Bean saw the girl step out of the watery shadows at the edge of notice. She came with mincing, nervous steps and went immediately to the men. But though she tugged at the salt-stained hems of the men’s jackets, though she gazed pleadingly up at the upper floor where the ladies lay on sharkbone couches, not even the sorriest sailor could give her what she was begging for. Eventually, the girl sat herself under the plank that Black Sam had nailed up, which read: If ye know where ye are, ye shudnt be here!

Someone had painted a grinning catfish halfway over the “here.”

There the girl sat wrapped up in fine netting nothing like what fisherman used, her bare feet crossed at the ankles and tears pattering on the rabbit toy she clutched. Even as she cried, passersby put little nibbles beside her, or whispered sweet things to turn her mind from tears. She paid attention to none of them. She was too sunk in her sadness.

Bean stuck himself under the baccy table to sulk in petulant perpetuity. The arrival of the girl had bothered him in a mean, sly way that he didn’t understand. He decided he wouldn’t come out until the girl was gone even if it took a hundred years.

It didn’t take a hundred years for his plan to fall apart. She crawled under with him within five minutes, rabbit dragging woefully behind. The netting rustled as she tucked her knees up. The sight of her made his belly ache. He felt bad for hating that she belonged here.

“The men say my parents aren’t here,” was the first thing she said, doing her best to say it bravely. “But they won’t tell me where here is.”

Bean scratched the memory of lice. Barnacles stuck to his scalp scraped his pruny fingers. He’d been “here” a long time now; he’d be here for a long time yet. And though he meant to spit, instead his tongue chose mercy. He said, “This is a place of safe keeping, where we get tucked if no one back home finds what we left behind. Black Sam’s the captain here, but he don’t talk much.”

“I don’t want to be kept safe,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“Well, s’pose we all do. What’s with the pretty?” Bean twitched the net. Already, his hatred was cracking. She was such a sorry sight. And he’d never been mean.

“Ma says it’s to keep the biting flies off.” The girl leaned her face against the rabbit, which dripped. They sat there in the lingering stink of salt.

A sniffle came from her.

It was such a strange, small sound and it had an explosive impact upon young Bean, who had been twelve, once, before his dad’s frigate had gone down and taken Bean with it. There was an echo in Bean’s memories of a sniffle just like that and a girl who’d smiled just the same. Glittering in those memories were the stars above their beds upon the deck, and how their mama had strung netting above them too, to keep the biting flies away.

“Let’s play a game,” said Bean. “You’re a ghost and I’m a pirate come looting. Do you know how to be a ghost?”

The girl gave one more sniffle, but the lure of play was stronger than even her darkest worries. “I shall go boo,” she declared.

Soon enough, the two of them tore about together. Bean hollered as he felt a proper pirate should, and the girl woo’ed as she knew in her heart a real ghost would. The ranks of the drowned looked down upon the two children with their own smiles, cast by memories left beyond the sea. All of them were now bones in the ocean, but even bones remembered being otherwise.

All of them but one.

Bean and the girl eventually fetched back up against the wall where Black Sam’s sign hung above. They collapsed in merriment, Bean holding the rabbit.

“What shall we do next, Flossy?” Bean asked without thinking.

The girl paused. “Who—” she went to ask, but coughed instead. Then, another cough, larger, and with the cough came a spilling torrent of brackish saltwater. Bean leapt up to slap between her skinny shoulders, but she grabbed his hand before he could. Words stolen by her blueing lips, her sodden, choking retches, but her begging plain enough by the way she stared up at him. She was afraid. And she was alone.

Except for him.

As the dead gathered, Bean took the girl—bug net and all—into his bony, waterlogged lap. Even as he held her, he could feel her puddling away through the floor. Washing into the sea. Becoming a concept hard for him to grasp, made of salt and sun and fists beating her heart back into motion. She blinked up at him through storm-tossed eyes.

“You can’t stay if they’ve found you,” he said solemnly. “Only those that never get found stay here. But I’ll be right behind you, Flossy. I just can’t go until you go first.”

For a brief, thrilling moment, he felt the air balloon into her body in a way that made him yearn for his own starved lungs—and then she was gone. Nothing left behind but the bug net.

Bean curled his knees to his chest. He sniffled, once.

He felt more alone than before.

But Black Sam picked the bug net up, held it for a long moment, and then he draped it over Bean’s shoulders.

“This’ll keep the flies from biting,” said the pirate, giving a smile that Bean realised meant here might be different now that they’d all seen the girl come and go. And Bean was comforted by knowing that Flossy might still be up with the stars and the flies, up where her bones would be warmed by the sun.