Rosalind. Two sailors threw down the rope ladder. When they saw Piper, they jumped to attention, saluting him. Thomas led us toward the prow. The sailors stood in silence as they watched us pass. Their clothes were bleached by sun and salt, and they looked as battered as The Rosalind itself. Many were thin, and some had the blue-red blotching of scurvy on their arms and hands.
A group of sailors was seated by the prow, where the stump of the broken figurehead jutted at the sky. Only one of them stood as we approached.
She left the group, limping slightly as she walked toward us. At first I thought one foot was bare, though it made no sense, on the frosty deck. But as she drew closer I could see that the bare leg was false. Not a wooden stump, such as I’d seen often enough. Instead, it was made from a smooth, harder material with a fleshlike texture, carefully crafted to look like a foot, although it didn’t bend at the ankle when she walked.
It wasn’t the uncanny replica foot that made me stare at her. Nor was it the fact that the other sailors all wore the blue of the island’s guards, and she did not. There was something else different that I could feel: a thinness about her, an insubstantiality that I couldn’t grasp. As though she would cast no shadow.
She was solid enough—when I shook her hand, her grip was strong.
“I’m Paloma,” she said, turning from me to shake Piper’s hand. But I still couldn’t stop staring. Piper seemed oblivious—why didn’t he flinch from her as I did?
“She doesn’t have a twin,” I said. I heard the fear in my own voice. I hadn’t meant it to be so obvious. But it was as if I could see a wound on her that the others couldn’t see. She was incomplete. Half a person.
“None of us do, in the Scattered Islands,” the woman said. “I gather that you call it Elsewhere.”
Ω
Thomas and Paloma told us their story first. The Rosalind hadn’t found Elsewhere, despite a tortuous journey through the northern ice straits, farther than any other resistance ship had ever traveled. Instead, Paloma’s ship had found them.
“There used to be machines for sending and receiving messages,” she said, “even after the detonations. But no messages ever came and we never knew whether anyone was out there to hear ours. Then the communication machines stopped working altogether. So the Confederacy’s been sending out ships, almost every year, for as long as anyone can remember.”
The cadence of her voice was unlike any I’d heard before. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Even within the mainland, there were variations in accents. When I’d met people from the east, close to the deadlands, their voices usually marked them as decisively as their ragged clothes or starved faces. A drawling tone, some words musically elongated. Up north, people shortened their vowels. My own father had spoken in the slightly clipped accent of the northern regions, where he’d been raised. Paloma’s accent was far stronger than any I’d encountered. It made familiar words strange, stretching them in unexpected directions.
“When we found The Rosalind, my crew sailed back to Broken Harbor to report the news,” she said. “But two of us came aboard your ship, to be the first emissaries. Then Caleb died in the storm.” She looked down. “So it’s just me now.”
Silence fell. Where could we begin? What questions came first, when encountering a new world? It had felt so audacious even to dream of Elsewhere that I’d never allowed myself to give the dreams detail, or to imagine what people from Elsewhere might be like. This twinless woman, pale and alone, was more like us than I’d imagined, but more alien than I could grasp.
Thomas was showing Piper a map, he and Paloma bending over it to gesture toward Elsewhere’s location, somewhere beyond the map’s edge. Zoe stood nearby, watching.
I couldn’t face being there when Piper told Zoe and Paloma about the Ark, and what we’d discovered there. It was cowardly of me, perhaps. Paloma’s twinless state was like a high-pitched sound that only I could hear, and when I was standing close to her, my teeth clenched tight and my breath evaded me. I left them talking, and walked back to the stern, to share my unease with the restless sea.
Ω
After a while, I heard Zoe’s footsteps on the deck.
“Piper told us about what you found in the Ark,” she said. “About