Ship Breaker (19 page)

Nailer and Nita and Tool all stepped out from the vines and clambered up the raised rail bed to the tracks. The wind buffeted them as the train roared past. The noise of rushing cars was as bad as a city killer storm. Nailer glanced back at his companions. Nita’s eyes were wide with fear. Tool watched impassively, perhaps even with contempt. This would be nothing to the half-man. Nailer found himself wishing that Tool were big enough to simply pick them up and carry them as he jumped aboard.

Quit fooling yourself. Hurry up and jump.

They were running out of time. The end of the train would be approaching. He needed to commit. It was like being in the oil room all over again, knowing that the only way to survive was to dive, and dive deep. But that time he’d known that there were no other choices. This time, he kept trying to find another way out.
Go
, he told himself. But his feet stayed rooted.

Reni had jumped the trains all the time. Had boasted about it. As Nailer’s heart pounded in his chest, he tried to remember everything Reni had ever told him. He took Nita’s shoulder and shouted in her ear, “You run ahead of the car, let it catch up and then grab the ladder and don’t let go no matter what.” He pointed at the wheels. “If you fall, you go under, so never let go, no matter how much it hurts.” He said it again. “Don’t let go!” He paused. “And get your legs up in a hurry.”

She nodded again. He took a deep breath, trying to get his bravery up.

Suddenly Nita dashed ahead.

Nailer stared, surprised, as she ran beside the train. She seemed pathetically small beside the rushing wheels and the ladders that ran up the sides. One ladder whipped past her. Another. She wasn’t even looking at the ladders of the train cars. She was just charging along beside the train, her black hair bouncing behind her in a ponytail.

One ladder, two, three, went by. At the fourth, she leaped. Her hands caught the crossbars and she was jerked forward. Her legs flew into the air, torn out from under her. Her feet came down, then flew into the air again as she hit the ground. She was like a rag doll being dragged. She was going to be sucked under the wheels. Nailer waited, thinking he would see her torn apart, but then she curled her legs under her and she was suddenly aboard, clambering up the side of the train car. She hooked her arm in the ladder and looked back. Already she was becoming distant, carried away by the speed of the train.

“The end of the train is coming,” Tool observed.

Nailer nodded. Took another breath, and started running.

Almost immediately, he understood why Nita hadn’t looked back. The ground was uneven beside the track, even though it looked smooth from a distance. The tracks where Reni had jumped the train had always been smoother than this. Nailer had to keep his eyes ahead if he wasn’t going to fall.

Beside him, the speed and noise of the train were dizzying. Cars blurred past. He kept imagining himself tripping and falling under the wheels, torn apart by the train. He was running as fast as he could over the uneven ground, and still the ladders whipped past him.

How the hell had she done it? How had she…? He glanced behind, wanting to be able to see the cars coming up. The movement and noise were dizzying. He stumbled and almost fell into the train’s rush. He caught himself and forced himself to look straight ahead. Picked up his pace. He counted time as ladders flicked past.
One, two.
And then a count of three for the center of a train car to pass, and then one, two again. He prayed to Pearly’s Ganesha and the Fates.
One, two. Pause, one, two, three. One, two…

The first ladder flashed past. Nailer grabbed for the second. It caught his hand and slammed him away, spinning him. His legs tangled. He fell, rolling over gravel and weeds and came to a stop. Train cars whipped past as he lay in the dirt, bruised and stunned. Blood ran from his scraped knees and numbed hands. His shoulder was a bright blossom of pain.

Tool flashed by, hooked easily on a ladder. The half-man looked down at Nailer as he went past, yellow eyes watching, impassive to Nailer’s failure.

Nailer scrambled to his feet. Nita was almost gone. He started running. The end of the train was coming up. His leg was bruised from the fall and he limped as he ran. His shoulder felt as if he’d torn it once again. Limping, he couldn’t get as much speed. Ladders blurred past. Again he timed them. He glanced back. The end of the train was here.

Now or never.

Nailer put on a burst of speed and leaped as a ladder swept past. Instead of grabbing for a rung, he grabbed the side of the ladder with both hands. His shoulders exploded with pain as his arms were yanked forward and he was dragged with the train. His feet bounced over rocks—bright pain blossoms—and then he pulled himself into a ball, dangling low off the ladder.

The ground blurred beneath him. Wind ripped at his clothes, choked him with its heat and force. He scrabbled for a new handhold, found a rung, and pulled himself painfully away from the rush of rocks beneath. Another handhold, and then he was up and climbing with the wind tearing at him and the trees of the jungle blurring emerald as he shot past. His arms were shaking; his whole body tingled with adrenaline. His legs felt weak. But he climbed, clawing his way higher until he was at the top of the freight car and could see down the length of the train.

His feet were scraped and battered, his knee was oozing blood, his hands were raw, but he was safe and he was alive. Far ahead, Nita and Tool were watching. Nita waved. He waved back tiredly, then hooked his arm in the ladder and let his body shake. Eventually he’d have to make his way down the length of train and rejoin them, but for now he just wanted to rest, to be grateful that for the first time in days, clinging to a speeding train, he felt absurdly safe. He looked back the way he had come. The twin rails of the train tracks were being swallowed by the dense jungle. Every minute on this train took him farther from his past.

He had to smile. His whole body hurt, but he was alive and his father was in the distance and whatever lay ahead, it had to be better than what lay behind. For the first time in his life he was safe from his father.

The thought of safety reminded him of Pima and her mother, still there, still facing more days on the crews, facing whatever retribution his father might think to devise. It worried him. In the heat of the escape, he hadn’t been able to concern himself with what the consequences might be for them; he had so desperately wanted to get away that he couldn’t think of anything else, but now, suddenly, the two of them were on his mind, like spirit demons, plucking at guilt.

Looking back the way they’d come, he used his free hand and touched his forehead to the Fates and prayed they would be all right. That they would be able to hold Richard off, that he would believe the story that Tool had betrayed him for the sake of a reward, and that Pima’s mother and Pima hadn’t been the ones who had stolen a Lucky Strike from his hands. Nailer prayed for the people he had abandoned and then he turned his face forward again and let the wind rush past. He opened his mouth, gulping at the heat and speed and smells of the jungle.

Through the trees, a flash of ocean showed, blue and bright. The train was slipping toward the shoreline. In the far distance, he caught sight of the moored clipper ship, its sails glinting in sunlight, a white gull resting on a mirror sea. He grinned at the sight, at the thought of all those swanks who would be scrambling now, trying to find them in the jungle, all of them never realizing they had been fooled and that their quarry had outwitted them.

The view of the ship and ocean disappeared, hidden again by the emerald tangle of blurred trees and vines. Nailer turned and peered down the length of the train, looking ahead to where the towers of drowned Orleans would eventually rise.

T
HE PROBLEM WITH
a clever escape was that it helped to have planned for it.

In their rush to slip away, they’d left with few supplies, and riding in the gaps between train cars meant it was impossible to scavenge for food. Within hours, Nailer was starving. He thought longingly of the dinner he’d had the night before.

He would have thought that by sitting still they would have hardly needed to eat. After all, it wasn’t like working light crew. But his body was already whittled by a lack of food from his time of fever and now his belly pressed against his backbone. There was nothing to do about the problem, so he gritted his teeth and felt his belly grind on emptiness and promised himself he would scavenge a feast when they arrived in the drowned city.

The train, in addition to the access ladders to the roofs, had tiny service platforms between the cars, but these were hardly more than steel planks two feet wide, suitable for standing and working, but terrible for hours of riding. Early on, Tool made his way down the length of the train, hunting for open bays in the train cars, but he was unable to crack any of the sealed compartments and so they huddled in the train gaps with the ground blurring beneath them and the wind whipping all around. It was awful, and yet still better than the hot roofs of the train with no protection at all from the blaze of the sun.

Sleeping on the brink of the wheels was nearly impossible. They pinned themselves between the ladders, perched precariously above the blurred ground and slept in nodding shifts that broke off at abrupt moments when the train jerked forward or slammed to a slower speed. All of the train’s braking and acceleration came in jerks and shuddering decelerations that threatened to throw them off their perches. After Nailer and Nita were nearly thrown down into the train gap, they rode with their arms threaded through the ladders. Another time, as the train slammed itself to a slower speed, Tool almost crushed them, his whole bulk smashing them against metal and leaving Nailer’s head ringing.

But all of those discomforts were nothing against their lack of water. The few bottles they carried in their pack were quickly drunk and by the second day all of them were parched and hollow in the heat and humidity. There was nothing to do but watch the landscape rush past and hope that the train would reach its destination soon. Sometimes huge lakes spooled past. They debated jumping from the speeding train into the cool inviting water, but Tool shook his head and said that they would never catch a train again at this speed, and unless they wanted to spend days walking, they must suffer instead.

Nailer resented the idea, even though he didn’t want to ever try to jump a train again and knew that the huge creature was correct. So while they killed time and watched the landscape roll past, they talked.

“Who are the people who are after you?” Nailer asked Nita. “Why are you so important?”

“It’s Nathaniel Pyce. A business-marriage uncle.” She hesitated, then said, “He and his people want me for leverage.”

Nailer frowned, confused. Nita saw his lack of comprehension. “My father learned about some of his dealings. Pyce was misusing the family’s corporate resources. Now Pyce wants to use me to keep my father from making trouble. I’m the best way to put pressure on him.”

“Pressure?”

“Pyce wants my father to allow something he disagrees with. If Pyce controls me, my father has to acquiesce. Pyce stands to make billions, and not in dollars. Chinese red cash. Billions.” Her dark eyes bored into him. “That’s more money than your ship-breaking yards will make in their entire lifetime. It’s enough to build a thousand clippers.”

“And your dad’s against that?”

“It’s tar sands development and refining. A way to make burnable fuel, a crude oil replacement. The valuation has gone up, because of carbon production limits. Pyce has been refining tar sands in our northern holdings and secretly using Patel clippers to ship it over the pole to China.”

“Sounds like a Lucky Strike to me,” Nailer said. “Like falling into a pool of oil and already having a buyer set up. Shouldn’t your dad just take a cut and let this Pyce run with it?”

Nita stared at him in shock. She opened her mouth. Closed it, then opened it again. Closed it, clearly flummoxed.

“It’s black market fuel,” Tool rumbled. “Banned by convention, if not in fact. The only thing that would be more profitable is shipping half-men, but that of course is legal. And this isn’t at all. Is it, Lucky Girl?”

Nita nodded unwillingly. “Pyce is avoiding carbon taxation because of territory disputes in the Arctic, and then when it goes to China, it’s easy to sell it untraceably. It’s risky, and it’s illegal, and my father found out about it. He was going to force Pyce out of the family, but Pyce moved against him first.”

“Billions in Chinese red cash,” Nailer said. “It’s worth that much?”

She nodded.

“Your father’s crazy, then. He should’ve done the business.”

Nita looked at him with disgust. “Don’t we already have enough drowned cities? Enough people dying from drought? My family is a clean company. Just because a market exists doesn’t mean we have to serve it.”

Nailer laughed. “You trying to tell me you blood buyers got some kind of clean conscience? Like making some petrol is different than buying our blood and rust out on the wrecks for your recycling?”

“It is!”

“It’s all money in the end. And you’re worth a lot more of it than I thought.” He looked at her speculatively. “Good thing you didn’t tell me this before I burned the boat with my dad.” He shook his head. “I might have let him sell you after all. Your uncle Pyce would have paid a fortune.”