The Misadventures of Anna Cabbot

What Lies Ahead

She and Jenny had walked arm in arm along the boardwalk earlier. They'd gathered a hefty amount of odd looks — some of the older sailors had made the sign of the cross in their direction — but when Anna had let her eyes turn black and silver for a few seconds they were left well enough alone.

Their leisurely stroll by the Wretched Soul had yielded only the basics — the captain departed in the afternoon for a seedy drinking hall (they'd followed him to be sure) and left behind a skeleton crew. The prisoner was assumedly somewhere below decks.

Anna was still fairly certain her madcap plan would still work.

Now, closer to late afternoon, Anna sat on the deck and leaned her shoulder against the mast.

"I wanted to ask you something," Jenny said, easing down beside her. "Well, it's not quite a question. It's more...I want you to tell me about your world."

Anna's eyebrows rose.

"I was already on the Endless Sea and I'll return to the Endless Sea. There's no reason you shouldn't tell me."

True." Anna couldn't argue with that kind of logic. Neither would it hurt anything for Jenny to know. She took a deep breath and floundered for a place to start. To stall, she stretched her legs out in front of her, crossed at the ankles. She rested her hands on her thighs so she wouldn't fidget.

"There aren't...there aren't any more pirates like you," Anna said, opting for bad news first. "Sailing on big ships or ships like yours is...it isn't rare but it takes time and lots of learning. Most ships now aren't made of wood, either. And they're powered by motors instead of wind."

Same as she had that one morning in the cabin, she blew into her cupped palms and floated the gray smoke head height between them. She pushed and pulled, sliding against her Evrael until she had a little fleet of cruise liners, oil tankers, cargo ships, and speedboats moving in a slow circle.

Jenny blanched. "Are they all gone?"

"No." She thought of the U.S.S. Constitution in Boston, and of the restored schooners who called Seneca Lake home. "No. But they're more for recreation and racing than they are for pirating." The ships dissolved into one, and Anna wasn't certain she'd gotten the rigging exactly right — it had been a few years since she'd seen the True Love tied at the Village Pier.

"We have other forms of transportation, too. We have cars and buses and trains, though our train system isn't as good as Europe's." Anna leaned away from the mast and into the warmth of Jenny's shoulder as she made the smoke change again — Carson's Jetta, a coach bus, and an Amtrak train. "Cities have grown. Buffalo's grown so much you probably wouldn't recognize it. We're friendly with our neighbors, the Canadians, too. Carson's Canadian."

"What?"

"Yeah. But we're....not so friendly with other countries." She locked her thumbnails together, one under the other. The smoke disappeared. "There's still war. It's different now. We've thought of worse ways to kill each other more effectively, and sometimes those who make these decisions forget there's actual lives involved on both sides." She couldn't bring herself to look at Jenny. "Sometimes they just don't care.

"There's good in the world, too. There are always those ready and willing to help. There's still community camaraderie and love. For the most part, love wins."

Jenny curled her fingers around Anna's. "What about for women like us? If you, that is — you're like me, aren't you?"

There was part of her — unsure and fluttery — beating in her chest alongside her heart. She let it fly free. "I am like you. I am. People like us can get married now. To each other. We can be open about it."

Jenny smiled wide and a little in awe. Anna noticed wetness at the corner of her eyes.

"We've taken a lot of steps forward, but some are just as determined to draw us back." Anna swallowed thickly. "There are places where a woman's body isn't her own. There are places where someone else's religion dictates a chunk of your choices." Most of the GOP thought her body was nothing more than an incubator. Her voice cracked. "There's this...there's so much wrong, too, with how the world treats women. How men treat women and, God, some days it's...it's overwhelming and stifling."

There was the pervasiveness of toxic masculinity and rape culture, the prevalence of everyday misogyny — internalized or otherwise — and the racism. The goddamn racism still so present in a society that was stubbornly, stupidly clinging to white supremacy in both subtle and explicit ways. There was the widening gap between the rich and the poor — there was an ongoing debate about whether poor folk deserved to have the things they needed in order to live a happy life, and it shouldn't even be a fucking discussion since everyone deserved goddamn basic human dignity.

Anna herself knew what it was like to weigh the choice between seeing a movie or having lunch out in lean winter months and then deciding against either because the toilet paper was nearly gone.

In a number of aspects, modern America hadn't come as far along as it liked to boast to the rest of the world. Anna didn't know how to explain all of that or even if she wanted to.

And yet, for as shitty as the world could be there were bright spots, too. There was Stevie with her kindness and fierceness. She was Anna's landlady, but she'd made the choice to be Anna's friend. Then there was Carson, her Naked Man. He tapped barefoot in her kitchen, despaired over her tea cupboard, and kept her secrets.

"It's not all bleak is it?" Jenny whispered.

"No. There's — there's so much good. There's been so many advancements in medicine — there's vaccines, so people aren't dying of things like polio and measles." She didn't touch the anti-vax movement — she couldn't talk about it and not go off on an anger-fueled rant about idiots who willingly put others at risk. Christ Almighty, it wasn't difficult to understand herd immunity.

"There's surgical advancements," Anna continued, lightly tapping her sternum with her free hand. "The surgery I had is....it's not commonplace, but it's more common than when they did it 30 years ago." She knew science's dark side, too, the human trials conducted on those who hadn't consented. Anna acknowledged the ugliness and lack of ethics, and let herself be uncomfortable with it — she owed that much to those who had come before her. "Food is better, too. Lots better. And there's more access to it."

For some, at least. There were still food deserts. Fresh fruit and vegetables were still stupidly expensive for most folks. And God help them all if their fuckwit-filled government decided to make sweeping changes to SNAP.

"It's a different world," Anna said, resting her head on Jenny's shoulder. "It's sometimes good and sometimes it's fucking terrible. It's different."

"It sounds lovely," Jenny murmured.

"It has its moments." Comfortable, she closed her eyes. "I'm nervous about our plan."

"My understanding is that you can improvise, as Carson says, 'like a boss'." Jenny rubbed her thumb back and forth across Anna's knuckles.

"I'mwingin' it." It seemed to always come back around to that, God help them all.