Free The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

face was bisected by a thick mustache, which was very much in style in the late nineteenth century, and he introduced himself as Colonel Iaukea, collector of the port.
    He seemed suspicious at first when Bee hailed him from the captain’s place at the wheel. Was it her skin color he questioned, or her sex? Then again, it could have been the ship herself; it wouldn’t be the first time the Temptation hadraised eyebrows.
    Whatever Colonel Iaukea thought, it didn’t matter much; he was nothing like the New York Coast Guard. I introduced us as a survey ship commissioned by a company in San Francisco. Then Kashmir brushed by the man; he half turned, and I raised my voice to regain his attention. “Uh, interested in building a fish cannery along the eastern side of Oahu! Or, ah, possibly the western side,” I extemporized. Kashmir moved away, and I relaxed. “Depending, of course, on local conditions.”
    The colonel took my claim at face value. In fact, after Kashmir palmed the silver he’d taken from the colonel’s coin purse and gave him a hearty handshake, the harbor master was quite diplomatic, claiming it was in the interest of beating the setting sun that he didn’t bother making even a cursory search.
    We were greeted by a small crowd at the dock; Chinese porters with tonsured heads, graceful native women with baskets of tropical fruit and shining masses of black hair, a wrinkled man bent under a huge piece of coral. Almost everyone—young, old, local, or foreign—was bedecked with blossoms, strung in leis thrown around their necks or tucked behind one ear.
    One particular young man—my age, with blond hairand bright spots of pink on his pale cheeks—stood squinting at the ship and writing furiously in a booklet. But why? He was too young to be a reporter. Then his eyes, roving over the ship, met mine, and he grinned. I lifted the corners of my lips tentatively, and he tipped his straw cap in my direction. Suddenly shy, I went to help roll the sails. What was it like, on the other side? Watching the ships come and go, instead of watching the ports appear and recede?
    When they saw our ship lacked interesting news or cargo—or more likely, lacked hordes of sailors willing to spend their pay on trinkets—the impromptu dockside market dispersed, the boy along with them, as the sun set and the gas lamps in the streets of Honolulu began to shine. Before they went, Kash bought a dozen ripe mangoes—his favorite—and a copy of the Evening Bulletin for me, which gave us the exact date: October 24, 1884, even later than I’d thought. In fact, this was the time and place I’d be living, had Slate never stolen me away.
    The harbor had become a winter forest of bare masts, lit by smoky torches that made the water sparkle like a scattering of black diamonds. The sounds of drunken laughter and someone pounding a piano out of tune drifted from the sandy town road to the dock. Sailorsmade their way toward the watering holes downtown; later that night, they’d stumble back, singing off-color shanties off-key.
    The crew of the Temptation stayed aboard and made a simple meal out of Rotgut’s catch, a couple of snapper, and our bottomless pitcher of wine, taken from a mythical map of Greece. I’d brought my paper to the table. The headline— MOURNING CONTINUES FOR PRINCESS PAUAHI! —explained the half-mast flags, and the article described the start of the second week of lamentation for the princess. Victorians were so in love with the rituals of death. Apparently, she’d left “a large estate earmarked to support the declining population of native children. The untimely death of the princess is another blow to the royal lineage, which has not been spared the high mortality afflicting their race—”
    “So. 1884,” Rotgut said. “At first I thought he’d done it.”
    “So did he,” I said under my breath.
    “Do you know what went wrong?” Bee asked
    “Well, I do have some theories,” I said, putting my finger