Free The Automaton's Treasure by Cassandra Rose Clarke Page B

Lisirra. It was a true prison.
    “You'll stay locked up in your cabin till then. Sailors got a choice of joining up or not, course. Now, if one of 'em says no—” The pirate drew a line across his throat. “Well, we drown 'em, usually, but—”
    “Why are you in my room?” I didn't want to hear any more about murdering sailors.
    The pirate grinned. “To keep you secure till things get settled. Ain't gonna touch you, if that's what you're worried about.”
    I shuddered and drew my knees up to my chest. I didn't let go of the hairpin. The pirate tapped his sword against the side of my trunk. He looked bored.
    “How long's that going to take?” I said.
    “Don't go planning anything.” He looked at me. “I told you, we're gonna let you go.”
    “On a pirates' island .”
    “Better than the middle of the ocean.”
    He was right, of course. I couldn't imagine them just letting us go, but it also seemed like if this pirate was to kill me, he would have done it already.
    “Couple hours,” he said.
    “What?”
    “How long it's gonna take.” He shrugged. “Till we got the new crew sorted. And then we'll be on our way.”
    He looked up at me and grinned, his face splitting into two, and the green light carved his face into shadows.
     
    I spent the next few days locked in my cabin, just as the pirate promised. Someone brought food twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. Decent stuff: thin stews and hard little scones. I supposed they were feeding us from the ship's stores.
    Different pirates would drop off the food, and I recognized most as sailors from when the ship had been a passenger liner. One of them even handed me a tin cup full of sugar-wine one evening. “Drink up, sister,” he said, lounging in the doorway, lips curled in a mocking smile. “Got another month before we get to Starlight Rock.”
    Another month, and cabin fever was already crawling over my skin. They let us out once a day, in groups of three or four, to go up on deck and empty our chamber pots into the ocean. A pirate would keep his pistol trained on us the whole time, and we never got to stay out for long. But it was long enough for me to remember what the sun felt like.
    Because I couldn't keep track of sunrise and sunset, I marked off meals and time spent up above in the flyleaf of my illustrated history of the swamp. Eight meals. Four times allowed on deck. Four days.
    In those long stretches of time between meals and being out on deck, I lay on my cot and watched patterns of light and shadow form across the ceiling. I thought of her , the person I loved, the person I'd left behind, the person who'd cost me my homeland. I took all of my belongings out of my trunk and arranged them on the floor and stared at them like they were tealeaves and could tell me what the future held.
    Nothing. The future held nothing.
    During this fruitless exercise, I found a thin sheet of paper tucked into the bottom of the trunk. I hadn't put it there. When I unfolded it I found a list of names written in Father's neat hand. These men can help you , he’d written across the bottom. Contact them when you arrive in Lisirra .
    I stared at the list of names for a long time. My eyes felt heavy but I didn't cry. For the last month I'd been dreading my arrival in the hot, dry city of Lisirra. I couldn't imagine my life beyond the days spent aboard the Ocean's Rose . But then the pirates came, and now I could hardly picture my life at all.
    Rage flashed through me: at myself, at the pirates, at Father. I crumbled the list of names into a ball and hurled it at the wall. It bounced off and tumbled across the floor. I picked up the illustrated history of Qilar and flung it open to a random page, trying to distract myself. It opened on an image of a cypress tree, roots disappearing beneath the calm, smooth surface of the swamp.
    Father put me on a boat to Lisirra when he should have put me on a boat here, to the swamps. Jokja is often called a Free