Page 60 of If I Go Down with This Ship

And it’s not from Silas, it’s from Captain Night.

My stomach churns as I lift my sleek black phone out from under the fabric—a thing that won’t exist for another three hundred years.Glancing across the beach, I hold it up so no one else can see it, and the sun catches on the screen, light bouncing across Silas’s shoulder.

“It’s a…” I clear my throat.This is my fault; this is all my fault.By showing him this, am I tearing a wider hole in the space-time continuum?I glance down at my phone, and now that I think about it, it looks an awful lot like a block of dark chocolate.

Hand shaking, I bring it up to my chin and tentatively bite the corner.The glass feels strange under my teeth, but I smile awkwardly around it.“See?”My voice is muffled by the phone, so I pull it away and wipe drool from my chin.Real attractive, Laszlo.“It’s a treat,” I say, sounding not at all sure.

Silas frowns.“It didn’t look like you enjoyed it.”He holds out a hand, and my stomach drops.“Come on, give it here,” he orders.

I place it in his palm, my fingers hovering, not wanting tolet go.He moves it out of reach and lifts it to his lips as if to take a bite, but before he can, the screen flickers on, searching for a face to unlock it, and his eyes widen.He drops it into the sand with a soft exhale, falling back as he scrambles away from it.

“What is that?”he hisses, pointing to it.“Are you a witch, Laszlo?”

I burst into laughter and quickly cover my mouth with my hand to muffle the noise.“Silas, I’m not a witch.”

He leans in close, his eyes darting from me to the rest of the crew scattered over the beach, a bit of fear in his gaze.“You show up out of nowhere aboard my ship after we’d already been sailing for two weeks, dressed in the strangest clothes I’ve ever seen.Your skies have no stars, and you have the most peculiar accent.The signs have been there all along, but I tried to ignore them.I convinced myself that you’re just an odd man, but this, Laszlo, this is inexplicable.Tell me the truth: What kind of magic is this?”

“It’s not…I’mnot a… I use this to…” But how do I tell this man that it is magic, just not in the way he thinks?I’m not a witch.I didn’t wish upon a star or travel back through stones.I put onhisjacket and ended up here.

I reach for him, but he flinches away.

I’ve never seen Silas so terrified.Not when I nearly got swallowed by the storm, or when I held him last night as he cried.All I want is to soothe him, to ease the worry creasing his brow.

Pushing the sailcloth from my lap, I lean forward and lift my phone from the sand before I stand.I hold out a hand to Silas, and he stares at it, uncertain.

“Come on,” I say.“I’ll explain it to you, but not here.”

Glancing nervously over his shoulder at the crew, he stands.He wipes the sand from his hands on his thighs before he tangles his fingers with mine.“All right, then,” he says gruffly, and nods past me to the thicket of trees.

I drag him through the trees and down a narrow trail.We push bushes and branches out of our path as we meander from the beach.His fingers are loose in mine, and there is something so normal about us holding hands, about the way he knots his fingers with mine, that it takes me a moment to notice he hasn’t torn his hand free.

We come to a stop at the end of the trail as it opens onto a small, secluded beach.I peer around to make sure no one has followed us here before dragging him farther down toward the water.

Gently pulling my hand free, I zip my phone back up into the bag, sliding it in front of the journal.I don’t know what he’ll do once he sees, what will happen if I show him, and I would very much like my phone to not be waterlogged if he plunges it into the sea.

“I need to tell you something.”He frowns and shifts in the sand but says nothing.He pulls off his boots and tosses them to the side before burying his toes in the sand.The action is so sweet, so childlike that I struggle to continue.“I am not from here.”

“I know, Laszlo.We’ve already discussed this.It must be somewhere strange if you cannot see the stars.Do witches live in some… ethereal place?”

I choke on a laugh.“I’m not a witch.It’s just… a different place.”

Sucking in a sharp breath, I punch in my passcode.The light of the screen is muted by the plastic bag and the glare of the sunoverhead.“Where I come from,” I start as I angle my phone for him to see, “most people have one of these.You can… well, there’s a lot you can do with it.”

“How does it do that?”he whispers.If he thinks the light is fascinating…

Smiling, I open my camera app.Our faces appear on the screen, and he takes a hesitant step back as his gaze trails over the image before flicking to my face and back to the screen again.He waves a hand, the image waving back at us.“What is this?”he asks shakily.“Is this your sorcery?”

When I take a photo and click on it, angling it for Silas to see, he slaps my phone out of my hand, his eyes wide with terror.It lands in the sand with a softthump.And I can’t help it, I laugh, my shoulders shaking as I bend down to pick it up.

“What is this?” he demands.He grabs me by the shoulders as I hold my phone out to him.

“It’s… it’s a kind of science,” I say.

“No.”

The laughter dies on my lips.It must be impossible for him to wrap his mind around.He doesn’t know what a car looks like, doesn’t know that electricity is in the future.Things will change so much in the next 150 years, and even more in double that time.But how do I explain that?How do I tell him I am from a time when this is the present, where people look at little black screens more than they look at other people?

“Silas, I understand this must be difficult to comprehend, but this is not magic.This is science.”