Even the drifters wanted me to do certain things.

  The tasks and tests mean nothing. They are not mine.

  I am who I say I am.

  I am Poe Blythe.

  “Nothing will ever be enough for you,” I tell the Admiral. I understand this about him. Because nothing will ever be enough for me. I could kill and kill and kill and it would never be enough to get Call back.

  Or I could stop.

  I could just stop.

  “Get off my ship,” I say to the Admiral.

  “What?” And here it is, at last and at once. The fury. The anger. The man inside. The real Admiral. His teeth bare; his eyes go hard. He points his rifle at me.

  “I gave you every chance,” he says. “But you’re an animal. So you can starve like one. Cut yourself to shreds trying to climb through the window. Beat your head against the wall until your brains come out. You can die on this ship. We’ll fly away, and you’ll never see anything outside of this room.”

  “I’m not an animal,” I say. “And I’m not your weapon. I’m not your anything.”

  The Admiral shifts his rifle. With his free hand, he reaches into his pocket and takes out a key.

  “You’re right,” he says. “You’re not anything.” He shuts the door to the bridge and locks it behind him.

  CHAPTER 48

  CALL AND I SHOULD HAVE RUN when we had the chance. We should have slipped away in the starry dark. Holding hands, laughing, afraid and alive.

  But we waited too long.

  I should have run when I had the chance. When I was in the woods with Brig and Tam and the others, I could have slipped away and never looked back.

  But I couldn’t let go. Of what the drifters had done to Call. Of the ship.

  The things I used to keep me moving, keep me alive, are now what tie me down. What will kill me.

  I don’t know why I’m crying. Because the Admiral was the closest thing I had to a father, even though I didn’t want him for one? Because if he hadn’t done that terrible thing, hadn’t taken the drifters’ children, I never would have known Call at all?

  Because the Admiral rejected me? Because that kind of person is the only kind who has ever come back for me?

  I’m hungry and thirsty and every bit of me aches. Through the window, I see the day turn into night and day again. The settlers have loaded up their wagons, and most of them are gone. I strain at the window, trying to see how many are left.

  I scratch and scrabble at the door, exactly like the Admiral said I would. I try to pick the lock with anything I can find. I manage to tear the safe from the wall and use it to smash through the window, and the breeze and the smell of the river come in to meet me.

  More and more, I wonder how much it would hurt to go through the window. Maybe it wouldn’t tear me apart completely and I could drop into the water and swim for shore.

  I remember when Call died, when I looked at his dead gone eyes and his beautiful face, his hands so still.

  I thought I will never be able to love anyone again.

  I thought I will kill the people who did this to you.

  And I thought I will do whatever it takes to stay alive.

  I turned away from his dead body and decided that no matter what, I was going to live.

  I don’t want to die.

  I won’t.

  If I try to climb through the window, at least I’ll die trying. I get to my feet and look through, careful not to touch the metal edges.

  I can see the river if I bend my head down, and the sky if I tip my head up.

  Oh.

  A flash of gold, passing across the window. Without thinking, I press closer. The metal bites the edge of my hand and I bring it to my mouth. The taste of my blood is sharp.

  The ship.

  It’s leaving.

  As it passes near the sun in the sky, something flares white-hot, incandescent. I move my hand from my mouth to shield my eyes. Blood drips into my lashes.

  Is the Palingenesis burning?

  Or is it merely a trick of the sun?

  Either way, the ship

  is gone.

  CHAPTER 49

  I WON’T EVER SET FOOT on that golden ship. I won’t ever see what’s inside, or watch the world drop away beneath me.

  I sink to my knees and rest my cheek against the cool metal of the door. It smells the way my blood tastes. “It’s just you and me, Lily,” I say to the dredge.

  “That’s not my name,” she says.

  Wait. Is the ship speaking? To me? After I broke her on the bank of the river?

  No. It’s a voice on the other side of the door.

  “Poe?” someone else says. “We’ve got a welding torch. Get away from the door.”

  I know that voice. It’s Brig.

  And the other one—was Lily? The real Lily, not the ship?

  I scramble away clumsily, back up against the wall. My heart pounding. I put my hand to my injured head. I’m not imagining this. I’m not. My head hurts, there’s dark dried blood on my hands and face, and there is someone on the other side of the door.

  And then it comes free from its hinges with a smell of fire and metal.

  Lily. And Brig. Standing there before me, cutting torch in his hands, a rifle in hers.

  They came back.

  “Poe.” Brig goes down on his knees on one side of me and Lily does the same on the other. They each take hold of one of my arms; they lift me up.

  “We’ve got you,” Lily says.

  “Brig,” I say. “Lily.” Then I remember. Lily is the ship. “That’s not your real name. What is it?”

  “Indie,” she says.

  CHAPTER 50

  “HURRY,” Indie says. “We’re not the only ones who came back for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The settlers.” She shifts her weight so she can better support me. “Some of them are outside. The ones the Admiral didn’t choose to go on the Palingenesis.”

  I’m cold and bloody and tired. I need to think. The pressure of Brig’s and Indie’s arms against mine reminds me where I am in my body, grounds me to the ship that’s here and not the one that left without me.

  “I think they know we’re here,” Indie says. “I think they’re waiting for us to come out with you.”

  We make it three steps, almost to the door, before Indie’s proven correct.

  “Captain Blythe.” A voice, magnified through a bullhorn, drifts through the broken window. “Please come out. It’s safe. We won’t harm you.”

  “You shouldn’t have come back.” I straighten up, put more weight on my legs. They hold.

  “I agree,” Lily says. Indie. I have to remember that she has another name. “But we did.”

  “You can bring your friends with you,” says the voice. It’s not the Admiral. It’s someone younger, and for a moment my mind skips and I think, Tam? before my heart sinks.

  Tam.

  He was ours, and I won’t forget him. That smile. The way he handed us food in a clearing in the woods. His profile, as he brought the gun up to shoot, sure and fast.

  He thought I was the kind of person who might change their mind. Who might be interested in other stories. You read me right, Tam. Tears sting my eyes, and I swallow hard.

  “We can put a white flag up on the deck and wait for them to come to us,” I say. “Let them board the ship if they want to talk.”

  Neither Brig nor Indie says anything. I know the deck is where Tam died. I know it’s where Call died, on another ship. I know there is blood up there. But I want to be out in the open on the dredge when I surrender. I don’t want to be on their ground. I’d like to be on mine.

  “We’ll decide together,” I say. “I don’t get to choose.”

  “You’re the captain,” says Brig.

  “This is your ship,” says Indie.

  We get a sheet from one of the rooms, climb up to the deck, tie it to the railing, and wait. Out on the shore, several wagons are drawn up near the tailings stacker. The settlers who came all the way up the river with the Admiral and then got left behind when he didn’t need them anymore.

  I wonder how they felt when the ship flew away.

  The white flag whips in the wind. Brig and Indie are pressed on either side of me, in case I fall. I can’t touch the railings to hold on; both my hands are hurt, but I will not sit down. “Why did Porter let me surrender us to the settlers?” I ask.

  “He trusted you.” Indie pushes a strand of wind-whipped hair out of her eyes. Though we aren’t moving, the wind is playing across the ship, as if it wants to help us pretend that we are. “He realized that you were the person most likely to know what the Admiral was thinking. What the Admiral might do. He thought we should take our cues from you.”

  “Because I’m like the Admiral.” The words are sick-sour on my tongue.

  “No.” Brig’s voice is forceful, and I feel him looking at me, even though I keep my eyes on the shore. “Knowing someone well doesn’t mean you’re like them.”

  “Why did the drifters really want the gold?” I ask Indie. “Were you going to try to go on the Palingenesis, too?”

  “No,” Indie says. “We knew the Admiral wanted the gold. We knew what he had in mind for it. So we wanted to take it from him, get to his rendezvous point. If we had the gold he needed, and the protection of the others who lived out here, we could bargain with him. We could try to get our children back.”

  “Is that why the drifters wanted the gold from our first voyage?” I ask.

  She nods. “We need it for a few things,” she says. “And it’s how we bribed people to get the information about the Admiral and his plans.” She takes a deep breath. “But we didn’t yet have enough to bring everyone home.”

  The Admiral wanted the gold to start a new world, to fly to glory and power and away from the disarray, the debris of the Outpost. The drifters wanted it to build, and to bargain for their own children.

  “Will you still try to find them, even without the gold?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.” Indie folds her arms across her chest.

  “And what about you?” I ask Brig, still not looking at him. “You said you have family back in the Outpost.”

  “I don’t know yet either,” he says.

  “To be honest, this is as far as we’ve gotten,” Indie says. “Helping you escape. Which we haven’t actually done yet.”

  “What about them?” I ask Brig and Indie, pointing at the settlers on the shore. They’re talking to one another, pointing at the flag and at us on the deck. “The ones the Admiral left behind. What do they want?”

  Brig isn’t touching me anymore, but his shoulder is inches away from mine. “I think they want you.”

  CHAPTER 51

  FIFTEEN SETTLERS, the three of us. We stand on the deck facing one another. I can almost see ghosts in the warming and cooling of evening, the changing of air and light.

  Call, up here keeping watch. Tam, aiming at the sniper on the shore.

  “We’re not here to hurt you,” says a settler with long black hair. She seems to be the spokesperson for the group and looks to be in her twenties. Now that she’s closer, I recognize her—she was the medic on our voyage. Laura Seng. “We’re going back to the Outpost, Captain Blythe. We want you to lead us.”

  They can’t mean it. I look from one settler to another, waiting for them to laugh. But all I see are serious faces watching. Waiting.

  “Why?” I rake my hand through my hair, which is sticky with dried blood and sweat. Bewilderment and anger run over me like I’m a rock in the river. “Didn’t you notice how well things went the last time I was in charge?” I gesture to the ruined ship where we’re standing.

  One of the settlers frowns.

  But Laura sticks to her plan. “We’ll make it work,” she says, turning halfway so that she can see both me and the settlers standing behind her. “We’ll say the raiders killed the Admiral and the Quorum and everyone else who isn’t coming back. We tell the other settlers that, when the Admiral was dying, he said Captain Blythe should be in charge of the Outpost. And then they’ll want her.” She nods to me. “We’ll back you. All of us. We’ll tell the same story.”

  Indie huffs and folds her arms. “So you’ll blame us for everything.”

  “You deserve it,” bristles one of the men behind Laura. “You raiders stole the ship. You killed some of our men and women.”

  “Oh yes,” Indie says, her voice a cool clean knife. “Let’s talk about what we all deserve. Let’s list the wrongs from both sides. I’d like to see who comes out ahead.”

  “Wait.” I hold up my bruised hand. “How many settlers did the Admiral leave behind?”

  “There are twenty-three of us left,” Laura says. “The others are back on the shore, waiting.”

  Brig draws in his breath next to me, and I catch his eye. He noticed the number, too. That’s how many were on the Lily when we first started out.

  But it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not an omen or a sign.

  “Naomi?” I ask.

  Laura’s lips tighten. “She’s staying out in the fields where they launched the Palingenesis. She thinks they’ll return someday.”

  Naomi killed for that ship. Now she’ll die waiting for it.

  “The rest of us are either dead from the fight with the raiders or gone with the Admiral.” Laura folds her arms. “We need someone to hold us together, or the Outpost will fall into chaos. The leaders of the old structure are gone. The Admiral took the entire Quorum with him.”

  The Lily groans, as if in protest or pain. I wonder how stable she is, beached on the bank like this. Is the river trying to take us back?

  How can they ask this of me? To take the Admiral’s place?

  I was finally ready to run.

  I close my eyes to listen. To the wind, the water, the ship.

  What will people think of the dredge if they come upon it years and generations after this? They’ll see it stripped of armor, run ashore, picked apart and savaged of everything useful. They will see what it destroyed along the river. The way it ruined.

  But. If enough time has passed, perhaps the river will have healed a bit. Maybe the ship will be covered in moss and birds’ nests and filled with what the wind brought through the widening cracks and rifts.

  I open my eyes.

  “No,” I say. “We’re not blaming the drifters. We tell the truth.”

  Will the settlers want to do it this way? Will anyone in the Outpost listen to me?

  “Poe.” Brig’s mouth is hard on the word, his hand gentle on my arm. His eyes are worried, the stubble grown during days of fighting and coming back for me shadowing his skin. “You don’t owe them anything.”

  “Why are you even considering this?” Indie’s furious, disbelieving. “After we risked everything to come get you?”

  I think of the Outpost. Of the Admiral climbing onto that magnificent, elegant ship to leave it all behind. He walked away from the mess.

  I’ve done that, too. Designed an armor meant to kill and maim that rode upon a ship built to ruin. Set fire to trees where houses hung like cocoons.

  It’s easier to kill than to save.

  It’s easier to imagine a new world than to take care of the one you’ve got.

  Did I come all this way just to go back?

  I thought I could only love one person. Call. I thought I could only make one thing. The armor, to kill.

  But what if there is more.

  What if I can make something else.

  What if I can love someone again.

  If I went back, I could build instead of ruin. I could help the drifters find the children that were taken.

  “I’ll come with you to the Outpost,” I say. “But I’m not going to lead unless people want it.”

  Indie exhales in frustration. Brig’s gaze is steady and straight, holding mine. Trying to understand.

  I think he will. The thought flickers hope inside me, and I surprise myself by reaching out my hand to brush my fingers against his.

  “Thank you, Captain Blythe,” says one of the settlers. I’m taken aback at the relief in his voice and on the faces of most of those around him. Including Laura, who was on my voyage and who knows exactly how badly it went. What cause have I given them to believe so much in me, to ask so much of me?

  And why do I think I can do this? That I should try? That I could change the myth and truth that is both the Outpost’s and my own—that we were abandoned, deserted?

  Call loved me. That is part but not all. It’s the battered hulk, the remains of the Lily beneath and behind me. The drifters’ houses in trees, their lost children. It’s the skeleton crew, who followed me off the ship and into the woods. Naomi might have betrayed me, and Eira is gone, but Tam and I fought shoulder to shoulder. Indie and Brig came back.

  It’s what’s happened, and what’s left.

  “There’s something you need to know,” I say to the settlers. “I’m bringing the ship with me.”

  CHAPTER 52

  INDIE IS STILL ANGRY. She’s like one of the lamps up in the tree houses. Every time I catch a glimpse of her she’s aflame. Illuminating. Some people always burn. Naomi was right about that.

  If Indie is a lamp, then what is Brig?

  Not the Admiral’s boy, through and through, but someone who reminds me a bit of the drifters’ creations. Bent, bending, in a tree, on the water. Flexing, giving, without breaking.

  I stand on the gangway of the ship. Brig and Indie are feet away on the shore with some of the other drifters and settlers. A few are with me on the dredge—Mac from the drifters, Laura from the settlers, a machinist, a drifter who knows how to fix things. There is an uneasy truce as everyone works together to get the Lily into the water.