by Anna Burke
“I do,” said Miranda.
“What is the proof?”
“I am,” I said.
Miranda whirled. You are not the only one who can make sacrifices, I told her with a look.
“You?”
“I served as navigator for Admiral Comita. The Archipelago Council knows my face, and they know I served as a spy. I can corroborate any reports.”
“A mutineer and a navigator,” said Mr. Sotto Voce. “Now there’s a story.”
You have no idea.
The commission spoke amongst themselves long enough for my racing heart to somewhat calm. They were considering it, which meant that maybe, just maybe, we’d spared Harper—as well as making ourselves more valuable alive than dead.
“We shall consider your case,” said the commissioner with a nod to Lia. “Take them to Kole. He’ll weigh their evidence.”
••••
“You really didn’t know?” I asked Miranda as Lia led us out of the room. Miranda shook her head, looking as stunned as I felt.
“Of course I didn’t know.”
Ching hadn’t told Miranda everything, then. That was a small comfort. If Miranda had lied to me about this . . . but she hadn’t, and the problem before us was much larger than Ching’s predictable deception. Harper’s parentage had to remain a secret. If only I could store the knowledge in a chest and drop that chest into Davy Jones’s locker or, better yet, the Mariana Trench.
“They can never find out,” I said in a whisper too low for Lia to hear—I hoped.
“I know.”
I wished, too, that we’d been given time to get our story straight. I’d already betrayed the Archipelago on more than one occasion. I’d even been willing to plot a raid against Crux’s supply lines. This, though—this was different. We’d been dropped in the middle of a game where we did not know the rules. I was shaking as badly as Miranda had in the worst of her withdrawal. The sea wolves—Symbionts—were not the solution. They weren’t even potential allies. They’d been willing to set a butcher on my people, and for what? My bare feet sank into the moss, and each step felt like drowning.
The room Lia led us to overlooked the central chamber. I could see the vines and the birds through the wide plex on the far wall. The effect was soothing, had I been in any state to be soothed. My thoughts tumbled over each other. Harper. Ching. Comita. Later, I’d have time to consider the effect this news had had on Miranda. Later. After I’d secured Harper’s safety. I’d failed Jeanine, but I would not fail Harper.
In the middle of the room, his head resting against a tank filled with tiny octopus, sat a man. He looked to be in his fifties, with the leathery, sun-darkened skin of a drifter. His thick, curly hair thinned at the temples. Gray laced the black. Someone had broken his nose at least once. It leaned crookedly to the right, and a divot in his upper lip suggested he’d lost more skin in that fight than his face belied. Wide shoulders. Waist thickening with age. Lean legs, bare from the knee down to reveal feet with the same high arch as mine. Deep lines in his cheeks. And his eyes—
Miranda tightened her hold on me as I slumped. Lia said a few words in their language to the man, her back to me, unaware I’d partially collapsed. He nodded, but his eyes remained fused to my face. He stared at me, drinking me in like a shriveled root.
Eyes the warm brown of sunlit kelp, with the barest hint of gold.
I should not have recognized him. Too much time had passed. He’d left when I was five, and what I remembered most were his large callused hands and the way his shoulders felt beneath my small thighs.
“Rose?” His voice traveled back through time and undid everything.
I ran. The door opened at my touch and my feet flew down the halls, skimming over the sucking moss. People leapt out of my way. I vaulted over a series of small pools, scaring several children swimming below the surface. Leaves whipped my face. Moss brushed my arms. I stopped only when the vines towered above me and I could force my way into the tight grove at the base. There, I huddled on a tangle of roots, feeling the pull of water up through the vines into the mangrove forest and north swirling all around me. I pressed my back into the roots hard enough to bruise my spine. I couldn’t do this. I wouldn’t do this. It was too much. Everything was too damn much, and I hadn’t asked for any of it.
Miranda found me. She crouched outside the grove and peered into my hiding place. I shook my head, unable to speak. Wave upon wave of tight, hot anger rocked me, and beneath the anger swam shoals of shame. Moving past this scant security was unthinkable. Here, I was just a nodule on a mangrove root, poised between water and sky. She edged in. One of her feet slipped on the net of roots crisscrossing the surface. She caught herself. There was barely room for both of us in the shade of leaves and smooth bark. Her hand reached out for mine. I fell into her, shaking so hard my teeth rattled.
“I’m so sorry, Rose.”
Fish glittered in rays of sunlight. A child laughed nearby. The rattle of my teeth painted sound patterns across my eyelids.
My father was alive.
“I want to leave,” I said.
“I know you do.”
“He’s dead. That man is dead. I don’t know him.” She stroked my back. I placed my tongue between my teeth to stop the rattling and tasted blood. “It’s getting more and more complicated.”
Miranda took my face between her hands and wiped my tears away with her thumbs. She, too, was a shell.
“He . . .” I couldn’t say the rest.
“You need answers. I can’t give them to you.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“You’re not a coward.” Her fingers pressed into my jaw, forcing me to face her. “You’re a navigator. A captain. Mine. And I don’t tolerate cowards.”
“Mere—”
“I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry, but you have to face this. I’ll be right beside you.”
“I can’t,” I said, but I took her offered hands and crawled out of the mangrove, blinking at the bright light because she was right. I had to face this. My crew depended on it.
The walk back to the room seemed to take less time than my flight, for all that we walked slowly. This was time I knew we should be using to plan, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t think at all, except to ask the same series of questions: how, why, and why again.
Raised voices greeted us at the door. Miranda put an arm around my waist and pulled me slightly behind her as we paused to listen. Lia shouted something at the man—my father—in their language, her voice breaking as it rose in pitch. His voice rumbled beneath hers in the baritone I remembered.
They broke off their argument, for I didn’t need to speak their language to know they were fighting, when they noticed us. Lia made to push past Miranda to leave, but he spoke a sharp word, and she halted. Tears glittered on her cheeks. She wiped at them furiously.
“What’s happened?” asked Miranda, holding even more tightly to me.
Lia threw a poisonous glare over her shoulder at the man waiting for me and refused to answer.
He stood. One of his legs buckled as he attempted to rise, but he steadied himself.
“You were born facing due north,” he said to me. My mother’s words: the story she’d told me on nights I had trouble falling asleep. I wanted to cover my ears with my hands, and I wanted to throw myself into his arms, as I had so often as a girl. Instead I clung to Miranda. Her arm enveloped my shoulders, holding me close. She couldn’t protect me from this the way she’d shielded me from other dangers. This was no pirate ship or duplicitous crew. This was betrayal on a level so deep I couldn’t have plumbed the depths if I’d wanted to.
“How do you know that?” I asked. I had to ask. I had to be sure, and I had to hear him say it.
“Rose, what are you doing here?” He looked at me like his heart was breaking. Good. Let it break, as my mother’s had. As mine had. I didn’t owe him answers.
“Your name wasn’t Kole when you were my father.”
“I can explain, if you’ll let me.”
“Does my mother know?”
He shook his head and closed his eyes.
“You were never a drifter.” Years of ridicule, of wondering, of searching drifter tubs for a familiar face. All for nothing.
“I was.”
“It was his cover. If you’re going to tell the story, tell all of it,” Lia said. A bloody red line marred her lower lip where she’d chewed it raw, and bioluminescence pulsed along her neck in shades of red almost as violent. Her reaction didn’t add up, but I couldn’t process any emotions other than my own.
“The work I did for Symbiont required access—”
“My mother was access?” I struggled free of Miranda and took a step toward him, though what I intended to do wasn’t clear even to me.
“No.” His face crumpled. “I loved her. I still do.”
“You left her. We thought you were dead!”
“I make no excuses. What is done is done. But Rose—”
I remembered, suddenly, the last time I’d seen my father. He’d kissed my forehead and bade me to be good, and I woke the next morning with a terrible headache. My mother had bathed my forehead with cool cloths and sang to me until it passed. That must have been when he’d made the alterations. Then, he’d left us forever.
“Why didn’t you take us with you?” I wished I sounded like Miranda: cold and commanding, not petulant and hurt.
“You had a good life. You were safe.”
It was true. My mother loved me, and we’d been happy. I didn’t want to have been raised by this man instead, but things might have been so different, had I known the truth. “Is that why you messed with my head? To keep me safe?”
“Never let it be said he doesn’t learn from his mistakes,” said Lia.
“Lia-lee—” he began.
“Oh, shit,” said Miranda beneath her breath. I looked at her, but she was staring at Lia with something like horror.
“What?” I asked her.
She shook her head and squeezed me.
“Are you going to tell her, or should I?” Lia continued.
“Tell me what?”
Kole cleared his throat and, with a heavy glance at Lia, began to speak. “I met your mother two years before you were born, Rose. I was on a reconnaissance mission. Symbiont has been keeping tabs on the Archipelago since the beginning.”
“No one looks twice at a drifter tub,” said Miranda. How many times had we relied on that very sentiment over the last few months? Drifter anonymity had saved our lives. I locked my knees to prevent them from giving out on me while I struggled to parse through the maelstrom of emotions to the facts beneath.
“And you are?” He took in the protective curve of the arm she’d placed around me.
My life. My heart. My broken, angry ocean.
“Miranda Stillwater,” she said.
Kole rocked back on his heels in surprise.
“So, you’ve heard of me?”
“You caused quite a stir,” he said.
“You’re getting off topic,” said Lia.
“The Archipelago had a duty, and they failed.” He cleared his throat and searched my face, as if he wished he were saying something different. “The finest geoengineering minds built us both. The Archipelago was supposed to work with us to reverse what we could of the damage to the climate so that the oceans, at least, would remain livable.”
“What does that have to do with my mother?”
“He was a spy,” said Miranda.
“Did she know you were using her?”
“I never used her. She had nothing to do with my mission.”
“Which was?” I asked.
“I cannot tell you.” Regret flavored his words so thickly I could almost taste it. “Believe me, if I—”
“Why didn’t you come back? Can you at least tell me that?”
“My cover was exposed. You would not have been safe. If someone had linked me to you—”
“Brief 182C,” Miranda said. “Seas. That was you?”
“What?” I said.
“There was a brief I found in an old ship log on my first ship. I didn’t understand half of it then, just that a drifter man had kidnapped a kid from Gemini. The admiralty wanted that kid back. Badly. I remember it because the wording was odd. There was something about the mother, too—”
“She died,” said Lia. “After trying to drown me.”
••••
My mother had dated only one person since my father had vanished: a woman named Kit, who worked with her in the kelp beds. Sometimes Kit had dinner with us. Occasionally she stayed the night. I never got the sense it was serious for either of them, but I liked Kit well enough. She never got between me and my mother, and she made my mother smile. There hadn’t been anyone else, before or after, that I knew of. Despite my father’s long absences, she’d remained faithful to him—or perhaps she simply hadn’t craved companionship. She’d never told me whether or not she and my father had spoken of commitment or monogamy, and I had never asked. For all I knew, she’d given him her blessing to be with as many other people as he wanted.
This was different. Slowly, I peeled my eyes from my father’s face to look at Lia. “Drown you?”
“She thought I was radioactive because I came out glowing.”
I’d been five years old when Lia was born. Five years old. The same age as when my father left us forever one August morning.
“Of course I couldn’t drown because I had baby gills.” She touched the skin on her neck. No gills broke the surface, but that angry red still pulsed. “She didn’t know that, though. She’d already slit her wrists.”
“Oh,” I said, an involuntary gasp of pain for the girl standing with her arms wrapped around herself.
“What’s funny is my father always told me he didn’t know his genes would pass it on. He said,” and here she glared again at Kole, “he came from three generations of Symbionts who hadn’t expressed, which was why he made such a good spy. He used to tell me that if he’d known, he would have warned my mother. But you did know, didn’t you?”
This last was directed at Kole.
“Lia—”
“Because he already had another child, and she’d been born facing due north with eyes the color of a fucking star.”
The message my brain had been trying to nudge my way finally penetrated my shock: Lia was my half sister.
“I couldn’t tell you,” said Kole. “Not without jeopardizing Rose.”
“Who you protected with a lobotomy.” The accusation she flung at him stuck its landing, and he flinched. “Have you ever spoken a single word that wasn’t a lie?”
“Enough,” he said.
But Lia wasn’t done, nor was she going to listen to him, no matter how firm he made his tone. “You can go talk to the commission and explain to them why you were not able to validate their evidence today. I’m done.”
“Lia!”
She stormed out of the room, tears clinging to the lashes around her golden eyes.
“Rose, you should sit,” said Miranda. She pointed to a chair. I obeyed, feeling dizzy. Then she turned to Kole. “She will speak to you when she’s ready. Until then, I have a few questions.”
He stared out the plex window, perhaps hoping to catch a glimpse of Lia’s retreating form.
“Did you work with Amaryllis?” she asked.
His head whipped back around. “How do you know that name?”
“Used to sail with her.”
“She told you her real name?”
“She did. Left out a few other things, though, like how your people financed her attack on the Archipelago.”
“Before you judge, consider this: once we are in possession of the stations, we will reintroduce the protocols that should have been in place all along. It will take time. Generations. Our innovations might be able to keep us alive as a species long enough to benefit. Without intervention, we’ll be dead within the next millennia. We had
no choice.”
“What about negotiations? Did you think about talking to us before you decided to wipe us out?” I said.
“Repeatedly.” His mouth twisted bitterly. “For decades. For generations. Each attempt has been rebuffed by your council.”
I recalled my own experience with Archipelago politics. It had taken the threat of immediate annihilation to get them to act on Ching. Cold pervaded me as I realized he might speak truth. The Archipelago responded slowly, if at all.
“Now, will you tell me why my daughter is here?” he asked Miranda.
“Because I am a fool. And no. You will never touch her again. In fact, you—”
“Miranda,” I said, catching the hem of her shirt as she advanced on Kole. “He doesn’t matter.”
Kole—I would not call him Father again—looked at me with that same heartbreak.
“We came here with Amaryllis because the Atlantic order is crumbling, and we’d hoped to broker a trade alliance, or at least . . . something. On the way, we had a falling out.”
“She would not have wanted to return empty-handed,” he said. I filed the information away for later, as I had to do with all the emotions currently putting themselves through an engine turbine in my chest.
“Then one of our crew got an infection, and we had nowhere else to go so we stuck to the course. We did not know you were behind the attack on the mines. If we had, we would never have come. But I guess it’s all the same, in the end. You want order. Comita wants order. Who the fuck knows what Ching wanted. We came looking for answers, and now we have them, and I wish we didn’t.”
“Rose—” Miranda began.
“You say you want to stabilize the ocean,” I said.
He nodded.
“Convince me you’ll find a place for everyone else, and we’ll tell you everything we know.”
“Your mother will be safe. I promise—”
“I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. By everyone else, I meant the Archipelago. Pirates. Drifters. Everyone you seem to think matters less than you. And when I said convince me, I didn’t mean you, personally. Get your commission to make us an offer.”
We were in no place to make demands. I knew this, but I was gambling on the stricken look in his eyes and a prayer he was human enough to feel guilt.
