Naomi leans over to me. “Reminds me of that story about the children and the witch in the wood,” she says. “Why is the Admiral fattening us up?”

  I laugh, remembering. “This ship isn’t made of candy.”

  “That it isn’t,” she says, and her face goes grim.

  Maybe the Admiral is going to eat us. Isn’t that how the other story ended?

  “Excuse me,” a man says, standing up. “I beg your pardon. If I could offer a few words as well.”

  Chaplain Clair. I remember him from this morning and from the manifest. A prickle of irritation rustles through me. I never said he could speak.

  The chaplain is short, smaller than me. And he has a sweaty red face and a twitchy little nose and big patches of wet on the underarms of his uniform. I want to roll my eyes.

  “You may speak,” I say. “But keep it quick. We need to eat.”

  Right then, there’s a clamor at the door. Heads turn and I see Brig pushing into the cafeteria with two crew members, both men. Brig and the man on the right are trying to restrain the one in the middle, who’s struggling. Has there been a fight? No blood, that I can see. But the man they’re holding has wild in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Brig says. “But he was trying to get off the ship. He came onto the bridge and tried to climb through the window.”

  “It’s driving me crazy,” the man in the middle says. Jonah Miller, I remember, from the roll call earlier. “The noise. How slow it is. Just let me off and I’ll walk back to the Outpost. We haven’t gone far.”

  “We’re not going to stop the whole dredge and risk the crew,” I say. “Stopping makes us vulnerable. Once we’re in motion, we stay in motion.”

  He casts his eyes around desperately, trying to think of another way out. “Let me jump off the deck,” he offers, his voice tinged with hope.

  “No one goes on the deck,” I say. “And no one jumps.”

  “So there’s no way off.” His shoulders slump. “There’s no way out.”

  “Of course there is,” I say. “We could put you in one of the dredge buckets going back into the water and out you’ll go into the river. We won’t even have to stop. If you don’t drown or get caught on any machinery, you can swim your way to shore and walk back to the Outpost.”

  His eyes go wide. My words have given him a new source of panic.

  “If there’s a way off, then there’s also a way for the raiders to get on!”

  He’s trying my patience. “If they attempt to get on that way, they won’t make it far,” I say. It’s true that the buckets dragging the river bottom for gold are large enough to hold a person, if the person were small and curled themselves up tight. But I’ve equipped the bucket line with the guillotine—an enormous blade that each bucket passes under as it arrives inside the ship. No one over the age of ten or so could make themselves so small that they wouldn’t have some part sticking out—a head, an arm, a leg.

  The room is silent.

  “You can go out,” I say. Bluffing. “I’ll help you do it myself. But there’s no way back on.”

  Jonah’s eyes are still wild. Brig holds on to his arm. I tilt my head. “Get him out of here,” I say. “Send him through the buckets. Off the ship.”

  Will Brig do it? I’m interested to find out more about my first mate. It’s against the Admiral’s orders. No one’s supposed to leave the ship. Period.

  But then Jonah starts to weep. “I’ll stay,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “Then get back to work.” I nod to the other crew member who’s holding Jonah upright. “You stay with him. Report any other problems immediately.”

  Brig meets my gaze as they start toward the door.

  I wonder if he would have put the man off the ship.

  I wonder if I would have.

  Naomi stands up. “Permission to speak requested, Captain.” She says it loud enough for everyone in the cafeteria to hear. Brig and the others pause in the doorway.

  “Permission granted.”

  “I want to speak on behalf of those who went with you on your first voyage,” Naomi says. “We never had a chance to thank you. For our lives.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I say. The bargain I struck with the Admiral—my armor design for the lives of the crew who lost the other dredge—isn’t something I want brought up now. I motion for her to sit down but she doesn’t, so I stay standing, too. Crew members are putting down their cutlery, leaning in to listen to Naomi.

  “I went on the next voyage, you know,” she says. “The first one with your armor.”

  Why is she telling me this now? In front of everyone?

  “The raiders tried to board several times,” she says. “We heard them, even with all the noise of the dredge. Screaming. Scratching. Pounding with fists and weapons.”

  Naomi pauses. “We looked through the bridge window when we absolutely had to to navigate,” she says. “We saw a body fall down now and then. But we didn’t go outside, of course, until we got back.”

  Everyone’s still, listening to Naomi. All our beautiful food is getting cold. I can smell it. I’m hungry.

  “When we got out and looked at the ship,” she says, “it looked like it had rusted. There was so much blood. They spent days cleaning and oiling it so it could leave again.”

  A few of the crew members look at me with a hint of fear in their eyes.

  I’m not sure what to say in the silence but right then I hear the door to the kitchen area swing open. We all turn to look at Tam.

  He’s carrying a cake. A ridiculous, towering white cake. Something so frivolous and rare in any circumstance, it’s ludicrous to see here on the dredge. But somehow, he managed it.

  Has he heard what we’ve been saying? Tam’s eyes meet mine over the cake. I’m only a year older than he is, but he’s so young. He’s who I used to be.

  “Did I forget a wedding?” I ask, and I feel the tension in the room give, and some of the crew laughs.

  “We’re all married to this ship,” Tam says. “To the Lily.”

  The crew laughs again, and as Tam brings the cake closer I realize it’s the dredge. He’s turned it into a confection. A fluffy, ornate cloud.

  Tam has spoken lightly, but as he hands me a knife to cut the cake he makes certain to hold my gaze. In his eyes is a warning.

  About what?

  I shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking Tam’s like me, the way I used to be. He might be. He might not.

  I plunge the knife into the cake, and then lick the cutting edge of the blade, careful not to draw blood.

  “Get another knife, Cook,” I say. I don’t use Tam’s name because there’s no reason to—crew often refer to one another by our titles—but I still see a flicker of hurt in his eyes. “We might be in the belly of the dredge now, but soon it will be in ours.”

  The others laugh again and in a few moments I’m slicing into the cake, and Tam hands it around, accepting their compliments and congratulatory slaps on the back. “Save some for the other shift,” he tells them.

  When the bell clangs for the shift change, everyone stands up to leave. Besides Naomi and me, Chaplain Clair is the last one out. He never did have his chance to speak.

  “What do you think he wanted to say?” I ask Naomi.

  “I’d imagine it’s something about the Admiral,” she says. “How working for him is a great and noble endeavor.”

  I pause at the door. “So we’ve already had our first would-be deserter,” I say. “Do you think there will be more?”

  “Not after that,” Naomi says. “And I’ve heard the crew talking about you. They say that the Admiral trusts you. That you’re hard.”

  I suppose it could be worse. I gesture for Naomi to go through the door first, but she has more to say.

  “You’ve changed.” Her eyes are shrewd.

  I press my lips together. Naomi wouldn’t speak to another captain this way. Her tone is respectful but she’s calling on our past, she’s speaking of personal things.

  “Thank you, Second Mate,” I say. “If you’ll excuse me. I need to prepare to speak to the next group.”

  “Of course,” Naomi says.

  Several people have challenged me today. The chaplain put himself forward to speak without an invitation. Tam talked to me as if I were a peer. Brig hesitated when I told him to send the man off the ship. Naomi assumes that she knows me.

  I need to put an end to all of it.

  CHAPTER 6

  I MAKE MY WAY to the small platform down on the mining deck, where I can watch the machines work and the motor run. The two crew members standing up on the platform keeping guard nod to me. “You can go down for a bit,” I say. “I’ll take a turn.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” one says.

  I take their position at the watch.

  This is the most dangerous place on the ship.

  Everyone—the would-be deserter, the Admiral himself when I first showed him the plans—worries about someone getting on the dredge through the buckets. It’s the first spot they picture a breach now that the top deck is secure and the windows on the bridge are armored. But the most vulnerable part of the ship isn’t where the gold comes in. It’s where the rocks go out—a rectangular protrusion called the tailings stacker that juts out the back of the ship. It’s high above the river and a constant stream of tailings, or slicken—rock and debris—cascades out of it as long as the dredge is mining.

  I thought for a long time about how to best secure the stacker. I gave it the same outside armor I used on the rest of the ship—gears and turns that move all the time, ready to chew up and spit out.

  But after that, I was stuck. The stacker has to have an opening, needs to be constantly disposing of the slicken, or we’ll sink under all the weight. Finally, I decided to trust in the sheer force of the tailings coming out and in the fact that my armor covers everything but the opening. Those two things, plus the height of the stacker from the river, means that anyone trying to board would likely die. And it wouldn’t be a good death, to be cast out with the tailings and buried, still alive, in the refuse of the ship, body crushed under what we don’t need, can’t use, and drowned in the water besides.

  There aren’t really any good deaths if you try to board my ship.

  I think about all the systems working together. The mining gear, the propellers that the ship uses for motion, the armor—the dredge is like a person, with each system combining to make a whole. There are ways to disengage the systems from the main motor, but we rarely have occasion to do that. And everything takes their energy from the solar conduits. It’s efficient. My ship runs smooth.

  This is not your river.

  It’s time to look into the matter of the note written on the map. I have another hour before I need to be up at the helm.

  First, the logistics room. Maybe I’ll find a map there with a piece cut out. Although it seems unlikely I’ll be that lucky. And I want to talk to the ship’s cartographer, Eira Clyde. The young woman with dark hair.

  In the hallway, I run into Brig. Since I’m the captain, most people step aside or flatten themselves against the wall. Not Brig.

  “I’d like to talk with you,” he says.

  “Good,” I say. “I need to speak with you as well. Go ahead.”

  I’m tall, but he’s taller, and we both have to duck our heads under the dredge’s low ceiling. It makes for awkward eye contact, which I like, because when we’re sitting down or fully standing Brig can draw himself up to his full height and look down on me.

  “That man who wanted to desert,” Brig says. “Would you really have put him off the ship? He thinks so. The crew thinks so.”

  As is the case every time I’ve spoken with Brig, I can feel his charisma, his pull. He’s handsome, but it’s more than that. The timbre of his voice, maybe, and the way he looks you full in the eyes. Most people don’t. They end up glancing away. There’s a subtle force to Brig that makes me try to take up more space so he can have less.

  “Of course,” I say.

  He nods, as if that’s the answer he expected. I get the sense that there’s something more he wants to say, but after a beat of our quiet and the ship’s noise, I speak instead.

  “When Jonah Miller tried to desert,” I say, “why did you bring him to the cafeteria, when you knew I was holding a meeting? Why didn’t you lock him down in his room and keep him there until later?”

  “I brought him in because I thought you’d want to make an example out of him,” Brig says.

  “I don’t care about examples,” I say. “If something bad happens, I want the least amount of people to know about it. I want everyone to keep quiet and do their work. It’s loud enough on this ship as it is.”

  “Captain.” It’s not quite an acknowledgment. There’s a hint of objection in Brig’s voice.

  “And I want you,” I say, “to follow my orders. This ship needs me to run. It does not need you.”

  Call used to laugh when I’d threaten someone, another worker on the scrap yard, another child on the playground when we were small. “You couldn’t hurt anything,” he’d say.

  “They don’t know that,” I told him.

  “But I do,” Call said.

  Now, though, I think even Call would believe me when I say it.

  “We must have similar concerns about this voyage,” Brig says. “It would be helpful if we could discuss them.”

  “All I need from you,” I say, “is to follow my orders.”

  Brig looks like he might speak again but I turn away, brushing his chest with my shoulder in the tight hallway as I pass by.

  There is not nearly enough room on this ship.

  * * *

  • • •

  When the time came for Call and me to move out of the orphanage and into the quarters out at the scrap yard, we walked there together, our packs slung over our shoulders. We stopped in our tracks at the same time in front of the huge mural painted on the cinder-block exterior of the dormitory.

  The Outpost is full of murals. In some ways I liked them because they lent color to the buildings. But the lack of proportion in the people bothered me. They were all depicted in the same style—the men had impossibly large muscles and broad shoulders, the women had nipped-in waists and enormous eyes. The painted people stared at us as we went inside the dormitory.

  “They’re watching us,” he said.

  “They’re jealous,” I said. “We can move and they can’t,” and I stuck out my tongue at them, which made Call laugh.

  We were still only friends, then, Call and I. It was over the course of the next year, when we walked past each other in the scrap yard all day long and sat together at dinner at night, that things changed. We’d always been close, but our new lives brought us closer. We had the same marks on our hands, same cuts from the metal. We told each other stories of our days, of the frustration we both felt at the work we were doing, how all we ever did was fix things, how we never got to build anything. We both felt like time was running out. We felt the urgency of our lives in a new way, that we should at least do something with them.

  And we fell in love. I remember thinking how strange and right it was, that I could know that I wanted a different life and yet also know I wanted this person, same and new, with me.

  CHAPTER 7

  AS THE CAPTAIN, I’m entitled to go anywhere on the ship at any time, so I open the door of the logistics room without knocking. Eira turns, a pencil tucked behind her ear, another in her hand.

  “Captain Blythe,” she says. “How can I help you?”

  “I need a map.” I don’t want to tell her about the note. After all, she’s just as likely as anyone else to have left it. More so, in fact; she has the easiest access to all the maps.

  “Of course,” she says. The logistics room is tiny, lined with metal cabinets with long thin drawers. In the middle of the room there’s a small, bolted-down table with a chair. “Which one?”

  “I want the most detailed map you have for this part of the river.”

  “I think that map was placed in your quarters at the beginning of the voyage,” she says.

  “I’d like for you to look again,” I say. “I’ll help. I promise I’ll keep things in order. I don’t want to hamper your work.”

  Eira nods and moves over to one of the cabinets. I go to the cabinet next to her and slide open a drawer, leafing through the maps while keeping an eye on her as well.

  The maps feel different depending on their age—soft, brittle, stiff, smooth, all different textures, like the land they depict. My favorites are the topographical maps, with bumps for mountains and slick blue plastic for water. The Union didn’t skimp on the maps they sent with the first settlers, and the Outpost has taken great care with them ever since. The Admiral must trust Eira a great deal if he appointed her as the cartographer for this voyage.

  “Here’s one,” Eira says, “but I don’t know that it’s any better than the one you have already.”

  I take the map from her and go to the table. She hurries over to sweep away her papers and drafting materials, but before she does, I see what she’s been working on.

  It’s an artistic rendering of the dredge, and it’s exquisite.

  “You did this?”

  She glances over. Her mouth draws tight. “Yes,” she says.

  “What is it for?”

  “I’m afraid that you’ve caught me working on something simply because it gives me pleasure,” she says. “I find the ship fascinating. And challenging, artistically. Your armor is particularly hard to draw.”

  I think she means that as a compliment. Looking at Eira’s picture, I feel a twinge of jealousy. I’ve never been accused of artistry in my drafts or drawings. My work is accurate. Exact. Utilitarian.