“Our scout reports that the Admiral is traveling with plenty of guards and guns,” Porter says. “We think it’s to guard the gold and escort the dredge along the river. But he won’t hesitate to use them on us when he finds out we’ve taken the ship.”

  Is Porter telling the truth? How can I know for sure?

  I don’t even know what I want the outcome to be. I want my ship back. I want the Admiral to help us fight the raiders. But I don’t want him to take the ship from me. Or to punish the crew.

  “You’re out of time,” Porter says. Behind him, the clouds move and the light changes. There is a sun somewhere low beyond the horizon, waiting to come up. “We didn’t hunt you down when you jumped. We’ve kept you alive so far. But you’ve become a liability.”

  “So I fix the armor, or you kill me,” I say. “Like you’re going to kill us all.”

  “I’m not going to kill anyone unless they don’t cooperate,” Porter says.

  I spit out the words. “‘This is the last time we leave anyone alive.’”

  Silence on the ship. Porter’s face, drawn in the lamplight. I think I hear him sigh. “Do you remember what I said before that?”

  “‘Tell your Admiral that we’re done with him taking from us,’” I say.

  “He took Call from us.”

  “No.” I’m livid at the lie. “He didn’t. You shot Call.”

  “The Admiral’s guards took Call from us when he was a child,” Porter says. “We didn’t realize who we’d killed until you’d all gone and we got a closer look at the body.” He swallows. “Even then, we weren’t sure. He’d changed over the years. But his mother knew when we brought him home.”

  Sun-black hair. She walked in a field and picked three flowers.

  “Where is she now?” I ask. My hands are trembling. Maybe I could see her. Maybe we could talk.

  “She’s gone,” Porter says. “She died a few months after we brought back the body.”

  “What about Call’s father?” There has to be someone left. Someone who knew him. Please.

  “He died before Call was born.” Porter shifts his weight. This is the longest I’ve ever seen him stay in one spot. “It’s not an easy life out here.”

  “Brothers or sisters?”

  “He didn’t have any.”

  “Wait,” I say, realizing something I should have noticed sooner, the minute Porter spoke of Call. “How do you know his name?” I never told anyone out here. Naomi didn’t say it in the woods, when she spoke to the others. But did she tell Porter?

  “It was the one his mother gave him,” Porter says. “The settlers let him keep that, at least.”

  The settlers stole Call. The raiders shot him.

  I want to push Porter over the deck, swing the lantern against his head, rake my nails across his face. Call was one of their own, and they killed him. And Call’s family is gone. Even the possibility of meeting them is stolen from me. I thought I hadn’t let myself take hold of it, but the tearing in my heart tells me that I did. I dared to hope again, a bit. Not that I could get Call back. But his family. Others who loved him.

  That’s not for you either, the stars seem to say.

  Am I ever going to heal?

  “Are you going to help us?” Porter asks.

  My mind races, running over the ship, the armor, the Outpost in the unseeable distance, the houses in the trees, a boy’s body on another boat, wagons on their way.

  Can I believe Porter about the Admiral? About Call? About any of it?

  Who can I trust?

  My ship. Myself?

  “That depends,” I say.

  “On what?”

  “On how greedy you are,” I say.

  “I’m not as greedy as a settler,” Porter says.

  I laugh. The sound rings out in the night and I fold my arms. “If that’s true, then we’ll get away fine. The solution is simple.”

  “What is it?”

  “If you outrun the Admiral,” I say, “you’ll never have to fight him. All those guards and guns won’t matter. Get to where you’re going and hide.”

  “We can’t outrun him.”

  “Leave the gold,” I say. “Leave the ship, too. Get in your little boats. And run.”

  A pause. “We can’t do that,” Porter says. “We need all of the gold, and the ship is the only way we have to carry this much.”

  I let his words and what they mean hang in the air. You are just as greedy as we are.

  “I see,” I say, finally. “Then you’re dead.”

  “Fix the armor,” Porter says. “If you do that, we have a better chance of fighting them off.”

  “It’ll take too long. He’ll catch us before we can repair it.”

  “So you’re not going to help us,” he says. There’s a rifle on his back. He could finish me now.

  “I am,” I say. “There’s one more option. One last thing you can do to make a run for it on the ship, and keep the gold.”

  “And that is?”

  “What else can you dump that’s heavy?” I ask, goading Porter, gilding my words with the urgency, the certitude in my tone.

  “I already told you,” he says. “We’re not going to kill everyone. Most of the settlers have been cooperating.”

  “That’s not what I’m suggesting,” I say. And he’s a fool if he thinks that dumping bodies would make a difference. Human bodies are nothing compared with the weight of gold. “Do I need to spell it out for you?”

  “Please,” says Porter.

  “The armor.” I point to the gears glimmering in the moonlight, the metal teeth hungry for more. This thing I made. “Get rid of it.”

  CHAPTER 33

  “YOU’RE LETTING HER DO WHAT?” Lily asks, outraged.

  Porter hands me a torch for cutting metal. I resist the urge to light it now, to let it blaze and blind them.

  “Mac’s going to watch her,” Porter says. “He has orders to shoot if necessary.”

  “I could cover her,” Lily says. “Or I could do it myself. There’s no reason to give her a weapon.”

  Porter ignores that. “She knows the way the armor is put together better than anyone,” he says. “She’ll be able to dismantle it faster.” He hands a torch to Naomi as well. We know how to work them best, but I’m sure Lily isn’t the only one uneasy about this. The assembled raiders and crew Porter called up to the deck to help with the demolition all look wary. Porter’s trying to mix oil and water by having us work together.

  “Taking off the armor leaves us too vulnerable.” Lily balls up her fists in fury. “I know she can fix it.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “But with the Admiral on his way, we’re out of time.” I smile at Lily. “And it turns out that you aren’t willing to give up the gold. So this is our last option.”

  Naomi’s expression as she watches me is wary, weighing. As if she can’t believe what I’m doing. The way I’m betraying my own creation.

  “Let’s get it off,” I say to her. “As fast and neat as we can.” We have three cutting torches on board. They were intended to aid in repairs, not demolition. But they’ll work for this.

  “We have no reason to trust her,” Lily fumes.

  “Enough,” says Porter. “We’re wasting time.”

  “This is our best chance.” I’ve washed my hair in the bath and sluiced off all the dirt from the forest, and I’m wearing the change of clothing left in my room. I ate real food for breakfast and took medicine and slept for an hour.

  I feel . . . not happy. Not that.

  Ever since I told Porter about the armor, I’ve been full of a reckless something. Something wild and free, terrifying and exhilarating and angry.

  The Admiral wants me to kill the raiders and get him gold. Porter wants me to fix the armor and double-cross the Admiral.

  These leaders. These men. They push and push and they back me into a corner, they follow me there and block my escape and ask the impossible. But I’m going to slip away through their grasping hands and leave them with nothing.

  Both of them had a part in killing Call, so they can both pay.

  Lily makes one last appeal to Porter. “She deliberately delayed fixing the armor. How do you know this wasn’t her plan all along? Maybe she wasn’t really surprised when you told her the Admiral was coming. She could have been buying time for him to catch up to us. Maybe that’s what she’s doing now.”

  The door to the deck opens.

  There he is.

  The one I asked for.

  Two guards haul Brig out on the deck. He has to duck through the doorway like I do, like Call did. The raiders are none too gentle, shoving him toward Porter, but Brig doesn’t stumble. His eyes, when they meet mine, are clear but weary. The cut across his nose is a neat red line. They haven’t let him shave, so he is shadowed, his hair more unkempt than I’ve ever seen it. His cheeks look hollow, as if the time without food has already set in to wasting him. And yet the word that comes to mind when I see him isn’t beaten or weary or broken. It’s contained. Not by the raiders. Within himself. “He’s the Admiral’s boy, through and through,” Tam said.

  Is that really what Brig is?

  “Is it true?” Brig asks, his voice low and familiar. “You’re helping the raiders tear apart the ship?”

  “We’re getting rid of the armor.” I hold up my torch. “The raiders don’t have any experience with these. Do you know how to use one?” Brig didn’t work on the scrap yard like I did. And he’s still the most likely of us to be the Admiral’s watchdog. But I want to see what he’ll do. What he’ll say.

  Will he join me?

  I swear I see a flicker of a smile on his lips, a lick of fire in his eyes.

  “Yes,” he says.

  * * *

  • • •

  Minutes later, Brig and Naomi and I hang on ropes down the side of the ship. Mac and two other raiders cover us with their rifles. Another raider belays Brig, Lily’s got Naomi, and Porter is lowering me. I guess he thought anyone else might decide to drop me right into the churn of the river below.

  Maybe the three of them will drop the three of us. They could. It would be a neat way to get rid of the former captain and first and second mates in one fell swoop. With one hand still bandaged and wrapped up, I’m not as fast or agile as I’d like. They could take me out easy.

  Brig and Naomi have the torches. They run on acetylene and oxygen gas in the small tanks, and when the flames are lit, they spit fiery sparks. I have a grease pencil in hand, which I’m using to mark the best places for them to make the cuts. Once I finish marking, I’ll use a torch, too. All over the dredge, the rest of my crew dangles from ropes, sawing, hammering, bludgeoning my armor to death the fastest way they can, using whatever they can find. Crowbars. Wrenches. They unscrew and unhinge; they worry at the puzzle I created years ago in the safety of the Outpost.

  But my armor is sound. Solid. It doesn’t give up easily.

  I hear grumbles of frustration and muttered epithets, and I shove the grease pencil into my breast pocket.

  “Brig,” I say. “Give me your torch for a minute.”

  His sleeves are rolled up and I see singes from the torch on his arms as he makes his way across to me, pressing his boots against the side of the ship as he walks. “What are you doing?” Mac calls down.

  “I want to give it a try,” I say, pulling the leather gloves out of my pack to protect my hands. Brig hands over the tank and the torch, carefully.

  I bring the flame to the mark on the metal. Sweat trickles down my back as I bear down on the cut, bracing my boots against the prickly, serrated side of my ship. The torch hisses and spurts; people batter the dredge all around me, all of us locked in battle by and with the choices we and others have made.

  And then. A give. A groan?

  I push away just in time.

  The armor drops. The motion feels slow; it feels like I sink with it, the heavy, inevitable fall pulling something within me. I tighten my grip. Don’t follow it down.

  Below, the piece of armor hits the water like an oversize stone thrown by a child.

  Am I helping the raiders run faster? Or am I giving the Admiral a chance to assist me in finishing them? Maybe I can ruin them both, Porter and the Admiral, the men who killed Call. I’ll bring them together, let them kill each other off, and I’ll slip away through the cracks.

  Will it work? Will I finally run?

  I’m not completely sure why anyone on the dredge is doing what they’re doing. Including myself.

  Am I going to get what I want out of this?

  Or destroy the one thing I have left?

  CHAPTER 34

  MY ARMS SHAKE, my shoulders ache, and my face is dirty and hot. Small burns cover my forearms where sparks singed through the sleeves of my shirt. My injured hand throbs, though I’ve tried to go easy on it. We’ve been de-armoring the ship all day, dawn to dusk. I feel the heat of a sunburn prickling my nose and the back of my neck.

  Others will work through the night while Brig and Naomi and I steal a few hours’ rest. The beating and uncoupling of the armor still takes place all over the ship, a dissonant song of destruction and severance.

  Tam and the kitchen crew carry soup and bread up to the deck for supper. I linger near the railing, wanting Brig and the others to have food first, but Tam brings me my portion himself. He peers over the side of the ship and whistles. The dredge looks like one of the feral dogs that run through the back streets of the Outpost, mangy and mottled, pieces of their coats torn away or dangling. “Why did you decide to do this?” he asks. “You love the ship. You hate the drifters.”

  “Why did you decide to do this?” I ask, sending the question back to him. “Why turn on your own people?”

  He levels his gaze at me, his expression unusually earnest. “Didn’t you ever get sick of the same old story?”

  “What story?”

  “The Outpost story.” He’s still holding the tray, but he seems to have forgotten all about it; the tray tips, a bowl slides. I reach out and take the tray from him, balancing it with my good hand as I listen. Tam’s voice is full of feeling. “How the rest of the world abandoned us, so the first Admiral gathered us in, and now we all scrap and scrape to survive at the edge of the Territory?”

  Yes. I am. I’m so tired of that story—of the Union deserting us, of the Admirals protecting us ever since—that I could scream. It’s why Call and I wanted to run. It’s why we were going to leave, together. It was time for something new and unwritten. My throat knots and tears sting my eyes. “Of course I’m tired of it,” I say. “But there’s no other story to tell.”

  “I started to wonder if it was even true,” Tam says. “What if the people living outside of the Outpost never wanted to come back in? What if they’d left for a reason?”

  The ship shifts. Somewhere below, we’ve lost armor, and the motion tilts the tray, sends the dishes sliding into one another. Tam and I reach out to catch them; he grabs at the soup bowl, my fingers close on the bread. The water tips, spills out onto the deck, is lost.

  “When I found out what we’d done, taking the raider kids, I knew I had to do something,” Tam says. “Can you imagine what it would be like to have been torn away from everyone you know? From where you belong?”

  “I know what it’s like to lose your family,” I say. “The place where you belonged. I was raised in one of the orphanages.”

  Tam looks taken aback. He must have forgotten that about me.

  And the truth is, I can imagine what it would be like. Too well. The dark of night, someone coming and taking you away. Bringing you to another night with terrible false stars and lights and so many buildings and people, and someone saying, This is your home, and you know that isn’t right, and you cry out for help.

  But no one comes. You never get to leave. You don’t go home.

  And when you try, they can’t see your face in the dark, they don’t know the shape of you anymore, and that is how someone else finishes your story.

  CHAPTER 35

  BY THE END OF THE NEXT DAY, it’s clear we’ve made headway. Sparks dance near Brig’s hands and face as he cuts through the metal. Another piece of armor splashes into the water below and the ship seems to sigh in relief. I tell Porter that we can try the motor soon, since we’ve lost so much mass.

  It’s hard to look at the gears and mechanisms that I designed fall into the river, to watch the ship stripped of its defenses. The armor is everything I’ve done. The one thing I’ve ever created.

  I steel myself against the unsettled feeling of loss that turns at the back of my mind. This was my idea. I made something. Everyone else wants to take it. Everyone else gets to use it.

  And I have decided, Not anymore.

  I made this.

  It’s not yours.

  If I can’t have it, then I’ll unmake it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Without warning, the rope to which I’m tethered jerks sharply. I shoot a glance up at Mac, who’s belaying again.

  Is he going to let me go?

  But he’s hauling me up, hand over hand, shouting, “Hurry!” I use my boots against the wall of the ship to help him, gripping the rope with my gloves, the torch slung into its strap across my back. Brig and Naomi climb next to me, Brig fast, Naomi not far behind, even with her injury. Once I’m over the railing, I ask Mac, breathless, “What’s happened?”

  “Someone’s coming,” he says, “on the shore.” All around me, crew and raiders who were cutting and sawing and clubbing at my armor clamber over the railing and onto the ship.

  “Duck down,” someone says. “They might have a gun.”