Chapter One: All Aboard

The first thing Mari Vega learned about the Giant of the Seas was that it was rude.

Not the people on it. The ship itself. It sat against the pier at PortMiami the way a mountain might sit in a parking lot, blocking the sun for six blocks and forcing everything else to arrange itself around it. Eighteen decks. A hull painted the deep blue of a classroom globe. Along the bow, in letters taller than her house back home, the name.

Mari stood in the boarding line with one duffel bag and did what she always did, which was notice things.

The families crying at the barrier belonged to first-years. The families checking their phones belonged to everyone else. Returning students carried soft bags worn shapeless; the new ones dragged hard rolling suitcases that were not going to fit under the beds. A boy ahead of her wore a sweatshirt from a school in Lagos. A girl behind her spoke Portuguese into a phone held flat like a slice of toast. And near the gangway, a man in a windbreaker was watching the students. Not the ship, not the luggage. The students, one at a time, like he was counting them for later.

The line moved eleven steps each time it moved. Then she was at the front of it, and a woman with a tablet said, "Name?"

"Marisol Vega."

The stylus flicked. "Vega, Marisol. First year, Foundation scholar." She said it no differently than anything else, but Mari felt the words anyway, like a label being tied on. The woman handed her a lanyard with a plastic card. "Don't lose this. It's your room, your meals, your library account, and your identity. Your whole life is on this now."

"That seems like a lot to put on one card."

"It is. Welcome aboard. Next."

The gangway was longer than it looked, with a seam in the middle that flexed with the tide. Halfway across, with land behind her and eighteen decks of ship ahead, the whole thing struck Mari as insane. She was fifteen. She was moving onto a floating city with eight hundred strangers from seventy countries because she'd filled out an application at the public library on a computer that ate her essay twice. Somewhere behind the barrier, her tía Rosa was still waving at the wrong deck.

Someone behind her said, "Keep it moving, please." So she did, through a hatch in the blue steel wall, and into the ship.

Inside, the Giant stopped pretending to be a boat.

Mari came out onto a rail overlooking an open-air street. An actual street. Trees in planters, café tables, storefronts that had once sold watches and perfume and now had signs reading MATHEMATICS 4 and STUDENT SERVICES and LANGUAGES (A–K). It ran down the middle of the ship as far as she could see, five decks deep, balconies stacked above it, signal flags strung across the gap. Hundreds of students were already down there, dragging bags, shouting names, getting lost.

"Main Street," said a voice at her elbow. "Technically the Central Promenade, but nobody's called it that since the refit. You're Marisol."

The voice belonged to a girl with a black bob, a denim jacket covered in enamel pins, and the alert look of somebody who'd been up for hours doing things. She stuck out her hand.

"Junie Park. Second year. I'm your shipmate. Not a romantic thing, a school thing. They assign every new student a second-year so you don't wander into the engine room and die. No offense. I have your dorm assignment, your schedule, and a map you won't use."

"Two questions," said Mari, shaking the hand. "It's Mari. And why won't I use the map?"

"Because the map is of the ship they wish they had." Junie set off along the rail at a pace that assumed Mari would follow. "The real ship has about forty percent more doors. You're Deck Nine aft, which we call the Boroughs, which is the best neighborhood, and I'm not just saying that because I live there."

Following Junie through the ship was like being read a phone book by someone who found it thrilling. That's Rafael Costa, third year, captain of approximately everything, don't lend him money. That's the aft stairwell, it smells like that all the time, nobody knows why. That's Sofía Delgado, she can get you anything, chargers, snacks, a birthday cake in international waters, but she writes down what you owe her and she has never once forgotten. That's Nastya, she does what I do but worse, we're at war, wave nicely.

Mari waved nicely and filed all of it. Names, faces, alliances. It was the most useful hour of orientation she'd get all week, and it wasn't even orientation.

"Shortcut," Junie announced, shouldering through a door marked CREW ONLY in three languages. "It's fine. This one's only crew-only in a spiritual sense."

The shortcut was a service stairwell, steel and echoing, painted the flat white of everything not meant to be photographed. They clattered down two flights, and on the landing between them, Mari stopped.

There was a plaque on the wall. Or there had been. Bronze, the size of a serving tray, bolted at the corners, and someone had painted straight over it in the same flat white as the wall, so only the raised ghost of lettering showed through. The paint was fresh. The bolt heads were still shiny where the brush had missed.

"What was this?"

Junie glanced back. "What was what?"

"This plaque. Somebody painted over it."

"Huh." Junie came up a step and squinted at it. "Refit leftovers, probably. This whole thing used to be a cruise ship. They painted over a million things. There's a door on Deck Six that says CASINO under the paint if the light hits it right."

A crewman was coming up the stairs with a coil of cable over his shoulder. Mari pointed at the wall. "Excuse me, do you know what this plaque said?"

The man looked at it. What happened in his face was fast, and most people would have missed it. Something closed, like a hatch.

"Couldn't tell you," he said, and went on up the stairs without looking at it again.

"He could tell me," said Mari, watching him go.

"You're going to be exhausting," said Junie, with real delight. "Come on. Miss the muster drill and they make you do it alone with an officer. Saddest thing you've ever seen."

Mari went. But she gave the plaque one last look, and put it in the place in her mind where she kept things that didn't fit yet. There was a lot of room in there.

The muster drill was eight hundred students in orange life jackets, arranged in numbered rows on the open decks while the horn made a sound Mari felt in her back teeth. It was, Junie explained over the noise, the one thing aboard nobody joked about. Every soul on the ship, at their assigned station, in under twenty minutes, or they ran it again. The crew moved down the rows checking straps with the speed of people who had done it a thousand times.

From row twelve, Mari got her first proper look at the faculty, lined up along the rail.

The one in the middle was unmistakably in charge: a tall woman in a gray coat who watched the whole deck at once and spoke to three officers without turning her head. Director Fairweather, said Junie in her ear. Founded the whole program. Do not be late to anything she runs. Near her stood a big man in a security uniform, hands behind his back, and Mari felt the little itch of a thing that didn't fit. Every other adult was watching the drill. This man was watching the students. Faces, not life jackets. The windbreaker man from the pier.

Further down, a teacher with silver-streaked hair had crouched to talk a green-faced first-year through his first bout of seasickness, and it was working; the kid was laughing damply by the end. She rose, straightened his strap, and moved down the row spot-checking buckles as if she'd done it all her life.

The horn sounded three times. Eight hundred life jackets came off in a great crackling wave, into numbered bins, row by row.

And Junie Park said, in a small flat voice unlike her other one: "My phone's gone."

"You had it during the drill?"

"Zipped in the jacket pocket. The life jacket. I always..." Junie was patting herself down with rising speed, and Mari watched something she didn't yet understand: this loud, unsinkable girl going pale over a phone. Not annoyed. Frightened. Whatever was on it mattered more than a phone should.

"Okay," said Mari. "Stop. Don't dig through the bins, you'll bury it. Which pocket?"

"Left. Why does that..."

"Which row were we?"

"Twelve. Mari, there are fifty jackets a bin, they're already stacking..."

"Then we have a minute," said Mari, and closed her eyes, and ran the drill backward.

This was the thing Mari Vega could do, the thing with no name on any application form. She could hold what she'd seen. The deck rebuilt itself behind her eyes: the rows, the bins, the crew sweeping down the lines. Row twelve's jackets had gone into bin fourteen; she'd seen the stenciled number. The crewman collecting their row had worked right to left, so Junie's jacket, third from the end, went in third. But the stacking.

She opened her eyes and looked at the bins, the crew, the angle of the rack.

"Bin fourteen. Third jacket. But count from the bottom, not the top."

The deck officer at the bins was a young man with a clipboard and forty more tasks in his day. "Lost phones go to the purser's office. If it's in a jacket it'll turn up by Thursday."

"It'll turn up in ninety seconds," said Mari, "if you open bin fourteen and take the third jacket from the bottom. Left pocket."

Maybe it was the specificity. Maybe it was the small crowd gathering. The officer sighed, unclipped the bin, and counted three from the bottom.

The jacket came out. The left pocket unzipped. And there, held up to scattered applause and one loud whoop that was almost certainly Rafael Costa, was Junie Park's phone in its cracked, stickered case.

"Bottom," said the officer, turning the jacket over as if it had personally deceived him. "How'd you know to count from the bottom?"

"Your rack faces aft," said a new voice, before Mari could answer. "Everyone stacks that bin backwards. It's the angle."

The voice came from a boy leaning on the rail of the deck above, chin on his folded arms, watching like it was a show he'd seen before but still liked. Maybe fifteen, untidy brown hair, and a maintenance-grade flashlight clipped to his belt loop, which was not a thing Mari had ever seen on a student.

"That's what I was going to say," said Mari. "More or less."

"You were going to say the crewman was left-handed. People always say that. He's not. It's the rack." He came down the steps and stuck out his hand with a formality that didn't match the hair. "Theo Beckett."

"He lives here," Junie supplied, hugging her phone with both hands, color coming back. "Like, lives lives. His dad's the chief engineer. Theo's been aboard longer than most of the paint."

"Three years in March," said Theo. "You're the new one Junie's assigned to. The one who found the phone in one guess."

"It wasn't a guess," said Mari and Junie at the same time, Junie triumphantly, Mari a little defensively, and Theo Beckett grinned.

"No," he said. "I didn't think it was."

They ended up at the aft rail of Deck Ten that evening, the three of them, because Theo said sailaway was the one thing worth pushing for a good spot, and Theo turned out to be right about things like that.

The whole port came out to see the Giant go. Car horns along the breakwater. A ferry hooting like a fan at a concert. Somewhere below, so deep Mari felt it in the rail rather than heard it, something vast changed its mind about being asleep, and the strip of harbor water between hull and pier began, very slowly, to widen.

"So what's on it?" Mari asked.

Junie looked up from her phone, which she had not stopped holding since the drill. "On what?"

"The phone. You went white when it was gone. That's not a phone face. That's a documents face."

For a second Junie's expression did something complicated, and Mari thought she'd pushed too far, too fast, the way she sometimes did. Seeing more than people had agreed to show her. Then Junie laughed and put the phone in her inside pocket, the one with the zip.

"Okay, you're good," she said. "It's genuinely annoying how good you are. Ask me again when I know you better. That's a second-week question, minimum."

"I'll ask in the second week."

"She will," Theo told the sea.

Miami strung itself out along the horizon, a bracelet of light going thin. The rail was packed, phones held high, someone's speaker playing something with too much bass, a teacher calling pointlessly for everyone to stand back from the rail they all had to stand at to see anything. Mari dug out her own phone, older than Junie's, in a case her cousin had outgrown, and took a picture of the nearest life ring: white and orange, the ship's name stenciled around it. She sent it to her father. Made it. This is my school now. It has 18 floors and a street inside it.

Her dad was not fast with texts. He typed the way he did everything, deliberately, reading glasses pushed up on his head where he couldn't find them. She put the phone away and watched the water while Junie narrated the coastline, and it was twenty minutes later, with the land nearly gone and the first long ocean swell moving under her feet, that her pocket buzzed.

She read it twice.

Her father had been a ship's engineer, years back. He'd worked more vessels than she could name; the hallway at home was lined with photos of him young and skinny in a boiler suit, grinning in engine rooms all over the world. He loved ships the way other dads loved football teams. When her acceptance letter came he'd gone quiet in a way she'd taken for pride. Maybe some of it had been.

The message said: Be careful on that one.

Not congratulations. Not have fun, mija with the string of anchors and fish he attached to anything nautical. No emoji at all, which from her father was itself a kind of alarm.

On that one.

Mari stood at the rail, wind pulling her hair loose, the deck trembling under her feet with the engines. Behind her, Junie and Theo argued about whether the lights to the south were a town or a container terminal. Under the fresh blue paint, the old steel of the Giant of the Seas carried them out into the dark.

She typed: Careful of what?

The reply took a long time. She watched the dots appear, and stop, and appear again. Her father, on land that no longer connected to her feet, writing something and deleting it. Writing and deleting.

In the end, all that came through was: Just look after yourself. We'll talk.

"Everything okay?" said Junie, appearing at her shoulder with the timing she would turn out to always have.

"Yeah," said Mari, and put the phone away. "My dad's just weird about boats."

It was the first lie she told aboard the Giant of the Seas. It would not be the last thing about her father and this ship that turned out to be more complicated than it looked.