I’m drinking ale with Darla on the hundredth voyage of her unmarked vessel.

“We never got around to picking out that logo,” she says, her mermaid hair swept into a messy bun.

The ship makes a swipe across the sea, rocking through rickety waves. A series of storms has wrecked the crew, and many faces are missing from the crowd.

“Like bombs falling from the sky,” Darla says, trying to describe the blasts that sent waves up and over the sails. You nod at the simile, which is perhaps closer to the truth than Darla can imagine. “And then, all the prisoners, released. Not to mention that dragon. Is it a dragon or something worse?”

The pirate captain’s wife sits alone at the mast of the ship, watching an old movie projected on the sails.

“It’s been a rough time.”

“Pearl?” I ask.

Darla shakes her head.

Two Pearls lost, none remain. When everyone is gone, it doesn’t matter who came first, who was original, who was not.

My first instinct: secure myself to the prow in protest of my grief. My second instinct: race to the dungeon, find the boy’s missing mother. But no, there are new captives here, new people, new problems, the old captives gone long ago. It’s been ages. There’s a crease that runs along my brow, and I’m not sure where it’s from. Darla serves me a plate of grub and forces it down my throat. Maurice flies overhead, the real Maurice, squawking at the fading sunlight.

“How are your grandparents, the ones who live in Florida?” I ask Darla.

“Dead.”

Safe at my old porthole, I spot a human barnacle riding the back of a whale. A special kind of breed. I wonder where it goes. Where I will go next, what I will do, what kind of adhesive I am made of, if any kind at all. I think I finally know something, but the knowledge slips away. And then the sea mist and the clouds and the fog return, the trusty dispersion and reconstitution of water.

I tie the knots required of me and file the daily logs. I drink coffee with the executive assistant, sitting on the plank with our legs dangling free. It’s like nothing happened, like nothing changed, like I’ve been sitting here all along, right where I started. My world, done and undone.

“Never would Darla do to others as they would do to her,” I say.

“I do them one better,” Darla says, and we laugh like crazy. Or no, not like crazy. Just like friends. When I’m in a rush to file the daily logs, Darla cleans my bunk for me, makes my bed, organizes my cabin. I do the same for her. We do this thing for each other. We make gestures at the world that ricochet toward an intended person. I thought I understood Darla. I thought I had practiced the kind of empathy that would allow me to replace her. But there are new pieces of information every day. She does this thing with her ears when she thinks no one is looking. She wiggles them. How long does it take to accurately replace a person, I wonder? Certainly longer than a life. An eye patch doesn’t replace the eye, it just provides temporary coverage.

“To Pearl,” she says.

“To Pearls,” I say.

Sitting in the middle of the sea, we eat under the stars, the sky reflected in the water, an infinite display of light.

Darla invites me to serve as the new first mate of human resources.

“Permanently?”

“Sure,” Darla says, thumbs in her pockets. “We have so many people to replace.”

It would be easy. How long have I been here, anyway? I consider the roughness of my hands, the soreness in my throat. “I’ll think about it,” I say, but I’ve already thought about it. It’s the only thing I think about, the ways in which I can’t stay. I close my eyes and wait for the steadiness to arrive, but it never does.

On a beautiful afternoon in spring, when the air hits my skin at just the right temperature, with just the right distribution of breeze and sun, the port accepts our ship with a quake. I jolt awake from where I nap in the crow’s nest and find myself positioned at eye level with the sign that hangs over this part of the harbor, a billboard of sorts, a beacon painted in large block letters, stomping across the sky.

“Our parent company,” says Darla.

Something familiar after so much time away.

Major Corp.