“Five,” said the Lundlandian businessman. “I bet five.”
“He’s pretty confident . . . for a man who is about to lose!” declared the Derudan lumber merchant as he laid down seven glittering gemstone pieces. He wore a ridiculous purple cloak, and the sleeve kept falling into the glass of wine next to him on the table.
“How about the boy?” the Lundlandian asked. “You’ve been playing well tonight. But perhaps you’re afraid to keep playing with real men.” They all laughed heartily.
“No,” I said, laying down ten of the playing pieces. “I think I can handle it.” I met the Lundlandian businessman’s eye. I had already won four hundred Allied dollars, and I wasn’t about to stop now. Zander and M.K. stood behind me watching the game. Zander let out a nervous little sigh.
“Ahhhh. The little boy plays big,” said the fourth player at the table, a white-haired Neo woman in a skintight green jumpsuit. The lights in her ears were all green, blinking on and off in a random pattern as she laid her pieces out.
We’d been aboard the Deloian Princess for three days, and I’d spent a lot of my time playing games in the lounge with an incredible variety of people from all over the world. The Princess was a huge, state-of-the-art SteamLiner, an oceangoing ship with ultra-efficient engines that could take her all over the Atlantic and Caribbean before she needed to stop for more coal. She could carry six hundred people and two thousand tons of cargo and she was afloat all year, shuttling BNDL officials and merchants around the Allied World.
Our expedition team, along with Mr. Wooley and Leo Nackley, had boarded in New York, and we were steaming down the East Coast toward the Caribbean, stopping in ports along the way to pick up cargo and passengers. The more ports we saw, the bigger and more interesting the world seemed.
I loved sitting on the main deck and watching the assortment of people making their way around the ship. There were BNDL and ADR and ANDLC officials on their way to the Caribbean from New York, wearing concerned expressions while exchanging hushed remarks with each other about Simeria. There were glamorous Neo couples from Paris or Milan, wearing colorful clothes made from synthetic silks and velvets and carrying small dogs, their fur dyed red or purple or green. There were rich merchants from Africa and Deloia. There were sunburned farmers from the colonies and territories in the Caribbean and South America who had been in New York making deals with wholesalers for their meat and produce.
On our first day at sea, I discovered that I could sit on the promenade deck and pretend to use my spyglass to look out at the water while actually turning it this way and that to listen to the conversations of the first-class passengers as they made their way around the deck. As I eavesdropped I would catch sight of whales and dolphins and passing ships on the horizon. A few times, we’d caught sight of the bright purple sails of the Neo pirates who cruised the Atlantic and the Caribbean, looking for smaller ships hauling produce and meat products to market. The attacks on cargo ships had been increasing as food supplies dwindled. The pirates had waved cheerfully to us but hadn’t given us any trouble. They knew that the Deloian Princess had guns on deck and BNDL agents on board.
The agents seemed to have relaxed in the contained environment of the ship, and they let us do pretty much whatever we pleased. M.K. spent most of the voyage down in the engine room, learning about the boilers and turbines that made the huge ship run. Zander had been spending his days swimming in the pool on the recreation deck with Joyce and Kemal, sometimes fishing off the lower deck, or watching whales and dolphins and seabirds from the upper deck. Jack Foster haunted the lounges and restaurants, flirting with the waitresses, and Lazlo holed up with his father, working on the expedition plans. Poor Mr. Wooley was seasick for most of the trip, and we’d barely seen him above deck.
As for me, I’d bumped into Dolly Frost almost as soon as I’d come aboard, and I’d been trying to dodge her questions and requests for interviews ever since. When I wasn’t hiding from her or eavesdropping on the conversations of the Allied world, I was in the lounge, playing chess or Deloian checkers or Simalio with whoever would give me a game.
“Okay, my friends. What have we got? I want to see those Simalios,” said the Lundlandian. Despite the fact that we’d steamed into warmer waters, he was still wearing a fur jacket and pants. They made me think of Sukey. She must be wearing something similar by now.
Simalio was a Derudan game that everyone on the ship was crazy about. You played with a set of semiprecious gemstones that were dealt out to the four players in little velvet bags. You kept your thirty stones behind a little silk screen and offered up piles of them as bets, depending on what you had behind your screen and what you thought the other players had. You had to be good at remembering what the various combinations of stones were worth, and you had to be good at remembering what each player had bet, what they’d won, what they’d given up. I don’t know if it was that I liked codes and numbers, but I turned out to be pretty good at Simalio. I’d won $100 the day before, and I was already $400 ahead tonight.
We each laid down our screens, revealing our collections of stones.
“You old faker. You had the Grand Simalio all along!” the Lundlandian shouted at the Neo woman.
She grinned and scooped up all of our pieces. “Come on, now! Pay up!” she said. I took most of the Allied dollars out of my pocket and handed the stack over with the others. “I got you good!” she said, cackling and coughing.
The men pretended not to care, but the Lundlandian looked a little pale as he handed over his money.
“You almost had it, didn’t you?” Zander asked me when they were gone. “How much would you have won?”
“A lot,” I told him. “But I didn’t almost have it. I had a Simalio Brut, but the Lundlandian guy had a Simalio Gros. He would have won if she hadn’t had the Grand Simalio. It’s not just having one of each category of stones. You have to have the right combination of the precious ones, the rubies and sapphires.”
“I don’t how you remember all that,” Zander grumbled.
We found a seat in the corner of the lounge and read the discarded newspapers laid out on the low table. Things were still tense in Simeria and our government had moved twenty thousand troops into position in Greece and Italy, ready for war. I read the number again. How had they gotten the troops there so quickly? Most of the steamships would take a month to make their way that far east.
Kemal came over and sat down across from us. “You playing Simalio again?”
We lowered our newspapers and M.K. grinned. “Just Kit. We’re not smart enough to play Simalio.”
He laughed. “My father always says there are two ways to win at Simalio. One is to make sure you never play. And the other is to steal the Simalio stones. I think he lost some money once.”
“I’ll remember that next time, though that Lundlandian businessman didn’t look like he’d let a little thing like stealing his stones go.”
Kemal picked up a paper and we all read in companionable silence, listening to the conversations as the men and women in the lounge chatted, chewing Dramleaf and drinking wine. I had gotten used to the barely perceptible motion of the big ship, the background noise of the engines. It got later and later, and a big group of Simerian businessmen wearing long white robes and red fezzes came into the lounge, discussing the uprising. “If they don’t get control of this soon, it’s going to be outright war,” said the youngest of them, a tall man with a friendly, moon-shaped face. “I saw the papers in Miami. The Allies are telling their people it’s as good as put down. It’s all lies, though. They’re barely hanging on. The Indorustans are sending arms to the East Simerians through the mountains.”
“What about you, Musta?” said another of the men. “Whose side are you on?”
Musta laughed. “Whoever wants to pay me the most money. That’s whose side I’m on. Politics don’t matter to me as much as a new home in the mountains. If the Indorustans want to give it to me, what do I care?”
“You’d better be careful about saying things like that aboard this ship,” said one of his companions. I looked up and met Kemal’s eyes over my paper.
The Simerians left the lounge, and we read for a while longer until we heard an Antiguan landowner whom I’d seen out on deck say, “Did you hear about these kids looking for the underwater oil?” We held our papers higher, sinking down into the plush velvet chairs.
His friend laughed. “That old legend? What do you think about it? Your people are fishermen.”
“My grandfather always said he’d seen it a few times, floating on top of the water. He didn’t think it was a legend. But it must be said that he liked his rum.”
“I heard that pirate Monty Brioux is looking for the oil too. He thinks he might be able to find it and demand the government pay him for access. He wants Hildreth to give him an island of his own. Thinks the oil is the way to get it.”
The other man laughed. “Even if it is there, how would you get it? You know what they say about the water out there. It kills anyone who tries to get near King Triton’s Lair. The sea doesn’t want us to find it.”
We waited until they were gone before we got up and headed back down to the B deck, where our cabins were. Lazlo and his father had a big suite of rooms up on the first-class A deck.
“What do you think about what those men were saying?” Kemal asked nervously when we’d reached our doors. “Do you think it’s true?”
“No, it’s just stories,” I told him. “Get some sleep.”
He nodded and ducked into his room, and Zander and I walked to our cabin. I got into bed and tried to make myself believe what I’d said to Kemal.
I didn’t sleep well, and I don’t think Zander did either. When we came out on deck the next morning, the sun was stronger than ever, the water a more brilliant blue.
We were almost there.