Free Riveted by Meljean Brook Page B

Iceland.
    Mary also spoke English—not the sort that Annika had grown up hearing, or the sort that she’d heard on her visits to England, but she enjoyed speaking with someone without having to first think of every word.
    Annika still had to watch everything she said, however, or find that Mary spread it to everyone aboard.
    With a damp cotton rag, Mary wiped her face, scrubbed her bare arms. “So you’ve heard about García turning in his papers?”
    Annika nodded, moving to the engineer’s station, where the repair dockets and manuals were neatly stacked. García would have left the engine checklist here. He’d been so familiar with the process that he wouldn’t need to use it, but Annika did.
    “I’m wagering that his wife didn’t like him going from port to port.” Mary hooked the rag into the waist of her trousers. “She’d rather keep him at home.”
    “Perhaps,” Annika said, but thought that Mary was only telling her own truth, not García’s. Annika had never seen evidence that the first engineer took any lovers, but Mary had lain with many other men than her husband. Considering how devoted García had been to his wife, and how the rioting in Castile worried him, Annika thought he’d left because he couldn’t bear to leave her alone any longer.
    But Mary wouldn’t have assumed that. People never believed of others what they couldn’t imagine of themselves.
    The other woman sniffed, as if disappointed that Annika didn’t have any more to add. “Well, that’s it for him, then. Did you receive word from your sister?”
    “No.”
    Mary pursed her lips—probably to stop herself from saying, “Of course.”
    Annika had to stop her own laugh in response to that expression. She knew what Mary suspected: that Annika wasn’t really looking for her sister, anyway. Mary believed that she was Liberé, a descendant of the Africans who’d fled across the ocean to escape the Horde. According to the other woman, Annika disguised her accent and pretended to hail from Scandinavia so that Captain Vashon wouldn’t discover that an enemy of the French worked in her engine room.
    Mary wasn’t completely wrong; her papers were faked. But Annika wasn’t Liberé.
    Perhaps she had been, once. Annika didn’t know who her blood parents were. A warm, dim memory of a woman’s soft voice and tight arms made her think that she’d been orphaned rather than abandoned, but she couldn’t be certain. She only knew that at two or three years of age, she’d been found wandering the streets of Manhattan City, hungry and dressed in rags. Now she was one of the Huldrene, the hidden women of Hannasvik. That mattered more to Annika than blood ever could.
    She found the checklist at the bottom of the stack. All menial tasks, but they would take her at least forty-five minutes. Do them now or later?
    Probably best to do them now. Mary wasn’t supposed to have been on duty, and a little more than two hours still remained until first watch. They both needed to eat—and as acting first, Annika decided who would go now.
    “You run up to supper, then.” Her belly rumbled at the same time she spoke, as if to protest the choice she made. “I’ll work through this list while you eat, then we’ll start our rotation at first watch—and we’ll use the same dogged watch schedule as the deck crew so that we’ll both get our suppers in on equal time. Make certain to sleep while you can.”
    Dismay filled Mary’s voice. “So we’re just the two of us?”
    “Until we return to Port-au-Prince.” Only a month, but they’d be exhausted by the end of it. Four hours on duty, then four hours rest, with only a little variation at the two-hour dog watch. At full steam, they’d be stoking the furnace until they were all but dead on their feet. “I’ll ask the chief if he can find a boy to help shovel.”
    “That new Black Irish boy was eyeing a stoker’s apron.”
    “Who?”
    “Sula, I think they called him. One of James’s