“I just want to keep him safe,” I groaned.
“So do I. But sooner or later you’re going to have to let Griffin decide what he wants for himself. And whether or not there’s such a thing as safe anymore.”
CHAPTER 18
Grab your pack,” Kell shouted. “Tide’s rising. Time to sail.”
Breakfast was over and Rose hadn’t joined me. I wanted to see her before I left for food gathering.
“Pack, Thomas!”
I picked up the canvas bag. Someone had filled my water canister for me, and wrapped my lunch portion inside a piece of freshly washed cloth. The smoothness of the whole operation was comforting. It reminded me that the colonists made these trips regularly.
They almost always came back alive.
Kell headed for two sailboats tied to the jetty. I’d been too distracted to pay much attention to them before, but they were extraordinary: two slender hulls instead of one, connected by a metal frame. There were no seats, just a piece of canvas strung tight across the frame.
Jerren climbed aboard and rapped his knuckles against the mast. “Ever seen a catamaran before?”
I shook my head.
“Then you’re in for a treat.”
As he rigged the first boat, Alice copied him in the second. The process quickly turned into a competition, Alice’s fierce determination to be first in everything against Jerren’s familiarity with the sails.
When they were done, Alice took the helm of her boat, and Jerren, his. Ananias and Kell joined him, so he made sure to tell Alice that his crew was heavier. Alice didn’t respond, but raised an eyebrow, recognizing the excuse for what it was.
Jerren pointed to Charleston. “I’ll see you over there, then.”
“Where?” said Alice, sounding impatient.
“Over there,” he replied with deliberate vagueness. “As long as you don’t fall too far behind, you won’t get lost.”
For a boy who’d only met Alice two days earlier, he sure knew how to get under her skin. Before the words were even out of his mouth, the race was on.
Jerren set off first. He understood the harbor conditions well and began to pull away from us. As she struggled to make up ground, Alice wore the same grim expression she’d had ever since Eleanor had died. Griffin and I sat beside her in awkward silence, spectators in her personal battle with Jerren. Behind us, Sumter faded from view.
“We’re closing in,” muttered Alice. She seemed to be speaking to herself, not to me, but she’d said so little the past two days that I leaped on the words.
“What can I do?”
“Nothing.”
We caught Jerren after a mile. When we were only a few yards back, he eased the tiller toward himself, blocking our path. Alice baited him into changing his course even more drastically and then slipped under him. The breeze was blowing from the south and too late Jerren realized that we were going to steal his wind. We glided past as though he wasn’t even moving. The only sounds were the water lapping against the bow and Kell’s laughter.
I stole a glance to see if Alice was smiling too.
She wasn’t.
A couple more miles and we were bearing down on Charleston. It was the largest place I’d ever seen—a mishmash of battered buildings, crammed together so tightly that it seemed they’d had nowhere to go but upward. It must have looked beautiful once. Hard to imagine that such a place could be uninhabited. And uninhabitable.
We overshot our target because we didn’t know where we were headed, but after turning about we joined Jerren and beached our catamaran on a long, slender island about a half mile east of Charleston. A ruined wall ran around the eastern tip; tree branches emerged tentacle-like from every hole. It had a similar feel to Sumter—a stronghold from a past too distant to imagine.
“Welcome to Castle Pinckney,” announced Jerren. “Glad you could join us.”
I scanned the land for rats but didn’t see any. Neither Kell nor Jerren seemed concerned at all. Maybe that’s what happened after years of food-gathering trips—you let down your guard. Did that make you more efficient? Or more complacent?
“This way,” said Kell. He stepped through a blanket of weeds, heading straight for an arch in the nearest wall. “This place is even older than Sumter. Not as strong or stable, but you can’t have everything.”
We passed under the archway and into the ruined castle. Then we stopped in our tracks.
Plants ran in several orderly rows, green and healthy. There was weeks’ worth of food here. About twenty barrels too, arranged neatly against the walls. Pipes connected them to the top of the walls, where a series of sloping wooden panels diverted rainwater.
Jerren took a seat in the shade beside a barrel. He rapped his knuckles against it. “Sounds full,” he said. “Got to love storm season.”
Kell looked up at the clear blue sky. “Easy to say when you’re on dry land.” He turned to Ananias. “You were on the ocean when the last storm came through, right?”
Ananias took a sip from his water canister and gave a curt nod.
“How’d you handle such a large ship with your crew?”
The questions seemed innocent, but it was the answers that worried me. Ananias didn’t seem fazed, though. He just tilted his canister toward Alice. “Same way her crew handled us on the way out here. With her on board, anything’s possible.”
Jerren grabbed a metal bucket sitting beside the barrels. He placed it under a tap protruding from the barrel and turned a lever. Water gushed out.
“We’ll start with the top rows,” Kell told him. Turning to us, he added, “Don’t drink this water. We can’t purify it out here, and we’ve lost too many days to sickness after someone drinks this stuff.”
I thought of Rose and how she used to be able to tell the purity of water from a single drop. She’d be able to do it on Sumter too if we combined elements. But who would trust her? And if they found out about our elements, how would they react?
I pushed the thought aside and joined Griffin as he wandered along the rows. With the element of earth, he knew better than any of us how difficult it was to keep plants alive. Who. Plant? he signed.
I relayed the question to Kell.
“Chief did,” he told us. “He was a botanist; a plant expert. A survivalist too. While everyone else was leaving Charleston, he put down the master plan for the colony. Enlisted the help of a fish expert and a water and sanitation specialist. They died a long time ago—old age—but Sumter was sustainable by then.”
Griffin watched intently as I passed along as much of the answer as I could. Where. Plants. From? he asked next.
Kell seemed to enjoy having all the answers. Or maybe he just enjoyed the stories of how they’d survived. “During the evacuation of Charleston, there was looting, just like in every other city. But people always took the same things first: water, food, and fuel. Chief took live animals, seeds, tools, and a couple of weapons for protection. Wasn’t long before Charleston was a ghost town. After that, we began expanding our plantings and water collection to the other islands in the harbor.”
“You keep saying ‘we,’” Ananias pointed out. “You were, what—ten years old? Maybe less. So what exactly did you do?”
Kell licked his lips. “Chief sent me into abandoned houses and stores to grab stuff. I was the fake-out.” He was obviously proud of the title. “People were killing each other over nothing, but no one wanted to shoot a kid. They’d just tell me to get out instead. So I’d pretend to leave and then pop them. One bullet in the head for them, one fully loaded weapon for me. Can’t beat that exchange.”