Child of a Hidden Sea Read Online Free

“Zhillscra.”
    Feeling stupid, fighting tears, she wrote: Sophie Opal Hansa. Age twenty-four, lost at sea, she added mentally.
    â€œTanke, Sophie,” he said. “Din sezza—”
    â€œNo, I don’t know your damned Flitspak,” she snapped. “I’ve got three languages, bits of anyway. You can’t speak any of ’em? I mean, you look like you’re the educated guy, right? Teacher? Scientist? You should be speaking English and applying for foreign aid and … I’m ranting now, aren’t I?”
    Why not rant? She wasn’t in danger of drowning anymore. She was lost, miserable, and, apparently, a prisoner. Gale might be dying.
    Outside, the wind howled, louder now.
    â€œSeriously. You need Yankee dollars,” she told him. “Those leaky, scavenged-wood tubs … nobody should be out chasing fish in this weather.”
    He gave her bad shoulder a sympathetic pat, then threw a brick of what looked like pressed kelp on his smoky, makeshift hearth. He made a thin tea, putting it before her in a shallow black bowl.
    She took a sip. Whatever it was, it was bitter enough to make her sputter and spit it back. Bastien promptly took it away, setting the bowl on a marble table next to his trunk.
    â€œLook, I—”
    He held up a hand—wait. Then, opening a tiny larder, he came up with a carved wooden cup of water and an earthenware jar of pickled moths.
    Sophie shook her head. “Not hungry.”
    He pointed at a rough bed in the corner. “Fezza dorm?”
    She retreated there, curling up near the stove. Bastien fussed with her confiscated tea, dropping in dust from a vial of saffron-colored powder, then grinding golden, beeswax-scented granules into the mix.
    Could be worse. He doesn’t seem to want to “fezza dorm” together . She checked the cell phone she’d found in Gale’s purse. Still no service. She punched in Bram’s number, an oddly comforting ritual, and composed a text message:
    Losing my mind. Send doctors with straitjackets and Haldol. LOTS of Haldol. Sofe.
    The phone generated an immediate reply:
    Message will be sent when you return to service area.
    She’d last seen her brother five days ago, after the two of them put their parents on a plane to Italy.
    Sophie had decided their vacation was a chance to take another good look through Mom’s stuff, to see if she could find any clues that might lead back to her birth family. She had assumed Bram would want her to drop him off so he could go dive into the latest pile of research.
    Instead, he’d just finished a paper and was restless.
    Bram in a mood to play was too much of a temptation to pass up. They’d gone for burgers, and then he’d wanted her opinion on a mountain bike he was thinking of buying, and by the time they’d chewed over the pros and cons of that he’d run into a couple friends who were doing a stand-up comedy show as a benefit for a neighborhood family who’d lost their house in a fire.
    The two of them had agreed to be the comedy test audience for the show’s final rehearsal. That turned into Sophie getting pressed into providing musical backup—she’d taken guitar for a while, in school. They were at the comedy club all night, with her strumming and Bram alternately waiting on tables and “playing” the tambourine.
    Wind slammed the flimsy wall of the shack with the strength of an angry bear, jolting Sophie back to the here and now. The storm was building.
    She traced a finger over her case. There was no point in taking the camera out: the light was bad. She could click through her shots from the past three days, two hundred stalker pics of Beatrice, her husband, and Gale. But that would waste battery power. Tomorrow—if she didn’t get put to sea in a raft or forcibly married to the King of the Starvelings—she might get a shot of one of those moths in its pre-pickled