The Girl from Everywhere (37 page)

A
fter what seemed like hours, we arrived at Hana’uma Bay and came alongside the
Temptation
. Bee threw a line over the bollard and leaped over the gap, taking me by the shoulders and inspecting me closely. Once she was satisfied I was unhurt, she wrapped her arms around me and pulled me close. Then she pushed back to arm’s length, clapped me on the back, and went to help Slate bring Blake over. Kashmir climbed after them, leaving Rotgut and me standing there on the deck of the junk beside the general. I surveyed the contingent with regret.

“I’m sorry I can’t bring them home.”

“Maybe it’s better that way,” Rotgut said.

“How so?”

“Well, in their case, home is a tomb. Given the choice, I know I’d prefer to stay under the infinite stars.”

“Maybe so.”

Side by side, we sailed the two ships into the indigo waters past the bay, where the coral skirt ringing the island ended and the lava shelf dropped off and the seafloor plunged away a mile and more. When we reached a likely spot, I stood before the general, hesitating.

When I had envisioned this scheme, the warriors had been an abstract, faceless force to stand behind me for backup, or between me and trouble. But, as was so often the case, the reality was different than what I’d imagined. In doing their duty, they had created a debt in me. I wanted to thank them, to honor their journey, but would it mean anything to the soldiers? They were only made of clay. Then again, perhaps the same could be said of all of us.

“Thank you,” I said finally, because it felt right, and the general saluted, putting his fist to his chest. I did the same. “You can rest now.” He inclined his head, bringing the mark on his forehead to the level of my eyes. I used my thumb to remove the five. As I turned the “me/not” into a smear of soot, the light went out in his eyes.

Then, simultaneously, the fifty-three remaining warriors reached up to drag their hands down their own foreheads, and their lights went out forever.

Then we set about smashing the warriors to potsherds while Kashmir went to work on the hull with an ax. It wasn’t long before we climbed back aboard the
Temptation
to watch the remains of the
54
sink beneath the blue waves. Would someone find it someday and wonder what had happened? The sea was wide and we were over deep water, but there were no guarantees.

Rotgut laughed a little. “Such a sigh!”

“Well, it was nice while it lasted.” “The power?”

“The loyalty.” I swallowed a lump in my throat. “I need to speak to my father.”

He was there in his room, sitting with Billie on the floor beside the bed. Blake slept behind the single remaining curtain; I’d forgotten to take down the flag before we’d scuttled the junk. Slate looked up with wide eyes when I came in. I almost went back out when I saw he’d pulled his box out from under the bed, but he stopped me with a question.

“What’s that?”

I blinked, surprised; I’d pulled the map from my pocket. I turned it over and over in my hands, gently, like an egg about to hatch. Then I held it out, thrusting it toward him. “This is it. This is your next map.” He took it but did not unfold the paper. “Before you go, I . . .” I trailed off, not
wanting to finish the sentence, but I took a breath and opened my mouth, willing myself to speak, although when I did, I didn’t say what I’d meant to. “We’ll need to get him back to Nu’uanu, first.”

“No,” the captain said, but his voice cracked. “No. The boy asked to stay.”

“And you said yes?”

Slate twitched one shoulder in a half shrug. “He saved your life. How could I send him away?”

He still hadn’t unfolded the map, so I took it back and unfolded it myself. I opened my mouth again, but it took several long moments before the air would leave my lungs. “This one won’t work any better than the others,” I said at last. He took a breath, as if about to speak, and I hurried on before my cowardice caught up with me. “At least . . . at least not as long as I’m on the ship. I’m already there.”

I went to the table. It was easier to talk when I couldn’t see his face. “You can’t go to a place where you exist. Joss told me. It’s something about Navigating. That’s likely why none of the others worked. For you to go back, we need to part ways.” I laid the old map down over the new map of Hawaii, the father’s over the son’s. “She wouldn’t tell me whether or not you’d be able to change the past. So I
suppose my leaving is a gamble for both of us.” Slate whispered something. I turned back to him. “What?”

He cleared his throat and spoke again. “I said, don’t go.”

“Slate.” I ran my hands through my hair, then dropped them to my sides; it was a gesture I’d picked up from him. “You’re not listening.”

“I am, Nixie. I wasn’t before, but I am now. I don’t want to lose you.”

“You have to, Slate. You have to choose. You can’t have both.”

“I—I am choosing. I can’t . . . I don’t want to—I am choosing you.”

“I don’t believe you. You say that now, but in a few days—”

“No, I swear to you—”

“Slate!” He snapped his mouth shut, and Billie startled too, her ears perked, suspicious. I paid her no mind; I unclenched my fists, trying to breathe, and gestured to the box on the floor. It was battered now, the lid askew, one hinge bent. “I know you, Captain. I know about inevitability. This is an addiction. You won’t stop.”

“Everything comes to an end,” he said softly, in an echo of what Joss had told me weeks before.

“Yes. We were nearly killed, Slate.”

“Nixie, I would never—”

“But you did. We were all nearly killed, and if it wasn’t for your obsession, none of us would have been there in the first place. In fact, if it weren’t for your obsession . . .” My voice trailed off. He wasn’t meeting my eyes, but there was a look on his face, and my mind was racing again. Everything comes to an end, it was true . . . Joss had said so much that day.

There is always a sacrifice
. Slate had told me much the same thing in the carriage; sometimes you have to let something go to take hold of something else. I had thought he was talking about me.

Joss’s sacrifice, I knew. It was like the myth of the phoenix; if not for her fiery death in 1886, she never could have risen from the ashes and gone back to 1841, to start a life, to have her daughter—my mother—to introduce Lin to the captain.

But to escape Qin’s tomb, she had needed us to deliver the map of the aftermath of the fire. My father could never have made that trip; he hadn’t grown up steeped in the mythologies that made it possible for me to bring us to the emperor’s mausoleum. Besides, I had done it—had already done it, Joss had said.

Of course, if we hadn’t needed the soldiers to help with the robbery, I’d never have taken us to the tomb. If I hadn’t gone to the tomb, Joss would never have escaped. If she’d never escaped . . . I stared at the map. “If not for your obsession,” I said to my father, “I wouldn’t be here at all.”

He gave me a pained smile, more like a grimace than a grin. Then he put his hand on the map and traced the bloodstain at the edge. It cut right through the name at the corner. The silence between us was infinitely deep. “It does work, you know,” he said then. “Eventually.”

“What does?”

“This map, 1868.”

“Dad—”

“At least, Joss thinks so.” I must have looked surprised, because he laughed, short and bitter. “It was years ago. She told me my future. My fate. I didn’t really take her seriously until—well.” His eyes were far away, but he tapped his finger on the map. “She says I’ll spend my last months there.”

“Your last months?”

“In the time before I . . . arrived. To take you aboard the ship. She said I die of an overdose, believe it or not.” He laughed again, like it was funny.

“Do you believe it?”

His smile twisted. “Sometimes.”

I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat; everything Joss had told me about my future, she had seen in her past. We were both quiet for a moment. It was nearly impossible to force myself to speak, but I had promised to let him go. “Do you want to try it?”

His face paled. “Try . . . this map?”

“I wish we hadn’t scuttled the junk,” I said. “But if you leave me ashore, I can find my way. I’d like to stop in New York first, but if you can’t wait, I understand. And I’d like to take some of the other maps, if you won’t need them any longer. Although if Joss is right, you won’t need anything but this, really.” I nudged the box with my foot. “As usual.”

“Nixie, please—”

“Don’t deny it, Slate. This is what you want.”

“It’s not all I want!” Slate kept his voice low, but it was fierce, and Blake stirred on the bed. “If we part ways, we will never see each other again.”

“I can live with it if you can,” I said, jutting out my chin as though it was a dare; it was all I could do to pretend that his response would not matter.

“Don’t give me this choice, Nixie.”

“I don’t think I am, Captain.” At my words, he raised his
eyes to mine, and I did smile then, because I saw the truth in them now. “Sometimes fate makes choices for us.”

I went out on deck into the light, shutting the door behind me and leaning on the warm wood. I took a deep breath. Then another. Kashmir was there on my hammock, Bee was at the helm, Rotgut was fishing. Topside, everything seemed just as it always was. “He’ll be wanting to cast off again soon,” I said at last.

Kashmir sat up straight and met my eyes. “Where are we going?”

I shrugged, feeling whimsical. “How about somewhere perfect?”

He slid out of the hammock and came to stand beside me. “But no one believes in such a place.”

“You’re a good liar, Kashmir.” I grinned. “Maybe you can convince me.”

“And . . . when do we leave?”

“Whenever the captain’s ready,” I said, but the door to the cabin had opened again.

“Well, I’m not ready,” Slate said. “Not yet.”

“No?” Then I noticed that he held his wooden box, filled with all his precious things.

“No.” He paced the deck slowly, tipping the box back
and forth between his hands. “I haven’t got a good map,” he said, his brows drawing together as he peered over the rail. Then he rubbed a streak of green verdigris on the copper.

“I need you, Nixie,” he said firmly. “Go in the cabin and find me one, would you? Maybe something where we can make some honest cash this time? But you’ll figure something out, you always do.” He squared his shoulders. Then he hefted the box in his hands once, twice, leaned back, and flung it, spinning, tumbling, into the deep blue sea.

There was quiet on deck for a long time, and I was acutely aware of the sound of the waves brushing the hull, the wind trembling in the sails, my heart drumming against my ribs. Then Slate smiled at me, one of his brilliant smiles, as though nothing was wrong, or ever had been. “I’ve made my choice, Nixie.”

I sought out Kashmir. There was a question in his eyes, but he found the answer in mine, and he nodded a little. My home had always been the
Temptation
.

That evening, we left 1884 behind us for good. Blake came out on deck to watch the island grow smaller in our sight until it was a gray smudge on the horizon, and even after. Billie, standing beside him, howled once—“Roooooooooo!”—and then trotted toward the bow to face
the open sea. The sun arced overhead; the sea turned from cobalt to sapphire as the light made the deep water glow. The sails snapped in the breeze as we clipped along, heading away from the island, but toward what?

When I checked the captain’s cabin, the wide drafting table was empty. I came back out on deck, and Slate was at the helm, his strong hands on the wheel, looking for all the world as though he intended to remain there. He called out to me.

“Well, Nixie? Where are we going next?

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I
n a book like this, there is a fair bit of reality to help ground the fantasy. Certainly the Kingdom of Hawaii existed; almost certainly a time-travelling pirate ship does not. Between the two poles, what is fact and what is fiction?

THE HISTORY

On December 1, 1884, fifty pirates sacked Honolulu, looting the treasury and the homes of the wealthy, making off with $3 million in coin and plate without firing a single shot. This daring theft was only mentioned in a single newspaper article, in the
Daily Alta California
, which reported that over the course of nine hours, no attempt was made at resistance. Indeed, the locals were said to “thrown down their weapons without waiting for the opposing force to fire a single shot.” On the night in question, the Honolulu
Rifles, a militia controlled by the Hawaiian League, was very fortuitously out of ammunition.

The pirates were led by a tall man who seemed to know his way around the island, although no one claimed to recognize him, and by morning, they had disappeared without a trace. Where they disappeared to, no one seems to know.

The article emphasized how helpless Hawaii was, at the mercy of any band of determined men, which was a rather pointed accusation about the inability of the king to protect his citizens. Indeed, not a decade later, U.S. soldiers helped the Hawaiian League to overthrow the monarchy for the same reason—to protect the citizens—this time, from the queen, in whose garden the league had planted a cache of rifles.