Aurora Quest

“Driftwood?”

“Dead seal?”

“Rowboat?”

“Ah.” Nanci glanced back to where Henderson McGill was at the wheel. “Bring her up a couple of points into the wind, Mac! Yeah, better.” She returned her attention to Pamela. “A rowboat, girl? Well, now, wouldn’t that be interesting?”

“Why didn’t we come straight north, Nanci? We must be much faster than Jim Hilton.”

“Two things. First, we could have overrun them in the dark. Second, this bay is just a load of sea pouring over a lot of land. Absolutely no way of knowing what lay under our keel a hundred feet or two feet beneath. Soft mud or the roof of a church set to pluck out our timbers like the sweet bird of youth taking petals off a rose.”

Pamela nodded. “Course. Stupid of me.”

“Yes,” agreed Nanci. “It was.”

JEANNE STOOD by her ex-husband, blowing on her hands. “Colder’n charity, Mac,” she said, her breath pluming out ahead of her, drifting away over the high stern.

“Snow yonder,” he said, not taking his hands off the wheel. “Farther north we have to go, then the worse the weather’s likely to get.”

“Where are we going to land?”

Paul joined them. “Sukie’s got the squitters,” he reported. “And she says she’s cold.”

His mother shook her head. “We all are. I was just asking your father where we’d land.”

Mac ran his fingers through his wet, thinning hair. “No harbors, on account of the quakes. Maybe we’ll keep on sailing north until we reach Seattle.” Nanci appeared up the ladder from the main part of the deck, and he said to her, “Just wondering whether and how we’d finally put into land.”

She looked at him for several seconds, stock-still, her eyes seeming to drill right through his head. Then she blinked and came close to smiling. “Just spent a few minutes with Jefferson in the anchor locker up under the bows, and I swear it’s taken my mind clean off matters.”

Mac glanced down and noticed that there was a tiny thread of fresh blood near the heel of her left boot. And again he wondered about what the ill-matched couple did together in their private moments.

“You asked me where we were going? I gave some thought to keeping on north. Save us some time and possibly a deal of grief. We could be in Puget Sound in a couple of days, sailing day and night with a fair wind. Round Cape Flattery and Low Point and Angeles Point, through the Admiralty Inlet. Maybe put ashore at Squamish, across the sound. If we travel by land, it might take us a month with the bad weather I smell in the air.”

“So?” said Paul. “You make it seem a good option, Nanci, but the way you say it makes it sound like putting your neck into a noose.”

She nodded and patted him on his bearded cheek. “Good, Paul, good. You see and you listen. Rare qualities. Keep you living when all about start dying. Neck into a noose? Maybe. My guess, ladies and gentlemen, for what it might be worth, is that the Hunters of the Sun have a network of informers strung across this pink and unpleasant land.”

“How about Zelig? He have the same?”

“Possibly, Mac. And the nearer we get to Aurora, then the more that’s likely. But I am of the opinion, most strongly, that it will be known that two vessels were stolen from Eureka. Like pointing a finger. They’ll know we’ll go north. Have to. But how far? Best would be to keep sailing.”

“So?” asked Pamela, joining them on the stern.

“So we aim for what you think might be an abandoned rowboat, right ahead. Sail her straight onto the beach, helmsman, and damn the torpedoes!”

THE LITTLE ONES, Sukie and Jocelyn, had been brought out of the cabin down below and bundled together in front of the mast with a pile of blankets around them. Paul McGill had been delegated, along with Jeanne, to keep a careful eye on their safety. Pamela was positioned up in the bows, told to watch out for any last-minute underwater danger. Mac took the wheel, ready to respond to any order from Nanci.

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