“I need blankets,” he whispered. The girls wrapped him, but still he couldn’t stand the sweeping chills and the ice that filled him. He shivered uncontrollably. Sweat dripped in his eyes. His teeth chattered, waves of fever surging through.
Below, his father and his cronies clambered over the wreck with the feral grace of tiger monkeys.
“We are so screwed,” Pima muttered.
Nailer could barely speak through his chattering teeth. He wanted to tell Pima to check the far side of the island, to make sure they weren’t going to be surprised, to tell swanky Nita Chaudhury that she needed to keep her damn head lower, that the adults below weren’t smart but they were plenty sly, and they’d look around sometime. At some point, they’d get tired of hooting about all the wealth, and start making sure they had the scavenge protected for themselves.
He wished they’d fled before the tide had come. It was stupid not to assume that someone would be coming. The ship was too big not to attract notice. Little scavengers only had so much time to profit before the lions rolled in and took the vast share of the meat. And now they were hiding and watching and stuck, while the lions stalked through the ship’s carcass and laughed and cracked open liquor they’d found in the galley. They tossed plates of silver onto the deck and shattered fine china against the rocks with shouts of pleasure, china that even he and Pima had guessed might be more valuable than the silver it sat beside. Then again, if you couldn’t smelt it, it wasn’t worth a copper yard on a ship-breaking beach, so maybe they were right to destroy it all, maybe they should light the damn ship on fire, turn the sky black…
Nailer shivered. He was going crazy. He needed to lie still. He was so tired. Needed to lie down and rest.
“We need to get you back to the yards,” Pima whispered.
Nailer shook his head. “No. They’ll get Lucky Girl.”
“I don’t care. Let her hide or be found. You need medicine now.”
He could barely force the words through his chattering teeth, but he stared at her as hard as he could, trying to make Pima understand. “She’s crew, yeah? Bloodmarked just like me and you.”
Pima looked away. Nailer knew what she was thinking. There was crew, proved over years of scavenging together and sharing the take, sharing the risks of thefts, putting aloe on belt marks after a bad night with Richard Lopez, fighting to get onto light crew and then sweating hard to keep the quota coming through…
And then there was day-old crew.
“Pima.” He clutched at her. “If you think I’ve got the fever eye then you better believe we need to keep our Lucky Girl safe, even if she’s a blood buyer. We need her.”
Pima didn’t answer.
Nita crouched beside him, studying him with concern. “He needs a doctor.”
“Don’t tell me what he needs,” Pima snapped. “I know damn well what he needs.” She peered through the ferns at the men below. “No way we can get him across the flats without them catching sight of us, and then they’ll want to know what we found.” She shook her head. “We’re trapped.”
“I could go down,” Nita offered. “It would distract them.”
Nailer shook his head violently. Pima stilled, studying her. She looked to the men again, grimacing. “If you actually knew what you were offering, I’d let you do it.” She shook her head. “No way.” She glanced at Nailer. “You’re crew, anyway.” She almost said it like she meant it.
“Well, well,” a familiar voice interrupted. “What we got here?”
The sunburned face of Nailer’s father peered through kudzu vines, grinning. “I thought we saw something moving-” His eyes widened with surprise. “Nailer?” His eyes flicked back and forth, skitter quick, high and fast, looking all of them over. “What are you kids up to? Scavenging ahead of us?”
His gaze fell on Lucky Girl. “And who’s this pretty little thing?” His eyes scanned her, wide and fascinated; then he grinned again. “Soft girl like you could only come off a big boss boat.” He smiled at Nailer. “Didn’t know you were crewing with swanks, boy.” His wide blue eyes swept over her body, lingered. “Pretty.”
“She’s our crew,” Nailer said through his shivering.
“Yeah?” A knife flickered into Richard’s hand. “Come on down, then. All of you together. Let’s get a good look at what the light crew’s got for us.” He turned and shouted, “Up here!”
A moment later, Blue Eyes and the half-man Tool and a couple others surrounded them and goaded them out of their camp. They scrambled clumsily back down through the weeds and ferns, with Nailer’s dad’s friends all making comments. They whistled at Pima and Nita, slapped and pinched them. Laughed harder when Pima tried to fight.
When they were out and collected on the clipper ship, the men and women gathered around.
“You have scavenge for us?” the huge half-man asked. He lifted Nita up as though she weighed nothing at all, bringing her face close to his own blunt, doglike features. He studied her jeweled nose ring with his yellow eyes.
“It’s a diamond,” he announced. Everyone laughed. One huge finger touched the jewel. “Do you want to give it to me? Or should I rip it off your pretty face?”
Nita’s eyes widened. She reached up and unclasped her jewelry.
“Damn,” Richard said. “Look at all that gold.”
While the half-man held her, he and Blue Eyes ripped the rest of the rings off Nita’s fingers. Nita cried out, but Nailer’s father held his knife to her neck and she held still as Blue Eyes ripped the gold off, leaving bloody streaks. They all whistled at the amount of blinding metal. More than a year’s profit in one of the rings, let alone all of them. The adults were rich, and they were drunk on it.
Nailer crouched, shivering on the deck, watching as they tore away Nita’s wealth. Even with the sun burning down from overhead, he was freezing. And now he was almost uncontrollably thirsty as well. The last of the rain and storm water had evaporated and if there was more water in the bowels of the ship, he couldn’t stand to find it, and none of his father’s crew was likely to let Pima or Nita go look. All of the adults hunkered on the vessel, calculating their scavenge and scheming how to ensure their claim.
“We’ll have to cut Lucky Strike in,” his father announced finally. “We get half, but we don’t end up bloody, and he can move the scavenge out on the train.”
The rest of the crew nodded. Blue Eyes glanced over at Nailer and Pima and Nita. “What about the swank?”
“Our little girlie?” His father looked over at Nita. “You going to fight us for scavenge, sweetheart?”
“No.” Nita shook her head. “It’s all yours.”
Nailer’s father laughed. “Maybe you say so now, and maybe you change your mind later.” His knife flashed in his hand. He came over and crouched beside her, the big knife gleaming over his knuckles, ready to slit her open the way he gutted fish. No big thing to dump her intestines on the ground. Just a way to get food. Not even personal.
“I won’t stop you,” Nita whispered, her eyes dilating in terror.
“No.” Nailer’s father shook his head. “You’re right about that. Because your guts are going to be feeding the sharks and no one’s going to care what you say, yes or no. Maybe in your big boss house people care what happens to you.” He shrugged. “Here, you’re nothing at all.”
Through his delirium, Nailer could see his father’s building willingness to do violence. He recognized the signs from when his father would strike, quick as a cobra, and slap Nailer upside the head or yank him close to sink a fist into his stomach.