Chapter OneNOWSeventeen years oldLiberan Sea
I climb to the main deck of the Pelican at dawn, expecting it to smell better than the sour, sweaty sleeping quarters packed full of snoring men. It doesn’t. It smells like dead whale.
The whale’s leviathan, half-stripped body towers in my periphery. Oh, Thea, it seems to say, judging. You stupid, stupid girl. What have you done?
Too much. Not enough. I’m sorry.
The deck is mostly empty, save the whale’s sad body and mine. Besides us, just a few tired sailors shuffle around the sails, trying to coax movement out of the windless dawn. I wrap my hands around the railing and breathe.
I always thought morning horizons were the best part of sailing—a refreshing, a newness—but today doesn’t feel fresh or new. Clementine would’ve told me that admiring the sunrise was sentimental nonsense, and now I see she’s right. Yesterday, I ran away from Clementine with a boy I never should’ve trusted, and I hoped that in dawn, I’d realize it was all a bad dream. But in dawn, all I see is the endless spill of consequence: The morning horizon can’t save me.
The sun shakes away the darkness, bayoneting the waves in short-lived colors. Black oil to quicksilver, silver to a urine gold, then the pink-red of diluted wine. In the distance, where an untrained eye would see smudgy nothing, I catch the faintest glimmer of land. I try to be stirred by awe and am not.
“That’s the greenhand’s girl?” one of the sailors asks behind me.
“Last captain I sailed with didn’t let any family on his ship,” the other responds loudly. “Said women were bad luck.”
“She look sort of familiar to you?”
I turn. The sailors both jolt, just a little, like they’re surprised I didn’t pretend I couldn’t hear them, as any polite woman would know to do.
“I’m not anybody’s girl,” I say.
The first sailor says to the second, “She looks kind of like that pirate—you know the one. The woman.”
“A woman pirate?”
“Oh, come off it. How many lady pirates are there? The Fowler one.”
“No. The crazy one? Does Captain know that?”
I think of that word, crazy, how it would scrape the inside of my dry mouth, how it would lodge there. Crazy. Clementine is volatile, decisive, stoic, exacting, irascible, audacious. Contradictory, impossible to please, and so fiercely disappointed in me that when I ran away from her yesterday, I hoped I’d never need to look back.
Is she crazy?
No; she’s just what she has to be in a world full of men like these.
“I’m her daughter,” I say.
The sailors blink.
“What are you doing on our ship?” one of them asks. “She going to come after us now?”
“Probably not,” I say. Not unless she thinks I’ve been kidnapped; not unless her honor is at stake.
The sailors seem wary of me now that they know I’m the daughter of the cool, the commanding, the crazy Clementine Fowler. But I don’t deserve their wariness. I feel weak and small and afraid, lost from my mother, on a ship full of men and one very dead whale.
My heart is beating too fast. I can feel it working away in my chest, ping ping ping ping ping, like the heart of the mouse I found in our kitchen when I was ten, so panicked that I thought its eyes might pop out of its head like lids on boiling kettles. I brought the mouse outside and set it in the grass, and it ran so fast I couldn’t see where it went. Maybe it shot into a fox’s burrow or under a bird’s nest. Any danger, it seemed to think, was better than the one it had just experienced in my hands.
If someone set me in a field of tall grass right now, I would run so fast no one could see where I went.
“What’s wrong with her?” one of the sailors is saying, waving a hand too close to my face.
I flinch. Then bare my teeth. That’s always been the thing separating Clementine and me; for her, the natural reaction is the teeth baring. For me, it’s learned, poorly.
“I said, how’d you meet the greenhand?”
My future is so, so narrow. I will no longer be Thea. I won’t even be Clementine’s daughter. I will just be the greenhand’s girl, the unnamed possession of an unnamed whaler.
Back on the horizon, the ocean glows faint and flickering under that new sun.
“Where is that?” I ask, ignoring the question, pointing at the smudge of land.
“Providence,” one sailor says, because of course it’s Providence. “We’re not going there. We’re docking two settlements south, in Fairshore.”
Providence. There should be mountains rising there, but they’re obscured by fog.
“How far away?” I ask.
“Fairshore? We should get there tonight.”
“No,” I say. “Providence.”
“Three miles? Why?”
I consider. I consider the smell: rendering blubber; ash; decay. I consider the whale blood in the water, the sharks that come close when they can taste it. I consider the fact that if I stay here, my eyes might pop out of my head like the lids on boiling kettles.
I wrap my fingers around the railing.
Three miles.
No, I can’t. That’s crazy.
What would Clementine do? the dead whale asks me. What would Clementine be?
Volatile, decisive, stoic, exacting, irascible, audacious.
Crazy.
“What are you doing?” one of the sailors asks as I unlace my boots. They’re sturdy boots, the kind with good tread that Clementine made all her crew wear. Goodbye, boots. You will be missed. I tug the lace from the left one and use it to tie my hair out of my face.
My jacket, I shrug off. The only thing I take is the knife from the pocket—Clementine’s knife, pretty but not delicate, carved with her initials, CMF. The gun holster on my hip has been empty since I left Clementine, but I put the knife there now. It’s not a perfect fit, but I button it shut and hope it will do.
“What,” the sailor says again, louder this time, “are you doing?”
I just want to move. I just want to run. I just want to be.
The railing digs into my knees. I clamber to the top of it. It’s slick with water but sticky with salt under my socks, and I sway as I suck in a breath of air.
There you go, the whale says. One of us should leave this place.
“Get down from there!” the sailor says, trying to grab my arm, but he’s too late, I’m too fast, I’m too free.
I dive.
The water shocks the air from my lungs. Maybe I dove too far. Maybe my body is too heavy, too full of guilt, shame, worry, weakness.
I need air.
Salt in my eyes.
Darkness.
The crown of my head breaks the surface. Then my mouth is free, my neck and the wet hair plastered to it. Air.
When I manage to blink away the salt, I see the hull of the Pelican rising from the waves. While I was under, I must’ve kicked or drifted away—I’m twenty feet from it. But even from this distance, when I’m down here, it’s colossal.
The sailors are shouting something blurry and indistinct. Their faces: stunned. Voices: panicked. I did that to them. I am crazy. What a beautiful thing.
I laugh.
“Are you insane?” one of the sailors calls down, cupping his hands around his mouth. “You’re going to drown!”
“No,” I shout back. “I’m not.”
What I don’t say—what he doesn’t understand—is that drowning is not high on my list of worries right now. It’s slid down a few dozen spaces and now ranks below a number of more suffocating fears, like my teakettle skull, or Bauer waking up and smiling at me.
Three miles.
In front of me, the ocean is open, empty, and depthless.
If the sailors call after me for a while, they give up soon enough. If they go tell Bauer I’ve gone, I’m not worth pursuit.
I am seventeen years old. I am a runaway many times over. I am going to swim.
The water is cold but not too cold. This is the part I try to focus on: the kindness of temperate water. If I focus on this hard enough, I can almost forget that white sharks, which are among the least friendly of the cartilaginous fish, like temperate water too. I can’t see anything. The water feels bottomless, and maybe it is—below me, there’s a film of dusty green, occasionally interrupted by a tangle of kelp or a drifting cloud of jellyfish. Below that,
I imagine barrel-headed sperm whales in water like twilight; stilt-legged spiders in water like midnight; an abyss too black to consider beneath it all.
I swim.
When I think of fear, I think of the barnacles that cling to ships. That’s how I imagine my own fear: glued to my skin, visible to all who see me, blemishes to be scraped and carved away. In the ocean, no one can see whether or not I’m afraid. I’ve never been afraid of water, but this water plays tricks with my head. The endlessness of it. Anything too big to hold in your hands is scary—the depth of the sea, the years of a life, the vastness of human emotion. Usually, my fear comes in breathtaking bursts of panic. Here, it’s slow, thudding. I can’t panic for three miles. I can’t let anything take my breath away. Left arm, right arm. Breathe under the crook of my elbow. And then I do it again. Over, over, over again.
I swim.
Sailors call the ocean She. ...
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