Houseboats used to be a rich people thing. The upper Willamette was littered with them, fastened together like links in a chain along the wooded shores. That was when the river had defined shores, of course. After the quake, the flooding and the landslides and the rockfalls erased those boundaries. The clean lines that once bisected the city grew blurred with silt and refuse. Some of the houseboats miraculously survived. Some regular boats survived, too, and after years of modification, they became houses in all but the most technical of terms. Cobbled together from wrecked frames and river salvage, they floated like mechanical Frankensteins across the murky water.

Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster, Lacey would huff, if she were here. Which she wasn’t. And hadn’t been for a while.

Staring at one such monstrosity drifting across the predawn river, Rede reaffirmed her belief that Lacey had been right to veto the houseboat idea. The rest had argued in favor, but Lacey eventually wore them down. The crew needed somewhere stable, she argued; they couldn’t be moving around all the time, or else no one could find them, and wasn’t that the whole point? Plus, you try to rig a canoe without standing on solid ground. Not gonna happen.

But land was valuable at the best of times, and right now, when the city was half flooded and the only survivors clustered like naked mole rats inside the few structures that remained standing after the quake — well, land took on a special value. The thing was, Lacey and the others had something to offer. And so they ended up here. 

Here was a building that the crew referred to as “the Barn” based on its size and general design. In truth, it was probably used to store barges or small industrial ships, though no one had actually tended to the building in a while — Rede remembered staring up at its dilapidated husk during outrigger practices long before the quake. It was made of wood and half-rusted metal, one side completely open to make room for a massive ramp leading down to the river. After all the quake-induced flooding, the water level had risen to cover most of the ramp, so all they had to do was tilt the canoe off its runners and guide it a mere three feet down to the surface. Plus, the Barn was only a ten minute walk from the wreckage of what used to be the Tilikum Bridge. Lacey had suggested it because not only was the building good, but the surrounding area had been blocked off for a while, and over the years, Nature had constructed a low-tech security system. Blackberries ran rampant, climbing a forest of hardy bamboo and ringing the Barn like a crown of thorns. Assorted weeds clung stubbornly to the few bare patches of dirt in between. Most of those plants were invasive, but no one would complain about the ecological impact of their last line of defense against the fuel jackers and crackheads known to prowl the area.

The only native flora there was the stinging nettle. The crew let it grow tall and wild, alternating leaves waving cheekily at the overcast sky. Their stings were far from deadly, but they itched like hell, and they were enough of an inconvenience to deter any lurkers whose bare skin happened to brush up against the wrong side of the leaves. Plus, once you boiled them down, you could eat the nettles’ leaves. Mimi, the designated cook, made tea, soups, stews. She even tried pesto once, though that didn’t go over well.

Mimi hadn’t been cooking a lot lately. She hadn’t had the time. Actually, none of them had the time — for a crew of six people, the loss of one was a serious blow, especially when that one was the de facto leader. Now that Lacey was gone, everyone else had to pick up her slack. Before the quake, when they had been just a competitive outrigger team, Lacey had been both steersperson and captain. Afterwards, when the crew realized that their skill set made them both unique and useful, Lacey had been the one to suggest they monetize their talents. She hadn’t managed every little detail, but she had been the most visible player. Lacey was the one to negotiate with the still-emerging figureheads of the area — jacker bosses, minor gangs, police, community leaders rallying their fellow survivors — and secured a place for her crew at the heart of their struggle for dominance. By the time a tenuous understanding had been reached, Lacey had guaranteed the crew safety from harassment and a promise to spread the word about this new outrigger canoe courier service. 

The idea that Lacey had slept her way to the top was treated as an open secret, but people came to the crew for help regardless, keeping their wary looks and disdainful comments to a minimum. The crew themselves had remained impassive; in private, they collapsed into laughing fits at the very thought of Lacey running around on a desperate mission to seduce every important person within city limits. Rede always laughed the loudest. She considered it a sort of right, being Lacey’s girlfriend and all.

She hadn’t laughed like that since Lacey….well.

Rede had gotten into the habit of wrapping herself in Lacey’s old jacket and sitting on the ramp in front of the Barn, letting the gentle waves lap at her toes and losing herself in time. The jacket itself had stopped smelling like Lacey a while ago. Still, there was something comforting about the sound and the feel of it, clinging to Rede like a second skin. She fiddled absently with the zipper and watched the sun unfurl its tendrils past the silhouette of the broken bridge.

A distant bang and muffled cursing echoed from inside the Barn. Rede considered ignoring it, then shrugged the thought away. Why wallow in misery any longer? It wasn’t like that would help anybody, least of all Rede herself. She got to her feet, wiped the dirt off the seat of her jeans, and hoisted herself back up the ramp.

Electricity was hard to come by, the only sources being solar generators that most people couldn’t afford or machines run by gas that you’d need to buy from fuel jackers. Neither option was a reality for the team, so they relied on battery-operated string lights and candles for times when light was absolutely necessary. Rede didn’t think she’d ever get over the hilarity of seeing their post-earthquake survivors’ hideaway lit up like a college freshman’s dorm room.

Right now, though, the lights were off. The only light source was the glassless windows near the top of the building. In the half light, Rede could barely see Mimi hunched on the floor, still spitting out curses and clutching her handheld HAM radio. Rede noticed a dent on the side which she knew for a fact had not been there moments before.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

She bit back a sigh. Like the lights, the radio was battery-operated, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have to ration its usage. Batteries had to be bought or stolen, and neither option was particularly appealing. They had agreed to leave the radio alone except to contact clients or in emergencies. Judging by Mimi’s attitude, this was not an emergency.

Just as Rede came to this conclusion, Mimi looked up. Her bangs had fallen behind her glasses, tangling in her eyelashes as she blinked. The two locked eyes.

“Shit,” Mimi said.

Rede sat cross-legged on the floor. “Were you trying to reach Lacey again?”

Mimi, too familiar with Rede’s bluntness to be shocked, let out a defeated sigh. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Rede picked at the dirt caked under her nails. “If I knew how to work that thing, I’d probably be doing it too.”

Mimi was quiet for a moment. “I just…keep thinking. Maybe she’s on one of these channels, you know? She’s smart enough to find one of these.” Mimi tapped the radio. “I just.”

“Yeah.” Rede’s mouth twisted. “I get it.”

Now both of them were quiet.

On the other end of the Barn, past the docked outrigger and piles of boxes and miscellaneous scavenged furniture, Rede could make out the huddled shapes of the rest of the crew. They slept soundly, as far as she could tell, on their rollout camping mattresses piled with mismatched blankets. Rede gave silent thanks that she was the one to hear Mimi’s blunder. It had been almost a month since Thanh had lost her cool at Mimi over her ceaseless attempts to contact their friend. “She’s fucking dead!” Thanh had screamed, spittle collecting at the corners of her mouth. “When are you idiots going to understand that? She fucking died, okay? She’s gone. Dead. Kicked the fucking bucket. We have the fucking note to prove it.”

“But we didn’t find a body…” Mimi had protested.

“Who gives a shit?” Thanh had thrown her hands in the air. “She wrote the note, she said she was killing herself, she disappears, we can’t find her. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out. I seriously didn’t think you were this fucking stupid, Mimi, but I guess I was wrong, huh?”

And Mimi hadn’t touched the radio after that.

Well, at least, not when anybody could see her. Rede stared at the dent in its side. Bits of metal shone through where the paint had chipped away, reflecting the dawn light like some bastard version of a disco ball. She felt her legs growing numb.

“I think we should both sleep,” Rede said.

Mimi blinked owlishly. “You can. I won’t. I’m awake anyway.”

“Well, if you’re gonna be up, I might as well do it too.” Rede stood, pins and needles rushing through her legs. “Is the amma rigged already?”

“Yeah.” Mimi went to replace the radio. It lived inside an armoire that the crew had stolen from a nearby building. They used it to house emergency supplies — like the radio — along with rigging rope for the canoe, maintenance supplies, and any other vaguely tool-like thing they owned. It was pushed up against the wall near the canoe, which was indeed fully rigged and sitting on top of a pair of runners that Inna had engineered using plywood, foam, and the wheels from a pair of shopping carts which he had somehow managed to unlock. The crew often joked that, for someone with the same first name as Indiana Jones, Inna was remarkably useless when it came to survival. He was creative, though, and resourceful, and he’d surprised them all with those runners. He’d also been the one to find the dresser which Mimi now rifled through.

After replacing the radio, Mimi joined Rede next to the canoe. Yesterday they had realized that the rope they used to connect the yaku, two wooden slats that connected the float to the body of the canoe, had come loose. It wasn’t difficult to redo, but it was a pain, and it usually required at least two people. Rede hadn’t been sure if anyone else had taken care of the problem until now. 

She tugged experimentally on the rigging. It didn’t budge.

Rede nodded approvingly and went on to double check the contents of the canoe. Each of the six seats needed to have life vests underneath, even though the crew rarely wore them. It had been a Coast Guard rule that their coach had harangued them about so tirelessly that, even now, when the Coast Guard was laughably obsolete, the crew retained their life jacket protocol out of sheer force of habit.

They also needed a five-gallon bucket and two bailers in case they capsized. The crew had done countless capsize drills — plus more than a few unintentional instances — so they all knew the importance of having some way to rid the boat of water. It would never sink, thanks to its natural buoyancy, but it would still fill up and become virtually immobile. Both the bucket and the bailers, which were just detergent jugs with the bottoms cut out, had been with the canoe since before any of them had even joined the team. Checking for their presence was a cursory task. Rede knew there was no reason to remove them.

Satisfied, Rede moved to the wall above the dresser. Most of it was covered in streaks of paint and marker, drawings and snippets of poetry and incomprehensible diagrams drawn on the corrugated metal while the team was drunk or tired or both. Amidst the visual chaos, a large white board served as an island of order. This was were the team wrote down their orders for the week in a neat little table.

Today’s task: paddle to their typical rendezvous point (a pillar on the East side of the Tilikum wreckage, just five minutes from the Barn) to pick up some cargo, which would then be delivered to a tall red house on the West Bank. Mara had scrawled more details about their destination in her messy handwriting. Rede chose to ignore them. She wasn’t steers or lead, so she didn’t really need to know. More important to her was the ‘payment’ column. 

Only fuel jackers and big bosses used real money anymore, and even then they preferred other forms of currency. The team just stuck to basic supplies or whatever their clients could provide. This particular job was more an act of generosity than anything, judging by the sparse list of items they had been promised: a box of matches, fifty yards of nylon rope, and three pairs of men’s cargo pants. 

The crew’s lenient attitude toward payment was nothing new. It was part of their appeal: you paid what you could, the team did what you asked. Usually they took jobs like this, hauling cargo from one place to another. Easy enough that, for this type of thing, they asked for just enough in return that the buyer wouldn’t feel like a charity case. Occasionally they transported passengers. Although such requests didn’t come often, the team never turned them down. They knew perfectly well that their clients’ only other alternatives were far more dangerous and probably involved vehicles powered by jacked fossil fuels, which lured criminals like flies to shit — not to mention the danger of roving police boats. The only real laws they could enforce at this point involved drugs, fuel, and weapons, and of the three, fuel violations were easiest to spot. The combined risks were just too much for most people to handle. So they went to the crew, who inevitably found a way to squeeze their passengers between benches without slowing down their speed too much. That was another thing that had grown exponentially more difficult since Lacey was gone, of course, with the diminished manpower and the loss of her grounding presence in the boat.

But Rede didn’t like to think about that. She preferred to stay in the here and now: in the Barn, with Mimi, feeling the warmth of the rising sun leach into her bones and watching the silhouettes of her teammates furl upright like sprouts pushing through soil.