Son of Fortune

By Victoria McKernan

Aiden Lynch is a survivor—only 16 years old, he's seen himself through near-starvation on the Kansas prairie, a brutal journey on the Oregon trail, and backbreaking work in a lumber camp. Now he's reached the glittering city of San Francisco, and though his future is uncertain, promise lies ahead. Luck seems to favor him as he manages to stay one step ahead of trouble, even in the city's notoriously dangerous Barbary Coast. And it is pure fortune that leads him to a wealthy family, and then the high-stakes poker game in which he wins a ship—fully outfitted and ready for trade. The trade he has inherited: importing guano, a highly potent fertilizer, from island mines in Peru.

But what he finds in Peru is a savage business—conditions at the mines are unthinkable, the workers forced into servitude. When Aiden becomes involved with a miner who claims to be a kidnapped Chinese nobleman, all his loyalties are called into question, and he's plunged into a dangerous game.

CHAPTER 1
Aiden Lynch walked off alone into the night forest. He had no real idea where he was going, but his body needed to move, so he went along with it. He had slipped past exhaustion into a restless exhilaration that demanded motion. The path was faint, but as long as he walked west, he would come soon enough to the sea. The sea offered escape, and he needed escape, for he had just killed a man. The stain was still on him. The blood had soaked through his coat and through his sweater and the shirt beneath that and onto his skin, where it had dried and itched for hours: a rude smear, crisp and foul like a smashed bug. He had washed at the river, rubbing the place with cold handfuls of water until his skin felt raw, but even now, many hours later, it seemed he could still feel it, the poisonous crackle of another man's blood drying slowly on his own flesh.
William Buck was no loss to the world, but Aiden could have easily gone his whole life without killing him. That the death was in fact mostly accidental changed little. Buck was not a virtuous man, nor really even liked by anyone, but the raw truth was, at the time of his death, he was pursuing a thief, a highway robber who had ambushed a medical team and stolen its precious smallpox vaccine. In another day or two, Aiden knew, the name of that thief would reach Seattle, and that name was his own. So Aiden Lynch, sixteen years old and alone in the world, was on the run.
The fight wasn't even a whole day ago. His left leg throbbed where Buck had clubbed him, and there were splinters still buried in his palm where he had grabbed the stick. There was a deep pain across his lower ribs, a tender, swollen eye and raw cuts on his face where little shreds of broken skin were beginning to curl. He had a dark, pulpy bruise just below his collarbone where one end of that stick had landed; the other end, accidentally sharper and more fatefully positioned, had pierced the neck of William Buck. The blood had poured out amazingly fast, awful red and dense as mercury, steaming a hole in the fresh snow.
Aiden's legs felt shaky and he stopped, light-headed. He bent over and rested his hands on his knees. The sharp tang of urgency that had carried his muscles along so far was starting to evaporate. He felt frail and drenched with mortality. The sweet scent of pine needles drifted up from the ground like incense. He slumped into the fragrance, resting his head on his arms. In the few months that he had worked as a logger, he had come to love this land and was sad to be leaving it. These northwest woods, with their enormous, ancient trees, were insane and delicious, strange as Mars yet calmly beautiful.
He yearned just to lie down and sleep, but he struggled to his feet again. It was January, and even on a mild night like this, with no wind and the temperature in the forties, he knew that he could freeze to death lying on the bare ground. The moon broke through the clouds and spilled silver on the tips of branches. In a far part of his brain, Aiden recognized it was lovely, but he was numb to beauty right now, numb to everything but the rhythmic solace of his footsteps. Tree roots braided the path before him. He didn't know what came next, and he wasn't sure he had the strength to find out, but there were, as always, only two choices. He could go on or he could die. There had been grander chances to die so far, so it didn't seem justice to do it now.

CHAPTER 2
The sky was beginning to lighten behind him as Aiden stood on the last hill overlooking the Seattle harbor. It would still be a while before the sun actually rose above the trees, but he could see the flat, square shapes of the city streets and the shimmering water of Puget Sound just beyond. He saw fourteen ships anchored. Nine were lumber ships, in various stages of loading. The rest he didn't know. Aiden had never seen the open ocean and knew little about ships, but he did know the ones in Seattle always needed men. There was a gold rush in British Columbia, and it was common for whole crews to desert in Seattle to chase their fortunes. He also knew he had to be careful. Seattle and Portland had long been notorious for shanghaiing--men were fed knockout potions in saloons and dropped through trapdoors only to wake with throbbing heads, far out to sea with the roll of the ocean beneath them, forced into service as deckhands on their way to China. Aiden was determined not to fall prey to anyone. If he did decide on the sea, it would be on his own terms, and those terms, he knew, would be best in San Francisco. He made his way down to the harbor as the sun rose behind him.
"You have never been to sea." The captain squinted at him suspiciously and twitched like a fly had landed on his ear. "And so I should hire you as sailor for why?"
"I'm not asking for pay," Aiden replied. "Just to work my passage."
"The fare to San Francisco is ten dollars. The pay to a sailor is two dollars a day. It is four, maybe five days to San Francisco. Can you think the numbers?" The captain tapped one finger on the side of his head. He had a thick Swedish accent, so the question sounded almost like a child's rhyme. Caan you tink da nuumbers? So many of these lumber boats that ran along the coast were run by Scandinavians that they were sometimes called the Swedish Navy.
"I can sleep on deck."
"Go away," the man said. "You are no use to me."
"I've worked lumber," Aiden said.
The captain shrugged. "The lumber is already loaded."
"I just meant I know hard work," Aiden pressed.
"I have no hard work. I have a steam engine. I have a winch. I have a crew. We do not sail to China."
Aiden knew this boat was the only one ready to leave that day. Besides, even to his inexperienced eyes, it looked like a good ship. The decks were clean, the sails were neatly reefed, the wooden railings were recently varnished and the lumber was well stacked and secured. He had some money, almost two hundred dollars. It was a modest fortune but hard won, and he didn't want to spend it unless he had to. Fortune, for most of his life, had been a box of pennies on the shelf above the stove, saved against hard times and emptied far too often. He knew San Francisco was expensive, and he had no idea what sort of work he could find there. He had no formal education and little experience. He could plow a field, skin a wolf, cut down trees and fight. He had read most of Shakespeare, all of Dickens and the Atlas of the World, but he knew that didn't count for much.
"I'll give you five dollars' fare for passage, and sleep on the deck," Aiden offered.
"Your face was in a fight," the captain said, flicking a disapproving hand at Aiden's bruises. "It looks like trouble."
"Well, it never looked all that good to start with."
The captain twitched in what might have been a laugh. "Did you win?"
"I'm here, aren't I?"
"What is this?" He tipped his prickly chin at the bundle that Aiden carried. "A gun?"
The bundle was long and narrow, wrapped in oiled cloth and tied securely with rough twine.
"Bow and arrows," Aiden answered.
"You are not the Indian."
"No," Aiden said simply. He wasn't sure what he looked like these days, but he was pretty sure he didn't look Indian.
"Where do you come from?"
"Logging camp up north."
"Before that?" the captain pressed suspiciously.
"Kansas mostly, then west. I came out with a wagon train." The facts were true, though they left out a lot. His parents had been godforsaken bog Irish who had escaped famine in the old country as indentured servants, their passage to Virginia paid for with nine years of work: the regular seven, plus two for the children they brought along--his two older brothers. After the indenture was completed, the family had worked in coal mines and rock quarries, saved every penny and bought land of their own. But that land turned out to be a barren plot of desperate Kansas, where drought and blizzard and fire made the plagues of Egypt seem like sniffles and hangnails. That land had ultimately killed most of them. A pile of woeful history, he thought, that mattered to no one.
"What is your name?"
"Aiden . . . Madison, sir," he said, thinking only now that he ought not use his real name. He did not imagine himself a very grand outlaw and doubted a manhunt in Seattle would chase him very far, but his real name--Aiden Lynch--might be tainted for a while in local parts, and a lumber ship on regular runs might hear it. His sister's name had been Maddy, so Madison would be easy to remember.
"How old are you?"
"Nineteen," Aiden lied, adding on three years. He was tall and still lanky, but months of plentiful food and hard work in the logging camp had given him some muscle. His face, angular and roughened by a life outdoors, had never really looked boyish, but a close inspection would betray little need yet for shaving.
The captain frowned but didn't challenge him.
"Are you a good shot with this bow and arrow?"
"Yes," Aiden said evenly.
"What do you know about polar bears?" the captain asked abruptly.
"Um . . . they live in the Arctic," Aiden replied, quickly trying to switch his brain around. "They can weigh six hundred pounds and are solitary animals. They eat seals, which they hunt from ice floes--"
"Are you being smart?" the captain snapped.
"No, sir." Aiden flushed with confusion. Hadn't the man just asked him? Wasn't he just answering? "I had a book," he explained. "It told about all the regions of the world and their native peoples and animals and so on." The Atlas of the World had been nightly reading for most of his life, and the only thing that had kept him and his little sister, Maddy, going through the desperate last winter. He could call up most pages entirely by memory.
"So I could ask what do you know about headhunters or yaks and you would tell me that too?"
"Not yaks, sir," Aiden said. He suspected the man was now teasing him but decided to play it back straight. "They were mentioned only briefly, as Mongolia is still a largely unknown region," he said. "Though I could probably build a yurt if I had to."
"Ha!" The captain jerked his head back once, overly quick like an amateur sword swallower. He seemed too young to be captain of a ship, Aiden thought. No more than thirty, though he did have a beleaguered air of experience about him. He was shorter than Aiden and stockier. He looked like he might once have been athletic, but now had the slight softness that came from spending long periods of time on a small ship with a steam engine, a winch and a crew.
"Ha! All right, then, Mr. Atlas of the World. So you know all about polar bears! Are you afraid of polar bears?"
"I've never seen one, sir."
"Well, think! Think!" It came out Tink! Tink! and Aiden, his nerves already on edge, had to work hard not to laugh. "Use your imagine! It's a bear!" He lunged at Aiden in bear pose, with curled finger-claws and a toothy snarl. Two of the other sailors working on deck briefly looked up but didn't seem to think their captain's behavior all that peculiar. Aiden took some hint from that. Crazy people were in charge of lots of things in the world, he had learned, so you just had to go along with them.
"Well, if I saw one in the wild, I suppose there wouldn't be much I could do," he said. "I suppose it would kill me regardless, if it wanted to, so being afraid wouldn't matter much either way." He gave a quick glance around the deck, suddenly wary that there might actually be polar bears on the loose. "But if I saw one anywhere else, it would probably be in a cage." He shrugged. "So I'd be all right."
"Yes!" The captain jerked his head again in his odd way of maybe laughing. He actually had a kind face, Aiden noticed, once you got used to the twitches.
"These are in the cage." He grew still and looked at Aiden with a sudden piercing concentration. "See. Here. I have bears. For a rich man's zoo in San Francisco. Special order from Alaska. We go all the way for the special trip. It is the long trip and now mother bear is sick. We give the fish but she will not eat. My men try to kill the seals but they are not hunters. One time when they do shoot the seal, God knows by what luck, it swims away before we catch it. So here you come now with the Indian bow." He gave one tiny twitch, then went on. "This morning when we leave the harbor, we will pass by a little island full of seals. So you will put string on your arrow like the harpoon, yes? And so you can shoot the seal and pull it in." He mimed this vigorously, tugging an invisible rope hand over hand. "And then you feed the bears."
"Uh, sure," Aiden said. He doubted the string-and-arrow plan would work, but he certainly wasn't going to talk himself out of an opportunity.
"Keep the bears alive and you have free passage. Ten dollars you pay if they die. Yes?"
"Five dollars if they die," Aiden countered. "Though I promise I will devote myself."
The captain shrugged. "Ja, all right. But no coffee! Only food, and you eat last."
"Fine," Aiden agreed. He liked coffee, but he could go without. He held out his hand, but the captain just turned away and shouted to the deckhands in Swedish. Three of them began hauling in lines and preparing to cast off. The fourth, a small, bowlegged man, muttered something that sounded, even in the unknown language, to be more grumbling than a ship captain usually heard. But the captain didn't react. The bowlegged man was at least fifty and could have been much older--his weathered skin and rough gray beard made it hard to tell. His watery eyes were the palest blue Aiden had ever seen.