Seabound (Seabound Chronicles Book 1) (28 page)

David stood,
leaning forward over the helm with his hands wrapped tight around the wheel,
eyes fixed on the horizon. The windshield had shattered into a thousand cracks.
A patch of blood was growing on David’s left shoulder.

“You all right?”
Esther asked, voice shaking as the shock finally registered.

“The destroyer
can’t outrun this beauty. Whew, just feel her move!”

David crowed like a
rooster as
Lucinda
sped through the waves. Even as his left hand seized
up and dropped to his side, he gazed triumphantly at the horizon line.

Chapter 27—Aftermath

As the sun gasped
out its
last light and dropped into the sea, they lost sight of the destroyer
in the distance. The
Galaxy
Flotilla
was gone, swallowed as surely as the sun.

Though the sea was
empty again, the new crew of the
Lucinda
wasn’t safe yet. The destroyer
couldn’t catch them in a straight run, but she carried more fuel and could sail
for longer. They had no idea how long the chase would last.

The aftermath of
the day’s events began to sink in. Esther had been so afraid, and she was only
just realizing it. And Paris was dead. She allowed herself to think the words,
but she still didn’t believe them. He’d helped them so much, put himself at
risk to spirit them away from the
Flotilla
.
He’d been so kind to her when she was left behind after the storm, and now he
was gone. Esther felt like curling up in the deepest corner of the hold until
the shaking in her limbs subsided. She pushed the feelings away. There was work
to do.

She forced herself
to move, making her way through the ship to check on everyone. Dirk had the
engine room well in hand. His crew—it was clear they were all loyal to
him—had already divided into teams to manage the propulsion system.

One of the men,
apparently Dirk’s second-in-command, had taken shrapnel to the leg. Adele knelt
in the grease and blood on the floor of the engine room, digging shards of
metal out of the man’s calf muscle. The others winced as he hollered, but they
kept to their tasks.

“Will he be okay?”
Esther asked.

“He’ll be fine.
Nothing to worry about,” Adele said, wrapping the wound with gauze.

“Can you take care
of David next? He’s in the pilothouse.”

Esther had left
him with his own shirt pressed against his shoulder to staunch the blood.

“Certainly,” Adele
said. “And then you.”

“Huh?”

Adele smiled.
“You’re leaving bloody footprints on the deck, Esther.”

Esther looked down
at her bowling shoe, which had turned a dark purplish-brown. “Oh, it’s just my
stitches. David first. He’s got a hole in his shoulder.”

Looking at her
bloody shoe made the pain come rushing back. Esther flinched and turned toward
the door.

Dirk stepped in
front of her, blocking the exit. “Taking charge, are we?” he said, his face
unreadable.

“Just making sure
everyone’s okay,” Esther said.

She waited for him
to step aside so she could leave. He didn’t.

Dirk dropped his
voice lower. “You’re still an outsider on this ship. We didn’t want the
captains telling us what to do, and you’re no captain. Remember that.”

“I just want to
find my family,” Esther said, willing her voice to remain steady. “I don’t want
to be the captain of anything.”

Dirk stared hard
at her for a moment before stepping aside.

She wanted to
bolt, but she resisted, walking slowly and brushing against him as he hovered
just out of her path. But then an image flashed in her head, and she couldn’t
help but smile. Soon Dirk would meet Judith.

Esther continued
her rounds. Byron and his wife were busy assigning bunks to the children when
Esther poked her head into the crew quarters.

“We’re okay,”
Byron said. “Everyone will be better after a bit of sleep. But you look like
you’ve seen the Great White Whale himself, Esther. You should get some rest.”

“I will. Got a few
things to do first.”

Esther smiled at
them and ruffled little Thera’s hair. The shaking in her hands had gotten
worse. She had to keep moving.

It was dark
outside now, and the wind whipped around the deck, harsh and cold. Esther
trailed her hand along the railing, heading aft.

She found Neal in
the stern, kneeling over Eva’s body with Dax at his side.
Not another one.
His hands were dyed red, and blood was soaking
into the fabric of his trousers, leaving dark patches on the knees.

Esther asked Neal
what had happened. His voice monotonous, he told her Eva had been climbing the
turret to warn the lookouts when the gunfire began. She’d been hit multiple
times. Neal had been too late to stop the bleeding.

“It was so quick,”
he said dully. “I couldn’t do anything.”

Esther swallowed.
She felt numb. “You did what you could, Neal.”

He sat back on his
heels and wiped his nose with the back of hand, leaving a red smudge. Eva’s
friends stood around her body in a circle. Zoe’s face was red, and she was
crying with heaving, openmouthed sobs. Toni shook like a leaf, tears clinging
to her thick eyelashes. Eva’s sister, Anita, was the only one with dry eyes.
She simply looked at her sister’s still face, shrugging off her friends’ attempts
to comfort her.

They all looked up
at Esther. She met their sad, accusing eyes and said the only thing she could
think of: “We have work to do.”

She had to keep
going, keep working. Her father had taught her that. In a crisis, the worst
thing was to be idle. Simon made sure the people on the
Catalina
were too busy after the catastrophe to let the reality of
their situation set in. It had saved them from panic. Now, she would do the
same.

As the cold
deepened, Esther circumnavigated the
Lucinda
,
surveying the damage. She’d assign people for the most essential repairs, no
matter what Dirk said about her giving orders. It didn’t look like there were
any breaches in the hull.
Lucinda
had an ample tool supply. Esther would
get the less technically able sorting through the supplies and organizing the
hold in the morning. She occupied herself with such thoughts: tools, work,
practical things over which she had some measure of control. She couldn’t allow
her emotions to get in the way.

But soon Esther’s
walk slowed, and she nearly stumbled. She caught the cold railing between
shaking hands and stared at the black sea sliding past her. Desperately, she calculated
the days since she had walked the
Catalina
’s decks, smiled at
Bernadette, spoken to her father. She imagined them using makeshift methods to
clean their water, rationing what they had, slowly burning through their fuel.
She hoped there had been sunny days where they were. She needed them to hang on
a little while longer.

The cost had
already been too high.

Esther
straightened up and continued her journey around the ship. When she had made a
complete circle, she came upon a small gathering. It was a burial at sea for
Eva, quick and simple. Anita recited her sister’s favorite poem by Lord Byron.

Roll on, thou deep
and dark blue Ocean, roll!

Ten thousand fleets
sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth
with ruin; his control

Stops with the
shore; upon the watery plain

The wrecks are all
thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man’s
ravage, save his own,

When, for a moment,
like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy
depths with bubbling groan,

Without a grave,
unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

As Eva’s body
slipped beneath the surface, guided by her friends, Esther looked around at the
people who had thrown their lots in with her. The people who had trusted her,
counted on her.

Neal reached out a
hand and rested it briefly on Anita’s shoulder. Adele stood in front of a group
of oilmen like a pillar of salt. Byron and his wife had come out on the deck,
holding hands while their solemn-eyed daughter stared at the waves. David’s silhouette
was visible in the pilothouse, separate from the others still. She imagined
Paris standing among them, smiling at her with his twinkling eyes.

Esther hoped it
wouldn’t all be for nothing. As the group dispersed to find rest and comfort,
she stood alone, watching the ruffled wake of
Lucinda
slicing through
the sea. And finally she cried.

Chapter 28—The Search

The rising sun the
next
morning found Esther in the pilothouse with David and Neal. Two bullets had
passed cleanly through David’s shoulder, one right next to the other, but Adele
had patched him up. He would be fine.

They had sailed
through the night at full speed, working in shifts, to get as far away from the
Galaxy Flotilla
as possible. Esther slept in a crew cabin for a few
hours but woke before the sun to check for updates. With only the secondhand
messages from other ships to go on, they headed for the last known location of
the
Catalina
.

Neal stood at the
communications console, looking shell-shocked after the events of the previous
day. His usual good-natured smile was gone, replaced with a sea-deep melancholy.
Esther wondered if she’d ever see that smile again.

But Neal was ready
to work. He switched through a handful of languages on the radio, seeking
information about the
Catalina
.

At first, a
barrage of communications had come from the
Galaxy.
The messages
threatened and enticed but eventually became less frequent. They mostly ignored
them.

Neal managed to
get in touch with a metal-harvesting vessel that had seen the navy ship
Marianna had talked to before, but the harvesters had never heard of the
Catalina
.
Neal carried on a long conversation in a language Esther didn’t recognize that
left her and David anticipating good news, but when he signed off he only said,
“The harvesters don’t know anything, but they said the
Galaxy
is asking
other ships to apprehend us.”

“Think anyone will
do what the
Galaxy
wants?” David
asked.

“Doubtful,” Neal
said.

David nodded.
“There are advantages to living in a waterlogged world without laws.”

“Do you think the
Galaxy
could get people to withhold information about the
Catalina
from us?”
Esther asked. “Maybe that’s why everyone says they haven’t seen her.”

“That’s possible.”
Neal was quiet for a moment. “The harvesters had some interesting things to say
about land.”

David tore his
eyes away from the horizon for a moment to look at Neal. Land.

Adele had appeared
in the doorway, as if drawn to them by the word. “Is another ship picking up
signals from land?” she asked.

Neal nodded. “Apparently
it’s true—what David said about the captains withholding reports from
land. There really are people growing crops again. And someone’s working on a
network of satellite towers near the coast. We could get some real information
soon.”

“Who’s in charge
on land?” David asked. His broken glasses gave him a wild-eyed look that was
starting to get a little worrying. He would need to sleep again soon.

“In North America
there’s a group based in old Kansas City, in the Midwest.”

“Any word of New
York?” David asked.

Neal rubbed his
eyes. “That’s where you’re from, isn’t it? They didn’t say anything about it.”

David nodded as if
he expected no less. There had been reports of New York years ago, before they
were entirely cut off. The city had drowned. It wouldn’t be fit to reoccupy,
maybe for decades.

“Is there any
fighting?” Esther asked.

Neal shrugged, but
Adele spoke from the doorway. “The last I heard, they are cooperating for the
moment. I don’t know if you were old enough to remember it, Esther, but in the
early days after the volcano, people got pretty savage.”

“I heard enough,”
Esther said.

She remembered
people speaking in low voices as they hovered over their first fishy meals.
Tales of looting and murder and lawlessness in the areas that had survived the
initial explosion. She’d asked her father to explain, and Simon had told her
they were lucky to be adrift at sea. Hard as it was to believe, they’d avoided
the worst.

“Perhaps we should
send a group over there when all this is finished,” David said. “What do you
think, Esther?”

“It won’t be up to
me,” she said. “You should talk to Judith.”

“You think any of
these people will answer to Judith?” David said.

She stared at him,
surprised.

Adele was nodding.
“Like it or not, Esther, I think you’ll be more than a mechanic when we get
back. If we get back.”

Esther frowned.
“As long as they’re alive . . . that’s all I care about.”

Esther didn’t like
what David and Adele were implying. They didn’t understand how the
Catalina
worked. She’d have to keep an eye on all of the newcomers.

But another day
passed, and they still only had vague information about the
Catalina
’s whereabouts. An indistinct
radio report suggested she was near a small group of islands off of what had
once been Hawaii.

Esther started
having nightmares about the
Orchid
, the ghost ship they’d sent to the
bottom of the sea. What if they discovered the
Catalina
and it too had
become a floating mausoleum? She woke in a cold sweat each time she managed to
fall asleep at all.

Esther shared a
cabin with Zoe, Toni, and Anita. Once, she awoke in the darkness, shaking after
another
Orchid
dream, and a lumpy
pillow hit her in the face.

“Salt, what was
that?” Esther shouted.

“You were
whimpering,” Zoe said, and she hit Esther with the pillow again. “Snap out of
it.”

“Ouch. I’m awake.”
Esther sat up in her bunk, rubbing her eyes.

Zoe’s head was
hanging down from the top bunk, her hair pulled halfway out of her ponytail.
She grinned, preparing to swing the pillow again.

“Did I say
anything?” Esther asked, ducking Zoe’s next swing and drawing her knees up to
her chest.

“Just mumbling,”
Zoe said, tossing the pillow back onto her own bunk and swinging her head back
down. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Esther
said. “Just worried about the
Catalina
.”

Zoe seemed to be
waiting for her to say more. She looked comical with her head hanging upside
down from the bunk, but she had as much a right to be worried as Esther.

“Some people seem
to think that I’m a leader now. Adele. David. And I was just wondering, well,
do you think we’re doing the right thing?” Esther asked, finding it hard to explain
what she was really getting at.
Did I
mess this up? Is it all my fault?
“With the mission, I mean?”

Zoe nodded without
hesitation. “It was time for us to go.”

“But Eva . . .”

“Eva wanted to get
away from the
Galaxy
as much as the
rest of us,” Zoe said. “And Paris wanted to help us. Don’t beat yourself up
about them, Esther. We’re all adults. We made our choices.”

“I wish I hadn’t
put so many people in danger,” Esther said, again feeling the need to do
something. “Maybe I should go check on the propulsion.”

She started to
stand up.

Zoe frowned, then
reached back on her bunk and grabbed the pillow again. “Go back to sleep,” she
said, whacking Esther in the head. “You’ve been keeping us crazy busy. You’re
doing a great job, O Great Leader, but you need to sleep too.”

“Okay, okay, cut
it out,” Esther said.

She curled up in
her bunk again, listening to Zoe shifting above her. She was grateful for Zoe
and for Toni and Anita. She enjoyed their company in the midst of everything.
Esther was starting to understand why they had left the
Galaxy
, why it was so important to them to be out from under the
tyranny of the captains and the drastic inequality. And Zoe was right. If she
was going to find the
Catalina
,
leader or not, she would need to sleep.

But by the third
day tempers were running thin in the pilothouse and in the rest of the ship.
Other people had started to question whether it had really been such a good
idea to leave the
Galaxy
. At least there they had room to roam and
plenty of conveniences. Dirk’s friends said they should abandon the rescue
mission and head for the
Amsterdam
Coalition
to restock. Dirk met such suggestions with stony silence, but he
didn’t contradict them.

Dax alternated
between pacing the deck in a frenzy and speculating to anyone who’d listen
about whether Cally had made it off the ferry. Finally, Esther ordered him
below deck to count ammunition. When Anita went to check on him, he had fallen
asleep amongst the bullet cartridges.

Esther encouraged
everyone to fish and gather seaweed when they could, hoping to preserve their
supplies. A few people grumbled, and Esther worried about what would happen if
they didn’t make progress soon. This was what it must have been like for her
father after the disaster. Simon understood how dangerous bored people could
become.

It was Neal who
heard the first truly promising rumor. He’d spent a late night stumbling
through a conversation in Spanish with an Argentinean trawler who claimed to
have seen the
Catalina
turn north after drifting southwest for several
days. Neal was pretty certain the trawler had said north. They altered their
course.

As they neared the
estimated coordinates on the afternoon of the third day, a fogbank tumbled low
over the sea, obscuring the view. Neal tried to reach any ships in the vicinity
on the radio. Silence. Their location was remote, far from the trade winds.

Esther thought
Neal’s informant must have been mistaken. Someone on the
Catalina
would
be in the broadcast center. If they were nearby, they would respond to the
Lucinda
’s calls.

Then, as the
Lucinda
sped through the choppy, fog-cloaked sea, a solitary blip appeared on the
radar.

“What’s that?”
Esther hovered behind Neal and David.

“A ship, isn’t
it?”

“David, head
toward that point.”

Esther gripped
David’s shoulder until he grunted and she remembered he was injured. She
dropped her hand.

“It could be a
ship,” David said. “Could be a whale. Or a wreck.”

“How long will it
take to get there?” Esther asked.

She felt a thrill
of hope, like a struck match, but tried to keep it under control.

“We’ll have a
visual soon. It’s too foggy.”

David twitched the
wheel.

Neal studied the
radar screen. “Hold on, we’ve got a landmass too. Looks like whatever it is is
hiding in some sort of cove. You see anything yet?” Neal asked.

“Nothing,” David
answered.

Esther stared at
the fog until her eyes ached. “How much longer?”

“Don’t worry,
Esther. We’ll get there,” David said.

Still, he
increased their speed. Esther leaned forward until her nose was almost touching
the cracked web on the windshield.

“We got
something!” Toni shouted from the crow’s nest. “Esther, are you seeing this?”

Esther dashed out
of the pilothouse and ran to the bow. Hope grew, now a sparkler in her chest.

Slowly, the fog
cleared. There was a landmass, dark and low on the horizon. Set against the
dark rock she could just see it: a flash of sun-dazzled white. They broke
through the fogbank.

“It’s a ship!
Yeah! It’s a ship, Neal!” Esther shouted.

“I can hear you.”
He was standing at her elbow.

The people from
the
Galaxy
crowded onto the deck. Everyone watched as they approached
the brilliant smudge of white. When they got closer, the white dissolved into
shades of gray—familiar, weather-battered shades of gray. She looked
somewhat the worse for wear, with a gaping section missing from the hull
shield, but it was her.

“Is
that
the
Catalina
?” Zoe asked.

“Doesn’t look like
much,” said Byron, who had come on deck with his whole family.

“That’s her,”
Esther whispered.

She couldn’t see
any movement on deck. Nothing at all. Someone should be working on hull repair.
Someone should have tried to communicate. If anyone was left.

David sailed the
Lucinda
in close to the ship. He cut the engine but stayed behind in the pilothouse.
Somewhere, Neal had acquired a loudspeaker. He cleared his throat several times
and tried to speak, then gave up and handed the loudspeaker to Esther.

She swallowed.
Someone should have come out on deck by now.

She took a breath
and raised the loudspeaker. “Ahoy,
Catalina
! Anyone there? Hello?”

She waited. The
only sound was the lapping of the water against the hull. A light breeze picked
up. The
Catalina
remained still and
silent.

“Hello? This is
Esther. Esther Harris. Is anyone alive up there?” she shouted, her throat
threatening to close up.

Still no answer.
Esther could feel the world dissolving, narrowing to a sliver that was just the
railing above their heads and the crisp blue sky.