“Meadow!” Peri scampers over to me and buries her face in my stomach and I wrap my arms around her. She’s skinnier, even more so than yesterday, if that is even possible. I press her closer to me. “Did you get it? Did you get the job?” she asks.
My father and Koi emerge from the cabin and watch me with tired eyes. My father has been working all day. Fishing off the docks, like most Shallows men do. It is a good job, and if he reaches his quota by the end of the year, he gets to bring home an actual fish for us to eat. Sometimes, we even get to go to the marketplace and buy extra clothing, a box of matches, a bundle of dried meat. But those things cost far too many Creds, and we don’t indulge ourselves often.
Koi has spent the day guarding the boat, and more importantly, guarding Peri. “Well?” he asks. “What happened?”
“See for yourself.” I smile. I place my badge into Peri’s small hands.
“You’re so badass!” she says, and I am so shocked that I laugh before I scold her. Her smile is different tonight. She is missing a tooth.
I stoop down to her side and run my hands through her curls. “You lost another tooth,” I say to her. “You know what that means, right?”
“Koi says all my teeth will fall out and I’ll look like a fish.”
I glare at Koi, and he stifles a laugh. “You’re just growing up,” I say, “that’s all. Soon you’ll be as big as me!” I tickle her, right above her hips, the same place Koi used to tickle me.
Peri’s laugh is sweet, like music. She falls to the deck of the boat, clutching her stomach, and for a second, I just kneel there beside her, wishing I could stop time.
Soon, my father will begin her training. I don’t want to think about what my father will do to her, how he will harden her soft edges. How someday, she will be faced with a choice: kill or be killed.
I know Peri will be strong enough to survive. She’s smart, and she can swim fast. She even knows how to read. I taught her with the History of the Shallows book. She knows how to take care of herself, too. But thinking of her being out on the streets makes me feel sick. So instead, I commit this moment to memory, the smile on her face, her laughter.
“All right, quiet down,” Koi says. I plant a kiss on Peri’s cheek. She giggles and wipes it off.
“Your mother would be proud, Meadow.” My father is standing behind me, watching me, I’m sure. I don’t know why I feel so empty at the mention of her. I don’t know why I feel so dead inside.
I should be proud. But Koi is staring at me like I am dripping with someone else’s blood. We all know what happened in that room today.
“Did she suffer?” he whispers to me. I shake my head. No.
His eyes meet mine, just for a moment, before he whispers something under his breath. “You did what you had to do.” Then he walks away and down the ladder to the engine room.
“Let’s go talk in private for a moment, shall we?” My father places his calloused hand on my shoulder, and I flinch. His touch means the slice of a knife, a sudden spar, a jarring slam to the floor. His touch means training. It never means fatherly affection.
We settle down on the bow of the boat, both of us cross-legged, facing each other. The engine rumbles beneath us as Koi starts it up, and then our houseboat begins to move across the surface of the ocean in silence. Tonight, the sea is glass.
“There’s something you should know,” my father begins, his voice cracking strangely.
“All right.” I nod, unsure of what else to say.
“It’s about your mother. What do you remember about her, Meadow?”
My eyes close and there she is. Tall, brilliant, hair the color of the moon, the color of the seashell charm she gave me the last night I ever saw her.
She was an engineer, always the one to fix our boat when something went haywire. And she could sing. Oh, she could sing, and at night, when I sleep, when I dream of her, I hear her voice. It is beautiful, like a bird singing its summer song, like the sound of rushing water over smooth pebbles, or wind tickling the set of seashell chimes I made for her birthday years ago.
“She was perfect.” It’s all I can say because the tears have begun spilling down my face. They drop onto the deck and splatter, hot and sticky in the night air.
“She wasn’t perfect,” my father whispers.
My head pops up. “How can you say that?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” He sighs, squeezing the bridge of his nose with filthy fingertips. “What I mean is . . . to you, to your brother and sister, she was wonderful. But Meadow, you have to understand. Your mother was a dangerous woman.”
A sad laugh flies from my lips. Dangerous? My mother could defend herself, sure. We all can, thanks to him. But dangerous? For the last months she was with us, I watched her strength fade, as she refused to train, and her happiness wither away.
My father continues. “You know that the Initiative is all-controlling. That we no longer have the freedom to make choices because of them. Water—it isn’t ours to drink anymore. The fish I catch—I can’t bring them home to my family to eat unless I earn the right. Human lives—they are no longer precious the way they should be. We aren’t precious, Meadow. We are numbers to them. That is it. Nothing more.”
“I know all that. What does this have to do with Mom?” I’m getting frustrated, breathing too hard.
“You wear a number close to hers on your forehead. We all do. Similar ones. Recognizable ones.”