I don’t bother pointing out how much influence I’ve had on every voyage since. The Admiral knows.
“You do have more invested in the ship than anyone else,” he says when I don’t fill in the silence.
“Except you.”
“Indeed.” There’s a turquoise ring on his right middle finger. He’s worn it so long it looks like it’s burrowed into his flesh, though the Admiral is not a heavy man and his fingers are lean. “Don’t underestimate how much the raiders hate your ship.”
“I won’t,” I say. I’m glad. I want them to hate it. And fear it.
“Good.”
One of the Admiral’s guards appears in the doorway, and the Admiral stands up.
“The ship leaves in seven days,” he says. “Prepare accordingly. I’ll have the manifest sent to you. So you can familiarize yourself with your crew.” The Admiral smiles. A flash of very straight teeth. “Captain Blythe.”
He leaves me alone in the room.
I feel something I haven’t felt often in the two years since Call died. Interest. Why aren’t the raiders trying to board?
I may not know exactly why the Admiral is consumed with pulling more and more gold from the rivers, but I do understand the power of obsession. Mine straightens my back. It keeps me alive.
CHAPTER 3
WE LEAVE TODAY.
From far enough away, jarred along in one of the Admiral’s archaic, sluggish wagons, I almost can’t see my ship on the river. With mountains behind it and a grassy river plain stretching out in front, the dredge masquerades as something it isn’t, a natural part of the landscape. Sunrise and water can make even a dead thing look half alive.
But then we’re closer, and I see the dredge for what it is.
I want to crawl all over the outside of the ship, making sure every gear works—touching the armor, polishing it. I’ve done this before the other voyages, the ones I didn’t go on. But the Admiral didn’t allow it this time around. He said he didn’t want to risk me getting injured.
I don’t like it. I wanted more time to check the ship.
I’m the first off the wagon when it slows. The Admiral’s guards at the dredge know me; I lift a hand and they step aside.
“Don’t let anyone else board until I say.” They nod, and I climb on the ship. I’m the first on. And I’ll be the last off.
That’s what it means to be the Captain.
* * *
• • •
On my way down to check on the motor and the mining equipment, I pass the door that leads up to the ship’s top deck. It’s locked. Now that the dredge is armed, there’s no reason to open it. Once the voyage begins, none of us will go above until we’re finished. No one has been able to go up and look for stars since Call.
He often had trouble sleeping. Usually it was because he’d had the start of a dream that he didn’t get to finish. He dreamed outside of himself, which I always thought was strange. As if he were watching things, rather than experiencing them, which was how it always was for me.
When we were young and living in the orphanage, every few weeks he’d find me at breakfast to tell me about a dream. He did the same in the scrap yard when we were older. And later, on the dredge. He’d tell me, I saw a boy running, running or There was a man standing by a tree late at night holding a lantern or My mother was walking in a field and stopped to pick three flowers.
“And then what?” I’d ask.
“That’s when I woke up,” Call said. “Finish it for me. Please.”
Call liked me to come up with endings for his dreams. When I was younger and we’d had a fight, sometimes I’d refuse. When we were older and I loved him, he asked less, only when he absolutely had to know, and I never turned him down.
We became friends at the orphanage. Neither Call nor I had a story that was especially tragic. We were like the other children there in that we’d lost both our parents, and we were like the other children in that we didn’t know exactly how. There are so many ways to die in the Outpost—working accident, childbirth, lung disease from the pollution that hangs in the sky from cities long ago and far away, any of the myriad illnesses we can’t treat with the limited medicine we have. Still, we’re told, it’s less dangerous than being out in the wild.
I couldn’t remember much about my parents—my father had never been around, and my mother died when I was three. Call had more concrete memories than I did. “My mother had sun-black hair, like you,” he told me once when we were small.
“Sun isn’t black,” I said.
“It is after you look at it,” he said, “when you shut your eyes. You see black and gold.”
“And red,” I said.
“Yes.” He pointed to my hair. I pulled the ends around to look at them. He was right. In the sun, somehow, there were filaments of gold glinting along my braid.
“You’re not supposed to look at the sun,” I said.
“Sometimes you don’t mean to,” he said. “But you do.”
I was jealous of Call—that he could remember his mother so well. Later he told me other things about her: that she had a quick temper, but laughed often. It was hard to reconcile that with Call, who was endlessly patient and whose laughter was rare and deep.
Call and I were both good at making things with our hands. And so, when the time came to leave the orphanage at fifteen, we got sent out to the scrap yard to work our way up, to haul and carry and do piecework for the machinists and learn from them.
The first time I slept after his death, I had the dream about the armor for the dredge. I was watching someone build it. It wasn’t long before I realized it was Call. I kept trying to talk to him, but he wouldn’t answer. He couldn’t hear me. He looked right through me every time. Finally, I stopped trying to talk to him and paid attention to what he was making.
I always knew it wasn’t real. I knew that Call didn’t come to me in a dream to tell me to build the armor. I knew because it wasn’t something Call would have ever wanted me to build in real life.
But I still finished it for him.
* * *
• • •
“Line up in front of me,” I tell the crew assembled on the bank. “Don’t worry about order or ranking.”
Off to the side, the Admiral stands, watching.
The crew wears dusky-green uniforms like the ones we wore before; the hats are the same, too. Mine has a captain’s insignia on it. I’ve worn my hair in braids to keep it out of my face, but now I wonder if they make the hat seem ill-fitting, make me look ridiculous.