The Reader (23 page)

W
hile Archer lay on the cabin's long table with the tattered remains of his shirt sheared away, Sefia watched Doc tend to his wounds. The woman's brown eyes swooped over his body, searching out injuries like an owl hunting in the night. Then her hands flicked open the metal fastenings on her black bag and began plucking out clear bottles of liquid, bandages, gleaming silver scissors, forceps, curved needles, and thread. She made each suture perfectly—one neat stitch after another—until they were lined up across Archer's wounds like sharp black letters, as if every set of stitches was a healing word Doc had written to keep his skin together.

There was a crash outside as a heavy wooden object hit the deck. The floorboards rumbled.

Sefia started up, but Archer caught her hand and held it fast. He stared at her, pleading with her to stay. There was so
much blood—on the table, on the floor, on his face and hands and chest—and when he moved, the cuts on his arms and legs opened up like narrow red eyes. She sank back onto the bench.

There had been no word on where the woman in black had come from, and no word on whether others would follow her. How had she found them in the first place? How had she known Sefia even existed? There was only one—

“So you were with him—Harison—when he went?” A voice startled her out of her thoughts. At the end of the table, Horse, the ship's carpenter, looked up from the enormous flask cradled in his shovel-like hands. He'd drawn his yellow bandanna low over his brows.

“Yeah,” Sefia murmured. “I talked to him.”

Tying off a tidy row of sutures, Doc made a small
hmm
sound.

Horse wiped his cheeks. When he looked up again, his eyes were bright with tears. “I'm glad you were with him, kid.”

Sefia nodded . . . more because she had to than because she wanted to. It was hard to be glad when she'd watched someone die. When he'd been crying and breathing raggedly in her arms one second and then . . . not.

And then . . .

. . . nothing.

Like Palo Kanta.

“It don't make no sense, though,” Horse added, turning the flask in his palm. “Why was that woman in the hold in the first place? There ain't nothin' of value down there.”

Sefia and Archer exchanged glances.
They
had been down there. The
book
had been down there. She looked toward the
door again. It might still be hidden in their crate, but with all that had happened, it wouldn't remain hidden for long.

Archer's hand clinched around hers, his face contorting, as Doc began stitching a wound on his right hand. He grimaced as she raised the edge of the cut with a pair of forceps.

“It's not too late for that drink,” she said, though she didn't stop suturing.

He pressed his lips together.

“Suit yourself.”

Slumped in his chair, Horse let out a weak chuckle and took a long pull from his flask. “Harison never liked drinkin' much either, not after the first time.” He didn't seem to expect a response, so Sefia kept silent.

The ship's carpenter was just as she'd imagined him: the round mountains of his shoulders; the brown, sun-lined face and the bandanna tied around his forehead; the splintery abused hands spotted with scars and pitch. He even smelled right—like oakum and wood shavings.

As if sensing her watching him, Horse looked up, bleary-eyed. “What?”

Sefia felt her cheeks go hot. “This is really the
Current of Faith
, isn't it?” she asked. “You and Doc . . . everyone . . . you're all really here?”

“For now,” Horse murmured.

She looked around the room. It was exactly as the book described it, down to the way everything came in even numbers: the hooks on the door, the chairs, the cabinets on the walls. The glass cases contained dozens of keepsakes: a ruby the size of a man's fist, a wedge of gold shaped like a sandwich, even the
Thunder Gong she'd read about in the book. She felt like she'd been dropped onto the page, among the letters, or like the book had somehow drawn the
Current
to them, as if it were all preordained. She swayed.

Archer blinked at her, and the corners of his mouth turned upward, dimpling the skin of his cheek.
They
were here, and they were still together.

At his forearm, Doc's hands wove in and out of each other, swift and silent as shadows.

“Can't believe I didn't see it before.” Horse coughed. “You're the kids from Black Boar.”

“You were on the pier?”

Horse bobbed his huge head a few times. “Funny little world, ain't it?”

“Yeah,” she said faintly. Her gaze was again drawn to the objects on the shelves: A rusty iron key. A black box inlaid with ivory. A necklace, its square blue sapphires girdled by glittering diamonds coated in dust, except where a few fingerprints allowed the light to strike through. She blinked, and in her vision she caught glimpses of Captain Reed fingering the necklace. A cloud of ash. And the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, wearing the necklace like a collar, gaining eternal youth. That was what the necklace did. And if you were beautiful, well . . . it let you keep that too. No matter how old she was, the woman was always surrounded: by men, by flowers, by laughter, by children . . . and then by disease, by screams, and smoke.

“The Cursed Diamonds of Lady Delune.” Closing her eyes, Sefia rubbed her aching temples.

“As the story goes, the captain was the only man to ever get
her out of those diamonds. She turned to dust as soon as he'd unhooked it.” Horse sighed. “I reckon that's what she wanted, in the end. The Lady didn't live a very happy life.”

Sefia thought of the woman from her vision: Though she never grew older, she became colder and colder as the years passed, as her parents and husbands and children and grandchildren were struck down by plagues and fires and cart accidents and suicides and withering old age.

“There's more to life than being young and beautiful . . . or happy, for that matter.” Sefia thought of her own life. She wasn't living to be
happy
. It had been a long time since she'd wanted something as simple as
happiness
.

“Ain't that the truth, kid.”

“My name is Sefia,” she corrected him.

Horse nodded and sipped at his flask. “Right. Sefia. You're quite the pair, the two of you. I hope—”

The door swung open, and cold air flooded the great cabin, making Sefia shiver. Horse sat up straight, tucking away the flask as the chief mate entered, dangling their packs from one hand. Sefia looked eagerly for the familiar rectangle of the book and was relieved to see its outline straining against the leather. The mate dumped their packs casually in the center of the floor, but she noticed the way his arm jerked back, as if he could not wait to be rid of them. She resisted the urge to gather her pack up in her arms.

Then the captain entered. She recognized him by his bright blue eyes, his air of command, and the black gun he held in one hand. She had been excited to see him—the real Captain Reed!—but at the sight of him her excitement congealed in her
stomach. He was angry. His anger seethed under his skin and behind his teeth. This was not the Reed from the stories.

“What's the damage?” he asked.

Archer pushed himself into a sitting position, wincing a little. The doctor sighed and began stitching a deep cut on Archer's shoulder. “Eleven wounds total, six needing stitches, two broken ribs. I think even you'd be proud, Captain.”

Reed ignored the humor in the doctor's voice. “And the girl?”

Sefia spoke up for herself. “Fine, sir. Archer did the fighting, not me.”

The captain stared at her for a long moment—long enough for her to wish she could swallow her words and disappear into the floorboards—but she did not look away.

“Horse?”

The big carpenter waved him off with a meaty hand. “Nothin' more than a bruised backside, Cap,” he said.

Reed jerked his head toward the door. “Get goin', then.”

Horse stood instantly, though he winked at Sefia. As he passed the captain, he leaned over and whispered, just loudly enough for her to hear: “They're good kids, Cap. If it comes down to it, you can count on my eatin' a bit less and workin' a bit more. I'll even kick in my wages if it comes to that.”

Sefia smiled faintly.

If the captain was surprised, he gave no sign, and Horse put his large hand on the doc's shoulder, where she laid her dark cheek against him as she continued stitching Archer's wounds.

A touch so small that communicated so much.

He squeezed her shoulder once and withdrew, slipping out the door into the cool night air.

The captain sat down in the chair Horse had occupied and placed his black revolver on the table. Sefia watched it warily. While the chief mate stood behind them, Reed unrolled a leather packet and took out a set of tools, lining them up in neat rows. Without a word, he began cleaning his gun, opening it up and removing the bullets, checking the cylinder. He attached a small square of cloth to the end of a metal stick and began jabbing it down the barrel and through the chambers—eight times. It was clear that no one was going to speak until the doctor had left, so Sefia simply watched.

The black gun was beautiful, all gold inlay and ebony carved like dragon scales, but up close she could see how damaged it was: pitted and scratched, flecked with age and long-forgotten acts of violence. The entire length of the grip was cracked, with a deep seam visible where it had been glued back together.

She narrowed her eyes, feeling for the lights that simmered beneath the physical world, and then she blinked, slipping into her Vision, which she'd begun thinking of as having a capital V. As Reed began scrubbing the Executioner with a small brush, the history of the black gun rushed over her.

A flurry of gunshots, a spray of blood, and the wet
crack
of a body hitting the water. Then her Vision shifted, and she saw the former captain of the
Current
, a man with a kind face and a bulbous nose, put the Executioner to his temple.

An explosion—fire and flesh and bone.

The black gun hit the deck, its grip fracturing on impact.

Moments later, Reed heaved himself onto the deck, dripping with seawater that made his shirt cling to his chest, revealing the landscape of musculature and black ink beneath. The ocean puddled at his feet as he reached for the broken gun.

She gulped and sat back, blinking rapidly. Her gaze darted once to the packs.

The doctor finished bandaging Archer's wounds and snapped her black bag closed. Standing, she pushed her glasses higher on the flat bridge of her nose and focused on the captain. “Cooky told you?” she asked.

Reed flicked his eyes at Sefia and nodded.

What had Cooky said? Did he blame her for Harison's death? Because she hadn't pressed hard enough, hadn't stopped enough of the blood? There had been so much blood, going so fast. She chewed the inside of her lip.

The doctor nodded at Archer, then at her. Sefia wanted to thank her, but the stony silence of the room was forbidding, so she only nodded back. The doctor left the room, and then Sefia and Archer were alone between Captain Reed and the chief mate.

Reed finished wiping down the Executioner and began applying drops of oil to its moving parts, working the action a few times. He did everything in even numbers, just as the legends said. Then he rolled up the cleaning kit, set the gun on the table, and lined up the remaining rounds in a neat row of four.

“I remember you two from the dock,” he said, tracing two interconnected circles on the tabletop, his finger leading into one and out of the other, over and over. “Didn't expect to see you again, though.”

“No, sir,” she said.

“You know who I am and what ship you're on?”

Sefia nodded.

“Then you know how peculiar it is for us to see intruders here. Tonight, I caught three of you, and one of my crew died. Now, that raises some questions. Dependin' on how you answer 'em, I might kill you, or if I'm feelin' lenient, drop you on a deserted island to get picked up by the next ship that comes by. You understand?”

Sefia looked back over her shoulder, and the mate turned his cloudy eyes on her. With a start, she saw the gray in them was from scarring: punctured places in his eyes that had healed over time. She swallowed. All the stories said the mate could sniff out lies like a bloodhound. She'd have to tell the truth. A truth that wouldn't get her and Archer killed.

Then she looked at Archer, who was sitting beside her, cradling her hand in his bandaged one.

He nodded, his golden eyes never leaving hers.

Whatever she said next, it was going to determine whether they lived or died. He had kept them alive on Black Boar Pier, and now it was her turn. She took a deep shuddering breath and looked back at Reed.