The Edge of the Ocean Read online

  Flick tried to move, to back away from the frozen crowd of people, but she felt as if her cold-cement insides had now broken into stones, clacking together in her hollow shell.

  The knowledge that she could not save this world, could not even try to, was bearing down on Flick like a crushing weight. She had felt helpless before, of course she had. Being trapped in the tiny false-world of the Waiting Room had been terrible. But this was worse. This was standing, suitcase-less, watching a world crumble before her very eyes.

  And if the magic of the Break really was being stolen… then who was taking it?

  Flick wanted to run away, but there was nowhere to go.

  “How long does this place have left?” she whispered.

  Jonathan’s eyes were wide, staring behind his lenses. “A month,” he murmured. “Maybe less. We got here too late.”

  Captain Nyfe turned, her face emotionless. The only sign that she was upset was a muscle throbbing in her cheek. “Get to your ships,” she barked at the onlookers. “Gawking isn’t going to solve anything. Now!”

  The sailors scattered, too disorientated and frightened to do anything other than follow her orders.

  Nyfe jerked her chin at Flick. “This way. The Aconite welcomes you.”

  They finally made it down the jetty to where a large wooden dinghy was tied off, and Edony got them all seated. Once Nyfe and Jereme, neither of them particularly small, were seated, the boat seemed almost overloaded. Jereme and Edony took the oars.

  Flick met Jonathan’s eyes and tried to say with her face how awful she felt—tried to get across some of the panic she had felt at the sight of the Break crumbling before her.

  Nyfe barely glanced in their direction. She was running a finger over the raised embroidery on her eye patch and her lips were pursed as if she was thinking deep thoughts. It hardly seemed possible that she had broken a man’s arm only a few minutes before. But then, watching a piece of your world disappear could take someone’s edge off, Flick imagined.

  A few silent minutes later, they had reached the swollen belly of the great ship that had almost mown Flick down in the ocean earlier that day. The side of the ship stretched upward higher than a house. Jereme stood and grabbed a bit of rope hanging down the side, holding it to steady himself and the little boat. He thumped the side of the ship.

  A moment later, a skinny rope ladder unfurled from high above them. Next there was the squeaking of pulleys as two bigger ropes with hooks were lowered down to them, which Jereme attached to the sides of their boat.

  “Everyone out and up the ladder,” Nyfe said.

  Avery gaped at the ladder, her eyes goggling.

  “Can’t they just pull us up in the boat?” Jonathan asked.

  Edony snorted, rolling her eyes so dramatically it was a wonder they didn’t fall out of her head.

  “Easier for the lads pulling the jolly boat up if it’s not full of sailors,” Jereme said. “So, up you go, like Captain said.”

  Flick looked at the rope ladder. “Up that?” she asked, her voice doing a wonderful impression of a squeaky toy meeting a heavy boot.

  “You can sleep with the sharks, if you’d prefer.” Nyfe hauled herself up, taking the ladder steps two at a time. Her boots, Flick could see, had been scored with grooves on the soles to bend better and get a better grip on the wet, slippery wood.

  “Should I go next?” she asked.

  Avery hadn’t moved her gaze away from the ladder yet, and Jonathan was rather green. “Fine,” he said.

  “Not that I’m desperate to get up there,” Flick said, “but if you fall, you’ll probably take me with you.”

  “Oh, as long as it’s only that you’re concerned with.” He managed to smirk.

  Flick took a hold of the ladder and began to climb.

  The first few steps were easy. But as she went up, it became more difficult. You had to haul your whole weight up, plus fight against gravity, and you only had rope to hang on to. The steps were so slender your legs had to stay tensed the entire time, or else you might slip, and to top it all off the wind was getting up, and it clearly had a mind to blow Flick clean off the ladder and headfirst into the sea for the second time that day.

  “Keep going, girl.” Nyfe looked over the edge of the ship’s gunwale down at her. “Bit higher.”

  “I…” Flick tried to get her legs to move, but they were solid on the step and refused to lift. “I can’t! I don’t know how to do this!”

  “You’ve done it this far!”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t thinking about it then!” The wind blew harder, making the ladder rise up and slam back down against the curve of the ship. Any harder and it would have banged Flick’s white-knuckled fingers.

  She was going to let go, she knew it.

  “Felicity!” Jonathan yelled below. “Don’t you even think about letting go, do you hear me?”

  She shook her head, frozen.

  Something warm suddenly touched her shoulder, and she opened her eyes to see Nyfe leaning down over the side of the ship, one hand on a cannon to anchor herself, the other arm wrapping around Flick’s underarms. “How you lot get anything done I’ll never know,” Nyfe said.

  “I—”

  Before she could protest, Flick was pulled smartly off the ladder and hauled onto the deck. Nyfe swung herself around on the cannon and got to her feet with the grace of a dancer.

  Flick landed on her backside. “Ow.”

  Nyfe helped her up. “You really would have clung there forever, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” Flick said. “I would have fallen off eventually.”

  The Pirate Queen smiled.

  Avery came up next, looking extremely relieved to have the climb over and done with, and Jonathan followed after her, helped (pushed) onto the deck by Jereme, who had donned a slick-looking raincoat.

  “Thank you.” Jonathan put a hand on Jereme’s shoulder, then took it away, looking at his palm in horror. “Is this tar?”

  “Keeps the capes slick.” Jereme grinned, and Flick could see now that the front four of his top teeth were capped in silver metal. “Rains are coming in, you see?”

  “Lovely.” Jonathan looked for somewhere to wipe his hand, settling for the front of his borrowed jacket.

  “We’ve a few bunks spare for you and your girls, Mercator,” Nyfe said, leading the way across the deck.

  “Avery and Felicity aren’t my girls,” Jonathan said. “They’re my friends.”

  “I belong to one person,” Avery said, her bravado coming back now she was safely away from the ladder. “And that’s me.”

  “A sensible girl.” Nyfe pushed open a door at the rear of the ship. “First we’ll talk in my cabin. Then sleep. You’ve eaten, yes?”

  “Yeah, but don’t ask what it was,” Flick sighed.

  Nyfe laughed. “Nothing that’ll kill you. Edony, cast off and get the crew working. Jereme, with me.” She held the door open, and the five of them went inside.

  The cabin wasn’t large—it was about the size of Freddy’s room in their new house. There was a bed of sorts to one side—a blanket-covered mattress atop a chest of drawers—but the rest of the room looked like an office. There was a desk to the far end strewn with papers, and a small window behind that. There was a covered stove in one corner, and Flick realized why the window was so small—it was to keep the heat in. Flick wondered what it would be like to never be properly dry, to never get your land legs back, to always have the dark depths of the ocean beneath your boots.

  Nyfe went behind her desk and sat in the chair, legs out in front of her, ankles crossed. “So,” she said, looking at Jonathan, “is he dead, then?”

  “I’m sorry?” Jonathan frowned.

  “Your father. Daniel Mercator. Is he dead?”

  “My dad? I…” Jonathan paused. “I don’t think so. He…” He trailed off, looking confused. Flick met his eyes, and for a moment time seemed to slow down. Surely not. He couldn’t be, could he?

  Nyfe took
her legs off her desk, sitting up seriously. “My summons was for Daniel Mercator,” she explained. “Him, or his closest relative. And… here you are.”

  12

  My dad isn’t dead,” Jonathan said, words rushing out in one breath. “He’s missing. I—I’ve been trying to find out where he went.”

  “This is most unfortunate,” Nyfe said. “We could have used his expertise. Instead, we’re stuck with inexperience.”

  “We thought he might have come here, actually. The Break was listed in one of his books.”

  “I haven’t seen him for many of our years,” Nyfe said.

  “But I don’t understand.” Jonathan’s brow was furrowed. “Why did you think my dad was dead?”

  “The spell we used to send the summons searches the multiverse, and heads for the addressee. Or the closest blood relative,” Nyfe repeated, “if Daniel couldn’t be found.”

  Closest blood relative? The words sounded very loud in Flick’s head. Closest relative meant next of kin, didn’t it? Which meant…

  Avery was frowning. “Closest blood relative?” She looked at Flick. “What does that mean?”

  It means Daniel is dead, Flick realized. To her shock, grief suddenly washed through her bones, and she felt her chest seize in a tight agony. It was not, she realized, grief for Daniel Mercator—a man she had never met.

  It was for the look that had crossed Jonathan’s face as he too realized what Nyfe’s words meant. His expression went completely blank, and what little color there was drained from his face, leaving his features looking as if they had been drawn on a crumpled paper bag.

  “No,” he croaked.

  Nyfe softened her tone, just a little. “I’m sorry. That spell can search every world in the multiverse. If it couldn’t find him, he must be d—”

  “Stop saying that!” Jonathan shook his head. “There must be some mistake. He’s just missing!”

  Avery walked over to him and reached to put a hand on his arm. “Johnnie, it’s okay—”

  “Get off me.” He snatched his arm away. His eyes were shining behind his glasses. He stopped, putting a hand to his mouth.

  Flick couldn’t stand still either; she felt too awful. “Jonathan, I’m so—”

  “Don’t,” he snapped. “Just don’t.” He marched to the cabin door and wrenched it open, slamming it shut behind him.

  Flick looked at Avery.

  Avery looked back, her expression of grief mirroring Flick’s. Flick wondered if she ought to run after Jonathan, but the menace in his voice when she tried to speak to him told her enough—he needed to be alone, at least for now.

  Nyfe sighed. “I didn’t mean to break it to him like that.”

  Avery clicked her tongue. “Done now, isn’t it?” she snapped.

  “Everyone dies, girl.”

  “Yeah, but that was the only real family he had left,” Avery said, and Flick was proud and jealous of her being brave enough to back talk.

  Nyfe said nothing, and there was a long silence.

  Flick rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyebrows. The people of the Break still needed Strangeworlds’ help, and Jonathan wasn’t in a fit state to help them. It was up to her now, she thought.

  “We need the suitcase back,” she said to Nyfe. “From the mer-people. If we can get that back, Jonathan, Avery, and I can go back to the Strangeworlds Travel Agency, and try to find you a new world to live in. It would take some sorting out, but if you really don’t mind the risk of a shorter life, you could all walk through a suitcase to start again in another world.”

  Nyfe held a hand up to interrupt. “And the mer-folk?”

  Flick frowned in confusion. “What about them?”

  “The mer-folk cannot breathe outside the water. Some of them, the cephalopod-people, can survive for a very short time on land, but the fish-folk can only manage a jump from the water before they need to submerge again. They cannot walk through.”

  Flick blinked, temporarily boggled. “The mer-people… maybe we could have them swim from water to water, somehow. That wouldn’t be too difficult.”

  “And what about my ships? Do you have suitcases big enough for them?” asked Nyfe, demandingly.

  Flick was taken aback. “Your ships… they’re too big. They’d never get through a suitcase. You’d have to leave—”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘No’?” asked Avery.

  “You could make new ships, couldn’t you?” Flick chimed in.

  “You can’t just make a new ship,” Nyfe scoffed. “You’re thinking of these vessels like they’re simply transport.”

  “Well, aren’t they?” Flick asked, who was starting to feel irritated.

  Nyfe shook her head. “These ships have been passed down by our ancestors. Yes, some parts have been replaced or mended. In fact, I doubt you’d find a single bit of the ship that hasn’t been altered somehow over the years. But it’s the same ship. It’s not just a box to float over the water in. It’s our home, forever. Even after our bodies are gone from it.”

  Nyfe saw Flick’s confused face and went on. “We are born, we live, and we die at sea. Our bodies? They get old and we pass them over the side to the beings that need them—the sharks, and other creatures of the deep. But our souls—they stay on board. And they remain as much a part of the crew as anyone.”

  “They’re ghosts?” Flick asked, feeling the hairs on her arms suddenly stand on end. “There are ghosts on the ship?”

  “You’d be a fool to think otherwise,” Nyfe said. “Many a time there’s been a man slip on the rigging and had his arm caught by a hand he can’t see. Sometimes there’s a glass of something left out in the morning, though the cabin boys will swear they locked everything away the night before. The ship is crewed by those who came before.” She leaned forward. “And I will not be leaving them behind.”

  “But we don’t have suitcases big enough to fit your ships!” Flick cried. “I’m sorry. I think…” She glanced at the door Jonathan had slammed behind him. “I think we need to do what’s right for the people who are still alive, not listen to the wishes of the dead.”

  There was a gust of wind. The lanterns swinging overhead were abruptly extinguished.

  And then the wind dropped as suddenly as it had arrived.

  Flick looked around, but the window and door were both still shut.

  Smoke from the lanterns drifted slowly outward, reaching like fingers into the dark. And Flick could just see Nyfe’s outline, shaking her head.

  “Be careful how you speak aboard the Aconite,” she said. “There’s captains past in this cabin.”

  13

  Flick found Jonathan up the steps at the back of the ship. He was leaning against the edge of the surrounding railing, looking down at the iron-gray water with an unreadable expression.

  “Jonathan?” Flick tried.

  He turned his head a fraction to indicate he had heard her.

  “There’s food,” Flick said. “It’s vegetable soup, and it actually looks nice. Avery’s waiting in the dining room. The mess, I mean.” She almost saw her words bounce off him. “Are you coming?”

  Jonathan took a deep breath, like he was trying to inhale the entire atmosphere. “Later.”

  “All right.” Flick wondered if she should try to persuade him more, but decided against it. Jonathan was in a world of his own right now, and wherever he was, he was out of her reach.

  * * *

  “Is he okay?” Avery pushed a bowl toward Flick.

  “No.” Flick picked up the large mussel shell that served as her spoon. “It’s like he’s not there.”

  “Poor Jonathan.” Avery tapped the tabletop in a nervous habit. “What do we do with him now?”

  “I don’t know.” Flick swallowed a mouthful of soup, which was rich and flavorsome. For some reason, that annoyed her. At a time like this, food should be bland and tasteless. She tried to enjoy it as little as possible. “We need the suitcase so we can take Jonathan back
to Strangeworlds, but Nyfe didn’t say anything about helping us get the suitcase back.” Flick hesitated. “And that whole thing with the spirits of dead captains…”

  “Seriously creepy,” Avery said. “Ghosts can’t be more important than living people, surely?” She pushed her empty bowl away. “You ask me,” she said softly, “Nyfe’s scared. She can’t see what she should be doing. I don’t think everyone here agrees with her, either,” Avery added darkly, looking at the sailors around them.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If there’s one thing I’m good at,” Avery said, “it’s listening. I’ve had to be; my parents like to keep secrets. The trick is to look so busy that no one notices you’re even there. And no one notices kids in a place like this, anyway.”

  “So?”

  Avery glanced about. “I heard some of the younger sailors talking. There’s another bunch of pirates, around the edge of the world. They call themselves the Buccaneers.”

  “Are the Buccaneers bad guys?”

  “Depends on who you ask. But the men over there”—Avery jerked her chin in their direction—“they sounded worried. They seemed to think there’s going to be a fight, though none of them were saying why. They reckon that’s why Nyfe is gathering all her allies together. The Buccaneers are led by someone called Burnish.”

  “Why would Nyfe start a fight now?”

  “I’m not sure,” Avery said. “But that’s the last thing this world needs.”

  “Nyfe said she wanted peace,” Flick pointed out. “That she wanted the whole world’s population to get out of here, not just her sailors.”

  Avery shrugged. “Looks like she’s not being entirely honest. She is a pirate, after all.”

  Flick pushed her bowl away. “Do you think we can trust her?”

  “Probably not,” Avery admitted. “But do we have a choice? You saw what happened to Jask. We wouldn’t get very far in this world going against her. We need to keep on her good side.”