Hope and Red Read Free Page B

wrong.”
    “I’m willing to bet you did,” said Backus, giving the smile again.
    Sadie dropped to the mattress, not bothering to take off skirts, boots, or knives. She watched the cracked ceiling spin unpleasantly for a few minutes until Backus returned with a cold mug of something nice.
    Had she not been so drunk, she would have smelled the traces of black rose before she’d even had a sip. But as it was, she downed the whole thing in one go, and a few minutes later everything went dark.
    *  *  *
    When Sadie woke up, she wasn’t on a mattress in a flophouse anymore. She was lying facedown on a wooden deck. It took her a second to realize that the deck was rocking back and forth. A small shaft of sunlight came in through a round portal that brightened things up just enough for her to see that she was in a ship’s cargo hold.
    “Piss’ell.” She struggled to stand, but her hands and feet were tied with grimy rope, so the best she could manage was to sit up. She tried to untie her wrists, but it was hard to get a grip at that angle and it was some sailor knot so bewilderingly complex, she didn’t even know where to start.
    She leaned back against something that gave a light grunt. She turned and saw a young boy next to her, also tied up. He was ragged and filthy, probably some street urchin that had been picked up same as her.
    “Eh, boy.” She poked him hard in the ribs with her boney elbow. “Wake up.”
    “Get off, Filler,” the boy muttered. “I ain’t got nothing for you.”
    “Stupid,” she said and jabbed him again. “We’ve been pissing southended!”
    “What?” The boy’s eyes opened. They were bright red, like rubies. It was the sign of a kid who’d been born to a mother addicted to coral spice. Nasty drug, very hooky and slowly ate the brain right out of your head. Most kids who were born coral-hooked didn’t last past the first month. Sadie figured there must be some hidden mettle in this kid for him to have survived. Hidden, because she sure as piss couldn’t see it now. The boy was blubbering and whining like a whipped puppy, tears falling from red eyes beneath a ragged curtain of brown hair as he cried, “W-w-w-where am I? W-w-w-what happened?”
    “I just told you, didn’t I?” said Sadie. “We’ve been southended.”
    “W-w-w-what’s that mean?”
    “Are you a complete cunt-dropping?” said Sadie. “Never heard of southending? How’d you live on the streets and not know such a thing?”
    The boy’s lip quivered like he was starting a fresh bout of the weeps. But he surprised her by drawing in a shaky breath and saying, “I only just landed on the street about a month ago. I don’t know much. So please, lady. Please tell me what’s going on.”
    She looked at him and he looked back at her and maybe it was the first sign of soft old age setting in, but rather than laugh or spit, she just sighed. “What’s your name, kid?”
    “Rixidenteron.”
    “Piss’ell, that’s a mouthful.”
    “My mom was a painter. She named me after the great lyrical romantic painter Rixidenteron the Third.”
    “She dead then, your mom?”
    “Yeah.”
    They were quiet for a minute, with only the occasional sniffle from the boy, the wooden creak of the ship, and the gentle hiss as the prow broke the water. They must be sailing at a pretty good clip.
    Finally, she said, “So this is the length of it. We’ve been taken aboard a ship bound for the Southern Isles. Press-ganged into service. They’ll let us sit down here awhile and stew, then they’ll come down, maybe bloody us up a bit to let us know they mean business. Then they’ll give us the choice: Join the crew or be declared a stowaway and thrown overboard.”
    The boy’s eyes had grown wider and wider until they looked like big red-and-white dinner plates.
    “But…” His lip quivered again. “But I can’t swim.”
    “That’s the general idea. And even if you could swim, we’d be so far from shore, there’d be no way