there,” I say, as I have before. “He's an adult now, but, you know . . .” I point to myself. “Cryo.”

“Right.” Mendes shrugs. “Okay, try to get some sleep. I know that's been tough for you. If you ask the cook for a very modest amount of whiskey, he's been authorized to treat it as a strictly classified request.”

“Thanks.”

After Mendes is gone, I lean on the railing and watch the sky. Four more shooting stars. When I see through the bridge window that it is midnight, I move. I stay outside and walk the port deck, around large oval exhaust stacks, to a narrow deck at the stern of the ship. Here, I can see the southern stars behind us, stars I grew up without, romantic constellations like the Southern Cross and Scorpio and Libra.

I shiver against the damp dark. My healing wrist aches. With my other hand, I twirl the bone at my neck.

After a minute, one of the stars begins to dance, to bob and flutter among the others. It arcs with the winds, drawing close. And lands beside me.

“How are you?” Rana asks.

“Lingering on,” I say.

She makes a little whooshing sound, and though her mouth stays small and curled, I think this is a laugh.

“Ready?” I ask.

“All is ready.”

I turn and enter the nearest door, Rana trailing behind me, her skull bag with her. Most of the soldiers are asleep, the halls dark. I head to the center of the ship and then down the main stairs to the lowest of the three decks. We follow this hall to a solid metal door. I knock.

Footsteps. The door opens and Grayland, the medic, peers out. He is busy with patients during the day and saves most of his work in the morgue until night. This is the morgue.

“Owen,” he says. Everyone learned my name quickly. I am their orphan case. “What are you d—”

Rana slides up into his space like a cold chill, inhabiting him, not quite in the gentle way that she did to me in the ice, but also not in the instantly-killing-him way that she attacked the Eden soldiers in the Andes. His skin starts to glow and she clenches and the energy released has the effect she told me it would: His eyes go wide and he is paralyzed, the electric currents of his body interrupted.

I move quickly into the morgue. I know from the galley talk and from what Mendes has told me that one of the last two men Paul killed was the Peace Forces unit commander, distinguished from the others by a set of three green stripes on his shoulder. I slide down the aisle of sheeted bodies, checking under each, my breath making clouds. When I find him, I move to his right side and throw up the sheet.

“How are you doing?” I whisper to Rana.

Her voice comes back muffled by flesh. “I could do this all night, except this man has an odor.”

This makes me smile. Almost.

I take the man's right hand and I drape it over my cast. The fingers are stained with a blue dye. I pull the white-handled knife from my belt.

Once, I would have hesitated. But time is short. For us all.

I slice down into the plump middle digit of the man's pinkie. The cold, dead skin pops and splits apart, the nearly bloodless tissue tough like dry meat. I cut down, hit bone, grate laterally, and cut back up. I have to hack at the skin flap. Once it's free I scratch down with my fingernail to be sure. . . .

There. A burst of adrenaline courses through me. This was the first key. . . .

I clamp his finger between the metal table and my cast and I press down with all my weight and I saw against the cold rigid tendons, down into the plasticlike cartilage until there are cracking sounds and the pinkie is severed.

I slip it into my pocket and place the hand back up on the table, stuffing it slightly under the back of the man's thigh. I put away my knife, replace the sheet, and hurry back to the doorway, making sure to stand in exactly the same position as I was when Rana stilled Grayland.

I will be off this boat in the morning. With luck, Grayland has no further work to do on that body between now and then.

“Okay,” I say.

Rana slips from him, around me, and down the hall out of sight.

Grayland wobbles on his feet, wincing and rubbing at his head. “Ahh,” he says. He looks up and it takes him a moment to focus on me. “Oh, Owen, sorry . . . just got dizzy there for a spell. What can I help you with?”

“I just couldn't sleep,” I say. “Wondered if you'd found anything new.”

“Ah, no. I've just been filling out paperwork and getting fingerprints.”

Fingerprints—but I remember the dark ink on the tips and curse myself for feeling nervous.

There is no need to feel.

“You shouldn't be hanging out here around the dead anyway. Go on, get some sleep.”

“Yeah, okay,” I say.

“You're shipping out in the morning, I hear,” says Grayland.

“Mmm.”

He sticks out his hand. “Well, it's been a pleasure knowing you.”

He's reaching for my right hand, but realizes it's in the cast. “Oh.” He switches to his left, but my left hand is in a pocket with a finger, and so I reach with the cast anyway.

“Oops, sorry, habit.”

We both pull our hands back. Grayland laughs. “Well anyway, you have a good one. Stay safe.”

“You, too,” I say. I start down the hall, my breath held, and he closes the door. With each step, I expect to hear the door open but it doesn't, and soon I am on the next deck up and in my little stateroom.

Rana hovers beside me as I sit on the narrow bed. I examine the commander's finger and start to whittle away the rest of the skin to reveal the bar code. She watches, saying nothing.

When it is done, I slip the finger under my mattress and lie back. I close my eyes, but sleep feels a million miles away.

I think of the wide palm leaves above our heads and the way Lilly would curl against me. The echo of her body makes me tense. I try not to think of it, but the memory hovers like a mosquito.

The weight of her arm on my chest . . .

Her hair against my neck . . .

I try to imagine I am there, and for a second or two it works but then I remember that, no, I am not there, and when I can't take it anymore I open my eyes.

Rana sits on the floor, staring into space.

“Do you ever sleep?”

“A shade needs no sleep,” says Rana. “There is never a break from this world. There is always a cold wind, always the feeling of the emptiness.”

I gaze up at the metal crossbars of the ceiling.

“What if you inhabit me, like you did in the ice?”

“That would seem like a strange thing to do.”

She is probably right.

But I think of sleeping beside Lilly. I think of hearing her breathing. The times she would snore. “Try it, anyway.”

There is a slight whistle of a sigh, and then I feel the buzzing sensation of Rana entering my space, filling my seams, occupying the same electron orbits. There is an electricity to it that is not warm but more like brimming. I see the light around the borders of my vision and I feel something like less empty.

I close my eyes.

“This is maybe better,” she says. “Less hollow.”

The humming of her presence makes it harder to think, harder to know up from down.

Harder to miss.

“Yes,” I say, and sometime soon after, I sleep.

18

THE SHIP'S HORN WAKES ME. GRAY LIGHT THROUGH the window.

Rana has left, as is our plan.

I have barely moved when I hear faint shouting and the crack of a rifle. Then another. And now the spray and heavy thumping of a machine gun.

I sit up, still dressed. Mendes got me gray pants and an olive T-shirt, standard issue for the troops, along with a black LoRad jacket. I reach beneath the bed and slip my only other possession into my pocket.

The engines roar and the boat turns sharply. I hear shouts from up on deck and the clomping of boots. There is a shrill knock on my door. My heart lurches, worried that my handiwork last night has been discovered.

But it's the corporal. His face is troubled. “General sent me to get you. You ready?”

“Yeah.” I follow him up to the bridge deck. Dawn is stifling, the sky a dirty brown, the water slicked with rainbow swirls and stinking of oil. Smoke fills my vision, smelling like burned rubber, and I wonder where it's coming from until I notice the flicker ahead of us.

The water is on fire. A wall curving away from us in both directions.

More gunshots sound. The corporal instinctively puts a hand on my shoulder.

“This place . . . ,” he mutters to himself with a note of disdain.

There is a sound of thumping bass from somewhere beyond the wall of flame and smoke.

This is the Flotilla city of the Indian Ocean. Compared to the others in the Flotilla network, built on the garbage gyres in each major ocean, this one is modest. But it is considered the most dangerous, a lair of pirates, secret lords, and exiled kings, perpetually surrounded by fire.

Another crack of bullets sounds. An engine roars, and a speedboat bursts through the flames, carving apart the smoke and zooming toward us. Gunshots crackle after it. The driver of the boat, a short, sun-scorched man, shouts and throws something back over his head: a grenade that hits the water and explodes in a plume of flames.

“Target acquired!” a soldier shouts.

“Hold your fire!” Mendes calls from the bridge. “Let him go. It's not worth the bullets.”

The boat speeds past us, and the driver wags a middle finger in our direction. I watch him pass, then notice another boat on fire in the distance.

“Owen.” Mendes joins me on the deck. “Things are going sideways,” he mutters.

“You were right about this place being dangerous,” I say, and I feel that deep foreboding inside again, freeing the adrenaline. This is crazy. It's not going to work—

No. No doubting.

“It's not just here.” Mendes looks down at his computer pad. “Since we went to bed last night . . . a reactor meltdown in Siberia, a coup in Sweden, a mass live bright suicide on Mauna Kea. There's even a report of a new pandemic spreading out of the Indian refugee camps in the Himalayas.” He looks at me. “It's like the world lost its mind overnight.”

Or its heart.

Mendes nods toward the sea of fire in front of us. “We did make contact with the Flotilla, and things are somewhat stable there, for a den of mercenaries and pirates. They're playing nice, though. I think they know I have torpedoes trained on them.” Mendes turns to the bridge. “Take us in!” To me: “Better step inside.”

The boat nudges forward into the flames. They lick at the bow and the smoke engulfs us. Chunks of debris add to the fire in spots. Two soldiers appear on the forward deck in flame-resistant suits and begin hosing down the ship in white spray.

After a minute of smoky silence we emerge on the other side, the boat sliding over a line of strung-together junk, mostly foam chunks of docks and buoys, that seems to keep the oil slick mostly at bay. There are small boats here and there, with men spraying a similar white substance at the fire when it tries to advance. The light is still ashy and brown, but the sun filters through.

Ahead of the ship is what at first looks like an island, but as we draw closer reveals itself as a floating mass, the entire structure undulating on the water with groans of old wood and rusty metal.

It is a spill of cockeyed triangles, everything built of flotsam. It rattles with a thousand loose joints. Water plunks and splashes beneath its decks. Masts and antennae jut out as docking points, with all manner of boats tied off on them, sloshing against one another. A crammed labyrinth rises behind the makeshift docks, slanted structures built from driftwood and sheets of metal and car doors. In one spot a plastic sandbox has been used as a wall. The carcasses of inner tubes have been stretched to create canopies. The structure builds on itself like a little kid's first Lego castle—

Elissa—

Some structures dangle out over the edges; some seem to have been built out of the inside of others. There are ropes and pulleys and things tied in place with lengths of power line and shoestrings. It smells like tar and burned rubber and dried fish. Hundreds of people crawl like ants both through the smoky alleyways and over the outside of the superstructure. Others sit on ledges and walls, feet dangling as they smoke or drink from brown bottles or fish for who knows what in the sickly tea-colored water.

It doesn't seem like a friendly place.

But then I see a figure standing on one of the docks, waving his arms over his head at us, large metal poles held high that flash in the muted light. And I see a familiar sight tied off behind him.

The
Solara
. Its twin hulls and mast and sleek metal decks cause a strange pain of nostalgia in me. I remember that long day on the boat . . . before I'd seen any of the horrors of Desenna, and everything since. It had been the first time we'd been safe since escaping from Eden, and it seems like some better place in my mind. So much I didn't know then that I know now. How nice would it be to wake up in that little cabin and realize that everything since had been a dream?

Except then I might have to live it all again, and maybe that sounds worse.

The man waving isn't someone I've actually seen before. He lowers the metal poles and I see that they are crutches. His left leg ends at a bandaged stump. He wears a long leather coat in spite of the heat, its shoulders and forearms fitted with mirrorlike plates of metal, along with a cowboy hat and what look like flying goggles, his face shaded in a tightly cut black beard. It all says Nomad.

As we pull up, two soldiers drop to the cockeyed metal dock and tie off ropes. They stand, guns at the ready. The
Solara
's deck is lined with men and women armed with rifles and crossbows, and you can feel the lack of trust thick between Nomad and ACF. The blood in their past is all too recent.