Near + Far Read Free Page A

watching for engine activity. After it gets dark, they won't notice us cutting. In the meantime, we'll act like we're fishing. Not even act, really."
    We broke out fishing gear. The mermaids had deserted us, and I hoped to find a decent school of something, bottom-feeders at least. But the murk around the Lump was lifeless. Plastic tendrils waved like uneasy weed, gobbling our hooks till the rods bent and bowed with each wave.
    I wanted the corp ships to see our lines. Every hour, a buzz boat would whoosh by, going between two of the larger ships.
    When the sun went down, I went below deck. The others followed. I studied the weather readout on the main console's scratched metal flank.
    It took longer than I thought, though. By the time we'd managed to cut our chunk free with the little lasers, draining the batteries, the sun was rising. Today was cloudier, and I blessed the fog. It'd make us harder to spot.
    We worked like demons, throwing out hooks, cutting lumps free, tossing them into the cargo net. We looked for good stuff, electronics with precious metals that might be salvaged, good glass, bits of memorabilia that would sell on the Internet. Shellfish—we'd feed ourselves for a week out of this if nothing else. Two small yellow ducks bobbed in the wake of a bottle's wire lacing. I picked them up, stuck them in my pocket.
    "What was that?" Jorge Felipe at my elbow.
    "What was what?" I started hauling in orange netting fringed with dead seaweed.
    "What did you stick in your pocket?" His eyes tightened with suspicion.
    I fished the ducks out of my pocket, held them out. "You want one?"
    He paused, glancing at my pocket.
    "Do you want to stick your hand in?" I said. I cocked my hip towards him. He was pissing me off.
    He flushed. "No. Just remember—we split it all. You remember that."
    "I will."
    There's an eagle, native to the islands. We call them brown-wings. Last year I'd seen Jorge Felipe dealing with docked tourists, holding one.
    "Want to buy a bird?" he asked, sitting in his canoe looking up at the tan and gold and money-colored boat. He held it up.
    "That's an endangered species, son," one tourist said. His face, sun-reddened, was getting redder.
    Jorge looked at him, his eyes flat and expressionless. Then he reached out with the bird, pushed its head underwater for a moment, pulled it out squawking and thrashing.
    The woman screeched. "Make him stop!"
    "Want to buy a bird?" Jorge Felipe repeated.
    They couldn't throw him money fast enough. He let the brown-wing go and it flew away. He bought us all drinks that night, even me, but I kept seeing that flat look in his eyes. It made me wonder what would have happened if they'd refused.
    By the time the buzz boats noticed us, we were underway. They could see what we had in tow and I had the Mary Magdalena monitoring their radio chatter.
    But what I hoped was exactly what happened. We were small fry. We had a chunk bigger than I'd dared think, but that wasn't even a thousandth of what they were chewing down. They could afford to let a few scavengers bite.
    All right, I thought, and told the Mary Magdalena to set a course for home. The worst was over.
    I didn't realize how wrong I was.

    Niko squatted on his heels near the engines, watching the play of sunlight over the trash caught in the haul net. It darkened the water, but you could barely see it, see bits of plastic and bottles and seawrack submerged underneath the surface like an unspoken thought.
    I went to my knees beside him. "What's up?"
    He stared at the water like he was waiting for it to tell him something.
    "It's quiet," he said.
    Jorge Felipe was atop of the cabin, playing his plastic accordion. His heels, black with dirt, were hooked under the rungs of the ladder. I'd let the plastic fray there, and bits bristled and splayed like an old toothbrush. His music echoed out across the water for kilometers, the only sound other than splash or mermaid whistle.
    "Quiet," I said, somewhere between statement and