shoreline, palm trees leaning over the pure white beach. 'I know my stuff when it comes to tropical diseases, too.'
She smiled fully and stood up. She was exactly my height, our shoulders level as she reached out to embrace me in a hug that I sensed was more ritual than emotional. 'Then welcome to my kingdom,' she said. 'I used to have another name, but now people just call me Queen M.' She smiled, as if it was a big joke. But I knew damn well that she was a queen, and I'd better be sure to treat her like one.
Queen M took me on the tour herself. The flagship was just what I'd thought: a luxury cruise liner which had been stranded off the coast of St Martin when the Cull struck and its crew were too sick to think about anything but dying.
'We threw off the corpses, scrubbed down the decks and took her over,' Queen M told me. She was standing at the prow of the small catamaran they'd launched from the belly of the cruise ship, the wind rattling through the beads in her hair.
'Where do you get the fuel to move her?' I asked.
Queen M looked at me, judging the question. Why did I want to know? Was I figuring out their weaknesses? 'We don't very often,' she told me eventually. 'But it's useful to know that we can if we need to.'
The catamaran circled the prow of the boat and I got my first view of the rest of the fleet. Hundreds of vessels, almost all of them sailboats, some big enough to carry a crew of fifty, others barely big enough for one. There were fishing boats as well as luxury yachts, and somewhere in the middle I saw the flying boat which had taken me from the compound. After a second I noticed that all the vessels were all flying the same flag: a stylised drawing of a red blood cell – the outline of the platelet picked out on red against a white background. A survivor's celebration. And also a subtle sort of warning.
'All following you?' I asked, watching one ship hove away from the fleet, the wind billowing its sails.
'I brought them together,' she said, a non-answer.
'And the rest of the world?' In the back of my mind, always, were the thoughts of him. Of what had happened back in London and whether there was any chance he might have survived it.
She looked at me almost with pity. 'You don't know?'
I looked away, not liking what I was reading in her eyes. 'I can guess, but…'
'Yes,' she said. 'Everything you've guessed, and worse. There's no government left in Europe or America. The Cull took most people, but other illnesses and fighting and just outright stupidity took an awful lot more. Infrastructure broke down. The rule of law. There are crops rotting on the plains of America while the people of New York starve. You wouldn't believe, would you, that civilization could fall apart so quickly?'
I shook my head. But I saw in her face that she'd believed it – and prepared for it.
After that, the catamaran headed for one of the more distant islands, a small hump on the horizon. We passed more ships as we travelled, some with long thin lines stretching into the water from their bows, trawling the deep waters for fish.
'Yours too?' I asked.
She nodded at me and then at the dark-skinned fishermen on the boat as they shouted a greeting. Nearer in to the island I saw something stretching across the waves, barring our way. 'Fishing net?' I guessed.
'Wave farm.' The turbines stretched entirely around the shore, ringing the small island in steel. They must have generated enough power to supply everyone on board the flagship and then some. Civilisation might have collapsed elsewhere, but it seemed to be alive and kicking here.
'Food?' I asked. She didn't answer, just waved an instruction to our skipper. The catamaran veered sharply to starboard, throwing up a cliff of water as it turned, and we headed for yet another island.
At first I thought a massive fire had scorched this island's soil, but as we drew nearer I realised that it was just black, volcanic sand. The interior was flat, stretching off to a distant horizon, but it was vibrantly green. Closer still and I could see the pattern to it, a patchwork of fields with flourishing crops. There were people there; slowly working their way up the lines of crops, planting or weeding, whatever the hell you did when you were a farmer.
'Food,' I said.
'The Caribbean's a fertile place,' she replied.
'And that's why you came here?'
'One of the reasons. My mother was Trinidadian you know. We used to come here on family holidays when I was a child.' Her face had a faraway look for a moment, drifting in memory.
'It must have taken a while to set this up, though. Time to gather resources…'
She smiled. 'The scarce resource these days is people. And all you really need to do to gather them is offer a tiny bit of hope.'
I looked over at the island again, the crops thriving in the region's benign climate as field workers sweated under the tropical sun. Maybe she was right.
After the tour they took me back to the flagship, to a different room from the one I'd detoxed in, bigger and cleaner. I had the impression that I'd passed some kind of test. But the instant I stepped onboard my two shadows joined me; Soren and Kelis, falling into step behind me as naturally as if they'd been doing it for weeks. I kinked an eyebrow at Kelis – figuring she'd be the more communicative of the two – and she seemed to understand the question.
'Bodyguards,' she said. 'For you protection.' She had a Latin – American accent. A pleasant, light voice with an air of lethal competence about her. Kelis looked like she could kill without even raising a sweat.
'And what exactly am I going to need protecting from?'
Kelis smiled slightly. 'Oh, I didn't say we were going to be protecting you.'
I shut the door of my cabin on her smile and Soren's frown and heard the key turn in the lock. As soon as I was alone I realised how exhausted I was, almost on the point of collapse. There was so much I should be doing, so many things I needed to find out about my rescuers, but there wasn't an ounce of energy left inside me to do it. I lay on the bed, closed my eyes and that was all I knew.
When I woke it was dark. I had no idea what time it was but it felt late. I realised that I needed a watch and ridiculously, it was that, more than anything, that made me realise I was back among people. I wondered if I should try sleeping again, but I knew it wouldn't come. It would take some time to get my body clock back in sync with the normal, sunlit world.
There was a small bathroom attached to the cabin with hot and cold running water. Someone had even left me towels, soap and shampoo. And when I emerged, naked and still a little damp, revelling in the sensation of finally, finally feeling clean, I found that the wardrobes had been filled with clothes, the same colourful silk and leather as I'd seen everyone else wearing. I understood the pirate theme, obviously, but I didn't quite get it. Just because you hung around on boats didn't make you a buccaneer. What wasn't I being told?
Something else had been left for me too. A vial of a strong anti-psychotic with a new, sterile syringe. Just one vial. There was something about that I didn't like, the implication that the drug was to be rationed, the threat of its withdrawal used as a way to control me.
Still, I pushed the dose into my arm, and slipped on a loose pair of maroon trousers and a tight-fighting white blouse. When I looked in the mirror I saw that I was still far too thin and far too pale, but washed and dressed I could at least pass for heroin – chic rather than straight-out junkie. My eyes were still ringed with black circles. I wondered if those would ever fade, the knowledge that had drawn them there was not something I could unlearn.
I opened my door and Kelis and Soren were there waiting, looking as if they might never have moved from where I'd left them hours ago. I nodded a wary greeting to Kelis, then Soren. Only she bothered to return it. His eyes looked almost as shadowed as mine.
'It's three o'clock,' Kelis told me when she saw me surreptitiously glancing towards her wrist. 'We saw you were awake.' So that meant a hidden camera, shit!
'Sorry,' I said, though really why should I apologise?
'Let's go for a walk,' Soren said. 'You can explore the rest of the ship.' So maybe I wasn't a prisoner anymore. It seemed that Queen M trusted me now. We set off along another of those endless, intestinal corridors which seemed to fill the entire vessel. The cabin doors were all shut but it was impossible to tell if they were occupied.
'Are these all used?' I asked Kelis, but it was Soren who answered.
