The Ship Beyond Time (The Girl from Everywhere #2)(21)

A memory disorder? It was hard to imagine; my own memory had always been encyclopedic. I made a new search on the cell phone. The link to the Mayo Clinic listed Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, dementia—but the girl hadn’t been older than sixteen. I kept scrolling. Traumatic head injury? No, she’d still be in the hospital if something like that had happened in the last few days. Retrograde amnesia was very rarely caused by brain tumors—I bit my lip; poor thing—but more often by alcohol, drugs . . . depression. I held my breath, my mind no longer on the girl.

My finger hovered over the blue hotlink on the word; at a touch, a new screen loaded. Causes: loss, death . . . genetics. I scrolled past them hurriedly; I’d read—and worried—about them before, when I’d first realized my father’s peculiarities might have been heritable. My eyes fell on the risks: substance abuse. Family conflicts. Suicide.

I clicked the phone dark and dropped it into my bag. Then I scrubbed my palm on my shorts. “Slate will need his map back someday.”

“Well.” Kash folded his arms across his chest. “You and I are the only ones who know where it is.”

“Kashmir.” I gaped at him, and he threw his hands in the air.

“What? Amira! It’s the same dans tous les cas! If the past cannot be changed, the captain will find a way back to Honolulu, no matter where that particular map is. And if it can be changed, then Joss’s prediction for you and me is nothing to fear! Isn’t that what this is really about?”

“What if Crowhurst is telling the truth?” I shot back. “What if he knows how to save us?”

“And what if this is how it happens? You said the sea was rough in Ker-Ys.”

“You’d be roped in—” I started, but he shook his head.

“If it’s fate, does it matter? There’s a story about this—a man who fled his destiny only to meet it on the road. He blinded himself when he saw the truth of it.”

“Oedipus?”

“That’s the one. You taught me that.”

The reproach in his face cut to the quick. “So I should do nothing? You want to be lost?”

“Of course I don’t! But I don’t want to lose you either.”

“You won’t.”

“I already am.” His voice was bitter; he kicked at a bottle cap. “There’s a wall around you now, amira. You built it with your father. I don’t know who holds the key.”

I clenched my fists, crushing the letter. “There’s got to be a way, Kashmir. There has to be a way for me to take my fate in my own hands.”

“Khodaye man.” Kash shook his head. “You sound just like him.”

His words knocked the wind out of me. “Never say that again.”

We waited in a prickly silence for the rain to ease before returning to the ship along sidewalks washed clean and fresh. Rotgut, Blake, and Bee were already sitting at the folding table on the deck, feasting under a makeshift sailcloth awning. Overhead, the sky was clearing, and at their feet, Billie made Romeo eyes at the roast.

“Surprise,” Bee said with a wry grin when she spotted us coming up the gangplank. I winced. I had completely forgotten the party. But she waved my shame away. “Come, sit! There is a brisket. What are children for if not to scold and feed?”

My appetite had deserted me, but I sat at the table, slipping bits of brisket to Billie as Bee regaled us with the story—her favorite—of how she and Ayen had married. I had heard it many times, but Blake had not, and he sat, rapt and a little bemused, at Bee’s energetic retelling.

“We met at a dance, and she . . . hmm.” Bee half closed her eyes at the memory. “Words fall so short. Her energy, her movement, her legs! I knew the moment I saw her that she was for me. She was being wooed already.” She grinned toothily. “But I was a better man than him.”

Blake cocked his head. “How so, exactly?”

“I had bigger cattle! More of them too.” Bee’s eyes went soft at the sight of her own memories. “It seems like yesterday we were betrothed. My family was proud, of course. My two brothers had died young, and my sister was married with many children. I alone kept our name, and our herd. We were very happy, Ayen and me. Not so much, her old suitor. But the joke is on him.” Bee looked around the table and spread her arms. “For now we have three children, and his name is forgotten. I got revenge, you see.” She drew one finger across the scar at her throat. “And he had no wife.”

She hesitated then, glancing back toward the captain’s cabin. Usually this was the part of the story where she mentioned how she and Slate had become friends—Bee seeking justice, her slit throat still healing, and Slate, heartbroken for her and happy to give over the gun he’d brought all the way from 1980s New York. But now she only smiled, her eyes touched with rare sorrow. “I am a lucky one, to know love.”

“And to have lived to tell the tale,” Blake said.

At that, Kashmir lifted his head and put down his fork; his eyes cut to me and then away. “The loving’s more important than the living, Mr. Hart.”

Blake only shrugged. “Love isn’t much of a legacy, Mr. Firas.”

“I think there’s none better.”

“It doesn’t last.”

“It doesn’t have to.”