The Girl from Everywhere (The Girl from Everywhere #1)(69)

And yet . . . there was a quality in our silence that had never existed before, almost imperceptible from the outside, but such a difference, like salty water instead of sweet. It was the same feeling I’d had the night of the ball, as we’d stood on the deck. I’d been unable to speak then. I’d been unable to speak for years. I steeled myself. “Kashmir?”

He was stringing the jack line and he didn’t look up, but by his face, I knew he’d heard me.

“Kash.”

His shoulders rose and fell in a sigh, but he met my eyes. “Amira—”

“I just wanted to say—”

“You don’t have to,” he said quickly. “It was my mistake. The other night I thought—” He shook his head and laughed a little. “Well. Will you forgive me? I only hope it hasn’t hurt what we have.”

My hand went to my pendant; the pearl was warm and smooth on my skin. “And what is it we have?” I asked softly.

“Our friendship,” he said. “As you’ve said many times.” He searched my face. “Yes?”

I hesitated, but only for a moment. “Yes.”

He nodded, and after a moment, he opened his arms. “Viens.” I stepped into his embrace, and he wrapped his arms around me . . . only to clip the jack line to my belt, giving it a yank. I gave him a shove in return, then I reached back and unclipped my line. “I don’t get one this time, remember? I’ve got the helm.”

“Oh, aye, Captain,” he said, grinning. “Why do you think the rest of us are roped in?”

I stuck my tongue out at him. Tying in was standard for any difficult journey, where the rough seas in the Margins might climb over the deck to clutch at our feet. Of course, no one but the captain had ever Navigated the Temptation, so none of us really knew what we might face when I took the helm. Would the fog rise for me?

I took one more look at Kashmir, who would have to ride out whatever I steered us into. As soon as I attempted to Navigate, the ship—my home—and the crew—my family—became my responsibility, and fear wrapped cold claws around my spine as I walked to the map room and shut the door behind me.

I’d known for years how to use a compass or read the stars. But now, as I stood alone in front of the drafting table where the two maps lay side by side—on my left, where we were; on my right, where we were going—I didn’t know up from down, much less east from west. My eyes slid from one map to the next: from the blue Pacific under the open sky, to the silver sea deep beneath a man-made mountain. Right off the edge of paradise and into the afterlife, as long as I didn’t steer us into some kind of purgatory.

I took a deep breath, then another, trying to calm my nerves. The smell of the maps and the books—the ink and the paper—helped me relax, and my hand went to the pearl at my throat. I bent my head and studied the map of the emperor’s tomb, turning the lines on the page into a shoreline in my head, the shore I would expect to see through the fog.

“It will be there,” Slate had said to me. “And sort of . . . not there. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I’d replied. “And no.”

“Smart ass.” And he had reached out to ruffle my hair, like he used to when I was little.

But the memory of our conversation, that rare closeness, was cold comfort. I shivered then; the air actually was colder. I had to get to the helm. I took one last look at the two maps and left the cabin, but I paused in the open door.

The sky that had been so blue not an hour before had faded to a tea-stained gray, and the sunlight, once golden, had the aged tint you see before a thunderstorm. The Margin was coming up fast.

I threw a last glance back over the stern, at the little island disappearing. Would I see her shores again? If Blake had chosen to thwart the Hawaiian League, I might never return. Against the biting chill of the stiff breeze, I wrapped myself in the memory of our kiss—my first—and walked toward the helm.

Slate watched me warily as I approached, and it was several moments before he stood aside and let me take the wheel. My palms were slippery on the brass, which was still warm from his grip. I wiped my hands on my trousers and grasped the wheel again. Almost immediately, wisps of fog drifted up like steam from the steely water, the air thickening like churned cream.

I heard Slate catch his breath. Goose bumps skittered across my forearms as I kept our course steady into the mist until it swallowed us completely. Would it lift again, or would we join the other ships—the Flying Dutchman or the Mary Celeste—and journey without end, ghosts in the fog?

The wind dropped, then gusted, then dropped again for a long minute. Suddenly it was back, whipping through my hair and lashing it against my cheeks. I couldn’t see more than thirty feet ahead in the swirling fog, but the sea was calm, almost eerily so. I squinted as light flickered far away in the clouds, followed, half a minute later, by sullen, distant thunder and the taste of metal on my tongue. The wind snapped in the jib, and I tensed. Then my father put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

I gritted my teeth and tightened my grip on the wheel, still staring into the pearly mist off the bow. As my eyes slid across the insubstantial gray horizon, I became aware of an odd unspooling in the center of my chest, an incongruous, lighthearted feeling that made me want to laugh. At first it was gentle, a tug and a flutter, upward like the rope on the kite I’d flown those years ago, and my body trembled as would the needle of a compass seeking north. Was this the draw of the faraway shore? Then came the counterpoint, a nauseating sinking in my gut, down like a fish on a line, and as we sailed farther into the Margins, the drag deepened like the haul of the anchor on its chain. But still something drew me forward, and in the center, I stretched like the sails in a gale wind.