Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

Ten days later…

IT WAS SEVENTY-FIVE degrees on deck. We'd been at full sail for most of the time since we left Long Island, making about 115 nautical miles a day. A good pace, according to Kira. But since yesterday, we'd been in a bit of a lull. The sails were limp and the Albatross was barely moving.

Kira still wouldn't say where we were going, but I didn't need a sextant to tell me we were headed due south. The sun and the stars showed me that much.

We hadn't been in sight of land for several days, but I had plenty of distractions. Kira was teaching me how to read the wind and trim the sails, and I'd become an expert at hooking bluefish with a spinning rod. Between my daily catch and canned fruits and veggies from the galley, we'd been eating well.

That morning, I was sitting on the foredeck with an assortment of gadgets spread out in front of me on a thick canvas. I was fascinated.

Kira came forward from the cockpit. "Enjoying your toy collection?"

She was wearing shorts and a halter top, with her hair tied back with a blue bandana. She'd scavenged her new wardrobe from a bag in one of the deck hatches. For me, all she could dig up was a pair of old khaki pants and a white linen shirt, missing a few buttons at the top. She said it suited me.

The day before, I'd found a big hold belowdecks, right under the cabin floor. That's where I'd discovered the artifacts in front of me. Kira told me she'd been storing them onboard for years.

"Where did you get this stuff?" I asked.

"It was all in the loft when I moved in," she said. "And trust me, this is just a small sample."

Eighty years before Kira discovered it, the loft I'd grown to hate had been the Midwest sanctuary of the original Doc Savage. It was his hideout and research lab. While she was living there, Kira had learned all the loft's secrets.

I was looking at a bunch of them.

"Your great-grandfather was a polymath," said Kira. "A genius."

" Troubled genius, if you ask me."

Kira sat down on the deck a few feet away. "You mean his history of violence? Okay. Yes. That was part of him, too."

I knew my ancestor had brains. He was a physician after all, like his father. But I wondered about his dedication to the Hippocratic oath. Because he definitely did a lot of harm. Most of the people Doc Savage killed over the years were evil, no doubt. True villains. But some things I'd read about him made me think that he enjoyed mayhem a little too much. Sought it out. Maybe got addicted to it.

"You know, he was only sixteen when he fought in World War I," I said. "I think it probably numbed him, or twisted him. At that age, how could it not?"

"Or maybe," said Kira, "it showed him that sometimes you need to fight evil with evil."

She watched as I sorted through the items in front of me one by one. A handcrafted pair of goggles. A handwritten dictionary of the Mayan language. A rubber gas mask. A scientific paper on electromagnetism. A manual for brain surgery.

From there, things got a little weird.

I held up a small device that looked like a 1980s Sony Walkman.

"Prototype for a telephone answering machine," said Kira.

"And this…?" I picked up a wristwatch with a miniature screen built in. "Did it actually work?"

Kira nodded. "Apple Watch, eat your heart out."

Next was a sheet of thin metal, with some kind of powdered coating on one side. I had no clue.

"That's a good one," said Kira. "Image-capture plate for a machine that could see through walls. Like I said—genius."

I rummaged through a box with flash bombs the size of acorns, luminescent flares in the shape of shotgun shells, fake molars filled with chemical powder…

And that was just the small stuff. There were a bunch of heavier items down below that I hadn't even bothered to haul up yet.

Kira stood and put her hands on the rail with her back to me, staring out over the azure water. "Still no wind," she said. "Slow day in paradise."

I looked up at the foresail. Barely a ripple.

"How much farther do we have to go?" I asked. I should have known what the answer would be.

"Wrong question."

I gathered all my little antiques together in the middle of the canvas and wrapped the whole thing up like a sack.

Enough nostalgia for one day.

As I stood up, Kira was walking back from the rail. She pulled the bandana off her head. She stepped up close to me. Very close. Then she pulled my shirt open and put her lips against my ear. "Are you done playing?"

She kissed me. Then she pulled me down into the cabin. My head almost banged into the door frame. With the bandana off, Kira's copper-colored curls spilled free around her shoulders. She undid the two remaining buttons on my shirt. I unfastened my belt and fumbled my way out of my pants.

When I looked up again, Kira was already naked.

Always one step ahead.