After the Flood. Kassandra montag
digging with driftwood, but after a few minutes Pearl tossed her driftwood to the side.
“We won’t find anything,” she complained.
“Fine,” I snapped. My limbs were heavy with fatigue. “Then go up the mountainside and see if you can find a stream. Look for willows.”
“I know what to look for.” She spun on her heel and awkwardly tried to run up the mountainside. The poor thing was still trying to account for the motion of the sea, and she set her feet down too firmly, swaying from side to side.
I kept digging, pulling the mud in piles around me. I hit a shell and tossed the clam in my bucket. Above the wind and waves, I thought I heard voices coming from around the bend in the mountain. I sat back on my heels, alert, listening. A tension settled along my spine and I strained to hear, but there was nothing. I always thought I sensed things on land that weren’t there—hearing a song where there was no music, seeing Grandfather when he was already dead. As though being on land returned me to the past and all the things the past had carried.
I leaned forward and dug my hands into the mud. Tossed another shell into my bucket with a clink. I’d just found another clam when a small, sharp scream pierced the air. I froze, looking up, scanning the landscape for Pearl.
SEVERAL YARDS UP the mountainside, in front of shrubs and a steep rock face, a wiry man held Pearl, her back against his front, a knife at her throat. Pearl was still, her eyes quiet and dark, her arms at her sides, not able to reach the knife at her ankle.
The man had a desperate, off-kilter look on his face. I stood up slowly, my heart pounding in my ears.
“Come with me,” he called out. He had a strange accent I couldn’t place, clipped and heavy on the consonants.
“Okay,” I said, my hands up to show I wasn’t going to try anything, walking toward them.
When I reached them he said, “You move and she goes.”
I nodded.
“I’ve got a ship,” he said. “You’ll work it. Drop your knife on the ground.”
Panic rose up in me as I unfastened my knife and tossed it toward him. He sheathed it at his waist and grinned at me. Holes showed where teeth should be. His skin was tanned to a red brown and his hair grew in sandy patches. A tattoo of a tiger spread across his shoulder. Raiders tattooed their members, often with an animal, though I couldn’t remember which crew used the tiger.
“Don’tcha worry. I’ll care for ya. It’s up thataway.”
I followed the man and Pearl along the side of the mountain, winding our way toward the cove. Rough grass scratched my ankles and I stumbled over a few rocks. The man lowered the knife from Pearl’s neck but kept his hand on her shoulder. I wanted to reach forward and snatch her out of his grasp, but his knife would be at her throat again before I pulled her away. Quick flashes of how things could go ran through my mind—him deciding he only wanted one of us or there being too many people to fight once we reached his ship.
The man started chatting about his people’s colony up north. I wanted him to shut up so I could think straight. A canteen hung from the man’s shoulder and swung back and forth at his hip. I could hear liquid sloshing inside and my thirst rose above even my fear as my parched mouth ached for water, my fingers itching to reach it and unscrew the cap.
“It’s important we have new nations now. Important for …” The man cast his hand out in front of him, as if he could pluck a word from the air. “Organizing.” The man nodded, clearly pleased. “That’s how it was always done, back in the beginning, when we were still in caves. People aren’t organized, we’d all be snuffed out.”
There were other tribes who were trying to make new nations by sailing from land to land, setting up military bases on islands and ports, attacking others and making colonies. Most of them began as a ship that took over other ships, and eventually they began trying to take over communities on land.
The man looked over his shoulder at me and I nodded dumbly, wide eyed, deferential. We were half a mile from our boat. As we approached the bend along the mountainside, the ground dropped away at our side and we walked along a steep rock face. I thought about grabbing Pearl and leaping from the cliff to the water and swimming to our boat, but it was too far in this choppy water. And I couldn’t know if we’d have a clean fall into the water or if there were rocks below.
The man had shifted to talking about his people’s breeding ships. Women were expected to produce a child every year or so, to grow the raider crews. They waited until a girl bled before they moved her to a breeding ship. Until then, she was held captive in a colony.
I’d passed breeding ships when I was fishing, recognized them by their flag of a red circle on white. A flag that warned boats not to approach. Since illness spread so quickly on land, the raiders reasoned the babies would be safer on ships, which they often were. Except when a contagion broke out on a ship and almost everyone died, leaving a ghost ship, unmoored until it crashed against a mountain and drifted to the bottom of the sea.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the man continued. “But the Lost Abbots—we, we do things the right way. Can’t build a nation without people, without taxes, without having people to enforce those taxes. That’s what gives us the chance to organize.
“This yer girl?” the man asked me.
I startled and shook my head. “Found her on a coast a few years back.” He wouldn’t be so keen on separating us if he didn’t think we were family.
The man nodded. “Sure. Sure. They come in handy.”
The wind changed as we began to make our way around the mountain, and voices from the cove now reached us, a clamoring of people working on a ship.
“You look like a girl I know, back at one of our colonies,” the man said to me.
I was barely listening. If I lunged forward, I could reach his right arm, pull it behind his back, and reach for my knife in his sheath.
He reached out and touched Pearl’s hair. My stomach clenched. A gold chain with a pendant hung from his wrist. The pendant was dark snakewood, with the engraving of a crane on it. Row’s necklace. The necklace Grandfather had carved for her the summer we’d gone to see the cranes. It was colorless except the drop of red paint he’d placed between the crane’s eyes and beak.
I stopped walking. “Where’d you get that?” I asked. Blood surged in my ears and my body thrummed like a hummingbird’s wings.
He looked down at his wrist. “That girl. One I was telling you about. Such a sweet girl. I’m surprised she’s made it this long. Doesn’t seem to have it in her …” He gestured with his knife toward the cove. “Don’t have all day.”
I lunged at him and swiped his right leg with my foot. He tripped and I smashed my elbow down on his chest, knocking the air from him. I stomped on the hand holding the knife, grabbed it, and held it to his chest.
“Where is she?” I asked, my voice all breath, barely above a whisper.
“Mom—” Pearl said.
“Turn away,” I said. “Where is she?” I pushed the knife farther between his ribs, the tip digging into skin and membrane. He gritted his teeth, sweat gathering at his temples.
“Valley,” he panted. “The Valley.” His eyes darted toward the cove.
“And her father?”
Confusion furrowed the man’s brow. “She had no father with her. Must be dead.”
“When was this? When did you see her?”
The man squeezed his eyes shut. “I dunno. A month ago? We came here straight after.”
“Is she