Ship Breaker Read Online Free PDF

wheel turned.
    Nailer redoubled his efforts. Gold and blue and red pulses filled his vision. The wheel turned again, loosening. He was frantic for air, but he stayed down, fighting the urge to kick for the surface, turning the wheel faster and faster until his lungs were heaving. He launched himself upward again, hope running wild as he surfaced.
    Eager now, he hyperventilated a final time, huffing high in the blackness.
    Dove.
    Spinning, spinning, spinning the wheel, his lungs bursting, all or nothing, reckless with the need to get out. Nailer yanked the latch handle. For a second he worried that the door swung inward and that he would never be able to drag the thing open against the pressure of oil holding it closed—
    The door blew open.
    Nailer was sucked through in a black torrent. He slammed into a wall. Curled into a ball as he tumbled. Oil roared around him. His forehead smashed against metal and he almost took a breath, but forced himself to curl tighter, letting himself be turned and swirled and bounced and slammed through ship corridors like a jellyfish thrown by breakers onto a reef.
    He blasted into open air.
    Nailer’s stomach dropped out of him. Free fall. Involuntarily, his eyes opened. Stinging oil and scalding sun. A mirror bright ocean, almost white with its intensity. Blue waves rushed up to meet him. He had only a second to twist—
    He smashed into water. Sea salt swallowed him. The surge and swell of an oily sea. The roll of breakers. Nailer surged upward, kicking for the surface. Broke out into sunlight and waves, gasping. He sucked air, flooding his lungs with shining clean oxygen, starved for all the life he’d been sure he’d lost.
    Above him, a tear in the tanker’s hull still spewed oil, marking where the ship had vomited him into open air. Black streams of crude traced down the ship’s hide, running in slick rivulets. Fifty feet of fall into shallow water, and he was alive. Nailer started to laugh.
    “I’m alive!” he shouted. And then he was screaming, feeling a flood of victory and released terror, drunk on sunshine and waves and the people staring at him from shore.
    He swam for the beach, still laughing and drunk on survival. Waves caught him and pushed him into the shore. He realized that he’d been doubly lucky. If the tide hadn’t come in, he would have slammed against sand instead of plunging into water.
    Nailer crawled out of the breakers and stood. His legs were weak from so long swimming but he was standing on dry land, and he was alive. He laughed madly at Bapi and Li and Rain and the hundreds of other laborers and crew gangs, all of them staring at him dumbstruck.
    “I’m alive!” he shouted at them. “I’m alive!”
    They all said nothing, simply stared.
    Nailer was about to shout again but something in their faces made him look down.
    Sea foam lapped around his ankles, rust and bits of wire. Shells and insulation. And intermixed with the ocean froth, his blood. Running down his legs in streams, bright and red and steady, staining the waters with the pounding of his heart.

5

    “Y OU ’ RE LUCKY ,” Pima’s mother said. “You should be dead.”
    Nailer was almost too tired to respond, but he mustered a grin for the occasion. “But I’m not. I’m alive.”
    Pima’s mother picked up a blade of rusted metal and held it in front of his face. “If this was even another inch into you, you would have washed into shore as body scavenge.” Sadna regarded him seriously. “You’re lucky. The Fates were holding you close today. Should have been another Jackson Boy.” She offered him the rusty shiv. “Keep that for a talisman. It wanted you. It was going for your lung.”
    Nailer reached for the metal that had almost cut him down and winced as his stitches pulled.
    “You see?” she said. “You’re blessed today. Fates love you.”
    Nailer shook his head. “I don’t believe in Fates.” But he said it quietly, low enough that she wouldn’t hear. If Fates