She looked at Mondragon, who looked at her. Not awkward. No. She remembered him in motion, not well-skilled with that pole, but he took to it fast, he found his balance, he hadn't gotten snagged or let them get past his guard.
"Didn't know you had a gun," he said finally. His breath still came hard.
"Don't like to use it." As if she did it now and again. Better he believe that, and not get ideas. She stood up with a hand on the tiller for balance. The wind was cold on her sweat. She gave her head a shake and drew the wind into her nostrils as she scanned the water ahead. City lights were mostly out now, only a couple of sparks snowing; and the way was clean—give or take the passage under the pillars of the Rimmon Isle bridges. That could be a sticky spot at night.
She thought about it more and shut the engine down all the way.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
"Dunno." And then because she wanted to appear to have the answers: "Had enough trouble tonight. I'm too tired to pole her through the bridges and I sure as hell don't want to tie up there; we had enough crazies tonight."
"Is that what they were?"
"Crazies or rafters, small difference with some." She drew in another large breath, blotted the killing from her mind and drank in a certain pride. Her boat. Her say, how it ran. She knew what she was doing and he knew she knew. She saw her mother, saw Retribution Jones handling that tiller in her earliest memories, sunlight on her face and those fine hands of hers so sure of what they did, the way she walked in those bright years, like the world had better move out of her way.
She hitched up her slipping towel and hopped off her halfdeck into the well, turned to Mondragon where he sat on the deck rim. "They got you a couple of times."
"Broke the skin." He stood up and caught her arms. "Damn, girl—"
She shook his hands off right quick. "Jones. Call me Jones."
"Jones." He stood there in the starlight and found nothing else to say.
Neither did she. The boat had lost most of its way, drifting with the chop.
"I got some salve," she said. And because she wanted to be clean again, sweat-slick and feeling the touch of the crazies still lingering: "I'm going to take a bath."
He said nothing. She dropped the towel, turned and stepped off the side, a straight drop.
Water shocked beside her, a gentle drift of bubbles against her skin as another body arrived. He found her, wrapped his arms around her. Damn fool, she thought, and in a moment of panic—Is he trying to drown me, a murderer after all, he wants the boat—?
Evidently not. She surfaced with him, rolled over in a sidestroke and felt him swimming at her back, stroke for stroke. She blinked back to sanity then, broke stroke and trod water. "Damn, we trying to lose the boat?" She saw it farther away and launched out for it with strong driving strokes.
He reached it first, none so far—held to the side and waited for her.
They almost lost it again when she caught up.
"Jones," he said in a way no one had ever said that word before. "Oh, Jones." And then they had to catch the boat a second time.
Chapter 3
MORNING was for slow waking; a little more of what they had done before under the stars on the halfdeck. And finally another swim: that was four baths in two days and Altair was amazed at herself. She washed her clothes too, soaped them up good and left them on the tiller to dry a bit in the wind, and he washed his, and they sat having breakfast in the afternoon wrapped in towels and letting the wind dry their hair. Hers went straight. His went curly and fine as pale silk. He was beautiful, every move he made was beautiful, the way the muscles stood when he reached for a bit of bread, the way the sun hit his face and turned his hair to light. She ate and stared at him every chance she got. And sighed.
"Where do we go now?" he asked finally, and she shrugged, not wanting to talk about it. He took that for his answer, it seemed.
But when she had put the breakfast dishes away, when she stood up and saw the rafters out floating like little islands on the Dead Harbor rim—she remembered the night and remembered what it might be like to try to find their way around the rim of the Dead Harbor, poling because they would be out of fuel. And that decided her. She sighed again and bent and took her pants from their hanging-spot over the tiller, and pulled them on. And the sweater.
"They're still wet, aren't they?" Mondragon asked, still wearing his towel, standing down in the well.
"We got to get moving is what, You want to tell me where?"
"Do we have some hurry?"
"Mondragon." She came and sat down where there was no need to yell it over the water-sound, on the declaim in front of him. "We go out there to the Rim again, that takes all the fuel I got. And poling back from there's a bitch. Through the rafters and the crazies." She hooked a thumb back toward the town, toward the low hazy hump of Rimmon Isle. "We got enough to get to the shallows under the Rimmon bridges. And I can pole her where you want to go after that, unless it's out in the bay. But I'm about out of everything except whiskey, I got a living to make, and the current here's going to generally drift us further and further toward me Ghost Fleet, which ain't a good place: crazies hang out there, 'gainst the sandbar, and it's opposite to Rimmon and I got only so much fuel to get us back; I been watching the drift. So all in all, I think you better tell me where you want to go, because where I'm going is back in the canals and I think you got reason not to want to do that. I reckon you've got a riverboat you'd like to get to, or maybe that Falkenaer ship. I can't pole you to the Det-landing, she's too deep, but I can set you out right at the dike, there's stairs at Harbormouth; and you just go up and over and right down the dike to the Det-pier and down again, easy walk. Best I can do."
He was quiet a moment. He looked down at the slats and up again, arms folded. "Let me out in the town," he said.
Her heart did a skip-beat and tightened up again. "You going to go hunt up trouble? Once in the canal not enough for you. Tell me where they'll throw you next, I'll keep my boat waiting."
He looked down at her with a tightening of the mouth. It turned into a wry smile "Stay out of my business"
"Right. Sure. Get your clothes on."
"Jones—" He took her face between his hands and made her look up at him. "I like you a lot, Jones."
That hurt. She drew a great breath and it felt like something would break. "Hey, you get me a kid, man, I'll kill you." Had her mother been that stupid? Was that how she had happened into the world? One time her mother let her guard down and liked a man like Mondragon? Or was it just some ugly accident or a rape somewhere her mother had lost a fight? She could not imagine her mother losing.
He brushed her hair back, kept looking at her. And let her go finally and skipped up onto the halfdeck to get his own clothes. When had he found his legs? When had he learned to move on the boat? Last night when he had to, when he stood there wielding that boathook with skill that grew by the minute—
—blade fighter, she thought. Fencer. Hightowner. They came in all types. Street rowdies. Duelists. The hightown had those too—some of them very rich. Some of them who would talk in that silk-soft kind of voice and not know spit about not dipping a iron skillet in the water or grabbing a prickleback round the fins.
He knew about deathangel spines all right. He knew how to take care of a good knife.
He had had no bad scars till the boathook caught him in the shoulder last night and he would carry that for the rest of his life—not a deep one, but wide as that blunt hook could make it. (He'll remember me, won't he? Rest of his life. Everytime some soft uptown woman asks about that scar.)