Will rowed the dinghy back towards the entrance. Cautiously they peered out through the gap.
Moored outside was something huge and white, so high it blocked the sunlight. It was a cruise ship.
Blue Water Princess
‘What is that doing here?’ Will cried, looking up the towering face of the ship. It had anchored behind the Sunfish, and dwarfed their tiny sailing boat.
A fleet of little boats started to appear from around the headland, where the town was located. The cruise ship blasted its horn in greeting, a huge sound that rolled out over the water, and the little boats honked and tooted in reply.
While most of them went whizzing over to the great cruise ship, one of them came over to the children’s dinghy and pulled up right alongside them. It was a small boat with a little motor on the back, with two ancient men in it, one steering, the other standing in the front.
‘You want to see the Blue Room?’ called the front man. ‘Very reasonable prices! I tell you all about the history. Quick, we take you in now, before the crowds!’
‘Thanks,’ Annalie said, ‘but we’re heading for the town.’ It seemed prudent not to tell him they’d already been inside.
The man changed tack. ‘You need somewhere to stay? Go here, tell them Astos sent you, they give you very good rate.’ The man leaned across the water to hand Annalie a card advertising a guesthouse and spice shop. ‘The best rooms, best views, very cheap. Try the spice cake!’
Then the second ancient man gunned the engine and they roared away to chase the rest of the little boats.
The cruise ship had released its own floating pontoon with a long companionway. The gates opened up on one of the ship’s main decks, and a great stream of passengers started tromping down to cluster on the pontoon while officers of the ship, dressed in shiny white uniforms, haggled with the people in the little boats. Soon, the passengers were clambering into boats, brandishing their shells to capture every moment.
The dinghy returned to the Sunfish, and the four of them watched the flotilla ferrying people from the cruise ship to the Blue Room and on around the headland to the town.
‘What’s a cruise ship doing in the Moon Islands?’ Will said. ‘I thought none of them came here anymore, because it was too dangerous.’
‘I guess nobody told them,’ Annalie said.
Will turned to Pod. ‘You ever see a boat like this in the Moon Islands before?’
‘Yes,’ Pod said. ‘Once. I need to get on there.’
‘You can’t,’ Annalie said. ‘They’d never let us on board.’
‘The boat that took my sister looked like that. Maybe she’s on board.’
‘Sorry Pod, but there’s no way you’ll get on that ship,’ Annalie said.
‘Yes there is,’ Essie said. ‘You just have to act like you belong. I bet I could get you on board.’
Annalie turned to stare at Essie in astonishment. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Trust me, it’ll be easy. Look how many people are getting on and off. If we go into town we can follow them on when everyone else is getting back on board the ship. Pod can ask about his sister, and then we’ll get off again. We won’t get into any trouble.’ Essie looked at Pod, who was still wearing the ragged clothes he’d come aboard in. ‘We might need to get him something better to wear though.’
While Pod was tidied up and made presentable in some of Will’s clothes, they sailed around and anchored in the bay beside the town.
‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ Annalie asked, as Essie and Pod were getting ready to climb into the dinghy. ‘What if someone questions you?’
‘I’ll make something up,’ Essie said.
‘But what if he finds his sister?’
‘We’ll take her with us,’ Will said.
‘But—’ Annalie began, then gave in. ‘Be careful. And don’t take too long.’
Will, Pod and Essie took the dinghy into town. They quickly separated so no one would see them together; Will went to buy supplies, while Essie and Pod followed the tourists. Essie was wearing her headset for the first time in weeks, coloured lights twinkling. She checked her shell optimistically—still no signal. All around them tourists were wandering, looking very out of place: the rich of the new world poking around the ruins of the old world.
‘Now what?’ Pod said, tense.
‘Now we act like everyone else,’ Essie said.
They found a marketplace filled with stalls selling everything from spices and T-shirts to baked goods and ancient pre-Flood souvenirs. Essie bought Pod a T-shirt with the slogan, ‘Don’t be blue, see the Blue Room’, and made him put it on. For herself, she bought a souvenir necklace (also blue) and put that on. Then she bought them both a box of baby spice cakes, and headed back to the beach.
There, a white-uniformed steward was busy mustering boats for the passengers who were ready to return to the ship. Essie went up to him. ‘Hi,’ she said brightly, ‘I think my parents went back already.’
‘No problem,’ said the steward, ‘the next boat’s leaving shortly.’
They went and stood with the rest of the passengers while they waited for another boat. Pod twitched and fidgeted until Essie had to remind him to relax and not look so suspicious. She held out her shell to an older couple who were standing nearby. ‘Could you take our picture?’ she asked. The older man was happy to oblige, and Essie and Pod posed while the man took their picture. ‘Thanks!’ Essie chirped, accepting her shell back.
The boat arrived then, and the passengers climbed aboard, Essie and Pod among them. Pod looked sick with nerves.
‘What did you think of the Blue Room?’ the older woman asked as the boat moved out.
‘I thought it was lovely,’ Essie said. ‘So blue.’
‘It was blue,’ the woman agreed. ‘Really lived up to its name.’
They smiled at each other and then returned to silence.
The boat tootled back up the coastline and the cruise ship loomed up ahead of them, huge and white. Essie read the name on the side: Blue Water Princess. She’d heard of the Blue Water line: there were a number of them, named aristocratically in order of size. The largest of them was the Blue Water Empress. Essie wondered briefly what they’d do for a name if they decided to build a bigger one.
At the pontoon, another officer stood with a checklist. Essie felt a tremor of nerves; this was where it could all go wrong. They climbed out with the others onto the pontoon and joined the queue.
The people in front of them gave their names, were ticked off the list, and allowed up the companionway. When Essie reached the officer in charge she said, ‘I don’t think I’m on your list. We weren’t going to come and then we changed our minds and it was all such a rush we didn’t get on the list.’
‘Name?’ the officer asked.
‘Essie Kudos. And this is my brother Paul,’ she said calmly.
The officer added their names to the bottom of the list. ‘I hope you enjoyed your visit,’ he said, already turning to the next in line.
Essie walked up the companionway, fizzing with excitement, and then stepped onto the cruise ship itself. The decks were wide and sunny, with chic coordinating deckchairs and sun umbrellas as far as the eye could see. A series of swimming pools in interlocking shapes and different depths sent up an azure dazzle. People reclined in bikinis, in sunglasses, in shorts, in caftans, sipping cocktails or eating hamburgers or salads made with tiny prawns served in huge glasses. There were staff everywhere, fetching and carrying and mopping and serving. Restaurants, cafes, bars and shops lined the pool area. It was a gorgeous, lustrous, floating world of consumption and pleasure.
And this had been Essie’s world until very recently. These people, the kinds of people who could afford a trip like this, were her people. Her father, the property developer, with his deals and his connections and his many business interests, had generated this sort of wealth and given his family this kind of life—until it all went wrong. Now her father’s empire was collapsing
and her mother had gone off with a new rich man. Essie had no idea where she would fit in with their lives when she finally stepped off the Sunfish and returned home.
Looking at her luxurious surroundings, Essie felt so many conflicting things all at once it made her dizzy: how very lovely all this was; how wrong it was that a privileged few should live in luxury when so many more were so very poor; and how superior she felt knowing she was on a super-important secret mission; but mostly she felt how nice it was to be able to live like this and how sad she felt that that was probably all behind her now.
‘Come on,’ she said abruptly to Pod, ‘let’s see what we can find out.’
Nearby, they saw a young woman in a grey uniform appear with a mop and bucket to clean up someone’s spilt drink. When she was done she slipped away through a plain door marked Staff only. No admittance.
Pod watched this, then turned to Essie. ‘It’s probably better if I do this alone,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ Essie agreed. ‘Meet me back here as soon as you can.’
Pod nodded, and followed the maid.
Outside on the deck, everything was painted a crisp, nautical white and blue, with accents of sunny yellow, but inside the service corridor was a dingy grey, lit with the cheapest lights. There was no natural light here. Pod hurried along it, knowing he shouldn’t be here, hoping he wouldn’t encounter anyone self-important enough to question him.
He caught up with the maid with the bucket. ‘Can you help? I’m looking for someone.’
The maid gave him a fearful look. ‘Ask a steward,’ she said, and scurried away. Waiters pushed past him, carrying trays. He passed huge kitchens, banks of stoves, vast clean-up stations, and noticed that some of the workers scrubbing pots and scraping plates wore only a jacket over their normal clothes. Just past the kitchens, a row of hooks held some spares and he helped himself to one, dropping a jacket over his tourist T-shirt and rendering himself instantly invisible.
Another maid went past, and he followed her. ‘Scuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for someone, I think maybe she works here. Can you help me?’
The maid looked at him in surprise, then beckoned to him to follow her. She took him into a cleaning station. It was filled with cleaning gear of all kinds, floor to ceiling, and another maid sat at a work station in the middle of the room, monitoring a scrolling list of jobs that needed to be done. The maid pushed Pod behind a high shelving unit, keeping him out of sight of the woman at the workstation, then dropped her bucket back in the bucket area. ‘Deck C122 clear,’ she called to the woman at the monitor, then collected Pod and took him down to the back of the room, where a group of exhausted-looking maids were sitting on benches.
‘You say you looking for someone?’ the maid asked.
‘Yes,’ Pod said. ‘My sister. She went away to work on a boat that looked just like this one.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Blossom.’
The maids all looked at each other as they mulled over the name, but eventually all of them shook their heads.
‘How long ago was this?’ one of them asked.
‘Maybe a year ago,’ Pod said.
‘I been here two years,’ the first maid said, ‘I don’t know nobody called Blossom. You sure it was this boat?’
‘It looked like this,’ Pod said.
‘Honey, they all look like this,’ the maid said sympathetically. ‘What’s your name anyway?’
‘Pod.’
‘Shamela,’ the maid said. She looked at him curiously. ‘Where’d you come from anyway? You just start here?’
‘Not exactly,’ Pod said cautiously.
‘You don’t work in the kitchen?’
‘I’m just looking for my sister,’ Pod said.
‘Hey, Dodo!’ called the maid on the monitor. ‘Glass broken on D40.’
‘Coming boss!’ One of the other maids got up.
‘Hey,’ Shamela said, ‘spread the word, huh? Maybe someone knows this boy’s sister.’
Essie was settled comfortably in a deckchair. Bliss! There was signal. It had been weeks since she linked in and she had forty voice messages and more than four hundred unread mails to wade through.
Most of the voice messages were from people trying to find out where she was. Friends at first. Then school. Her mother. Her father’s lawyer. Lots more messages from her mother and the school.
Her mother: ‘Essie? It’s Mum. Call me back.’
Beep.
‘Essie, I need to talk to you. Call me back please.’
Beep.
‘Essie, can you switch your shell on please? It’s really important that I speak with you.’
Beep.
‘If you’re getting any of these messages can you call me please? Now.’
Beep.
‘Essie, it’s me. The school keeps calling me. They’re threatening to expel you if you don’t come back. Enough is enough. It’s time to come back now.’
Beep.
‘All right Essie, you’ve made your point. You’re angry at me, I get it. But you know I’m not actually the bad guy here. I know you worship the ground your father walks on, but there are things I could tell you . . . Anyway, no need to get into all that now. Just call me, please. Or if you won’t call me, call somebody. Everybody’s worried about you.’
Beep.
She didn’t sound worried, Essie thought. More annoyed that her daughter was causing trouble at an inconvenient time.
There were more messages from her mother but she didn’t listen to the rest. She thought she had a fair idea what they’d say. Instead she turned to her mail. At least three quarters of it was pleasant fluff—pictures taken by her friends, songs and movies and all that—but then, buried among it, she found a message from her father.
It had been forwarded by her father’s lawyer while he was still in jail, some weeks ago (the company had eventually agreed to pay his bail—an astronomical sum—and he was out again, under very strict conditions, while he awaited his trial date). He wrote:
My dear Essie,
You must be thinking the worst of me right now, and I can’t blame you for that. What happened was terrible, and I feel terrible about it. It’s all more complicated than they say in the newsfeeds and I hope one day I can make you see things from my point of view. But I’m not writing this to justify myself. I’m writing to beg you to come back to us.
I don’t know what made you run away from school. I hope it wasn’t because of me and all my troubles. I know it can’t have made things easy for you. But even if things have been tough, you have to give it another try. The school will take you back, I’m sure I can make that happen. Don’t worry about the fees. I don’t know what your mother told you, but I won’t let anyone take you out of Triumph. You deserve the best, because you’re smart and kind and you’re the sort of person the Admiralty needs. So you don’t have to worry about being sent away.
They told me about the money, too. As you probably know, they’re freezing all my assets, but I’ll try and keep that line of credit open for as long as I can, so if you need it, you can use it. They told me you were last seen in Southaven, with another girl who’d also run away from Triumph. I have to hope she’s really your friend and she’s not just taking advantage of you. I wish you’d let someone know where you are and what’s going on. Why did you run away? Where are you? Why have you switched off your shell? We’ve been trying to locate you but they say your shell’s gone dead. Please let us know what’s going on. I won’t be angry, I just want to know that you’re safe. I have a lot of time in here to worry about your welfare, so please put me out of my misery and get in touch! Even if it’s just to let me know you’re okay. And remember that wherever you end up, whatever has happened, if you want to come home, just pick up your shell and I’ll arrange it, I promise.
Please know that whatever happens with the trial, and whatever happens between me and your mother, I will always love you, and I will always do my best to look after you. I�
��m still hopeful that everything’s going to work out okay. But even if it doesn’t, know that I’m always your loving dad, and I’ll try my best to take care of you.
I hope you can forgive me. Please come home.
Dad
Essie had to hide her face behind a drinks menu when she got to the end of the mail so no one could see her cry.
She had known, sort of, that they must be wondering where she was. But until now she hadn’t really let herself think about it. Now she realised that they must be frantic with worry. She had been gone for weeks without a word, and they had no way to contact her or even locate her. Guilt sideswiped her.
Essie spent several minutes trying to compose an email to her father, reassuring, explaining, justifying, but everything she wrote seemed wrong, or gave away too much information. Eventually she wrote:
Dear Dad,
Please don’t worry about me. I’m okay and Annalie is a true friend. I’ll send word when I can. Hope to be home soon.
Love Essie.
‘Hey, sister boy,’ the maid called Dodo said, and beckoned to Pod.
He got up and followed her out into the service corridor, where two young maids were standing with a trolley filled with neatly folded towels and tiny shampoo bottles. One of them looked at him, and her face brightened with excitement. ‘Hey, I know you!’ she said.
Pod recognised the girl too. ‘Karmon, right?’
‘Yes!’ She was giddy with excitement. ‘We were on that slave hulk together, you and me and Blossom. That boat was the worst!’
Pod nodded, almost feeling faint with anticipation. ‘You seen Blossom?’
‘We was together,’ Karmon said. ‘First six months or so. We was on the same boat at first, but then we got separated. We both started out on Blue Water Duchess, then they moved me here, to Blue Water Princess.’
‘Is she still there?’
‘Far as I know,’ said Karmon.
‘How’s she doing?’ he asked eagerly. ‘How do they treat you on these boats?’
‘They’re good places to work,’ Karmon said, a little too emphatically.
Escape to the Moon Islands: Quest of the Sunfish 1 Page 16
