The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Especially now, I bet.” He, Sophie, and Verena had proved that Sylvanna’s nearest neighbor was infecting Sylvanna’s swamps with a vine that was a variant of kudzu. It had blown up into a political scandal. “What was the best?”

  She leaned back, savoring her latte and pound cake. “Fall’s coming and we’ve been making our way southeast, toward where the Horn of Africa would be. And there’ve been these—well, I’ll show you. But remember the bevvies?”

  “How could I forget?” The seagoing serpents had looked like Chinese dragons and had the ability to sing chords that amplified human emotions. It was their influence that had nearly driven Verena—who had been at the peak of her heartbreak over Garland—to fling herself into the sea.

  “They shed their skin in the fall. All those huge iridescent scales, and a ton of biomatter. They pick up mussels and bits of seaweed and chunks of dead fish. They’re filthy like you wouldn’t believe; they don’t even look like the same creature.

  “They all descend to the bottom of the ocean in a specific location—I have the latitude and longitude, so we can figure out the equivalent map coordinates here on Earth—and they inflate their skin to break it loose, to shed it. These fleshy balloons float to the surface, all this food—”

  “Calorie bonanza,” Bram said.

  Sophie nodded. “Fish, mostly tuna and that thing called butterfish, show up. Then birds come in to catch the fish. There are algal blooms. The sea turns green, and the birds come out of the water stained green from their dives, and at the end of the cycle the skins get torn and it turns out they’re full of little golden bevvies, tiny and toxic. They frisk in all that soup, whistling—”

  They caught an exit to the freeway, and displacement hit her, a million things at once: the speed of the cars, set against the stillness of being on land rather than on the rolling deck of ship after ship after ship, the flavor of oily petrochemicals in the air. She groped for Bram’s phone, hit Play, and giggled a little maniacally as a Mika song obligingly burbled out of the car stereo.

  Commercial electronics and billboards and jet engines and MRIs and television—

  “What are you thinking?” Bram asked, and she realized she’d stopped telling him about the bevvies.

  “Is there an opposite to homesickness?” It was a weird feeling—less like pain, more like being spaced out, or stunned.

  “Homewellness?” he said. “Good timing, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Because we’re here,” he said, taking the exit to his place.

  CHAPTER 6

  Bram lived in a rented seven-bedroom heritage home, in indifferent repair, called the Dwarf House. He shared it with a dozen or so other graduate students from Stanford and Berkeley.

  He parked, got out and popped the trunk, and then unzipped her bag right there.

  “Bram,” she muttered. “Secrecy, remember?”

  “They let you take your chips out?”

  “Every last frame and sample.” Sophie grinned.

  He looked wary. “What’d you have to promise?”

  “You know, the usual. Arm and a leg, my firstborn child. Loyalty to the Fleet and respect for its laws.”

  “Heh.”

  “That last part’s true. I’m officially sworn to defend the Cessation.” Stormwrack had been free of war for just over a century, but they’d never written a treaty. On paper, the peace was merely a so-called Cessation of Hostilities.

  “I bet you’ll keep that promise for at least a week … well, depending on how soon you go back.”

  She punched his arm, stung.

  “Oh, did I strike a nerve?” he asked.

  “I’m rising above,” she said. She hadn’t let Annela or Convenor Brawn bait her. Bram, at least, knew her well enough to be allowed to tease.

  He kept looking through her things. “Did Tonio get the kits I asked about?”

  “Tonio would never fail to do you a favor.”

  He missed—or ignored—the hint. “Ooh, he did.”

  “Are we going to sit here taking inventory?”

  “Okay, okay.” He shouldered the duffel, heading through the yard. “How long are you in town?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve sold the Watch on the fingerprint project, so I need resources on the filing system and identification process. Loops and whorls and arches and all that jazz. There’s some chemistry I need to relearn. I want to learn to dust for latent prints and do one of the rooms at Beatrice’s place.”

  “So you can try to figure out who brought John Coine here?”

  “Yeah. Also refill my oxygen tanks, obviously. Buy real bras for about a dozen women—”

  Something—worry?—crossed his face when she mentioned shopping. “That can wait until tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Totally.”

  They climbed to the attic, murmuring greetings to two of Bram’s roommates, a pair of physicists. To her surprise, he’d put a serious electronic lock on the trapdoor leading to the attic.

  “How did you explain that?”

  He punched in a seven-digit code. “They think I’m designing the next breakout video game, remember?”

  The security didn’t end at the attic door. Bram’s computer and external hard drive were living in a heavy-duty safe. He keyed in the combination and retrieved his laptop, then took the camera bag from her and settled in for a long session of downloading and scanning her files.

  Sophie, meanwhile, plugged in all her electronics, recharging her batteries with a feeling of giddy greed. No single solar-powered charger here.

  They worked in companionable silence, moving files, sorting data, connecting her various gadgets to the wireless network. Bram dove into Sophie’s duffel again, examining the kits from Tonio, ripping open the first of them and fishing for what was obviously an instruction sheet.

  “What’s verfrite mean?” He was still learning Fleet, whereas she’d had it magically uploaded into her brain.

  “This awful thing they drink on some of the islands. Sort of buttermilk and ginger.”

  “Oh.” Disappointed noise.

  “Why?”

  “Spell component.”

  Unease sifted through her. “You’re determined to learn magical inscription?”

  “We’ll never understand what magic is until one of us can work it.” He sounded as though he was using ninety-nine percent or more of his kid genius brain to think about spellscribing, and all of one percent to carry on this conversation.

  It’s a good idea. Why does it bother you?

  She wasn’t sure.

  “How far have you gotten?” she asked.

  Still reading, he jerked his head to indicate something in the safe. She opened it, pulling out a sketchbook. Inside he had lettered the magical alphabet, spellscrip, over and over until it was perfectly rendered. His first attempts were in pencil, and sharper, but more recent pages bore the marks of a calligraphy brush. The alphabet then gave way to actual text, words incomprehensible to her, again brushed repeatedly.

  “What does this say?”

  “It’s the scrip for these.” He held up one of Tonio’s gifts, and she recognized some of the components. It was exactly like a kit she’d picked up in a market, months earlier. She hadn’t known it was a spell; what had caught her eye was a carrier pigeon skin among the ingredients.

  “What’s it do?”

  “It’s like a kid’s kit, educational. Easy spells to try at home, all components supplied.”

  He passed her the instruction sheet. The pigeon had been someone’s pet and had a name. In life, it carried messages. The page directed would-be spellscribes to line a stone box with its skin, using glue made from fish bones. Supposedly, if it was done correctly, the box couldn’t be lost. If you moved house, it went too. The crate it was packed in couldn’t be mislaid, the box’s contents couldn’t get lost, and at some appropriate point, later in life, it turned up just when you needed the contents.

  Before she could ask if he’d pulled it off, Bra
m handed her a brownish onyx box the size of her fist. Its interior had the iridescent sheet of pigeon feathers, and the text he’d been practicing glowed at her, in impossibly tiny letters etched into the inside of the lid.

  She sat there, blinking at it. Her little brother had worked magic.

  “If I can get my hands on the skull of a ram—”

  “Shouldn’t that be easy?”

  “A ram with a name,” he said. “Also, saw grass from a country named Colland.”

  “For what?”

  “I can make an outer box to put this in. Supposedly that makes it indestructible. The two, together, are the perfect message in a bottle.”

  “All you need then is a message.” She thought fleetingly of Garland and her failed attempts at love letters.

  “How about this: Dear Me: If you’re reading this, Stormwrack is literally a future Erstwhile. Very best wishes, from Me?”

  “You’re resorting to magic to prove whether we’re time traveling or going to an alternate universe?”

  “We have to start somewhere,” he said. “If I can figure out the science behind inscription and then use it to determine if we’re time traveling, we’ll at least know. It was your idea, sort of. We talked about digging up the Valley of the Kings.”

  She could see his train of thought. “If we leave ourselves a message here, on Earth, in an indestructible followbox, and it turns up you-know-where—that would argue they’re two time periods, not two worlds.”

  “It’s a start,” Bram said.

  “But if we’re in one of an infinite number of nearly identical universes, then wouldn’t Mirror Sophie and Mirror Bram also leave a mirror time-capsule for … argh … for mirror future us to find?”

  His expression indicated he’d thought of that. Of course he had. “One thing at a time, okay?”

  “Yeah. It’s a good idea.”

  “I’ll get a goat head next time I’m in Fleet.”

  “Right.” Instead of imagining or pretending that she could stop Bram from pursuing exactly the same path she was taking, Sophie made her way through a maze of piled texts, most on theoretical physics, and hit the bathroom.

  I could get the goat. If she brought him enough spell ingredients, maybe he’d sit here in San Francisco and scribe things forever. Studious, safe, and sound.

  It wasn’t her call. Bram had made it abundantly clear that he was just as eager to study Stormwrack as she was. But anything that kept her baby brother far from pirates, emotion-tweaking bevvies, and sword fighting was just great with her.

  She filled the tub with the hottest water she could handle, sliding in with a groan.

  “Nice?” Bram called through the door.

  “Yeah. But weird, too. Being in the real world feels more like a vacation than … I dunno, being home.”

  “Of course it does. You aren’t spending your time flipping through court documents and ferrying from ship to ship and sucking up to mermaids for dive partners. You’ve been working your ass off.”

  She thought of the little ship Kitesharp. “Why would anyone sink a mechanics’ garage?”

  “I downloaded a couple books on victimology,” he replied, in that voice that said he’d gone back to multitasking.

  Sinking victims. The other two ships had been a glass seller and a shared home, something of a dormitory, really, for medical apprentices.

  Was it merely a crime of opportunity? Were they choosing ships that had some quality that made it possible to infect them with a fright?

  Still need to find out about frights. Gonna have to suck up talking to that jailed bandit.

  Drying her hands, she reached for her smartphone. Months of e-mails began queuing up and she gave herself over to the mindless ritual of information triage: open, scan, delete; open, scan, mark as spam; open, scan, save for later …

  Bram had sent her links on Victorian-era forensics, along with a question: WILL THE FORENSIC INSTITUTE HAVE PROPRIETARY RIGHTS OVER FINGERPRINTING IF WE “DEVELOP” IT?

  Patents and copyrights. That’s another area of red tape where my knowing the law will help. If Island A is the only source of verfrite and Island B wants to make some, for a spell, how does the ownership of the inscription get resolved?

  She marked a link for further reading so she could start working on a fingerprint database.

  “Did you say something about a mechanics’ shop?” Bram asked.

  “Twenty minutes ago.” She ran more hot water, then told him about Kitesharp and the other sinkings.

  “Isn’t that more a criminal case? Or terrorism? Less of a lawsuit?”

  “They asked my opinion. But I can’t begin to pretend I know why some rogue frightmaker would sink a glass store or a hang glider repair shop. Annela said it might be the same person who made the salt frights that attacked Sawtooth. Which made it piracy, according to her.”

  “Because pirates sink ships,” Bram said.

  And Convenor Brawn had showed up the day after Sophie went out with the Shepherd crew to study the Kitesharp sinking. He’d offered her a favor, but it was also some kind of ritual warning to stay out of his way.

  “Those fuckers,” Bram muttered. She’d have bet he was rubbing the pearl embedded in his thumb. An echo of her own anger, over that, pinged through her.

  She decided not to tell him about the encounter with Convenor Brawn. Not yet anyway. Instead she said, “I wonder if they’re gearing up for another run at sinking or disabling Temperance?”

  “I—Hold on, Sofe. Hi there.… What? No! Again?”

  His phone must have rung.

  “We’ll be right over,” he said, which sounded like a cue to get out of the tub if she’d ever heard one.

  “What’s up?” She set her own phone out of stomping distance and reached for a towel.

  “The folks have had a break-in,” he said.

  Within minutes they were headed out to their childhood home, driving in the direction of Stanford, where their father taught English literature.

  “I have to tell you something,” he said as they turned onto their street. “The parents—”

  “It’s happened before,” she said.

  He paused as he was downshifting, and then let out a little hiss. “I said ‘again,’ on the phone.”

  “You said ‘again,’” she agreed, elbowing him in a companionable, bratty-sister way. He stuck out his tongue as he parked the car.

  There were a half-dozen police on the front lawn, along with a huge black dog whose every hair crackled with not-quite-antagonistic alertness. The person in charge appeared to be a tall African-American woman in a snappy suit. She wore a pricey-looking engagement ring—diamonds and sapphires—and her eyes were watering slightly as she came out of the house.

  Allergic to cats, Sophie thought as she took in the yard of her childhood home. There was a shiny new alarm sticker on the back door, which had been punched in by something big and heavy.

  “Bramwell,” the woman said, shaking his hand. “This your sister?”

  “Sofe, this is Inspector Bettel.”

  “Ella’s fine.” She scrutinized Sophie. “It looks much the same as last time.”

  Saying that to see if I know about the last one. “Bram just told me there’d been another break-in.”

  “Your house appears to have been searched.”

  “Searched?” She blinked. “Not robbed?”

  “First time, they got the family laptop.”

  With copies of all her Stormwrack footage. Sophie felt a spike of anxiety, then forced herself to let it go. She had backups in the cloud, and this was probably the work of people from Stormwrack anyway.

  Wrackers. In our house.

  “Sophie?” Her parents were just emerging from the house. “Sophie!”

  “Miss Hansa?”

  “Hang on a second, okay?” she said to Bettel, and dove into her parents’ arms.

  CHAPTER 7

  Cornell and Regina Hansa were career academics who had adopted Sophie from Beatri
ce twenty-five years earlier. They didn’t know she’d found Beatrice and Cly—and she couldn’t tell them, or anyone, because telling them about her birth parents would mean telling them about Stormwrack.

  Oh, yeah, this isn’t gonna be tricky.

  The ironclad closed adoption had, as far as she could tell, suited her parents just fine. They’d never wanted to help Sophie explore her past.

  Bram got out of the way as their mother swept in, crushing Sophie into a hug. “Oh! Honey, we’ve missed you.”

  She was tearing up. “Are you guys okay?”

  “Dad?” Bram said, echoing her question.

  “Unscathed,” Cornell said. “We were out when the alarm company called.”

  “Police catch them?”

  “Her, apparently. Missed by the skin of her teeth.”

  A sledgehammer lay just beyond the door.

  Sophie took it in: a well-used, dirty tool. Splashes of old paint adorned its handle, and there was clay ground into its head. Picked up, maybe, from a nearby construction site? What if her parents had been home when whoever it was used that to smash in the door? She tried to swallow. Her throat felt like it was full of sand.

  “That’s not very subtle,” Bram said.

  “Why bother with subtlety?” Regina said.

  Sophie turned a slow circle, taking in the yard and the police. “They didn’t take anything?”

  “I’m hoping you can tell us.” Bettel ushered Sophie through the kitchen; Dad gave her a smile and an arm squeeze as she went past.

  “Your parents tidied up after the first time, but—” The inspector was making straight for her bedroom.

  “Teeth!” Sophie’s possessions had been strewn out into the hall. The intruder had smashed in the walls. Two floorboards had been pried up. So had the windowsill.

  Searching for something.

  It wasn’t her biosamples—Bram had most of those. The few she had left here, a few slides and packets of seeds, lay untouched among the scattered stuff.

  “She got out using your parents’ balcony,” said Bettel. “Ran down the hall, right through the screen, and jumped down to the yard. Outran the police dog. Whoever it was, she was very fit.”