“Is it the settlers?” I ask, dropping to a crouch next to Mac.

  “Just one.” He points through the bottom rung of the railing. A rider moves fast along the edge of the river, where the grass and sand are smooth enough for a single horse. A plume of dust follows.

  “They’ve sent someone to bargain,” Brig says.

  “The Admiral doesn’t bargain,” I say. If you deal with the Admiral, you will pay and pay and pay.

  * * *

  • • •

  The group Porter gathers in the cafeteria is largely the dredge’s original crew, plus a handful of his women and men, who are armed. He left a few of the raiders on the deck to keep watch. He has me stand next to him, on his left. I’m at the Devil’s hand. Again.

  As I look out over my crew, I say their names in my head. Eira Clyde, cartographer, and one of the only people who jumped with me. Ophelia Hill, navigator. Laura Seng, medic. Corwin Revis, chief machinist. Owen Fales, miner and traitor. But the chaplain is gone, and so are two others, and maybe more.

  Do they think I betrayed them? Failed them? I told them to jump off the ship and run with me. They didn’t follow. Then I came back and shut down the motor, had them start hacking away at the armor.

  “The Admiral sent an emissary,” Porter tells us. “I went out to meet him. He’s on the shore awaiting our response.”

  I watch Porter, trying to decide what kind of leader he is. A good one? He didn’t let the emissary on the ship. He went out and took the danger upon himself. Those seem like brave choices. But are they stupid ones, as well?

  “Kill the emissary,” Lily says. “Right now. While we can. That’s a message the Admiral will understand.”

  “The emissary offered a deal from the Admiral,” Porter says. The raiders in the room mutter, and crew members shift warily in their seats. Does the Admiral want us back?

  “He says that if we give up the gold and Captain Blythe, he won’t hunt us down.”

  What?

  Eyes in the room, all on me. Why does the Admiral want me? When the emissary goes back, he’ll tell the Admiral what he’s seen. And what will he do when he hears what I’ve done to the ship?

  “Kill the emissary,” Lily says again. I can tell her mind is threading the same needle as mine. “He’s going to tell the Admiral that we’re taking apart the ship. That we don’t have any armor anymore. They’ll get to us as fast as they can. We’ll be sitting ducks.”

  Porter’s eyes meet mine. “You should,” I say. “That’s what the settlers would do. They take gold and they kill.” I don’t say the rest. We’re all the same. But it hangs there in the air anyway.

  “Killing him won’t buy much more time,” Porter says. “If he doesn’t return to their camp soon, they’ll come for us nevertheless.”

  “We can give the Admiral half of what he wants,” says Mac. “Send the captain back with the emissary and see what happens.”

  Why has the Admiral asked for this?

  I can think of only one reason. Somehow, he knows I’ve failed. He’s going to punish me.

  “That’s all the Admiral wanted?” Tam asks.

  “All he wanted?” Lily says, her voice cool. “You think taking the gold is reasonable?”

  Porter holds up his hand and everyone falls silent.

  “This is the point of no return,” Porter says. “If you are a member of the ship’s original crew, and you don’t fight with us when the Admiral attacks, I’ve given my men and women permission to shoot you.”

  “How do you know your raiders won’t just gun us down anyway the first chance they get?” Brig asks.

  “We need the numbers,” Porter says bluntly. “If you fight with us, we won’t kill you.”

  “What about the rest of you?” asks Naomi. “There are plenty more raiders out there who aren’t on the ship now.”

  “They won’t be fighting,” Porter says.

  “Why not?” Brig asks.

  “You’ll make us die for you, but you’re not all going to fight for yourselves?” Even as the words leave my mouth, the image of the raiders in their boats comes to mind. And then I know. They’re not going to help us fight because they’re not here. Not on the dredge. Not waiting on the shore or hidden in the forest.

  “They’ve gone on already,” I say. “In the boats.” That’s why the relocated village was almost empty when we came to set fire to it; why there were so few houses left in the trees. Even if Porter and his crew are killed and the gold gets taken by the Admiral, the rest of the villagers have a fighting chance and a running start. He could have used those boats to carry some of the gold, but that was never the plan. The plan was always to keep as many people as safe as possible, while this small crew took the enormous gamble of taking the dredge and its treasure.

  “The people on the ship are all we have now,” Porter says. “And everyone here will fight. Hard.”

  “What about this one?” Lily asks, jutting her elbow in my direction. “Let’s send her back with the emissary, like Mac said. Maybe filling half the bargain will buy us some time.”

  Porter studies me. What does he see? A tall girl with braided hair and grease under her fingernails? Someone who tried to set his village on fire? Does it matter that I once loved and was loved by one of their own?

  “It’s up to you,” he says. “You can go with the emissary or stay on the ship.”

  Lily draws in her breath but holds her tongue when Porter gives her a fierce glance.

  Everyone’s watching. Tam’s expression is conflicted—his eyes burning into mine, his lips twisted in a frown. He’s on the side of the raiders, but I don’t think he relishes the thought of sending me back to face the Admiral’s wrath.

  Most of my crew look as if they’d like me to go ahead and volunteer. Why not? I can see them thinking. It might buy us time, and she’s never been much of a captain. I wouldn’t miss her if she were gone.

  Brig shakes his head, an almost imperceptible motion. He doesn’t want me to go. Why? If he really were in the Admiral’s pocket, wouldn’t he want me to return to the Admiral to tell him what I know about the raiders’ plans, so he could better take them down?

  I don’t know why, in this moment, I trust Brig the most. Because he was the first to follow me off the ship? Because he never turned on me in the forest, not once?

  He could have been pretending then. He could be pretending now.

  It may be that I’m a fool.

  “We’re out of time,” Porter says. He folds his arms and fixes me with his eyes, brown and deep. Eyes that saw Call when he was young, that saw the Admiral take him away.

  I want to stay with my ship.

  I’m not going to walk into the Admiral’s arms to buy time for people I don’t know. But I can fix the dredge. “I’ll stay,” I say. “You need me to get the motor running.”

  It’s not your ship anymore, my mind needles at me. You had them tear off the armor you made.

  So why am I hanging on to it?

  The dredge took on gold. Killed people. Ruined the river.

  The ship deserves to die. It should be stopped.

  It’s me.

  And I can’t leave it.

  CHAPTER 36

  “IT’S NOT WORKING,” Lily says.

  “I can see that,” I say, irritated. I rub my dirty hands on my pants and lift my chin to Porter, who’s come down to the mining deck to check on our progress. “I swear what I’ve done should get it going again.”

  I’ve removed the metal shielding around the motor so I can get at it better. The motor’s not in good shape. They pushed it too hard. But we don’t need to go far. We don’t have to get back down the river. We just have to get to the raiders’ rendezvous point as fast as possible.

  I’m not just trying to fix the motor. I’m also disengaging any of the power take-off systems we don’t need so that I can increase torque. That will make us go faster than we ever have before. Faster than the ship was designed to go.

  I am keeping this fact from the others.

  “How long do we have?” Lily asks. She’s trying to calculate how soon the settlers will reach us. Porter sent the emissary back with the news that there would be no bargain.

  “The Admiral doesn’t travel often,” I say. “When he does, he uses wagons and riders. The riders are fast, but the wagons aren’t.”

  “How fast can they go?” Lily asks.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “I never worked on them.” The wagons are made of metal. They’re old trucks from before the Desertion with the tops sawed off to let in air. Some of them still have motors that work, but they use gasoline, which is a precious commodity in the Outpost. Others are pulled by horses that heave and strain.

  It’s not easy to get up the river, by motor or by horse.

  You have to feed them both.

  Why didn’t the Admiral adapt the solar technology from the dredge for the wagons? I wonder. Surely someone could have figured out how to re-create it.

  Well. He never asked me to do it, and it’s not my problem now.

  “I’d think we have a couple of days,” I say. “It’s a lot easier for an emissary to ride ahead on the river. There’s no road for the wagons near the banks. They’re going to have to clear the way.”

  I hope we have a couple of days. I’m guessing based on what I know of the wagons and what Eira and Porter and I have deduced from a combination of the settlers’ and raiders’ maps.

  I gesture for Porter to go up with me to the smaller deck so we can talk without anyone else trying to listen in.

  Lily follows us, of course. We climb the metal stairs and, though it’s only a couple of flights, I’m dizzy when we reach the top. I’m not getting enough rest, and the infection from my burn lingers. I lean against the wall in feigned nonchalance to hide the fatigue, my palm next to the written signals: three short rings for an emergency. The metal is cool and grainy under my hand.

  “I think someone’s undermining what I’m trying to do,” I say.

  Lily mimics my stance, propping one arm against the wall in a mocking way. She’s been following me around on the mining deck ever since Porter gave me permission to try to fix the motor. “So it’s someone else’s fault you can’t do your job?”

  I ignore Lily and address Porter, whose fingers drum against his leg. His face never shows panic, or fear, even as time slides away from us faster and faster. “I want everyone to leave the mining deck,” I say. “I need quiet. I need to think. I can’t do it with people watching.”

  Porter shakes his head. “I can’t allow that.”

  “I’m making no progress.” I grit my teeth. “And I know I could. You could stay. That would be fine.” But he can’t spare the time. He has so much else to do.

  “I have to leave someone down here with you,” Porter says.

  “Then have Lily stay,” I say.

  “Who?” Porter asks.

  Lily can’t hide her surprise. “What?”

  “If anything happens to me when the Admiral catches us, you’re going to need someone to know what I’ve done,” I say. “And I don’t think it can be one of my crew.” It pains me to tell them this. But I don’t think it’s a raider who’s trying to keep me from fixing the ship. What reason would any of them have to do that? I point at Lily. “But she can stay. As long as she doesn’t get in my way.”

  “All right,” Porter says. “I’ll have the others leave. But I can’t give you long.”

  “This means you’re going to have to watch what I’m doing,” I tell Lily, “and you’re going to have to listen to me.”

  Lily rolls her eyes.

  Porter’s lips twitch in what might be a smile.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Where did you come from?” I ask Lily as I work. I can tell—from her accent, her boots, the way she acts sometimes—that she is neither raider nor settler. What intrigues me is that she’s still herself, still different, but she’s found a place to belong. Porter respects her. The raiders see her as part of their group.

  “Why do you need to know?”

  I want to know how you do it. Instead, I say, “I want to know what else is out there.” I flip the switch to power up the motor, and it hums to life. Beautiful. I put my hands behind my head and stretch in satisfaction, letting myself hum along.

  Lily’s face lights up. “You did it!” For a few minutes we stand there, both of us listening, the motor running, sounding better and better until—

  I kill it.

  “What are you doing?”

  I make a motion for her to be quiet and I listen to the way the motor sounds when it’s stopping. I reach inside carefully. There’s not much room.

  “What are you doing?” Lily asks again. This time, there’s a note of curiosity in her voice.

  I wipe my hand on a dirty rag and gesture for Lily to listen closely. “Pay attention. This is something you might need to remember. I removed the check on the motor that keeps the propellers from spinning at maximum speed.”

  “What does that mean?” Lily asks.

  “The check is meant to keep the motor from burning out,” I say. “The propellers were designed to never spin at a one-to-one ratio from the main motor.” Lily’s hands are on her hips, her brow furrowed, listening closely. I try to make it as simple as I can. “I’ve removed the check, and I’ve cannibalized some parts from the mining system so that we can run at a full one-to-one ratio now.” When I say this, her blue eyes flash up to mine and I see that she understands. I’m going to burn out the motor. I’m sacrificing all its power to the propellers for speed.

  “We don’t need it to last forever,” I say. “Just long enough. And we need to move more quickly than we have been.”

  “You really think you can get us going fast enough to outrun the settlers?” Lily asks.

  “That’s the hope.” I study the motor. I didn’t feel anything wrong. It sounds good enough, but we aren’t going any faster. Which should be happening now, with my modifications. So what’s holding it back?

  “Hang on to this for me,” I say, giving Lily a kit full of tools. I slide underneath the motor, my back pressing uncomfortably against the metal floor of the ship.

  “The place I came from,” Lily says, after a few moments. “It was good and bad. Both.”

  “Will you ever go back?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Why not?” You can’t expect anywhere to be all good. One that’s both good and bad seems like a reasonable place to stay.

  “I like the drifters,” she says. “It takes everything they have to get food and shelter. But somehow it hasn’t made them mean.”

  I raise my eyebrows as I keep working. She must know what I’m thinking even though she can’t see me because she says, “It’s true. They can be merciless when they have to. But they’re not cruel.”

  There it is. Someone had added a rheostat to the motor, to reduce the power the motor is supposed to be retrieving from the solar-battery reserves.

  “I need the crowfoot wrench,” I say to Lily.

  Lily hands it to me. “Porter and I work well together,” she says. “He respects me.”

  “He does.” I’ve seen it. Been jealous of it. I want someone to treat me like an equal. Not lesser. Not greater.

  “He knows I understand,” she says. “That I accept that there will always be danger in keeping the others safe.”

  She doesn’t say it like she’s bragging, but like she’s proud. I wish I were that kind of person. I want to be that kind of person. To know I am trusted and respected, to say it out loud.

  “What made you that way?”

  “I’ve already died,” she says.

  I wrinkle my nose at the absurdity of this statement. “You’re not going to tell me that you believe in palingenesis, too, like the Admiral.”

  “No,” Lily says. Her voice has gone sober. “I crashed. I almost burned. I could have lost everything. I’d rather not come that close again. But I will if I have to.”

  Her face appears under the motor, her hair hanging into her eyes. She pushes it away. “Am I supposed to be learning how to do something here?”

  “Watch me,” I say. “And don’t worry. You don’t have to know how to do it all. As long as you know what to do and can tell it to one of the machinists later, you’ll be all right.”

  “So we should try to keep at least one machinist alive,” Lily says drily.

  “And you’d better pray that it isn’t one of them who’s trying to compromise the ship.”

  “Do you think it is?” she asks.

  “It seems the most likely,” I admit.

  I’ve finished removing the rheostat. I slide out from under the motor and engage the propeller’s power take-off system.

  I glance at Lily, my face dirty and sweaty, and then grin so wide I can feel my eyes crinkle. The ship sings with new momentum.

  I’m letting it loose.

  Faster. Faster. We are on the move and alive at last. “You feel that?” I ask Lily.

  She does.

  * * *

  • • •

  Over the next day and a half, the motor holds up, but no one lets down their guard. A crew batters and torches the remaining armor on the top of the deck, stripping it down the way we did the sides.

  We’re making good time, but we’re still running out of time.

  I stay on mining deck duty in order to guard the motor. Either Lily or Porter or Mac takes turns with me. I sleep for a few hours at night; Tam brings down my meals when he has a chance. I miss seeing Brig.

  “People don’t hate you as much,” Tam says.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “No, really,” he says. “A lot of them think you made the right call. And someone brought up that the armor wouldn’t have been much good against the settlers anyway.”