The Reader (14 page)

S
efia felt the warmth of the breeze and the swaying of the hammock before she was even fully awake, and for a moment she was couched in the gentle cocoon-like space between being asleep and awake, completely content. All was warmth and light and cottony softness.

But then she woke.

She opened her eyes and found herself staring up into the treetops. The events of the previous night flashed through her mind.

Palo Kanta.

Sefia untangled herself from the blankets and sat up. Archer sat across from her, legs swung over the branches for balance as he sharpened his new knives. All around him, suspended from the tree like misshapen fruit, were other new items: stolen shirts, socks, a length of rope, a tin cup, an extra blanket, sacks of food.

Seeing her rise, he wiped down the knife with a cloth and sheathed it.

“You did all this?” Sefia asked weakly.

Archer's gaze skimmed over the little encampment he'd made in the trees. He nodded.

“You did good.”

Looking down, she noticed traces of dried blood in the creases of her hands and the U-shapes of her fingernails. Grimacing, she dug her thumbnail into the cuticles of her other hand. It came away with rusty specks underneath.

Her face twisted. Palo Kanta. He'd had a whole
life
behind him . . . and he could have had a whole life ahead of him . . . but she had taken that away. She had taken the threads of that moment and changed them, reversed the trajectory of the bullet so that it wasn't coming for her—but for him. And the bullet had entered him, made a hole in him, and he had not survived it.

She had killed a man.

Tears spattered her arms.

There was a movement in the branches, and then Archer was taking her hands, wiping each of her fingers with a clean wet cloth.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. Not to Archer but to Palo Kanta, though he couldn't hear her, though he would never hear anything again. “I'm sorry.” That it had come down to this. Kill or die. Him or her. A choice you couldn't unmake.

Archer squeezed her fingers once and let go again, tucking away the cloth.

Sefia pressed her fists to her eyes and shook her head. “No.
No, no. What am I saying?” She'd been so sure this was what she wanted. Answers. Redemption. Revenge.

But this hadn't been revenge.

“He would have killed me.” She bared her teeth. “He was an
impressor
. The world's better off without him. Why am I
sorry
?”

Archer tapped his chest, over his heart, and smiled sadly.

“I am
not
a good person. All these months, all I've wanted . . . A good person wouldn't have . . . I just let them
take
Nin.” The last words came bursting out of her. “It's my fault she was captured. If only I hadn't gone into town alone . . . If only I'd come back a little sooner . . . I was
right there
, Archer. All I had to do was say something. It's my fault. It's all my fault, and now . . .”

She beat her own thighs. Pain blossomed beneath her fists. Archer tried to catch her hands, but she jerked out of his reach. “I was
supposed
to do this. For Nin. For my father.”

We're a team, you and me.
That's what her father had said to her.
We're in this together, no matter what.

But when it had mattered most, she hadn't been there for him. He'd died alone in that empty house while she played, stupidly, ignorantly, in the village below. She'd been the only one he had left, and she had failed him.

Frantically, Sefia dug through her pack for the book. She needed it in her hands, this thing, the only thing she had left of her father. She needed it to remember. To remind herself. She flung off the leather wrappings and traced the brand on the cover.

Two curves for her parents. A curve for Nin. The straight line for herself. The circle for what she had to do.

“Learn what the book is for.” She flubbed the words. “Rescue Nin, if she's still alive . . .” Sobs choked her voice. Her vision had gone wet and blurry.

But try as she might to reach for that anger, that rage that had sustained her all these months, whenever she grasped for it, she saw Palo Kanta.

Saw the bullet strike him.

Saw the blood drain out of him.

Saw him dead at her feet.

Sefia clutched the book in her arms and cried. Hating herself for this weakness.

“I don't think I can do it,” she whispered.

Then Archer crawled into the hammock and took her in his arms. She felt the pressure of him on her shoulders, the plane of his cheek on the top of her head, his hands holding hers. The kind of contact she hadn't had in years, wrapping around and around her like a bandage, until all the broken things inside her were held fast, secure in the loop of Archer's arms.

Captain Cat and Her Cannibal Crew

A
fter the
Current of Faith
fished him out of the maelstrom, and Captain Reed announced his intention to sail for the western edge of the world, there was some consternation among the crew.

He'd cracked, they said.

Something had happened to him, down there in the wild water.

This was going too far.

Some of them left, of course, but for the most part they stayed. Perhaps they'd grown so used to hearing the tall tales of their own adventures that they truly believed they would survive when all others had failed. Perhaps they thought Reed and the chief mate wouldn't let the
Current
disappear into the sea like the rest. Perhaps they knew she was the only ship in Kelanna with even a shred of hope of making it.

Whatever their reasons, they took their considerable earnings, loaded up with provisions in the Paradise Islands off the coast of Oxscini, and set a course for the blue and boundless west. All was smooth sailing till eight weeks into
their journey when, on the verge of uncharted waters, they came across the longboat filled with human bones.

Pelvises, scapulae, ribs.

Among the skeletons, two survivors stared up at the curving hull of the
Current
with sunken eyes. Their lips drew back from their teeth, revealing swollen tongues.

“It ain't right,” said Camey, one of the sailors on Meeks's starboard watch. He was new, someone they'd picked up in the Paradise Islands, and a bit of a rabble-rouser, but no one contradicted him when he said it again, louder: “It just ain't right.”

While the crew shifted uneasily at the rails, Captain Reed waited, counting out the seconds, weighing his choices. Take them in or let them die? It happened that way, sometimes on the ocean.

Of course he took them in. He was Captain Reed. He went down himself.

One of the survivors fainted as soon as Reed landed in the longboat, but the other backed away, scrabbling for purchase in the piles of bones. She had a fine velvet coat and felt hat, but her clothing was in tatters, and her long red hair had begun to fall out in clumps. She clutched at a splintered femur and sucked it greedily.

Reed sat down beside the mast and unscrewed the cap of his canteen. The woman looked at it curiously, like she'd forgotten what it was for.

“Who are you?” he asked. “What happened to your ship?”

A flicker of understanding passed over her face. Her mouth worked; her tongue came unstuck from her teeth. “Catarina Stills,” she croaked. “Captain of the
Seven Bells
.”

You've heard of the
Seven Bells
, of course. She was known for exploring the deep south, venturing farther and farther beyond Roku into the Everlasting Ice. Captain Cat had inherited the ship from her father, Hendrick Stills the Southern Explorer, who died of pneumonia on his last voyage.

What no one knew was that since her father passed, Captain Cat had been quietly exploring the west, sailing closer and closer to the edge of the world.

“I'm Captain Reed,” he said. “You're safe now.”

She let the bone fall from her hands, and Reed went to her, cradling her stinking emaciated body, and put the canteen to her lips, letting drop by drop slip into her mouth, wetting the cracks. Wide-eyed as a newborn babe, Cat stared at him, wondering, disbelieving, as he signaled to the crew, who began hoisting the survivors onto the deck of the
Current
.

The survivors remained in the sick bay with the doc for the rest of the day, but the crew couldn't stop talking about them. They kept sneaking glances toward the main hatch, where the sick bay lay belowdecks, though they never looked directly at it. Sailors are mighty superstitious, and as they went about the day's business, they were careful to avoid it, as if
they'd catch cannibalism, or bad luck, if they strayed too close.

Against the doc's advice, Captain Cat insisted on eating dinner in the great cabin that night, though her man Harye was still laid up in the sick bay. “Delusional,” Doc said, polishing her glasses. “I caught him hoarding bones, you know. Aly and I thought we'd gotten them all, but I found them stuffed up his shirtsleeves. I don't even think he knows he's been rescued. In his mind, he's still out on that boat.” She ran her dark fingers over her close-cropped hair and sighed. “I'll be surprised if he makes it another day.”

Captain Reed asked Meeks to join them in the great cabin. A teller of tales if there ever was one, the second mate could soak up a story and wring it out later word for word, and he was always happy to oblige. He sat across from Captain Cat, toying absentmindedly with the ends of his dreadlocks as he committed her tale to memory.

Cat had been cleaned up, her wounds washed and bandaged, but she was skinny as a beanpole, and her hands shook when she picked up the silverware.

“Believe me or don't,” she began, “but this is how it happened . . .”

The chief mate leaned in, examining her with his dead gray eyes, scanning for falsehoods the way he'd scan the
Current
for leaks.

But she didn't lie. Sometimes truth is more gruesome than fiction.

The
Seven Bells
had been at sea one hundred and twenty-two days searching for the western edge of the world, when a long crack appeared in the black sky, drowning the stars and the dark seas with cascades of light.

“Lightning?” Reed asked.

Captain Cat shook her head. “It was like the sky had split open at the seams, revealing some bright world on the other side. As we approached, the whole sky grew pale, and the
Seven Bells
was lit up, clear as morning. I never felt so tiny. A speck of dust in an infinite ocean. And there was something so beautiful about that, it nearly brought me to my knees.”

But then the light went out, and it went out with a
bang
, and it let such a storm loose upon them as they'd never imagined in their darkest dreams.

Captain Cat was shouting orders, but the noise had deafened them all. The wind churned up the waters, snapped the masts. The
Bells
was breached, taking on water so fast they barely got out with half of what was in the holds . . . and that wasn't much, not after sailing out there so long.

The men were scattered. The wind had ripped some of them right off the yards. Others went down with the ship. Out of a crew of forty-two, only eleven of them survived.

At this point in her story, Captain Cat was silent for a long minute. When she spoke again, her voice was harsher and more brittle than before.

She described the dehydration, the cotton-mouth thirst. Under the beating sun, their bodies blistered, and soon they were so wasted away that even sitting was agony.

Slowly, painfully, the remaining members of her crew began to die.

At first they tried to use the bodies as bait, chopping them up and trolling the pieces behind them. But they were attacked by a monster with milk-blue eyes and sawtooth skin and teeth like spears jutting from its lower jaw. Bigger than a whale, meaner than any shark. Within seconds, it had killed half the remaining crew, and, well, they didn't bait any lines after that.

Captain Cat paused again, panting. Sweat shone on her brow. The words tumbled out, faster now, as if a dam inside her had broken, and the story was roaring through her.

In the fifth week their provisions ran out, and it was decided they would cast lots. They tore up scraps of canvas, placed them in a hat, and drew, one for each sailor.

The black spot meant death. It marked you. It meant you were going to die.

When Farah drew it, they killed her and ate her heart immediately. The rest of the meat spoiled in two days, and after that they only had bones to pick at.

A week and a half later, they drew lots again, and
the black spot came to Waxley. He lasted them another twelve days, until it was time to draw again.

And so it went.

It had to be one of them, so the others could live. You do things to survive that you never would've done otherwise, just to keep going another week, another day.

“I don't regret doin' what we did,” Cat said, “but I regret takin' my crew so far west in the first place. I regret bein' so scared of the south, after it took my dad, that I couldn't go back. Maybe if I hadn't been so scared, they'd still be alive. Maybe they would've been the first to cross the Everlastin' Ice to whatever lies beyond.”

“I don't reckon they blamed you,” said Reed. “They chose to follow you.”

For the first time, Captain Cat looked at Meeks, whose dark skin went ashen under her gaze. “How much choice do our men have?” she asked. “They're
our men
.”

She was growing weaker and weaker with the effort it took to continue speaking, but the story inside her was bubbling up again. It wouldn't let her rest until she'd finished telling it.

Eventually, there were only two left: Captain Cat and her man Harye. Two scraps of canvas, and one would kill you. Either one of them could've drawn it, but the black spot came to Harye. He was marked. Their seventieth day since the wreck, and he was going to die.

But then the
Current of Faith
came along, and for the first time the black spot didn't mean death.

“Forty of my crew died,” she said. “Only two of us survived. Forty men . . . Forty of my men . . . Forty . . .”

She was shrinking back into her emaciated body, shoulders slumped, wrists limp. She seemed to have deflated with the telling of her story, as if for a little while the story had filled her out and held her up, but now that it was gone, she had collapsed, and there was no more strength in her.

At length she said, “We're in debt to you, Captain, for returnin' us to civilization.”

“What?” Meeks blinked, looking from Reed to the chief mate and back again. “Cap, we ain't—we're turnin' back?”

Reed sucked in a long breath and tapped his forefinger on the table. Eight times. He could feel Cat watching him with her yellowed eyes.

“No.” He sighed. “We ain't turnin' back.”