I touch the edges of it with my good hand. Feel along it, and up, up, up. It’s attached to something, but part of it has come loose. My hand meets a smooth surface, but it’s not metal. Not as cold.

  A curve of wood.

  A boat? And then I realize. The raiders have stored some of their gliders here.

  A voice, close to the door. “Get up to the deck,” someone calls out. The light around the doorway flickers as people hurry past.

  They think I jumped again.

  But I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.

  This time, I’m not leaving my ship.

  CHAPTER 29

  MY MIND IS A MIX of galloping, haphazard thoughts, my body flush with fever and fear. Focus. What happens next? I have to stay ahead of the raiders, but I’m not sure of their strategy. Why didn’t they set off the alarm when I escaped? Don’t they want everyone to know I’m on the loose, to be out looking for me?

  No. They don’t.

  The raiders have misplayed their hand by leaving so many settlers on board to run the ship and by keeping only enough of their own to make sure we stay in line. They can’t have my crew search for me—what if they help me instead of turning me in? And, more elementary than that, the raiders need the crew to stay at their positions and keep the dredge going.

  I hear it working, the motor still toiling on. Doesn’t everyone hear what I do? The ship is in trouble.

  Is it real—something they can’t fix, like the armor—or contrived?

  Is this how they intend to smoke me out?

  * * *

  • • •

  I can’t stay in one place for long or they’ll find me. But my body aches for rest.

  Where should I go next? The mining deck two levels below, the top deck, or somewhere else?

  If I go down one level, to the ship’s cafeteria and the cabins, there are a few possible places to hide. Would any of the crew conceal me in their cabin? I know where each person was assigned to sleep before, but the raiders have likely moved everyone around.

  I have Tam’s rifle. But I also have these handcuffs. If I can get to the kitchen, there’s got to be a fork or something I can use to pry them open. And Tam said they had plenty of knives in the kitchen.

  Tam.

  What if I have to kill Tam?

  Could I do it?

  I hear a grind, a strange catch in the motor. It lasts only a moment. But I’ve never heard the ship speak that way before and it decides me.

  I’ve got to get to the mining deck.

  I slide open the closet door, so, so slow.

  I peek out. No one in the hall. I slip through, slide the door shut, every movement gratingly, achingly deliberate so that the motions don’t draw the attention of the people on the bridge. Who’s in there now? Is Porter still steering my ship, or has he gone to look for me?

  Through the doorway I hear the voice of someone I don’t know. I freeze. “They think she jumped from the deck. But it’s dark. We haven’t been able to see her in the water.”

  “Someone told me she was injured.” Another unfamiliar raider’s voice.

  “She hasn’t had food or water since they brought her on board.” The first voice.

  “And she got burned when she set fire to the trees. She was in bad shape. If she jumped again, she might not have survived this time.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  Good. You keep thinking that. You keep thinking I’m down in the dark river instead of up here, on board the dredge.

  I was the ship’s captain.

  Now I’m its ghost.

  * * *

  • • •

  Down, down, down, my boots as soft on the metal as I can make them. I clear the first level and am on my way to the mining deck when my vision brightens, flashes at the edges, goes dark in spots. I grip the banister. No.

  Don’t pass out here.

  The stairwell is the most dangerous place for me. It would be easy to get caught coming or going. And I need to reach the mining deck and try to get an idea of what’s happening with the motor.

  This much closer, I can hear it better. I hadn’t imagined the discord in its timbre, the hum of something wrong. I’ve got to figure out what it is. We can’t lose the ship.

  I slip on a step and fall hard, grabbing at the banister with my handcuffed, awkward hands. My head snaps back, hits a step with a dull thud. Through the pain, all I can think is, How much noise did I make? The rifle on my back is like an external backbone, painfully bruising against the knobs of my real spine.

  I’m a wreck. I need to go eat something and get these handcuffs off before I try anything.

  I crawl as fast as I can up the few stairs back to the landing and glance down the hallway.

  Nothing. No one.

  Go.

  * * *

  • • •

  I stumble into the cafeteria, use the edges of a table near me to brace myself. I’m making too much noise, but the ship’s agony still covers my own.

  The raiders are gambling with the dredge. They’re hazarding that it will hold up long enough to get them where they need to go. But they’re greedy. This is too much gold and weight. They’re running the dredge into the ground.

  I edge into the galley kitchen, Tam’s domain. A single lantern is lit—safety protocol. The raiders trust Tam, that’s for sure. He’s working for them: another certainty I can’t ignore.

  Has he been a traitor this entire time?

  In the forest, he was helping me. Us. I thought. He voted to go along with setting the village on fire. But did he warn the raiders? And if he is in league with them, why didn’t he turn us in as soon as he found us in the forest?

  Think about that later.

  I open each cupboard and peer inside. There are enormous containers of water stored at one end of the kitchen. I don’t remember where the cups are and I’m too thirsty and hurried to look carefully, but the stove has pots and pans stored underneath. I pull one out and fill it from a spigot on the nearest container. When I’ve finished, I wipe off the pot with the edge of my shirt and put it back.

  A cabinet with flour, sugar, spices. Another with tack and other staples inside. The cold-storage bins are picked over, with an apple or two rattling around inside.

  They’re running out of food. We had enough to last us for the return, but the raiders never planned to journey back to the Outpost, so they’ve been using it up. And, of course, there are more people on the ship now.

  I take a piece of tack and chew it carefully, trying not to leave any crumbs.

  Once my hunger pains are appeased, I pull at the kitchen drawers until I find a fork. Jimmying the handcuffs requires thought and precise movements, neither of which is my strong suit right now. I accidentally bump my burned hand, and the pain sends a shrill scream ringing through every nerve in my arm. I bite down so hard on my lip that I taste blood. My heart races, judders.

  Get control.

  I put my good hand on my chest. Remind your heart where it is. Inside, safe. Remind yourself who you are.

  Poe. Poe. Poe.

  Bearing down against the pain, barely breathing, I focus on putting the tines of the fork into the keyhole of the handcuff. My wrists and fingers twist awkwardly, agonizingly. You can do this. I press, and the cuffs spring open.

  Tears of relief and pain leap to my eyes. I pull off the cuffs and stuff them underneath the refuse in the compost bin.

  What about medicine? There should be a first-aid kit here, because of the risks in cooking—getting cut or burned. I should know where to find it. Once I became captain, I studied everything about this ship. Where the fire extinguishers are. Where the spare parts are stowed. Think.

  In the cabinet next to the stove, on the left.

  There it is, screwed in just below the top shelf. I take down the kit and open it up. There are bandages, gauze, and, yes, several bottles of pills. Will they notice what I take? I double-dose myself with antibiotics and pain medication, shaking tablets into my pockets for later.

  Though it’s dangerous to stay in one place for long, I pause for a few moments, hoping the pain medication will kick in fast. I use my teeth to pull at the gauze and unwrap my wound. Raw-red and angry; yellow, seeping, infected. I pull out ointment and rub it on, then apply new gauze.

  As I wrap a fresh bandage around my hand, I remember my mother doing this. After I fell. And scraped my knee on the uneven sidewalk near the shop where we had gone to buy tea—the woodsy, scrappy kind made from a plant common in the Outpost. The shop was on the second floor of an old brick building that had a mural on the side. I had tipped my head back to look up, up, up at the giant rendering of the Admiral, who was wearing his gold watch and holding his hat in his hand, looking down, down, down, smiling and showing his perfect teeth, his swept-back hair. So hale, so hearty.

  If my mother was there to bind up my injured knee, then she was in the Outpost with me, too. Which means I wasn’t stolen. I was not torn from my family. I am an orphan, plain and simple.

  But. Call.

  What else did he tell me about his mother? His family? His life before the orphanage?

  He mostly told me dreams.

  I saw a boy running, running.

  There was a man standing by a tree late at night, holding a lantern.

  My mother was walking in a field and stopped to pick three flowers.

  I tell myself those dreams don’t mean anything. A boy could be running anywhere. We have some trees in the Outpost. There aren’t many fields there, it’s true, but once Call picked a purple flower from a weed growing in the scrap yard and gave it to me.

  My heart beats a panicked dance against my chest. What other dreams did you have, Call?

  He’s gone. And even if I ever get used to that, how do I get over this? The fact that I will never, ever know his whole story? I know the middle and the ending, but I can’t know his beginning.

  Unless.

  What if Call was a raider? What if he was stolen as a child?

  Could they tell me more about him?

  The raiders killed him. I saw his body with my own eyes. But what if I can find out more about Call from the raiders, before I bring them down? Is that a reason to work with them? To play along for a while?

  I hear the hidden anguish in the motor, the roughness and strain in the way the ship moves that’s new, but fast becoming chronic. And I don’t think the raiders have done this on purpose to get me to come out. The sounds are subtle, intimating trouble in ways that only a machinist would notice. For someone who knows the ship as well as I do, it’s a call for help.

  “I’m coming,” I whisper.

  Light slivers through the doorway. Someone has entered the cafeteria. They might be on their way here to the kitchen.

  There’s no other way out.

  I slide open the cold-storage bin, the one with the apples. It has no latch, so I should be able to get out when the time comes. I scramble inside and curl myself in the bin, reaching up to push the bin back into alignment with the underside of the shelving above me.

  Footsteps. Boots. A single person.

  Surely whoever it is came in for something other than that last apple. Maybe they’ll leave the bin alone.

  Noise. Clanging. Pots and pans.

  Tam, making breakfast? But I don’t think it’s time. I think it’s still night.

  Someone’s searching.

  I don’t know how long I can stay curled up like this, my body contorted, every muscle weary and taut.

  As long as I have to.

  Which doesn’t turn out to be long at all.

  Someone walks over and tugs at the bin. When they find out how heavy it is, they grunt in surprise and I feel them dragging it out, across the floor. I don’t have time to run or shoot or fight; I don’t even have time to unfold myself. So I do the one thing I can think of that might throw off the person who’s found me. I smile up at them, though with the pain I’m in and the anger I feel, it might look like a scowl, a scrawl across my face.

  “Tam,” I say. “It’s good to see you.”

  CHAPTER 30

  MY TONE THROWS HIM OFF. I almost laugh. I attacked him and ran away and now he’s found me tucked in a bin in his kitchen. I’m filthy, I smell like a forest fire, and I’m acting like everything is fine.

  Well, Tam, I want to say. Nothing really makes sense anymore. Would you like to tell me who you really are?

  He misses a beat before he responds. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “This is not your river,” I say. “This is not your gold.”

  He doesn’t pretend not to know what I’m talking about, not to recognize the words from the notes left in my cabin. Good. His face is harder than I remembered. He’s tired. We’re all tired and lit up, all at the same time, and fissures run through each of us, everyone on this ship. We are going to wind up and break down; fracture into new pieces and go under.

  “You wrote the notes,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Help me out of here.” I stretch out my good hand. “It’s ridiculous to talk like this.”

  His eyes flicker over my face as he pulls me up. He can’t quite hide his shock as he takes in my appearance. I must look even worse than the last time he saw me. I’m struck by how clean he is. His hair has been washed; his skin almost glows. He doesn’t seem to be the one injured by my shot in the hallway near the captain’s cabin. So was it Lily who went down?

  “You left the notes in my room,” I say. “It’s been you all along.” I move away from him so he can’t try to take the rifle from my back. “But how did you shut off the mining system? You were with me when it went down. We were searching the rooms.”

  Tam’s lips tighten, as if he’s thinking about what he’ll say and how to say it.

  “And where did you get a copy of the key to my cabin?” I ask. “Who gave you the maps to write on? Eira?” I lean against the kitchen counter in an attempt to hide my fatigue. I don’t think I’m fooling Tam. “Is she the other traitor?”

  “Eira didn’t give me anything,” Tam says, his voice low. He looks so wholesome, so honorable. So believable. But he’s an enemy, not a friend, no matter how familiar he seems to me after days spent on the ship and in the woods. Right now I think I have the advantage—I have a gun and he doesn’t—but we’re in his kitchen, and he knows where to get a knife. “I had it all before we left the Outpost.”

  “Then who gave it to you?” I ask.

  “Someone who was on one of the earlier voyages.”

  “Naomi?”

  “It wasn’t Naomi,” he says. “That’s all I’m going to say.” An expression close to fury briefly crosses his face.

  “And Brig?” I keep my voice conversational, while Tam’s brow is furrowed, his voice tight. We’ve changed roles. Now he’s the one ablaze, and I’m keeping cool, easy, light. “Was he in league with you?”

  “No,” Tam says. “None of them were. When the drifters caught you, we decided to come back to the ship.”

  Drifters. He doesn’t bother using the Outpost’s term. I suspected him for so long; do I feel any betrayal with the confirmation that it’s true?

  “Are the others following the raiders’ orders?” I ask.

  “Naomi’s trying to fix the armor.”

  Naomi? I try not to show my surprise. I thought she’d hold out longer. “Brig?”

  “He won’t cooperate, so they’ve got him locked up for now. He’s the Admiral’s boy, through and through.” Tam’s mouth twists into an almost sneer. It looks wrong on him.

  The Admiral’s boy, through and through. I’ve wondered that all along, too. But hearing Tam say it makes my heart sink. Did Brig jump ship not because he trusted me as a leader, but because the Admiral had ordered him to watch me? “And Eira?”

  “The drifters promised that if she joined with them, she could work on something new,” Tam says. “She was sick of drawing the Admiral’s maps and murals. She didn’t like being his pawn.”

  “No one does,” I say.

  “You don’t seem to mind.” Tam’s quiet now, his voice honest and sad.

  “You’re a fool if you think that’s what I am.” My façade slips, an edge of anger singes my voice. “The Admiral is my means to kill the raiders.”

  “Don’t you want anything more?” Tam asks. And just like that, we’re back to who we were before, me piqued and Tam earnest, trying to convince me.

  “Don’t you want anything more than to be the raiders’ puppet?” I counter.

  “That’s not what I am.” Tam wants me to understand. He wants us to fix this, to come out on the same side. Why?

  “What kind of deal have you made?” I ask. “You gave the ship and the crew to the raiders. So you could have . . . what? More gold?”

  “The drifters aren’t going to kill anyone as long as we agree to join with them,” Tam says.

  I laugh, a rusty sound as wrong as the dredge. “You forget. I was on the voyage where they said they’d kill us all.”

  “They changed their minds.”

  “Did they?” I ask. “So none of our crew has died since the raiders took over the ship?”

  Tam’s face falls. That’s the difference between us. He is good. He regrets when his enemies die. “We lost three,” he says. “That body Eira and Naomi saw, and two more. They tried to escape. That’s the reason they were shot.”

  “Why did you come with us at all?” I ask. “Why jump off the ship? Why help us set the fires?”

  “Because the drifters wanted you,” he says. “I offered to be the one to go out and bring you back in.”