I threw my hand in the air. “Figure it out yourself, then.”
“You sure you don’t have any ideas?” the captain said, taking a slow step toward me, then another. “I know you’ve been nervous about going to Honolulu.”
His doubt stung. I knew my worth lay in my abilities, my knowledge, the way I could chart a course. Without that, I was little more than ballast. I felt my face redden; out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bee and Kashmir watching. “Don’t blame me for your failures, Slate.”
He glared at me another moment, then returned to the wheel, gritting his teeth and squeezing with white knuckles as though willing us into the right decade. But to no avail. The fog did not rise, the wind did not drop, and the shoreline stayed stubbornly constant.
Bee approached me so I could hear her soft question; sweat or sea spray gleamed on her scarred brow. “If 1981 won’t work, do you know another map to try? One where we can trade tigers for dollars?”
I pressed my fingers to my temple, trying to call up everything I’d ever read; not an easy task. “I suppose . . . someone in Rome might buy them for the Colosseum, but even if the captain could go back that far, we’d probably lose money overall.”
Slate threw me a disapproving look. “On top of it being inhumane.”
“As opposed to selling them to the yakuza in Chinatown?” Kashmir said with a grin.
“If a man kills a tiger, that’s inhumane,” Slate muttered. “If a tiger kills a man, that’s just inhuman.”
“The gang was the White Tigers, actually,” I said. “The yakuza are Japanese.”
“What’s the currency in ancient Rome, amira? Is it gold?”
“Not most of it,” I said. “But the coins themselves are quite valuable.”
“We’d have to find a new buyer,” Slate reminded me. “My coin guy died two years ago.”
“How hard could that be?” I said.
“The auction’s on my timeline,” the captain said. “We’ve only got three days.”
“Two now,” Kashmir corrected him.
“Then you think of something!” I glared at them both.
A roar drifted up from the hold; it was a curious sound, like whale song. The captain swore again and left the helm, jogging down the stairs from the quarterdeck and into his cabin, slamming the door behind him. I ran my hands through my hair. As first mate, Bee took his place, but for a moment, my fingers itched to take the wheel. Could I do what the captain had not?
“You didn’t do anything?” Kashmir said to me.
“What?”
“To the map.”
I blinked. “No! If I had a mind to sabotage a map, there are better candidates.”
“Ah.” He leaned against the rail, tilting his head to study me. “So,” he said. “What makes you nervous about Honolulu?”
Turning to face the water, I frowned at the waves. “It’s complicated.”
“I haven’t got anywhere else to be.”
My fingers tapped an idle beat on the metal rail; the brass was cool under my palms. Kashmir was the only person aboard the ship who did not know every detail of the circumstances of my birth, and I was reluctant to surrender the strange, small bliss I had in his ignorance. Kash was the most confident person I knew; would he even understand how scared I was? Or worse—might he fear for me, too? Still, at this juncture, even if I didn’t tell him, he would know soon enough. But how to explain? I’d never told the story before.
“Oi!”
Startled by Rotgut’s shout from the crow’s nest, I followed his skinny finger to the lights in the distance; a sleek white boat on the water, far off, but coming toward us.
“What is it?” I called up.
“Coast Guard!”
I stared at the boat for a long moment, trying to convince myself it wasn’t headed our way—until another roar echoed in the hold. Then I ran to knock on the captain’s door, hard, though I counted to ten before opening it.
Even so, Slate looked surprised to see me. I met his eyes, deliberately not glancing at the box in his hands, the box he normally kept under his bed. It wasn’t worth telling him to hide it; if we were boarded, it would be harder to explain the tigers than to explain his stash of opium. “We need you on the radio,” I told him.
His fingers tightened on the box. “It might help the map to work.”
“Now, captain.” I shut the door behind me, harder than I had to.
Back on deck, Bee was taking the ship around while Kash raised the sails. We were moving again, plowing the waves, heading east along the southern coast of Long Island. I grabbed the halyard, helping Kash with the sail as I watched the lights of the boat off our stern, closer now and gaining.