• a bold round face and a curving tail

WE COASTED AWAY in a moderate swell and only looked back rounding the eastern tip of the island. From a distance the ship appeared as it must’ve a century ago—like a thousand-foot city, its wheelhouse illuminated, rain whipping itself into haloes around the sodium lamps. Then, since Flower’s mainsail was still shredded and useless, we raised the jib, which filled with a strong northeasterly breeze, and Posterity lost its hold on us forever.

Two surprises I remember from that long reach.

First, we were not pursued. We’d left Werryck and the others locked below, but I assumed it wouldn’t take long for someone to scramble up keys or commandeer a cutting torch. By now the old tyrant would be out and blazing for revenge. Of course, pursuing us would’ve made no sense. All the value was aboard the black cruiser, which had gone another direction. Also it was still dark, with rain and hard wind. Yet I couldn’t stop looking back.

Second, Burke was an actual sailor. I asked him to steer when I went forward to free a stuck line, and he said not a word but his ease with the tiller was plain. We moved swiftly on a heading of three hundred degrees by Kellan’s toy compass, a course to reach Jolie.

Sol vanished below, crawled into her bunk, and stayed there until it got light.

I won’t describe the damp day and next night, the shifts at the tiller, the soaked and hungry passage of hours, except to say I began to approach warily the idea that we’d gotten away. The wind continued, there were mountainous clouds behind us but they never caught up. We were not overwhelmed. The second morning I caught the smell of land before dawn. I thought we’d gotten too close to shore, but later realized we’d slipped past the Slate Islands, another near miss in the dark.

Late in the morning we eased into Jolie.

The harbor was still. A maple-leaf flag hung slack from a yardarm; the town lay at rest on its hillside. We tied Flower at the dock and made our way to the Girards’.

Nobody home but the gate was open, so we sat in the garden to rest and get used to the feeling of earth. Sol kept trying to walk and then tipping over like a top out of spin. She was exaggerating but not much. My feet felt made of wood.

We were still wobbly when Evelyn came in through the gate. She was startled for a moment, then beelined for me and wrapped me in her arms.

You forget how it is to have someone be glad you are there.

I said, “Evelyn, here are Sol and Burke.”

She shook their hands. I watched her eyes. Already she was busy with our welfare. She said, “Sleep, soap, or a meal, what would you all like first?”

•

For a while we all stayed with Girard and Evelyn, and if this made their big old house seem small, they never let on. I don’t know how much or how long that dose of compliance affected Burke. Maybe he was always that guileless. But when after ten days he accepted passage in a van heading west, we were sorry to see him go—well, not Sol. Burke may have been on board with us, but she was never on board with Burke. It turned out she’d been watching when he forced the twelve onto that tortuous raft. So had I, of course. But I couldn’t despise Burke; I could’ve been Burke. That’s what I believe. Maybe I still could. What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.

I soon picked up some work. Stevie at the welding shop, who had repaired Flower’s chainplates, was expanding her reach and needed what she called “a back and two arms” for deliveries. Hours were unpredictable but more days than not I drove her bouncy old hybrid east or west along the coastline.

One morning before I walked to the shop, Girard said, “Are you thinking of leaving us too?”

It had occurred to me to find a place of my own. I’d lived upstairs at their house for six weeks, which is way past guest no matter who you are.

Girard then offered me the loft above the garage. It had been used as an apartment decades earlier and was plumbed and electrified. He said it was mine if I cared to clean it up and fix the broken parts.

Sol remained in the house. She barely noticed when I moved out—partly because I only moved sixty feet away and partly because she liked the Girards. One day I went into their upstairs library to browse and Sol was there. She looked overwhelmed, and I recalled how she thought my shelf of seven books on Flower comprised a giant collection.

“Evelyn says there is a school in town, and maybe I should go to it,” she said. “But I don’t know.”

Girard had begun to teach her a little math, and I’d been reading to her most evenings. Already she had favorite stories and would ask for repeat performances. I thought she would adjust to school, but my instinct was not to push. Sol is always apt to revolt or vanish from sight, impulses that have worked well for her.

She said, “I didn’t hate the ship, at first.”

I sat down. Sol hadn’t talked much about the ship, so far. Neither of us had.

“The door was locked, but the room was big and we all had our own beds in there. And clean blankets. And a bathroom with hot water. And I never ate that much before in my life. Three squares a day the woman called it.”

“That sounds all right.”

“It was. This woman brought the meals on a big red tray. She had dark hair and seemed nice. The food was good. She’d hang around and watch us eat. She made marks in a book and then she’d take the plates and everything and go away.”

“You must’ve liked her.”

“Sure, but she didn’t like us. She wouldn’t say our names. Look, there was Lisha and Betts and there was Andre and Ferdie and me.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Five of us, and we told her our names, but she never said them. Not a single time. She said we’d get new names when we started the program and they’d be better names and we would like them more. Well, that was fine for Lisha. She hated hers, anyway, couldn’t wait to get a different one. But I was scared to forget my name. What if I they called me something dumb? But I remembered the letters.”

“S like a stream,” I said.

“Right! O like a face, L a straight line up and down. I made those marks with my finger on the counter. I breathed on the mirror and practiced. Once when the lady wasn’t looking I stole her marker. That night I wrote my name real tiny on the wall by the bed, so I would see it every day.”

“That was good thinking, Sol.”

“Then a man came and said he knew you and asked if I wanted to send you a message.”

“And I got it,” I told her. “It came when I needed it. I was proud of you.”

Sol looked around warily at the Girards’ well-filled shelves. “I still might not write a book ever,” she said. “They take a lot of letters.”

“You’ve got time,” I told her.

In early spring, Sol asked Evelyn whether she could “have a few garden seeds.” I instantly forgot about it, but a few weeks ago—about the time the Tashi Comet swam into view—I began seeing familiar plants in places you would never expect, up and down Jolie. A melon vine crossing the threshold of the abandoned petrol station, a stand of leggy sunflowers growing like a riddle from the crumbling chimney of a boarded house. Sidewalk cracks populated with healthy vines, their string beans plumping by the day. I said to Sol, “Is that you, planting these seeds all over town?”

She was pleased I noticed. I was pleased too. It seemed like something Molly Thorn would do, or Lark herself—once in her sleep Lark said The best futures are unforeseen and this keeps being true.

It took weeks to hear what happened to the overstuffed cruiser. When the answer came, it was incomplete and via the excitable Mosquito, which showed up in Jolie on its usual mercurial schedule. The Mosquito had a field day with what it insisted on calling the black-clad cutter, which arrived at an undisclosed location on the northern shore to unload dozens of refugees in various states of distress. Across several editions a reporter using the name Bart Kidneystone wrote transfixing descriptions of a “miraculous mass escape” led by a daring young revolutionary who “shrugged off bullet wounds as if they were beestings.” This impervious figure came with a Magdalene who never left his side and a dozen ascetic disciples who required no dock but simply strolled to shore over the rolling waves. Embroideries aside, it was pretty great reading. At least they hadn’t sunk in the gale that night, and Marcel had survived. For the first time, I was grateful for the Mosquito. It was improving, just as Lark hoped. No more copy given to space aliens, fewer pictures of dogs wearing headphones. The masthead now read AFFLICTING THE COMFORTABLE—still pompous, but with clean spelling. I even forgave the slapstick bylines and began enjoying them for their own sake. How do you root against someone whose nom de plume is Harpy LaFierce, or Inside Pants, or my favorite, Frijole Regret?

As for the comet it arrived as predicted. It seemed like nothing at first. I’d heard it would start to be visible to the north in the small hours, so I began to wake myself and walk up through town to a height of land where neither trees nor buildings lived. I carried the binoculars and swept upward from the horizon in a crisscross pattern. That’s worth doing, by the way, whether or not you are hunting a comet—the planets and star clusters and winking satellites predestined for silence and the wonder of rare jetliners would make anyone a happy insomniac. And then one morning it seemed a particular star was growing brighter. Day by day it gained weight, followed by a shadow of light, and then I moved a chair into the yard. Every clear night I sat in the shine of that space rock for two or three hours—depending on the atmosphere it looked like the mark an eraser leaves or else like the silvery wing feather Sol found on one of her gardening jaunts. It had a bold round face and a curving tail whose edges might look downy and shy or other times crisp as a blade.

One evening, just before dark, Harriet walked into the garden.

I was harvesting early carrots. I knew Harriet instantly by her vivid white hair—in a strong wind she’d have resembled a comet herself.

“They told me you were here,” she said. She’d stopped in the nearby town of Marathon the previous night, took a room above a tavern where the Indolent Vagrants were playing. By now I’d sat in with them once or twice.

She was on her way across country to stay with her sister in Vancouver. She didn’t have all the news, but she had more than the Mosquito.

The cruiser had landed at the dwindling town of Walda which still had a strong seawall and quiet harbor. Though the vessel was equipped with top navigation, either a solar flare or a rogue organization had disabled key satellites, and they ended up crawling along the shoreline for hours with the sky in a thundery mood, finally spotting the lights of Walda and entering the harbor to the consternation of locals who had seen squelettes before and didn’t wish to antagonize the astronaut or his damned ship. In the end Harriet offered them the cruiser itself as payment for permission to land. This they accepted and hauled it out on a motorized lift into a massive shed.

I asked the immediate questions. Where did everybody go? What happened to Kellan and the rest of the twelve? Did Marcel really shake off that bullet so easily?

What a lovely stoic Harriet was. She fixed me with a stare of reproach, mockery, and wry confirmation at once. “You know that paper is written by simpletons.”

“They mean well,” I ventured.

“Never change, Rainy,” she said and filled me in as best she could. The squelettes stayed a few days in Walda, where volunteers made up cots in the grade school and rounded up food and clothing. From there, residents drove them by threes or fours into neighboring towns. There was a network, Harriet said. An alliance of kindness. Some might still be taken for the small skanky bounties attached to their heads but not all. Not even most. The twelve also scattered in this way. Kellan went east, and that was all Harriet knew about him—except on the boat, when the waves got tall and wrathful, and the cruiser wallowed in the troughs, then people sought out Kellan to rub his roostery hair. “For luck,” said Harriet, rolling her eyes.

“Did you rub it too?” I asked.

She wouldn’t answer.

It seemed like maybe it worked.

Marcel was carried off the cruiser and spent time in two hospitals Harriet knew of, fighting a string of infections and fleeing both times when agents of the astronaut showed up wearing visitor tags. He and Tove were in Montreal, last Harriet heard, shopping for new histories and greedy for the dullest lives a human could invent.

Harriet lost track of Beezie—Verlyn too.

“Didier?” I said.

“Working for a beekeeper in the Maritimes. He seems happy. Wears netting over his face but no gloves. His hands get stung every day. It helps his arthritis.”

It surprised me to hear nothing of Werryck or Griff. I’d assumed by now they would’ve made serious trouble for at least a few of us.

“You don’t know,” Harriet said.

I leaned forward.

“Posterity sank,” she said. “It went to the bottom. Werryck went too. And the girl’s uncle, or grandpa, whatever he was. And the guards. How did you not hear?”

“How would I hear?”

That’s the trouble with the Mosquito being your primary news source. They didn’t report any such thing—only that the medicine ship Posterity was gone from its anchorage of nearly a decade. A ship can go a lot of places besides the seafloor.

“Nope. Sank,” said Harriet. She wore a cloud of guilt and silver lining of relief.

“The bilge pumps,” I said.

“Every mechanic came with us on the cruiser,” she said.

The pumps had given out within hours. As stinking water breached the Shambles, there was an immediate outcry. The upstairs professionals, the medics and aides and researchers, swarmed over the ship looking for the keys to let Werryck and the guards out. These keys, by the way, were neither digital nor skeleton but resembled any old deadbolt key to any house in the country. I know because I used them to open the door at the bottom of the stairwell on my way to invite Griff along. When I went to Werryck’s quarters to retrieve Mr. Fender, I tossed the key ring onto his couch. I remember its jangly sound.

I suppose those keys slid down between the cushions.

Harriet was quiet a minute, during which I imagined in nightmare hues the panic of caged men in rising water, the wrenching at the bars, the futility and exalted rage at their looming, unkind finish. I think of those men more often than I’d like—two hundred feet down, rotating slowly in the currents of the Shambles. The drowned of Superior keep returning—not these fellows, though.

“What about everybody else, the staffers, the medical people?”

And that was the good news. Someone remembered the power skiff, which fully packed could accommodate fifteen or twenty at a time. By the time water filled the Shambles and started covering the next floor up, everyone had been ferried to safety to nearby Michipicoten. When the sun rose, Posterity had vanished, but a former coast guard cutter—owned by the astronaut and piloted by state police—was just arriving.

Harriet and I talked for hours; the night was cool and clear. I said, “Have you been watching the comet?”

“What comet is that?”

We walked down to the dock with its clear view of the sky. I couldn’t imagine how Harriet had missed it—if you were outside after dark the Tashi was practically a banner. But when I handed her the binoculars she said, “Oh yes, there it is,” while looking in an absolutely wrong direction. That’s when I realized her eyes were bad. I asked about it, and she confessed her sight had been diminishing for years. Since long before her time aboard Posterity. Her parents had both suffered from macular degeneration and took medications no longer available. Days she could navigate but nights were darker all the time. She could make out the moon if it were full and if someone aimed her properly.

“I’m sorry, Harriet.”

“Maybe you’d describe it to me, though. The comet.”

I told her it was like a chalkboard smear ten fingers off the horizon.

“Is it gorgeous, Rainy? Tell the truth.”

I said it was long white hair blown back in the wind, or a lit road climbing a distant mountain.

She said, “Comets used to predict terrible things. That’s what people thought. Wars and epidemics, draught, famine. Locusts.”

I said, “This one feels different to me.”

“Me too,” said Harriet.

I never had a sister, but she felt like one then. Heading back up the pier she was a little unsteady. I gave her my arm and she hung on to it until we reached Girards’.

Next morning, once it was good and light, she drove west out of town.