He reached past me to flick a toggle, then draw a slider from zero to six.

Click. Whirr. Clunk. The hull shuddered faintly.

“Centerboard. Of sorts,” Daniel explained.

Sure enough. The Melville suddenly felt more stable. Then a turn of the key, a rev in neutral while Breakers cast off, a twist of the wheel, a light push on the control lever, and we were on our way to our new home.

The convoy gathered momentum as we tacked east on 8th Street, following Rousseau’s taxi as she chugged ahead. The other taxis had placed themselves between the rafts, close enough to haul people up out of the water if needed but keeping a safe distance. The going was slow and rough while we ran parallel to the swell. Daniel kept our nose into the roll by tacking as much as he could as the wind fought to slam us into the buildings. A few times, we had to hold position while one of the rafts got itself unhooked from a window ledge or rusting fire escape. We hauled our little tows in tight to keep them from tangling.

At First Avenue, the convoy turned north, picking up speed as they ran with both wind and tide. Melville continued east on 8th, across the Tompkins Square Lake, braided with whitecaps. The buildings were shorter this far east, just the top stories showing above water, in some places nothing at all. With our wind cover shrinking, Daniel worked hard to keep us from drifting sideways. At Avenue D, the grid opened out into the stretch of water broken by the many x-shaped stubs of the Riis development. Flooded and abandoned for years, crumbling long before Abel. Now I recalled sailing Haiku among them during a rare outing with my father when he snatched a morsel of time off from work. Rubio had declared Riis an example of what urban revamp should never be: block after block of cookie-cutter designs built on the cheap. But for now, they would do him a final service.

Daniel pulled into the lee of a more or less intact structure, three levels of blown-out windows and weathered brick looming above us, and slid out of the chair. “Hold her steady while I tie up.”

I nodded, reaching for a feel of the controls. So glad he trusted me to handle his boat. When I felt her tug steadily at her mooring, I cut the engine and went up. I passed Jenn at the com desk, still jousting with the ship-to-shore.

“You coming? It’s Rube’s send-off.”

She shook her head without raising it. “Funerals aren’t my thing. He’d understand.”

“Yeah. He would.” He’d probably hate that we were doing anything at all.