CALL TELLS ME HE SEES A STAR and that makes me laugh.
“I do.” His voice is serious, his mouth against my ear.
I tip my head up. He’s right. It hangs low on the horizon. “That makes six,” I say.
“Seven,” he says. “That was a star we saw the first night on the river.”
“It wasn’t.” We’ve been arguing about this for weeks, ever since we left the Outpost behind and boarded the dredge to go upriver.
He laughs softly before he starts kissing me again.
Up on the deck, it’s easier to hear past the sounds made by our hungry metal ship. But it’s still impossible to completely ignore the constant throb and grate of the dredge as it moves along the river in search of gold, taking in rocks and stones, grinding them out. It tears up the rivers and leaves refuse and silt behind, ruins valleys, adds a smear of smoke to the sky.
“All of this, because the Admiral has a taste for gold,” I say.
“I have a taste for you,” Call tells me. I laugh because it’s such a stupid thing to say, even though it’s true, and I feel him smile.
“It makes no sense,” I say. “What good is all this gold?” We all know that the Admiral wants to help the Outpost thrive. He thinks that getting more gold can help us do that, but I’m not entirely sure why. We’ve mined enough to last us for a while, and there’s not really anyone to trade with anymore. We need so many other things. Cleaner air, more water, better medicine, ways to rehabilitate the land. All gold does is gild the time until we die.
“Who cares?” Call says. “If the Admiral didn’t want it, we’d never get to be out here.”
Call says things like this, but I’ve seen the expression on his face as he looks back at the devastation we leave behind. Churned-up riverbed, life choked to death so we can raise the gold.
Even though it shivers me to think of the ruin we’re causing, I may as well count the stars while I can. Already, in two weeks out on the river, I’ve seen more than most people back at the Outpost will in a lifetime.
“It was a good idea to come here,” Call whispers. “Admit it.”
“A good idea,” I say, teasing. “A good idea for us to spend our days in the belly of a noisy old ship loud enough to make us deaf. A good idea to spend our nights up here standing guard and ruining our eyes looking for things in the dark.”
“A very good idea,” he says.
Call had overheard some of the machinists in the scrap yard where we work talking about the dredge voyages. “It’s not an ideal posting,” the machinists told Call. “It’s dangerous and you have to leave the Outpost.” To Call, those sounded like promises instead of drawbacks.
“It’s the only way you’re going to see the world, Poe,” he said to me. “The only way you’re going to shake the dust of the Outpost from your feet.”
And we both knew that signing on to the dredge was a way for us to be together, without settling down and having babies and working all day every day in the same places, doing the same things.
And then there’s the biggest secret, the best dream of all.
We’re going to escape.
At the turnaround point, we’re going to leave. Run. Be free.
I have imagined it all. Blue lakes. Forest smell. The sound of something else alive in the woods, that isn’t human and doesn’t care that we are. We might not last long in the wilderness, but who knows. There’s a chance we could survive.
I would rather be torn apart by something than wait for nothing. And it doesn’t do any good to worry about what might happen later.
Instead, I think about now. I like now. A kiss on the top of the dredge under a smeary star sky with Call’s hands touching me.
“Should we invite any of the crew to come with us when we go?” Call asks.
We’ve had this discussion before, too.
“No,” I say. “Just us.”
Call sighs in my ear, metal aches and scrapes against stone, the trammel inside the ship turns the rocks and sifts out the gold, water sluices against rock and metal.
And then the bell from the mining deck.
I swear because I know what it means. They need help with the dredge’s main motor, the one that powers all the systems on the ship.
“Go on,” Call says. “Then you can come back up here.”
It’s sliding past dusk and straight into night.
“Be careful while I’m gone,” I say. “Watch out for the raiders.”
“I do a better job watching when you’re not here,” he says, and even in the dim light I can see the twist of his smile.
“That’s true,” I say. “I won’t come up again.” I’m not joking. Perhaps we’ve been too giddy with freedom, with being outside.
“Poe,” Call says. “It’s all right. We haven’t seen a single raider on this river.”
Maybe they’re dying off. Everyone knew it would happen eventually.
The Outpost is the only place you can last. The only place with dependable medicine and food and the protection of the Admiral and his militia. You give up some of your freedom for it, but most feel it’s an easy trade.
Call touches my hand in the dark as I leave.
* * *
• • •
“There,” Naomi says, right as the mining equipment kicks back in, a constant low growl and grind that becomes part of you, like a heartbeat. Powered by solar conduits and battery storage, the main motor runs everything on the dredge through power take-off systems. The mining system is the loudest. It’s cobbled together from the dredge’s original system because we didn’t have the raw materials to replace it. The mining buckets move their belt, the trammel that sorts the gold from the rocks rolls, everything clanks and spins and grinds. Sweat trickles down Naomi’s tanned face. She wipes her hands on a rag and nods to Nik and me. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Nik says. We have to yell to be heard over the sound of the ship. Often we just read one another’s lips. “Sorry we got you down here, kid,” he says to me. In the lights below deck his face looks ghoulish but friendly.
“Any stars on the top deck?” Naomi asks.
“We saw one already tonight,” I say. “You should come up.”
Nik laughs. “You don’t mean that. You and Call want to have the deck all to yourselves.”
I roll my eyes at him even though he’s right. But Naomi and Nik both follow me up the stairs, the pull of fresh air strong after having been down on the mining deck. As we climb, the smell of night breezes and even, maybe, of pine forests somewhere nearby, floats down to us. I breathe in. It’s all worth it.