After a few more reckless seconds, Lincoln drops to his knees and crawls slowly up to the captain’s chair to my left. Blood streaks the deck beneath him. Looking back, I see that we’ve cleared the range of anything but a rifle, and not even one-percenters carry rifles on their bikes. Sawed-off shotguns, maybe, but not long guns.

With heroic effort, Lincoln struggles into the captain’s chair and faces forward. His breathing is alarmingly ragged.

“How long, you figure?” he asks, coughing.

Natchez lies roughly twenty-five miles south: one river bend, then a long, straight shot down to the big bluff and the landing at Under-the-Hill. “Forty minutes, max. Thirty if we’re lucky.”

Lincoln nods, then grimaces.

“Can you make it?”

“Somebody needs to live through this shit. Might as well be me.”

Snake’s speedboat is making fifty-three knots now. The broad river runs silver-black under the moon tonight, the Mississippi shore looming high on our left, the Louisiana Delta fading away on our right. Clouds of stars fill the sky over this dark stretch of water. A mile ahead, the lights of a pushboat and its barges are rounding the bend. At long last, I realize, we are headed downstream. Even if our engine fails, the river will carry us home.

“Hey,” I say. “Where’s home for you? Chicago?”

Lincoln considers the question. Then he shrugs. “Ain’t got one, really. Not anymore. Guess I need to find me a new one.”

“Or an old one.”

“What’s that mean? Mama’s dead now. Nothing here for me.”

“Maybe. But at least you’ve got a start here.”

“What you mean?”

I laugh quietly, thinking of Serenity. “You’ve got Mississippi blood, man.”

“Mississippi blood? Shit. What’s that mean?”

I recall reading Serenity’s galley in my basement, and with that memory comes the taste of her skin and the scent of her hair. “Just something that writer put in one of her books. Something her uncle used to say. An old pulpwood cutter named Catfish.”

“Yeah? What was that?”

“He said, ‘Mississippi blood is different. It’s got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there’s strength in it, too. Strength that’s been beat but not broke.’”

Lincoln grunts. Then, after a period of reflection: “I reckon that describes Mama pretty well. If she hadn’t had that, she’d have died a long time ago.”

“I think you’re right.”

I can tell from his breathing that he’s turned the chair to face me.

“What is it?” I ask, a little anxiously.

“What you think about what Snake said? About your mama being the one?”