The stranded, p.17
The Stranded, page 17
Even though I know it won’t get through, I type a message: Hey, how’s life as a landlubber? And press send. Message undeliverable appears in half a second. The distance between us is a few miles, but she might as well be on the other side of the planet.
The inevitable has been delayed long enough. I should go. Grabbing my bag and swinging it over my shoulder, I head for one of the exits on the portside of the ship. There’s a thin metal gate at the top of a staircase. This one will bring me out close to Alex’s cabin, unless some freak occurrence saves me from the impending dinner with its awkward topic of conversation.
Fear trickles between my shoulder blades at the sight of a figure propped up against the railing at the other end of the arboretum. Someone’s been watching me this whole time, while I’ve been lying in the grass and looking at the clouds. In the half-light, I can’t make out any details, just the creepy shape of a thin man in a long coat.
It’s nothing, I tell myself. Just someone enjoying the evening. My chest thumps like it doesn’t believe me, and I find myself running my thumb over the ring May gave me.
At a run, I figure I can make it to the portside staircase in ten seconds. Going through the middle of that radish bed will shave another second off. Slamming the gate behind me will buy me a couple more. Escape plan formulated.
But in those seconds of scanning the area, I took my attention off the figure, and now he’s disappeared. He could be anywhere. He could be coming up behind me. The hairs on my neck prickle, and I twist, trying to find him again.
Breathe to loosen your muscles. Walk to the exit. You’re being paranoid.
I’m almost at the gate, and there’s no sign of the skinny figure.
Ahead of me, two men emerge from the staircase. Recognition crosses their faces even through the bars of the gate, and I know: they’re here for me.
The gate’s hinges squeak.
I run, aiming straight across the arboretum for the exit on the opposite side. My dress whips around my knees. Feet pound behind me, dull thuds against the earth-topped deck.
I’m ten strides from the other gate. Seven. Six. The promise of safety. But then a woman emerges, separating me from the exit. She grins horribly, long locks swaying.
My feet skid on the earthy ground. Air screams through my throat. “What do you want?”
The woman shows the inside of her rotting mouth. Her cheekbones press against her skin; there’s not enough flesh over them. “I want you,” she says.
I sense the two men stopping somewhere behind me. At the sight of them, the woman’s grin drops.
“I found her first,” she spits, flecks of saliva spraying the air in front of her.
“Don’t mean you’ll be the one to deliver her,” one of the men says.
They split up and start moving around me like sharks. Circling closer.
The woman’s face folds into a grimace. She gobs phlegm on to the ground. “Compromise. Three-way split on the reward.”
Reward?
“Why should we split it with you?” says the jowled man.
“Cos otherwise I’ll help missy here slip away, and you’ll get nothin’.”
“Let’s take her to Silas then. The reward’s two months if we deliver her alive.”
“Don’t say his name out loud, you imbecile!” the woman says.
Who the hell is Silas? And why would he want me alive? Why does he want me at all?
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I say.
“You’re as good as dead already, so shut up,” the woman snarls. “Too much trouble getting her all the way below deck. Coalies could stop us; drone might see. Let’s just drop her over the side.”
“What’s he paying you? I’ll pay more, or, or” I scramble for a lifeline—“or get you medical supplies!”
All three of them stop pacing and snap their attention to me, hungry eyes darting.
“What kind of medical supplies?” the woman asks.
“Anything. Vaccines, bandages—”
“Drugs?”
“Anything.”
Her eel’s tongue moves in and out of a gap between her teeth. Seconds pass. “Nah, not worth pissing him off. Let’s throw her over now and be done with it. Fifty-fifty split?” She extends a hand to one of the men. He steps over to her and shakes it.
The arboretum turns around me. I can’t feel the ground under my feet. I won’t let them take me. Not again. An electrical hum shudders through my hand and into my arm. I look down at my fist in confusion. The ring May gave me is buzzing with life. The bands of metal move smoothly over one another to reveal a line of hair-thin needles. They stick out of the smooth surface like thorns. I hear May’s words: In case you ever need me.
“Got to take something off her, to prove we did her in.” The man’s voice drags me back to the present.
“Hair?” says the woman.
“That’d be least messy.”
I stare at her. My mouth opens and closes stupidly.
They pounce. Their hands are on me, pulling me down, down, until my knees buckle, and I thud to the ground.
In case you ever need me.
I twist my arm free, pain ripping through the muscle, and slam my fist as hard as I can into the nearest man. It’s a pathetic blow that’s like punching clay, but he screams as the needles pierce his skin. Without me doing anything else, the ring releases a charge that makes him jerk and twists his face in agony. He falls to the ground.
I struggle to pull myself up. The woman grabs me by the hair and pushes me so that my cheek squashes into the dirt. Her weight presses down on me, knees on my arms so that I can’t move. The other man forces the ring from my hand, scouring skin from my finger. I won’t get the chance to use it again.
I taste soil: musky and lifeless.
The woman tugs at my hair, gathering it above my head with one hand.
Huffing, I try to topple her, but she’s so heavy she hardly moves, and now the man is pinning me too.
“Hold her,” the woman says with a grunt. She reaches inside her coat and brings out something that makes me scream inside. A small brown handle. She holds it in front of my face, presses a button and the blade flicks out.
Chapter 30
Nik
It’s creepy, all those rusting girders penning you in. Everything streaked with seagull crap. Seriously questioning why Esther would hang out up here, but I’ve checked everywhere else.
My chest’s a pit of burning pain by the time I slam through one of the gates into the arboretum. Good thing Esther used a suture bot to close that gunshot wound. If she’d sewed it by hand, I’d have been stuck in bed for months instead of running around the ship, trying to save her life.
I scan the place. Dammit. Too late.
Two heavies are pinning Esther to the ground; another one lies on the floor, twitching like he’s been zapped. She figured out May’s ring. Good girl. The woman sitting on Esther’s back is struggling to hold her down. The woman’s fist punches the air, and my blood runs cold; they’ve cut off a handful of Esther’s hair. As proof that they’ve killed her, it could have been so much worse.
One of Enid’s guy’s leans on the railing, wearing a long coat and chewing a piece of grass. They call him Scratch or Sniffer or something.
“Why the hell aren’t you helping?” I shout.
“My orders were not to engage.”
“Engage now, or Enid’ll hear about it.”
Sniffer pushes himself up and spits out the grass.
I charge at the woman. We plow into the ground, air whooshing from her chest as we land in a heap. Esther’s hair showers to the ground. The woman rakes at my face with her nails, screaming. I yank her arms down behind her back and use my knees to hold them while I unwrap the scarf she’s wearing. I snake it around her wrists. The few teeth she’s got gnash and snap.
Sniffer lands a good punch on the other man’s cheek, and he drops to the ground. But Sniffer doesn’t stop, and now he’s standing over the man, pummeling his bloodied face. He’s lost in bloodlust. The woman must have dropped her knife when I hit her, because now I see Sniffer raise it over the man’s chest, crazed eyes staring out from blood-splattered skin.
“No!” I shout.
I let go of the woman and kick Sniffer in the chest hard enough to send him off balance. He gives me a disgusted glance before wiping his face and turning his back. The man lies still, face red and shining with blood, but not dead. Silas doesn’t take kindly to people murdering his employees, and after the thing with Esther kicking him, it’d be like spraying gasoline on a fire. It would be all-out war. No one would be able to help Esther then.
“Get out of here!” I scream to Esther. She’s already gone. Her chopped hair disappears down the nearest staircase.
The woman’s already getting up, the scarf dangling loose from one hand, and she’s looking like she’s going to follow Esther. I shoulder-barge her and then manage to get hold of the scarf, pulling it as tight as I can into a knot around her wrists. It won’t hold her for more than a few seconds, but it’ll be long enough for us to get away. I follow Esther, leaving the woman to curse herself hoarse.
Hardly touch the ground on the way down the stairs, and at the bottom I realize she’s not heading for home. Maybe she’s aiming for the market. Or the Lookout. Public places. Smart but wrong. Everywhere will be crawling with Silas’s people.
She needs to change direction. And then we need to hole up together, until they give up looking for the day. I figure sunset ought to do it. Most of them won’t risk being on an upper deck after curfew. I have to make her go home.
On the bend of a stairwell, I grab her by the jacket and swing her around.
She screeches, and her fists slam into my face.
“Esther, stop!”
She focuses on me, all bleary with tears, and the look on her face knocks me breathless; she’s the image of May.
“I’m a friend, OK? I’m trying to help.”
“OK,” she says, and she stops wriggling so I relax my grip. That’s when she brings her knee up between my legs. Exploding pain. I double over. She punches me square in the nose. Star-studded blackness.
Esther leaps down more stairs. If she gets away from me, I won’t be able to protect her. I force myself to keep up, running through the pain. We reach our home deck, the stretch of cabins, the rows of boots outside the front doors.
Esther fumbles for her keys, and I’m nearly there. But then she’s through. I jam my fingers around the door frame at the last second, and scream through my teeth at the stripe of pain where the door crushes my fingers. I shove it with my shoulder. Esther gets thrown backwards into the cabin. She sprawls on the ground, legs kicking up at me.
I drop on top of her and grab her in a bear hug that clamps her arms down. In my mind, a drone’s racing to the deck, alerted by the sound of her screaming or an image of us chasing down the deck. In my mind, there are cameras skittering along the railing. Coalies marching in formation, about to burst through the open door and drag me away.
“Shhhh!” I say. “Keep calm. I’m a friend of May’s. People are trying to hurt you, but I’m not one of them.”
“What do you want?” She’s shaking. Freshly chopped hair falls over her face. Strands stick to the shoulders of her jacket.
“Just want to make sure you’re OK.” My chest heaves. My fingers are throbbing and fat and seeping, and there’s a sick feeling running through my whole body. “I saw them attack you in the arboretum, and figured you might need some help. That’s all.”
She relaxes. I loosen my grip and kneel up so that I’m not squashing her. She edges backwards, putting space between us. We sit there on the floor, staring at each other, both breathing through the pain and adrenaline.
“Say my name.”
“What?” I say.
“Say my name again,” she demands.
“Esther.”
She grimaces. “It was you,” she whispers. “You’re the boy. You’re with them. The ones that kidnapped me.”
I open my mouth and close it again.
She pulls at the bottom of her dress. There’s mud smeared on her legs. She stands up and moves crab-like to the kitchenette. The Crosslands’ cabin is the same as ours: small front living area with a kitchen on one side and a sofa on the other, single-file corridor through to the bedrooms. It’s messier than ours though. Lived in.
“Why did you say you’re May’s friend? You don’t know her.”
“We work together.”
“You’re not a cadet.”
“No.”
Esther rests her muddy fingers on the counter. Her med bag hangs across her shoulder, covered in dirt from the scuffle. If I can distract her, I might be able to get those meds for Enid after all. I swallow hard. The door’s wide open behind me, and I imagine devices peering through. Drones or those creepy spider-bot things.
“I’m gonna shut the door, OK?” I say.
She stays silent.
No sign of Silas’s goons when I check up and down the deck. No drones. Nothing scuttling. Once the door’s closed, I let myself breathe.
Jeez, everything hurts. Chest. Gut. Fingers. Ego.
I cradle my mangled hand against my throbbing gunshot wound. Wonder if my fingers are broken.
When I turn back to Esther, I’m staring at a knife. It’s blunt but evil-looking. I hold my uninjured hand up in surrender.
“Come on, doc. You won’t stab me—you only just fixed me.”
“Want to find out?”
“Think I’ll pass.”
Esther raises the knife. “Start talking.”
Chapter 31
Esther
The knife hovers in the air between us. My arm’s shaking from holding it, and my hand is slick around the handle. I recognize that voice, even without the sickbed rattle. It’s been on repeat in my head since I heard him say my name the night I was kidnapped.
What now? Now I get answers. Hoping that trouble will disappear if I ignore it long enough hasn’t worked. I have to take action, even if it means doing things I never thought I was capable of.
Like holding someone at knifepoint.
“Start talking,” I say, trying to sound like someone who will use a knife if she needs to. It weighs a ton, and I already wish I’d picked the vegetable peeler, but I need shock and awe if I’m going to get info out of him. I raise it so that the point is level with the boy’s chest.
He scratches his head, ruffling scruffy black hair that looks like he cut it himself, and puffs his cheeks in exasperation. I realize I know him. He lives down the deck. We’ve passed each other a thousand times without ever speaking. His dad was taken by the Coalies a few months before May and I started our training. We watched them throwing the family’s possessions down into the sea until Mom shooed us inside.
“What do you want to know?” he says, shrugging.
He’s wearing a hoodie underneath a waterproof jacket that’s been patched more than once, and the smell of woodsmoke and paraffin lingers on him.
“Let’s start with your name, then move on to how you know my sister.”
“I’m Nikhil Lall. Nice to officially meet you. And I told you. We work together.”
His eyes flick around the cabin. He picks up our tea container from its place on the worktop and sniffs the leaves inside. He wrinkles his nose.
I snatch the tin and snap it closed. “Why was I kidnapped? Why not someone else?”
“How would I know? I was busy being half dead, remember?”
He wanders to the shelf by the front door and pulls a book out by its spine, leafing through the pages before dropping it and picking another one.
“Where does May keep her stuff?” Nik says.
Emotion catches in my throat, raw and hot, but I refuse to let him see me cry. “I’m asking the questions,” I say. I jab the knife in the air.
“All right, doc, keep your hair on.” He smirks.
My free hand goes to the choppy ends of my hair, and I want to cry all over again. If I had any strength left, I’d punch that stupid grin off his face.
“Who’s Silas? Why does he want me dead?”
He scans a book’s cover, then drops it on the growing pile by his feet. “That’s what happens when you give a gang leader a bloody nose. They hold grudges.”
“What?”
“The other night. You kicked him in the face. Ring a bell?”
“He attacked me! I was defending myself!”
“You’re a little girl, and you humiliated him. He needs to reassert his power.” Another book thuds to the ground. “May’s room through here?” He marches past me, pushing my knife hand out of his way.
“You can’t just walk in!” I toss the knife on to the counter and chase after him. This is not how I envisioned things playing out.
He’s in the tight space in front of our bunks, and I have to stand way closer to him than is comfortable. Adding a stranger to the tiny space usually reserved for me and my sister makes me twitchy with embarrassment.
He stares at May’s bunk, the blanket pulled snug over the mattress, the military textbook left open on top. “Come on, doc, where’s her secret stash?”
I press my lips together and fold my arms.
“Not playing, huh?”
He opens the top drawer and starts pulling things out. My frayed underwear. My unpaired socks. The things I don’t want anyone to see. Heat floods my cheeks. I reach around him and slam the drawer. It almost catches his fingers, and he responds by pulling the covers from May’s bunk. I drop my med bag to take hold of a scrap of blanket, and then we’re tussling tug-of-war style.
“Get out!” I say, snatching the blanket back and throwing it onto May’s bunk. “I’m not telling you anything. Just get out of my room!”
