He nudged the lantern with his foot so that it shone brighter on us, leaving him in shadow. The only part of him I could see clearly was the white of his eyes. “I’ve never seen your clan before,” he began. “And I guess you could say I’m curious.”
“About what?”
“About how a group as sick and disorganized as yours has stayed alive so long. And how no one seems to know anything about your colony.”
There was a challenge in every word. He wasn’t willing to take things on trust like Chief.
“Where’s your cutter?” asked Rose.
He adjusted his position. “What?”
“You’re wet,” she said. “Seems odd for you to swim out here in the middle of the night when there are cutters tethered to the jetty.”
He smiled. His teeth were white too. “And what about you? Any reason you decided to swim?”
Rose didn’t miss a beat. “The cutters aren’t ours. We don’t want to be accused of stealing. But you see, this ship is ours. And you still haven’t really answered Thomas’s question. So why are you here?”
He rested his arms on his knees and clasped his hands together. “I wanted to know where you came from. The world’s a big place, what I’ve seen of it.”
“What do you mean? What I’ve seen of it.”
Jerren studied his hands, weighing up how much to tell us. I was surprised when he continued: “Word is, there’s maybe five island colonies still surviving. When I got here four years ago, there were twelve, but some of them have died out now. Normally it’s a disease—wipes everyone out real quick. Plague isn’t the only killer, you know.”
“So where were you before you got here?” I asked.
“Fort Dauphin, just off the coast of Alabama.” He picked up on our confused expressions. “It’s a long way away, let’s just leave it at that.”
“Why did you leave?”
“My mother thought the other colonists were going to kill her.” He shook his head. “Scratch that. She knew the others were going to kill her.”
Rose inhaled sharply. “How could she know that?”
As Jerren pressed his hands tighter together, the muscles in his arms flexed. He wasn’t as tall as me, but he looked powerful. “Because they told her so. Whenever the food was about to run out, they’d make everyone draw sticks from a barrel. Whoever got the painted stick died—plain and simple. No other way to keep the colony going.” He closed his eyes and mouth, and seemed to disappear entirely. “My mother pulled out the stick.”
The name Fort Dauphin was a mystery to me. Alabama too. “What did you do?” I asked.
“We escaped in the middle of the night. My father stole a sailboat and we set out on the ocean with almost no food or water. I figured we’d all die the moment we got caught in a storm—earlier if the water ran out—but we were rescued by a clan ship. It was a miracle. They brought us here and we joined the refugee colony.”
I’d thought that nothing could be worse than our journey here, but now I realized that wasn’t true. “Chief said your parents died from the Plague,” I told him.
He nodded grimly. “Yeah. And now it’s up to me to look after Nyla. Which is why we have to—”
He stopped speaking as Rose’s open palm shot out. Slowly she lowered her other fingers until only one finger remained pointed at the deck above us. That’s when I heard it too: the unmistakable sound of planks creaking.
Rose closed the door silently. We shuffled across the floor until we were as far from it as possible. Jerren turned out the lantern as multiple sets of footsteps came below deck.
I held my breath as the steps drew closer. The glow from the visitors’ lantern slipped through the gap at the bottom of the door, and grew brighter until they were standing right outside.
Then they stopped moving.
CHAPTER 16
Rose found my hand and twined fingers with me, but pulled away after just a moment. My pulse was fast, energy scattered. It was our ship, but we were shaking. How could we explain why we’d swum out in the middle of the night, or why Jerren was hiding with us?
The people in the corridor didn’t speak, and finally they moved on. Not far, though—just to the end of the corridor, and Dare’s cabin. That’s when it dawned on me that they hadn’t tried any other doors. They knew exactly which cabin they had come to see.
They were only in there a quarter-strike at most, which surprised me. We’d had days, and still hadn’t discovered everything about the room. When they were done, they wasted no time returning to the deck and climbing down the rope ladder. It seemed like only a moment before I heard oars slicing into the water as their cutter retreated to Sumter.
I peered through the porthole, desperate to know who was out there. I was some way from the window so that they wouldn’t see me lurking in the background even if they had been watching. They’d put out their lantern, however, and I couldn’t see faces at all. I could only just make out their figures.
“They’ve gone,” I said.
Jerren huffed. “We’re lucky they didn’t find us.”
“No,” said Rose. “They knew we were here.”
Jerren turned his lantern back on, but covered it with a fold of his tunic to keep the glare down. In the faint amber glow it was difficult to see if he was amused by Rose’s announcement or intrigued by it. “How come?”
“If Thomas and I could see the glow of your lantern in the window, it figures they could too, right?” she murmured. She tugged at her tunic, which hung tight against her chest. “Anyway, we’re wet, so we must’ve left footprints along the corridor.”
I hadn’t considered our tracks. But she was right: Even now we were dripping onto the wooden floor.
“Then why didn’t they come in here?” demanded Jerren.
“Maybe for the same reason they didn’t speak. Because they didn’t want us knowing who they were.”
“They only went into one cabin,” I pointed out. “And last time I checked, the door to it was locked.”
Jerren clicked his tongue. “The men in this colony can open anything they want. Some of them used to be craftsmen. They know how to make things, fix things, and destroy them real effectively.” He made for the door. “As for that cabin, it’s the only one they haven’t seen. They might’ve been worried about what was inside.”
“Then why come at night? Why hide?”
Rose moved to the window and tried to spy the retreating cutter. “What are you thinking, Thomas?”
I was thinking about Dare’s logbooks, and the pages explaining that he was attacking Hatteras as a way to get to the solution. Most likely, the Sumter colonists had never heard of a solution, and wouldn’t know it was a person in any case. They probably hadn’t even read the books. But instead, I said, “I’m thinking we need to get back to Sumter and hope that no one sees us.”
Jerren nodded. “Then we agree on something for once. Problem is, if Rose is right and they saw us, there’ll be a welcoming crew at the main gate. We don’t stand a chance of getting in without being noticed.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“We swim back by a different route.” He tapped the porthole. “Head to the nearest point of Sumter—the northern side. It’s rocky at the base of the walls, so we can stop there. If there are no guards, we use the main entrance. If there are guards, we go the long way around to the animal enclosures. It’ll take a while, but it’s our best shot.”