“Good point. Sorry.”
“You’re lucky we even speak the same language.”
“Very.”
She pointed at a trickle of water that cut a small path down the cliff wall. “Cup your hands there. It’s potable.”
“A spring?”
She gave me a look.
“Sorry. Thank you.” I did as she said. The water was cold and clear. If there was some bacterium in it that was going to kill me, at least I wouldn’t die thirsty.
I showed my gratitude through silence and concentrated on the descent. The path was narrow, just wide enough for the sled she pulled, and the edge crumbled away to nothing. I put my feet where she put hers, squared my shoulders as she did. She drew her sweatshirt hood over her head, another discouragement to conversation.
We made it all the way down to the beach without another question busting through my chapped lips. She left the sled at the foot of the cliff and picked up a blue plastic cooler from behind a rock, the kind with cup holders built into the top. She looked in and frowned, then dumped the whole thing on the rocks. A cascade of water, two small dead fish. I realized those had probably been meant to be her dinner the day before; she had chosen to haul me up the cliff instead.
This section of beach was all broken rock, dotted everywhere with barnacles and snails and seashells. The rocks were wet and slick, the footing treacherous. I fell to my hands several times, slicing them on the tiny snails. Could you catch anything from a snail cut? At least the ship could still get us antibiotics.
“What are we doing?” I asked. “Surely the most interesting things wash out closer to the actual water.”
She kept walking, watching where she stepped. She didn’t fall. The rusted hull of an old ship jutted from the rocks down into the ocean; I imagined anything inside had long since been picked over. We clambered around it. I fell further behind her, trying to be more careful with my bleeding palms. All that rust, no more tetanus shots.
She slowed, squatted. Peered and poked at something by her feet. As I neared her, I understood. Tidal pools. She dipped the cooler into one, smiled to herself. I was selfishly glad to see the smile. Perhaps she’d be friendlier now.
Instead of following, I took a different path from hers. Peered into other pools. Some tiny fish in the first two, not worth catching, nothing in the third. In the fourth, I found a large crab.
“Bay,” I called.
She turned around, annoyance plain on her face. I waved the crab and her expression softened. “Good for you. You get to eat tonight too, with a nice find like that.”
She waited for me to catch up with her and put the crab in her cooler with the one decent-sized fish she had found.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A fish. What does it matter what kind?”
“I used to cook. I’m pretty good with fish, but I don’t recognize that one. Different fish taste better with different preparations.”
“You’re welcome to do the cooking if you’d like, but if you need lemon butter and capers, you may want to check the pools closer to the end of the rainbow.” She pointed down the beach, then laughed at her own joke.
“I’m only trying to be helpful. You don’t need to mock me.”
“No, I suppose I don’t. You found a crab, so you’re not entirely useless.”
That was the closest thing to a compliment I supposed I’d get. At least she was speaking to me like a person, not debris that had shown an unfortunate tendency toward speech.
That evening, I pan-fried our catch on the stovetop with a little bit of sea salt. The fish was oily and tasteless, but the crab was good. My hands smelled like fish and ocean and I wished for running water to wash them off. Tried to replace that smell with wood smoke.
After dinner, I looked over at her wall.
“May I?” I asked, pointing at the guitar.
She shrugged. “Dinner and entertainment—I fished the right person out of the sea. Be my guest.”
It was an old classical guitar, parlor sized, nylon-stringed. That was the first blessing, since steel strings would surely have corroded in this air. I had no pure pitch to tune to, so had to settle on tuning the strings relative to each other, all relative to the third string because its tuning peg was cracked and useless. Sent up a silent prayer that none of the strings broke, since I was fairly sure Bay would blame me for anything that went wrong in my presence. The result sounded sour, but passable.
“What music do you like?” I asked her.
“Now or then?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Then: anything political. Hip-hop, mostly.”
I looked down at the little guitar, wondered how to coax hip-hop out of it. “What about now?”
“Now? Anything you play will be the first music I’ve heard other than my own awful singing in half a dozen years. Play away.”
I nodded and looked at the guitar, waiting for it to tell me what it wanted. Fought back my strange sudden shyness. Funny how playing for thousands of people didn’t bother me, but I could find myself self-conscious in front of one. “Guitar isn’t my instrument, by the way.”
“Close enough. You’re a bassist.”
I looked up, surprised. “How do you know?”
“I’m not stupid. I know who you are.”
“Why did you ask my name, then?”
“I didn’t. You told it to me.”
“Oh, yeah.” I was glad I hadn’t lied about that particular detail.
“Let’s have the concert, then.”
I played her a few songs, stuff I never played on the ship.
“Where’d the guitar come from?” I asked when I was done.
An unreadable expression crossed her face. “Where else? It washed up.”
I let my fingers keep exploring the neck of the guitar, but turned to her. “So is this what you do full time? Pull stuff from the beach?”
“Pretty much.”
“Can you survive on that?”
“The bonuses for finding some stuff can be pretty substantial.”
“What stuff?”
“Foil. Plastic. People.”
“People?”
“People who’ve lost their ships.”
“You’re talking about me?”
“You, others. The ships don’t like to lose people, and the people don’t like to be separated from their ships. It’s a nice change to be able to return someone living for once. I’m sure you’ll be happy to get back to where you belong.”
“Yes, thank you. How do you alert them?”
“I’ve got call buttons for the three big shiplines. They send ’copters.”
I knew those copters. Sleek, repurposed military machines.
I played for a while longer, so stopping wouldn’t seem abrupt, then hung the guitar back on its peg. It kept falling out of tune anyway.
I waited until Bay was asleep before I left, though it took all my willpower not to take off running the second she mentioned the helicopters. I had nothing to pack, so I curled up by the cooling stove and waited for her breathing to slow. I would never have taken her food or clothing—other than the vest—but I grabbed the guitar from its peg on my way out the door. She wouldn’t miss it. The door squealed on its hinges, and I held my breath as I slipped through and closed it behind me.
The clifftop was bright with stars. I scanned the sky for helicopters. Nothing but stars and stars and stars. The ship’s lights made it so we barely saw stars at all, a reassurance for all of us from the cities.
I walked with my back to the cliff. The moon gave enough light to reassure me I wasn’t about to step off into nothingness if the coastline cut in, but I figured the farther I got from the ocean, the more likely I was to run into trees. Or maybe an abandoned house, if I got lucky. Someplace they wouldn’t spot me if they swept overland.