Ship Breaker Read online

  They made their way over the last rocks to the ship. At low tide, the hull was surrounded by ankle-deep water. A few fish sat in pools, others lay beached on the sand, rotting with streamers of seaweed. Up close the ship got bigger. Not like the rusting monoliths of the Accelerated Age, but still, it loomed over them. Pima clambered up the shattered edge of the clipper and slipped inside, her hands fast and accomplished from years on wrecking crews. Nailer followed more slowly, hoisting himself aboard with his one good hand.

  The ship was on its side, so crawling through its passages was a bit like being in the ducts, an unexpected familiarity to something that should have been so different. Nailer scanned the wreckage. Glints of metal, bits of people’s clothes strewn around, all kinds of junk, the stink of rotting fish.

  “Swank stuff,” he said. He fingered a gown that looked like it was silk. “Look at this clothing.”

  Pima made a face of dismissal. “Who needs clothes like that?” She clambered out of the hole and up onto the cant of the upper deck, scrabbling along until she found hatch access. A minute later she called, “I found the galley!” Then whistled. “Come look at all this!”

  Nailer struggled up to join her. The galley was trashed, all fallen out, but many of the bins of food were still locked in place: rice and flour in sealed containers. Pima started unlatching drawers. Bottles spilled out in a rain of broken glass and the puff of spices. She wrinkled her nose and coughed.

  Nailer sneezed. “Slow down, crewgirl.”

  “Sorry.” She coughed again. Opened a locker. Meat spilled out, spoiled already in the heat, big floppy steaks better than anything they could get anywhere on the beaches. They both put their hands over their mouths, breathing shallowly as stink enveloped them.

  “I think they had electric cooling in here,” Nailer said. “It’s the only way they could have kept all that meat.”

  “Damn. They had it good, huh?”

  “Yeah. No wonder Old Miles was so sad he got kicked off.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He said he was drunk, but I think he was selling red rippers.”

  Pima peered inside the locker, looking to see if anything was worth saving. Pulled her head out gagging. The reek of the spoiled meat was too strong. They kept going through the ship.

  They found the first body in one of the cabins, a shirtless man, his eyes still wide, crabs lurking in his guts. Pima turned away, gagging at the smell of death in the closed room, then peered in again. Fish flopped in a shallow pool beside the man’s head. It was hard to tell if the man had drowned or if the ugly gash on his forehead had done him in, but he was dead.

  “Well, he won’t care if we scavenge,” Pima muttered.

  “You going to scavenge him?” Nailer asked.

  “He’s got pockets.”

  Nailer shook his head. “I’m not touching him.”

  “Don’t be a licebiter.” Pima took a breath and crept close to the dead man. Flies exploded in a cloud, buzzing in the warmth of the room. Pima tugged at the man’s pants and ran her fingers through his pockets. She was acting tough, but Nailer could tell she was unnerved. They’d both heard stories of fresh scavenge. Bodies came with the territory, but it was still scary to look into a man’s dead eyes and think that he’d been walking the decks only a little while earlier, before the storm took it all away and gave it to a couple kids on the shoreline.

  Nailer scanned the rest of the cabin. It was big. A cracked photo on the floor showed the man wearing a white jacket with stripes on his sleeves. Nailer picked up the picture and studied it. “I think this was his ship.”

  “Yeah?”

  Nailer scanned the walls. There was an old-style spyglass secured with brackets. Pieces of paper with all sorts of writing on it, seals and official-looking stamps. And then this picture of the man with the braid on his shoulder and him standing in front of a clipper ship, smiling. Nailer couldn’t tell if it was the same ship as the wreck or not, but it was obvious the man was full of pride. Nailer glanced over at the bloated torn-open corpse and blew out his breath, thoughtful.

  As if sensing his thoughts, Pima looked up from her work. “It’s all luck, Nailer. Just luck and the Fates. It’s all we got.” She flashed scavenged coins at him meaningfully. It was enough money to feed them for a week. Copper coins and a damp wad of Chinese red paper cash. “Today we’re the lucky ones.”

  “Yeah.” Nailer nodded. “And tomorrow maybe we’re not.”

  The captain hadn’t been lucky. And now Nailer and Pima were flush because of it. Weird to think about that. The captain lay bloated, his face puffed and purpled, the sun baking and ruining his flesh. Flies buzzed easily around his face: his lips and eyes, the blood on his head, the tear in his stomach. Whole clouds settled back on him as soon as Pima stepped away.

  Nailer studied the cabin again, thoughtful. Brass on the walls, all kinds of scavenge. It was a swank boat, for sure. The captain’s cabin was rich, and even though the ship was as large as a cargo ship, it didn’t look like a working vessel. Everything seemed too nice, all silk and carpeted corridors and brass and copper and little glass lanterns. He and Pima kept going through cabins. They found carved furniture, sitting rooms, lounges, a bar with shattered liquor bottles, staterooms, art on the walls mangled and torn, oil paintings tossed about and punctured.

  Down below, in the engineering rooms, where mechanical systems controlled the ship, they found more bodies.

  “Half-men,” Pima whispered.

  A trio of them, bloated and drowned. Their bestial faces looked weirdly hungry with their long tongues hanging out of their sharp-toothed mouths. Yellow dog eyes stared dead at Pima and Nailer, gleaming dully in the tropical sunbeams that penetrated the torn room.

  “These people must have been damn swank if they could afford all these half-men.”

  “That one looks like you,” Nailer commented. “You sure you haven’t been selling eggs?”

  Pima snorted laughter and jabbed an elbow into his ribs, but even she didn’t suggest scavenging them. There was something just too creepy about the genetically designed creatures to consider getting close to them.

  Nailer and Pima split up and continued to explore the ship. Pima found another dead half-man in the upper decks, strapped to the wheel and drowned. So much death, Nailer thought. The people must have been complete idiots to get caught in a city killer. He shoved open another door and whistled, low and surprised.

  A table, tilted on its side, crammed against the wall, dark black wood as deep as night. Shattered glass everywhere, goblets thrown about…

  “Pima! Check this out!”

  She came running. The room was loaded with silver: silver candlesticks, silver tableware, silver platters, silver bowls… a huge Lucky Strike, all for the taking.

  “That’s a lot of scavenge,” Pima gasped.

  “That’s enough to pay off all our work debts. With that much cash you could set up scavenge on your own. Even buy Bapi’s light crew slot.”

  “Come on!” Pima said. “Let’s clear it out before anyone else shows up. We’re rich, Lucky Boy!” She grabbed him and kissed him right, left, and full on the lips, laughing at his surprised expression. “Ohhh, Lucky Boy! We’re rich! We’re gonna be bigger than Lucky Strike!”

  Infected by her spirit Nailer started to laugh, too. They gathered the silver to them, mounding it around, piling it high. They picked through shattered china, broken goblets, and the half-moons of delicate-stemmed glassware, unearthing more and more wealth.

  Pima went to find something to hold it all. She returned with hemp sacking that they would have called scavenge just a few minutes ago, could have sold off for a couple copper lengths, and would have called it a good day—and now it was just something to hold the real treasure: all that silver. Serving trays and forks and knives went into the sack. Forks so small that they disappeared in Nailer’s hand, spoons so big and deep they could have been used as ladles at Chen’s grub shack where he served a hundred head at
a time.

  Nailer straightened. “I’m gonna see what else there is. There might be more like this.”

  Pima grunted acknowledgment. Nailer clambered back into the main passage and made his way past a sitting room full of fallen paintings and shattered statuary. Even with a full light crew it would take them several days to strip the clipper of all the brass and copper and wiring. Once he and Pima took the first scavenge off, they’d have to come up with a plan. There had to be some way to get a share of the rest.

  Lucky and smart. They needed to be lucky and smart.

  The problem was, this Lucky Strike was almost too big to be smart about.

  He found another cabin door and kicked it open. An odd room, full of dolls and waterlogged stuffed bears. Gleaming wooden trains built like little maglevs. A torn painting hung on one wall: a clipper ship, maybe even this one, painted from high up, looking down on the deck. All the faces below were looking up, staring into the heights. The artist was pretty good, the painting almost like a photograph. Looking into it gave Nailer a spooky feeling, as if he were about to fall into the painting and onto the deck of that ship. Land on all those people with their swank clothes and cool eyes staring up at him. It was dizzying. He turned away from the image and scanned the cabin again. On the far side of the room there was another door. He crawled along the wall that was now a floor and hefted the door open.

  A bedroom: coverlets everywhere and a huge shattered bed. And a beautiful girl, dead in a mangle, staring at him with wide black eyes.

  Nailer sucked in his breath.

  Even bruised and dead, she was pretty, pinned under the pile of her bed and the weight of all the stuff that had crushed her. Her black hair strung across her face like a wet net. Wide dark eyes stared. Her blouse was torn and soaked, the fabric a complex weave of color and silvery threads. She was young. Not like the captain and the half-men. Maybe Pima’s age. A rich girl, with a diamond-pierced nose.

  He would have envied her if she wasn’t so dead.

  He called out to Pima. “Found another deader!”

  “Another half-man?” Pima called back. Nailer didn’t answer. Didn’t take his eyes off the dead girl. Scrambling sounds came from behind, and then Pima appeared.

  “Damn,” she said. “Too bad.”

  “Pretty, huh?”

  Pima laughed. “Didn’t know you liked corpses.”

  Nailer made a face of disgust. “If I want a girl, there’s plenty of live ones, thanks.”

  Pima grinned. “Yeah, but this one won’t slap you like Moon Girl did when you tried to kiss her. Lips look a little cold, though. Kiss that one and she’d take you down to the Scavenge God’s scales for sure.”

  “Ugh.” Nailer made a face. Pima spent too much time around heavy crews. It gave her a hard-edged sense of humor.

  “She’s got gold on her,” Pima said.

  Nailer had been looking at the girl’s black eyes, but Pima was right. Gold around her slender brown throat, gold on her fingers. If it was real, it was a fortune, worth more than anything they’d found so far.

  As one, he and Pima crawled across the wreckage to the broken body. The girl’s corpse was buried under furniture. None of it had even been secured, as if the rich swanks thought a storm wouldn’t dare rearrange their furniture. As if they were gods, and didn’t just predict the weather with their instruments and satellites, but also told it what to do.

  Nailer shivered at the sight of the broken rich girl. There were lessons there, as powerful as the ones Pima’s mother taught when she explained how they were to survive into adulthood. Pride and death came just as fast whether you were Bapi thinking you were the boss of the light crew forever, or whether you were this shattered girl with her fine toys and fine clothes and pretty gold and jewels.

  They crouched beside the body. “At least there’s no crabs,” Pima muttered. She took the girl’s necklace and yanked. The girl’s head jerked back like a marionette’s and the chain parted. The golden pendant swung before them, mesmerizing wealth in Pima’s fist. One quick grab and they were richer than anyone except maybe Lucky Strike. They both started working on the dead girl’s rings, tugging them from the cool flesh, trying to get them off.

  “Damn,” Nailer muttered, tugging harder. “Her fingers got all stiff.”

  “Yours stuck too?” Pima asked.

  “They’re all fat and waterlogged. None of the rings come off.”

  Pima drew her work knife. “Here.”

  Nailer made a face of disgust. “You just going to chop her fingers off?”

  “No worse than cutting the head off a chicken. And at least she’s not gonna squawk and flap around.” Pima set the knife against the girl’s finger. “Do it with me?”

  “Where do I cut?”

  “On the joint,” Pima indicated. “You can’t cut through the bone. This way, they pop right off.”

  Nailer shrugged and got out his own knife. He set it against the joint where it would part easily. He pressed his blade into the girl’s flesh. Blood welled up as he cut.

  The girl’s black eyes blinked.

  9

  “BLOOD AND RUST!” Nailer leaped back. “She’s not a deader! She’s alive!”

  “What?” Pima scrambled away from the girl.

  “Her eyes moved! I saw them!” Nailer’s heart hammered in his chest. He fought the urge to bolt from the cabin. The girl lay still now, but his skin was crawling. “I cut her and she moved.”

  “I didn’t see—” Pima stopped midsentence.

  The drowned girl’s dark eyes focused on her. They went from Pima to Nailer, and back to Pima.

  “Fates,” Nailer whispered. Cold fingers ran up his spine, raising hackles. It was like their knives had summoned her ghost back into her body. The dead girl’s lips started to move. No words came out. Just a barely audible hiss.

  “That’s some creepy shit,” Pima murmured.

  The girl continued whispering, a steady stream of sibilants, a chant, a plea, all so low they could barely make out the words. Against his better judgment, Nailer crept forward, drawn by her eyes and desperation. The girl’s gold-decorated fingers twitched, reached for him.

  Pima came up behind. The girl strained toward them, but they both stayed out of her grasp. More whispered words: prayer sounds, begging, an exhalation of storm and salt terror. Her eyes searched the cabin, widened in fear, terrified by something only she could see. Her gaze locked on Nailer again, desperate, pleading. Still she whispered. He leaned closer, straining to understand her words. The girl’s hands fluttered weakly against his arms, reached up to touch his face, a movement light as butterflies as she tried to pull him close. He leaned in, letting the drowned girl’s fingers clutch at him.

  Her whispering lips brushed his ear.

  She was praying. Soft begging words to Ganesha and the Buddha, to Kali-Mary Mercy and the Christian God… she was praying to anything at all, begging the Fates to let her walk from the shadow of death. Pleas spilled from her lips, a desperate trickle. She was broken, soon to die, but still the words slipped out in a steady whisper. Tum karuna ke saagar Tum palankarta hail Mary full of grace Ajahn Chan Bodhisattva, release me from suffering…

  He drew away. Her fingers slipped from his cheek like orchid petals falling.

  “She’s dying,” Pima said.

  The girl’s eyes had become unfocused. Her lips still moved but she seemed to be losing energy now, losing her will to pray. The words were a quiet punctuation to the larger sounds of the ocean and coast outside: gulls calling, the surf, the creak and shift of the wrecked ship.

  Gradually the words stopped. Her body stilled.

  Pima and Nailer exchanged glances.

  The gold on the girl’s fingers glittered.

  Pima lifted her knife. “Fates, that’s creepy. Let’s get the gold and get the hell out of here.”

  “You gonna cut her fingers off while she’s still breathing?”

  “She’s not breathing for long.” Pima pointed at the bed
and sea chests and debris piled on top of her. “She’s a goner. If I slit her throat, I’m doing her a favor.” She crept close and prodded the girl’s hand. The drowned girl didn’t respond. “She’s dead now, anyway.” Pima pressed the knife to the girl’s finger again.

  The girl’s eyes snapped open.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  Pima pressed her lips together, ignoring the words. The girl’s free hand brushed at Pima’s face and Pima swatted it away. Pima leaned on the knife and blood welled up. The girl didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull away, just watched, black eyes begging as the knife cut into her brown skin.

  “Please,” she said again.

  Nailer’s skin crawled. “Don’t do it, Pima.”

  Pima glanced up at him. “You going to get squeamish on me? You think you’re going to save her? Be her white knight like in Mom’s kiddie stories? You’re just a beach rat and she’s a swank. She gets out of here, this ship’s hers and we lose everything.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Don’t be stupid. This is only scavenge if she’s not standing on it saying it’s hers. All that silver we found? All this gold on her fingers? You know this boat’s hers. You know it. Look at the room she’s in.” Pima waved a hand at the wreckage around them. “She’s no servant, that’s for sure. She’s a damn swank. We let her out, we lose everything.”

  She looked at the girl. “Sorry, swank. You’re worth more dead than alive.” She glanced at Nailer. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll put her down first.” She moved the knife to the girl’s smooth brown throat.

  The girl’s eyes went to him, starving for salvation, but she didn’t speak again. Only stared.

  “Don’t cut her,” Nailer said. “We can’t make a Lucky Strike like this… It would be like Sloth was with me.”

  “It’s not the same at all. Sloth was crew. She swore blood oath with you. She didn’t have morals. But this swank?” Pima tapped the drowned girl with her knife. “She’s not crew. She’s just a boss girl with a lot of gold.” She made a face. “If we pigstick her, we’re rich. No more crew for life, right?”