Paolo Bacigalupi - Ship Breaker

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.

“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.”