Day Six
(age twenty-four)
Ganymede wasn’t so different from Callisto in its layout or its comforts, just bigger and differently textured.
Callisto’s streets stretched out in pristine, polished white, with broad-leaved vines climbing hydroponic trellises on the walls.
In place of Callisto’s white plaster, Ganymede used heavy slabs of gray stone, mined and compressed out of the ice-rock slurry of the moon’s own crust. It gave the parks and buildings an ancient, sophisticated air, like stone temples from a television show, with ivy growing up some of them so densely that the mortar between the composite stones could not be discerned.
The four of them carefully synchronized their watches before they disembarked.
Timing would be crucial on this mission, and there would be no way to communicate at a distance.
Kelli and Rowan and Ting stepped off the ship after that, with Zhaleh staying behind, preparing to jam Inspiration’s systems from afar.
Nobody stepped up to arrest them as soon as they disembarked, which meant the arrest would happen later, Kelli supposed. She just had to be Orlando until then.
Kelli had worn another set of work clothes for this—a skirtsuit in pearl-gray, with a white-gold blouse. She was going to use her own credentials to get them in, after all—if Baz’s team let them get that far. She might as well dress the part.
She sat very straight in the hyperloop pod, thinking about Orlando and the Salt Sacristy.
She wasn’t in charge of visual design, but she thought that the Sacristy should use old and gray stones like these, to make it properly monumental.
She thought about what Orlando would say to his crew, if they were on their way to an adventure like this.
He’d been forced into the mission, and so had the rest of the crew, but the magical control they were under probably stopped them from talking about it; and besides, complaining too much wouldn’t have been Orlando’s style.
Orlando was always smiling, quipping, confident.
“I love this weather,” said Kelli in her best approximation of Orlando’s voice.
On Ganymede, as on Callisto, there was no weather; this hyperloop line didn’t even swing outside the city the way Callisto’s did.
It kept to safe gray tunnels, probably owing to all the radiation, occasionally emerging into various different city sections.
“A healthy breeze, and hardly a cloud in the sky. You barely even have to row, with currents like these. No matter what else has gone wrong, I really think the heavens favor us on days like this—don’t you? ”
She still wasn’t happy about this. But it really did help to concentrate on Orlando and his eagerness for adventure.
It was like when Rowan had asked about him at the Good Dog, or when she’d been able to tell Rosaura all about him.
Kelli could do things with Orlando’s help that she never could alone.
They’d taken the hyperloop’s upper level.
There was only room for two people per pod—and, really, barely two.
Kelli and Rowan had taken one together, and they carefully sat an inch apart, not touching.
She would have preferred a pod of her own, but she didn’t think Rowan was going to let her out of arm’s reach.
He’d dressed up for this mission too. Kelli hadn’t known that Rowan owned a suit: nothing extravagant, not a tailored numbers, but a workaday suit like the kind a script supervisor would wear.
He’d left the jacket behind and gone on the hyperloop in his shirtsleeves, a cream-colored dress shirt that set off the whites of his dark eyes.
No tie. He looked good in it, although Kelli wasn’t about to say so.
Ting had followed in the pod behind them.
“Don’t overdo it,” he said to her now, smiling fondly. “We still need to blend in.”
“We don’t have to blend in on the hyperloop,” said Kelli. “No one else is here.”
“It’s harmless fun in here, yeah. Just don’t want you talking like a pirate to the reception AI.”
“It does help, though. Ting said it helps for you, too.” Kelli looked over at him shyly.
Orlando talked a lot; he didn’t just stare broodingly out into the sea, not unless something bad had happened.
“I’m imagining this pod is a little boat.
We’re rowing our way to shore. I’m being Orlando. Who do you think your character is?”
The smile fell off of Rowan’s face all of a sudden. Like she’d prodded into something vulnerable. Kelli hadn’t expected that. He didn’t look angry, but he frowned, cautious now.
“Is . . . that okay?” he said. “For me to have a character?”
“Of course it is. Ting said you do this all the time.”
“But I don’t get to be Orlando?”
“I need to be Orlando this time. Orlando’s confident.
You can be, um, Narine.” The name slipped out of her mouth without thought—the first other person she usually associated with Orlando’s adventures.
An instant later, she realized it didn’t make sense.
Narine was supposed to lead the effort to rescue Orlando, not to be trapped on the deep-sea cult’s mission with him.
Unless Orlando wasn’t the only one who’d been captured?
Maybe a few of the rest of the crew had been trapped along with him, and now the rescue effort was needed even more urgently than before.
“I don’t want to be a girl,” said Rowan. “No offense.”
“Oh, right. Well, you can’t be Kendrick; he’s awful. You can’t be Hui; he’d get too nervous and spoil the heist. Um—”
“I’ll be a new character,” Rowan said confidently, regathering himself. “I’m, uh, Gabriel, the rowboat-swain.”
“Rowboat-swain isn’t a thing.”
“It is now. Gabriel just joined up, but he knows Orlando from way back. He’s cool and savvy and knows his way around a heist like this. That’s why Orlando hired him. That’s who I’m going to be. Now, if you’re Orlando, then what are we stealing?”
“A magical orb,” said Kelli, relieved. If Gabriel wasn’t a normal member of the crew, then it made sense that the real crew could still be waiting in the wings, planning their rescue. “From the Salt Sacristy.”
“Who are they again?”
“Bad guys. Long story. Ship of Fools is going to cross over with Riptides; it’ll be a whole thing.
” Kelli leaned forward to look keenly out the pod’s transparent front.
As the different sections of Ganymede’s city went by, she could guess at the purpose of each one.
An industrial area; a set of blocky buildings that looked like Basic Housing; a brightly colored hive that could have been a shopping concourse.
She imagined being Orlando, surveying the treacherous rocks he meant to conquer.
It occurred to her that Orlando would have plans for this orb.
He wouldn’t just want to be rescued; he’d have some idea what to do with his stolen goods after the rescue was over.
Orlando stole from the rich and gave to the poor; he’d know a poor person who could actually use an orb like that, for something other than taking over the whole ocean.
Or who could, at least, keep it safe from the sorts of people who would use it for evil.
So on a wild impulse, she added: “I’m going to steal that orb and bring it home to my lady-love.”
Rowan raised his eyebrows. “You’ve got a lady-love now?”
Ship of Fools was only in its first season, so Orlando didn’t officially have a romantic arc planned.
But a few different contenders had caught the eyes of shippers.
There was Narine, of course, with her spitfire temper and her unshaking loyalty; Narine might have been Kelli’s preferred choice.
There was Amparo, a beautiful girl from a stern, strict city; Orlando had raided that city when it harbored one of his enemies, and it had gone badly, bloodier and trickier than he’d ever expected.
But in the process of sorting that out, he’d inadvertently freed Amparo from her impending arranged marriage to an awful man, and her extravagant gratitude had—also inadvertently—saved his whole crew.
There was Princess Caitriona, aloof and cold, who’d nonetheless took a liking to Orlando’s courage and tried to commission him as a privateer.
The fans would officially decide among these, and a few other underdogs, in the AdventureVerse’s next democratic polls.
But Kelli felt daring, here in this hyperloop pod, because Orlando was daring. She wasn’t exactly being the Orlando of the show.
“It’s a secret,” she said. “It’s not any of the women from the show, though they’re fine women, and any man would be flattered.
It’s a girl from a little fishing town, a few leagues south of here.
” She stared into the distance, imagining little wooden fishing boats, rickety nets, the sun beating down in the bright blue sky and the waves splashing up.
“Gabriel, you know me from way back; you remember I used to be a girl, too, before I gave that up for the pirate’s life. ”
Rowan blinked a moment, but stayed in character; after the slightest of pauses he waved a hand, rakishly amused, the way pirates were supposed to be. “Aye. You were a fine woman yourself, once.”
Kelli cleared her throat. “Well, sometimes I go back to that village. I can tell you this, because we go way back, because I trust you. I take a rowboat out like this one. I dock it in a little inlet where nobody will see me, and I take off all my pirate clothes—oh, don’t look at me like that!
I just meant I’m putting other clothes on, obviously!
Villager clothes. I dress up as a humble fisherman girl.
And that’s how I go to see my lady-love, and we’re just girls together, and that’s why it’s a secret.
I love the pirate life, I love the treasure and the adventure; I love the high seas.
But you can’t really. . . .” She bit her lip.
She didn’t know why this felt so poignant to her, now that she’d said it.
That even a pirate like Orlando still clung to something humble and sweet from his past. “You can’t really be two girls, on the high seas. It doesn’t work.”
Rowan was watching her carefully now. Kelli wasn’t thinking too hard; the point of this was to keep up a rhythm, to just keep pouring words out so that she could remind herself that she was Orlando on a heist he liked, and not herself.
But Rowan looked like he was thinking about it a lot.
Assessing, like Zhaleh, flicking that crystal earring back and forth.
“What about two men?” he asked lightly. “Since that’s what we are today.”
“Oh, I think some of the crew do that sometimes, probably. But it doesn’t make it onto the show.
It’s private, you know. But whatever lifts the crew’s spirits and keeps the group close on a long voyage is fine by me.
The whole point of this life is freedom.
” She gave Rowan a reproving look. “But you’re too late with me, friend.
My heart belongs in that fishing village. ”
Rowan settled back in his seat. “What’s a fisherman girl going to do with a magical orb, anyway?”
“Uh, she’s a witch,” Kelli improvised.
Rowan raised his eyebrows. “A witch?”
“Yes. Some of them remember the old folk traditions, out in those villages. They know old secrets that upstarts like the Salt Sacristy never would. They pass them down through the generations.”
“I like witches,” Rowan said mildly. “There’s an air to them. But you can’t ever tell where they’re going to jump next. Can’t tell when you’re going to wake up one day and find that they sold you off in some bargain with an evil spirit. That’s the problem with witches.”
He had a faraway look on his face now. Kelli thought of Zhaleh, and her crystals, and her habit of refusing to say things that made any sense, and she flushed.
She wanted their pretending to keep them here, in a more comfortable version of the present moment, not to take them to the past. If Rowan went back far enough to remember Zhaleh then he might go even further.
He might think back to the days when they’d pretended together this way all the time, every day at lunch and recess and after school.
And that was the last thing Kelli wanted to think about right now.
They’d both left that life for a reason.