The Ship Beyond Time (The Girl from Everywhere #2)(6)
Near the top, Bee and Slate lifted him the rest of the way. He tumbled over the bulwark and landed flat on the deck. Billie bounded toward him, trying to lick his face, but Bee pushed her off to check Kashmir’s breathing while Slate turned back and pulled me single-handedly over the rail. I started toward Kash, still needing him close, but the captain crushed me in an embrace so tight he squeezed water out of my clothes.
“I’m sorry, Nixie,” he whispered fiercely. “I’m so sorry. I thought today was the day,”
I hugged him back, trying to comfort him; he must have been scared, too. “What day, Dad?”
“The day you lose Kashmir.”
I stiffened, but he did not let go. “What are you talking about, Slate?”
“I told you from the start not to get too close to him.” The words came in a whisper; I could smell his sour breath. “That he won’t be around forever.”
A flash of rage, like lightning. “How dare you say that?” I pushed him, hard, and he released me. “You, of all people?”
But as he stumbled back, my anger ebbed. His shirt was bloody and torn, his face waxy and pale in the dark. And in his eyes, an infinite sadness. “You think I’m just being cruel?” My father shook his head. “It wasn’t only my fortune Joss told.”
Though the storm had passed and the water was calm, I felt the world seesaw. “She told you about me?” Joss—Navigator, fortune-teller. My grandmother too, though I hadn’t known it at first. I’d thought she was a charlatan, until the things she’d told me came true. But of course they had; everything she’d predicted, she’d already watched happen as she traveled back and forth across the years. “What did she say?”
Slate opened his mouth to reply, but then he bent double and vomited noisily over the rail.
I swore, rushing to his side as his shoulders shook. Away across the vast blackness of the waves, a glassy skyline glittered; he’d gotten us to his own timeline, twenty-first-century New York.
Not Tahiti, then. But maybe that was for the best.
“Dad . . .” I touched his side, my hands gentle, plucking at the blood-soaked fabric of his shirt; the bullet had dug a furrow through his flesh, skipping along his ribs like a stone. It wasn’t life-threatening—but where would I have been shot, if I’d still been at the helm? Under my fingers, Slate’s skin was clammy, and his whole body trembled. “We’ll get you to the hospital.”
“No!” Clumsily, he threw my hand off. “No hospitals.”
I rounded on him. “What’s wrong with you? You need stitches, you need medicine—”
“Oh, yeah?” He laughed coarsely as he struggled out of his shirt. Wadding it up, he wiped the blood from his tattooed flesh. Under the ink, it was pale as smoke. “Like painkillers?”
“You could still go to the hospital. Just tell them you don’t want any drugs.”
“You think so?” He smiled darkly, his voice bitter, and I realized how naive I must have sounded. He hadn’t been clean for years—maybe not since my mother died. Who was he, without his opium? Had I ever known my own father?
Oblivious to my scrutiny, Slate leaned heavily against the bulwark and spat into the water, wiping his mouth with his arm. Then he closed his eyes and put his forehead down on the rail. “It’s more blood than guts. I don’t die today. I know my fate. I’ll see her again.”
He spoke the words like a dreadful incantation—a prayer, or a curse. My father loved my mother. I knew it like I knew the position of the stars, or the pitch of the deck. His search for her had defined the last sixteen years—the entirety of my existence, for her life had ended as mine began. She was his safe harbor . . . or, more accurately, his white whale. Giving her up would be infinitely harder than giving up the drugs. His knuckles were pale as he gripped the brass. Was he trying to convince me, or himself?
After a long moment, he gritted his teeth and pushed himself upright. Then he turned from the rail and swore. “What are you looking at?”
I blinked, but he wasn’t talking to me. Following his stare, my stomach sank like an anchor. There he was, standing in the open doorway of the captain’s cabin: Blake Hart, the boy from 1884.
He still wore his nineteenth-century suit, very dapper once, though the hat he used to wear had gone missing somewhere back in Honolulu. Billie trotted up to him, wagging her tail slowly, but Blake ignored her, staring at the electric gleam of the glass fantasy of Manhattan. Over his shoulder, the green copper figure of Lady Liberty raised her spotlighted torch; back in his native time, Blake would not have even heard of her. “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me,” I said under my breath.
“What?” Blake’s face was white, and his voice cracked when he spoke. “What is this place?”
I tried to smile. “Welcome to New York.”
CHAPTER THREE
Fifty years ago, Slate had been born during a blackout in this protean city; when he was a child, he had watched the Bronx burn. New York had changed a lot since then—so much so that some longtimers found it unrecognizable. But even they would have felt more at home in the city than a boy from a bygone kingdom.
A speedboat roared past us, the prow painted with leering teeth, the laughing shrieks of the passengers drowned out by the motor. A helicopter whuffed overhead, seeking the latest news. We passed a garbage barge heading south; the stench wafted to us along with the screams of the gulls. And Blake stood dazed on the main deck as the salt of the Atlantic curled his golden hair. “Where are we, Miss Song? And where are all the stars?”