Across a Star-Swept Sea (29 page)

Persis narrowed her eyes at Justen. “My dear Justen is, perhaps, not entirely used to the way we do things in Albion.”

“But he’s so well-suited for it,” said Dwyer. “A Helo
and
a poet. Almost as good as a real aristo!”

At least three of the people on the deck rolled their eyes.

Persis smiled broadly at the guests. “Please excuse me. I’m going to pass my turn along to Andrine, who I recall spent many a night at school keeping us in stitches with her limericks.”

She crossed the deck, took Justen by the arm, and led him to the upper deck, out of earshot of the rest of the party.

“Your agreement with Isla demands not only that you accompany me to social events but that you look happy about it,” she reminded him softly but firmly.

“You first.”

She drew back. Who would have thought he was paying so much attention?

Justen looked out over the water in the direction of Galatea. “Those refugees are suffering and every moment I spend here playing your devoted admirer, I’m not able to help them.”

And every moment she was forced to spend playing hostess was one she couldn’t use to get to the bottom of Justen’s lies.

He turned back to her. “Does Isla really think she’s impressing the regs of Albion by setting off on a yachting trip with a bunch of aristos and a few token court regs? Is that what she thinks is going to keep the populace happy? Wouldn’t they be much happier to know that we’ve found a way to protect the regs in Galatea?”

“Shh!” she hissed. “Lower your voice.” The last thing she needed was for the Finches to find out the real reason she’d drugged Andrine. She leaned up against the rail and drew Justen against her. “People are watching.”

“So?” He leaned his body toward hers. “We’re supposed to be arguing.”

She draped her arms about his shoulders and arched her back. Behind her, the sea spray frosted her skin, but heat radiated from Justen’s body. The last time she’d held him this close had been in the star cove. It seemed like a world away. Then, she’d let down her guard, acted almost like herself, imagined that Justen was the sort of person she could tell things to. It had been her most serious lapse in judgment in a week that seemed full of them.

“Well, now we’re making up. Isla hasn’t authorized any fights.” More’s the pity. How she’d like to have it out with him here and now. How she’d like to pitch him over the side of the
Daydream
and sail away, no matter what secrets he might discover in his grandmother’s files to help her mother. If Justen could find a cure in them, someone else could, too.

“I don’t care what she’s authorized,” he whispered. “All I care about is my countrymen. I can’t stand by and watch them suffer.”

“You were happy enough to do so before.” The words slipped out, unfiltered. He began to jerk away from her but she held him tight. “When you were in Galatea, there were citizens being Reduced all around you. Why was that all right?”

“It wasn’t,” he replied. “And there was very little I could do in Galatea with my uncle breathing down my neck. Here I can help the refugees in that sanitarium.”

Persis was sure that was a great comfort to those regs already damaged by Justen’s pinks. She lifted her hand and caressed his cheek, when what she’d rather do was smack it.

“Oh, lovebirds,” called Lady Blocking, “are you going to rejoin the party or find someplace more private?”

He looked into her eyes, pain furrowing his brow. “You sound angry with me, Persis. If I’ve done something to hurt you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry Vania came to your house. I did not invite her, believe me. I respect your family’s privacy.”

“And what about the princess’s good opinion?” Persis said. “Entertaining her enemies—”

“Don’t worry about Vania. All she cares about is the Wild Poppy.”

That was plenty to start with.

“I thought,” he said, “that we were becoming friends. In the star cove—”

“I made it clear what we’re doing here,” she finished. “At least, I thought I had. If there was any confusion …” She shrugged. “This is a role, Justen.
Play it
.”

He glared at her, his jaw set, his dark eyes burning. And then he kissed her.

She couldn’t pull away, not with half the party watching and the other half judging. And after a second, she didn’t want to. There was something desperate and wild about the kiss, about Justen himself. In the star cove, he’d touched her gently, tentatively. Now he cupped her face in one hand, tangling his fingers in the windswept strands of her hair, while he slipped the other around the small of her back, pulling her up from the rails and holding her against his body.

This was not the Galatean medic she knew, cautious and serious and sarcastic. The petals of her skirt whipped in the wind, molding about his hips as tightly as her arms wrapped around his back. He moved his mouth over hers, hot and hard and hungry for understanding or absolution or something else entirely unexpected.

And then, just as suddenly, he lifted his head, and there was no pleasure in his face. “There,” he said. “Satisfied?”

Not even a little. Persis caught her breath before speaking, afraid of how she might sound otherwise. “It’s … a definite improvement.”

Down on the main deck, Princess Isla pointed at the sky and screamed.

Twenty-one

E
VERYTHING DISSOLVED INTO CHAOS
. Persis vanished from his side, hurrying to her princess. Justen tried to focus, taking in the situation. Moments ago, he’d been kissing Persis Blake like his life depended on it. Now, everyone was pointing up into the sky, gasping and chattering.

“What is it!” cried Lady Blocking. “What is it?”

Justen shielded his eyes and peered into the cloudless blue. It took a moment, but he found it, a tiny, golden glitter in the sky. At first, he thought it was a flutternote, but its movements were too measured for that. Flutters moved in lazy floating motions only to a certain height, and then they zipped off at maximum speed to their intended recipients. This … thing, whatever it was, was circling. Also, he got the sense that it was a lot larger, and a lot higher up, than any flutter ever went.

Persis reappeared in front of him. “Do you know anything about this?” she spat at him. “Is this one of Citizen Aldred’s new tricks? Attack the princess regent of Albion from the air?”

Justen shook his head, baffled.

“I thought,” Isla said, her voice faint and a little lost, “I thought it was just a flutternote gone astray. But it’s not. It’s high, and big …”

Tero took the princess by the arm. “Your Highness, we must go below for your safety.”

“Um,” said Lord Blocking, “maybe we should all go below. We’re the perfect targets out here.”

Andrine was staring up at the object hanging in the sky. “For a sniper, I suppose. But if they wish to bomb us, we’re as much in danger in the cabin as we would be on the deck.”

“No one is bombing anyone,” Isla insisted. “Not even Citizen Aldred would dare such a move.”

“And if he did?” said Lord Blocking. “What would be your response?”

Princess Isla shot the aristo a poisonous glare and went below. Persis was still on deck, staring at the thing as if she could bring it down by will alone. Justen couldn’t decide what was more unusual: Persis or the object that held her transfixed. All the other women had gone below, but she remained, in her silly green dress, like some ancient sea nymph defying the sky.

Flying machines. He’d read about them, of course, and seen the images. In the last war, unmanned flying machines had been the ones to carry the explosives that had torn apart the world. It was his ancestors who’d done that—his and all the other regs’. Safe and secure in their own, giant flying machine, they’d sat far above the Earth and destroyed the rest of it.

When the creators landed on the pristine soil of New Pacifica, they’d made a pact: no more flying machines. Even skimmers hovered less than a meter above the surface. Never again would mankind be able to destroy the world from a distance. It was inconvenient for travel but worth it for the preservation of the scraps of humanity who remained alive.

What if Uncle Damos had broken the creators’ pact? After all, he could argue that it was a limitation set by the aristos, and the revolutionaries were not bound to follow it.

“Whatever it is,” Persis said, still staring upward, it’s leaving.” Her tone was clipped and businesslike, nothing at all like the husky, breathless whisper she’d graced him with after their last kiss.

They were the only two left on deck. She strode to the side, dipped her head over and called out, “Slipstream, up!” The mink came scrambling up the hull and onto the deck. He shook himself until his sleek fur stood out in all directions in damp spikes, chattered once at Persis, then rolled over.

“Good boy, Slippy.”

Justen rolled his eyes. This was a time to practice pet tricks? “So are we turning around?”

“And ruining the party?” Persis asked. “Just as it was livening up?”

“Persis. There are flying machines. Shouldn’t we … I don’t know,
warn
someone?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure Isla, the actual ruler of our nation, handled sending a warning quite neatly. How can we, a socialite and an unemployed medic, do any better?”

Above them, the flying machine faded from sight. It hadn’t gone south, though. If anything, it seemed to have gone west—same as they were headed.

“Persis?”

She threw open the door of the cabin. “All clear! Next stop, Remembrance Island!”

The rest of the party emerged, some looking visibly shaken by the events, and a few, like Lady Blocking and Dwyer Shift, looking relieved that the commotion had ended and they could return to their useless, silly existences. Persis had adopted the attitude of the latter group, much to Justen’s dismay and a little to his surprise. He supposed he should be used to the idea now that, despite flashes that Persis could think of serious things, she’d shown a marked preference for
not
doing so. For a few brief moments—in his bedroom after he’d first met her parents, in the cove when she’d told him about her inheritance, with her mother the previous night, and even just now when she held him on the deck—he’d thought that maybe, just maybe, there was something in Persis, dormant, atrophied from disuse, that they had in common.

She had passion for the plight of DAR victims, due, no doubt, to her mother’s situation. But, like so many aristos, she seemed to want to keep it buried, as if not talking about would make it go away. Her reg heritage did nothing to change that, and the fact that she refused to have herself tested for the potential to develop DAR only underscored it. Persis preferred to live in ignorance. She preferred to devote herself to silly, useless pursuits like clothes and parties and playing courtship games.

And yet he couldn’t dismiss her entirely, either. Justen had never felt so unmoored. When he was younger, it was easy to pick out the worthy people of his acquaintance. They weren’t the ones who cared about fashion or social status or parties or romance. They were people like him and Vania, who were smart and well-read and ambitious and wanted to change the world.

But what had they changed it into? Vania was off imprisoning and torturing her own countrymen; and Justen had helped, then run away to hide. Compared to the damage they’d done, perhaps Persis’s idle concerns were the better ones. In her shallowness, she was harmless, and when she did use the brain she liked to pretend she didn’t have, it was to create beauty or to comfort her mother with silly stories, to compose entertaining poems or to playact a romance that would help the princess she so obviously loved avoid the same kind of war that he’d fled in Galatea.

Persis—silly, superficial, genetemps-partying Persis—was a far better person than he was. And if he ever hoped to correct the damage he’d caused, he needed to learn to emulate
her
.

There were no docks on Remembrance Island, but several mooring balls had been sunk near the shallowest bay, and it was to one of these that the
Daydream
attached. While most of the guests chose to travel to shore in the dingy, Persis defied the odds again, leaping over the side, dress and all, to swim in with her sea mink at her side. By the time the boat reached them on the beach, Persis had repinned stray locks of her wet hair, and Slipstream was shaking himself dry. Justen watched Persis make a sign to the animal, who snapped to attention and scampered off.

“What was that command?” he asked her, as Andrine and Tero began unloading the picnic supplies.

Persis shimmied her hips, and the seaweed-green petals of her skirt unstuck from her thighs. “Oh, you know, don’t go too far, be back after lunch.”

“He knows all those commands?”

“Don’t underestimate Slippy, Justen. You’d be surprised what he knows.” She clapped her hands and raised her voice to the rest of the party. “All right, what’s first? Food? Historical lecture and exploration? Cocktails?”

“I vote cocktails before any lecturing,” said Lady Blocking. “Otherwise I might not survive it.”

“Agreed,” said Persis. “Besides, we all know the story.” She turned back to Justen. “Though I’m curious as to the Galatean revolutionaries’ take on Remembrance Island.”

“We’re revolutionaries,” he replied smoothly, “not revisionist historians.”

Remembrance Island—a tiny speck situated halfway between the westernmost points of New Pacifica’s two main islands—was a sanctuary, a monument. It had been left completely barren and uncultivated but for a single ceramic obelisk, a remnant of the ship that all their ancestors had once lived on. Generations ago, when they marooned themselves on New Pacifica and destroyed their ship, they’d kept this one piece and inscribed it with a memorial to the Earth they had destroyed and the societies they had lost, promising to carry on, to live in the world that they’d made and to commit themselves to someday atoning for it all.