Page 29 of No One Aboard
But why was the hallway wet in the middle of the night...Onlythe hallway?
Tia tipped back her head to examine the sky. Not a single cloud. So it couldn’t have been rainwater...
More stars than she’d ever seen freckled the night, and she was able to calm herself even more.How many people ever get to see stars like this?she wondered.
“Little late for stargazing, don’t you think, Miss Cameron?”
Tia spun around. Nico de la Vega stood in the cockpit, forearms resting casually on the wheel.The Old Eileenprobably didn’t require much maneuvering when the ocean was this placid.
“Hey, Nico.” She joined him in the cockpit. She’d forgotten about the watch rotation. “I... couldn’t sleep.”
“Well, you came to the right place.” His easy smile shone like it lived among constellations. “I’m not allowed to sleep.”
“Do you get bored?”
Nico’s shoulders rose and fell. “It’s meditative at night in away it wouldn’t be if I had company. Like I’m out of my body and one with the ship.”
“Damn, so I’m disrupting your path to nautical enlightenment?” Tia joked.
“Don’t act like you don’t like disrupting,” he replied.
Tia laughed. “Can I try it? Steering, I mean. Dad never lets me.”
Nico looked her up and down, pretending to mull it over. “You want me to shirk my responsibilities and turn command of a multimillion-dollar ship over to my boss’s inexperienced daughter?”
Tia threw up her hands in defense. “Hey, I’m just trying to alleviate boredom. If I commandeer an entire ship in the process, that’s just good business.”
Nico chuckled, and Tia knew she wanted to hear that sound again. He gestured for her to stand next to him and put her hands on the wheel. The metal was warm from his grip.
She placed her feet shoulder-width apart to copy his stance. Nico tapped the screen in front of the wheel, which she’d never paid much attention to. “This tells you what heading you’re at. We’re going pretty much straight South, so you wanna keep between one ninety degrees and one seventy-five. There’s nothing much to fight you right now, no wind and tiny swells, so it’s really as easy as it gets.”
The screen showedThe Old Eileen, a tiny dot along a straight line that shifted direction as Tia moved the wheel. “What’s that number mean?” she asked, pointing to a big black6in the corner of the screen.
“Six knots. It’s how fast we’re going,” Nico replied. “We can maybe hit eleven with full sail power, but we average more at six.”
“So you just stare at the numbers and try to keep on track?”This was simpler than Tia thought. When Tia was little, Francis had let her touch the wheel, his hands over hers.Do you feel the power?he’d say in a low Disney-villain voice to make her laugh. It had been a long time since then. Along the way, Francis had stopped trying to teach her things.
“Yeah.” Nico let his head loll back, and starlight washed over his crooked nose and full lips. The dark prickles of his five-o’clock shadow almost seemed to sparkle. He was, she had decided, extremely handsome. “But I don’t use the screen anymore,” Nico said conspiratorially.
“Oh yeah?” Tia glanced back at the screen to make sure she was still at the right heading. She was.
“Yeah. At night, I use the stars. I pick out a bright one, or sometimes my favorite, and I see where it falls when I’m at the perfect heading. Then if the ship ever strays, all I have to do is find my way back to her.”
A thrill spread through Tia and she found herself on her tiptoes, reading the night sky to find her favorite star. “I want to do it your way,” she decided.
“As you wish,” he said and peeled off his windbreaker. He draped it over the screen, cutting out the only man-made light within miles aside from the red and green eyes atop the masthead.
One of the most dazzling stars shone slightly to the left ofThe Old Eileen’s main mast. There were smaller stars around it, a shimmering royal entourage. “That one,” Tia whispered to herself. As long as the main mast ran along that path of stars, her heading was true.
They stood side by side in reverent quiet for many minutes. Tia wondered if Nico was as taken with this sight as he was the first time he’d seen it, if views like this ever lost their allure.
“You have a hand for this,” he murmured. His voice didn’tshatter the moment, like Tia had been afraid hers would. Instead, something about this—about them, the ship, the stars, the sea—felt indestructible.
It was the sea’s doing. Being out here had a way of mummifying time.
“I want to be a captain,” Tia breathed. She had, just now, decided.
Nico sat on the bench to her left, arms behind his head. “You know, Tia, I think you will be. Runs in your blood.”
