Her father had been quiet for a moment, watching the small figure disappear over the rail. Then he said, in Arabic, the thing he always said when she asked him if a girl could do something, which was "Why not?" It was not a promise. It was an invitation to find out.
She had found out. Texas A&M Maritime Academy in Galveston, the only girl in her section who prayed five times a day, which meant learning to make wudu in a ship's head the size of a closet and to find the qibla with a magnetic compass and a deviation card before she had a phone app to do it for her. Her first ship as a cadet, a container ship bound for Rotterdam, where a huge Croatian bosun found her praying Isha behind the funnel on a flattened cardboard box, said nothing, and the next morning left a square of clean carpet remnant outside her cabin door. Third mate, second mate, chief mate. The grinding, unglamorous years of loading plans and ballast calculations and four-on, eight-off watches. Her master's license at thirty-one. And then the long, slow climb into the Bayard Pilots, which was not something you applied for like a job but something you were invited to try, and then watched at, and then trusted with, a little at a time: first small ships in daylight, then bigger ships, then night, then fog, then the biggest ships in the worst conditions, over six years of trips logged and reviewed and signed off by senior pilots who were mostly white men in their fifties and sixties who had never in their lives expected to be signing off on a woman in a headscarf, and who had, one by one, signed.
Her father had not lived to see the license. He had died of a heart attack in the engine room of a tugboat when she was a deputy, three years from full. At the funeral her mother, Hoda, had held her hand very tightly and said, "He used to tell everyone at the mosque. My daughter is going to be a pilot. Not 'wants to be.' Is going to be. He said it like it was already true."
The green prayer rug in the inside pocket of her bag had been his. He had kept it in the engine room, folded in a drawer with his wrenches.
The Gulfline Terminal sat on a flat spit of reclaimed land on the north bank of the channel, a mile of concrete wharf and parking lots fenced in by twelve-foot chain link topped with three strands of barbed wire. It handled cars, mostly, imported and exported, tens of thousands of them a year, new pickups and sedans and SUVs parked in endless shining rows in the storage lots like a frozen traffic jam. Gate Two was the small west gate, closer to the berths, used for crew and vendors and pilots and, after six o'clock, for almost no one. It had a single swing arm, a small white guard shack with a window air conditioner and a sliding glass window, a TWIC card reader mounted on a post at driver's-window height, and a sign that said ALL PERSONS AND VEHICLES SUBJECT TO SEARCH.
Rania pulled up to the arm at 6:41 by her dashboard clock. The sky over the terminal was dark now, the sunset gone behind the wall of cloud, and the sodium lights along the fence line had come on early, making everything orange. Far down the wharf, past the storage lots, she could see the Corvina Star at Berth Four, and her heart did the small, involuntary thing it always did when she saw a ship she was about to take: she was enormous, a sheer white slab of steel rising straight up out of the water, windowless except for the bridge at the very top front, with her name in tall blue letters along her side and her stern ramp already raised. She did look like a building that had fallen over. She also looked, from here, like she was leaning very slightly away from the dock, the way a person leans against a rope.
She rolled down her window and held her TWIC card up to the reader.
Nothing happened. The little screen on the reader stayed dark. She tried again, tapping the card flat against the face of it. Dark. Then she saw the strip of yellow masking tape across the top of the reader, and the words written on it in marker, a little smeared by humidity: OUT OF ORDER USE WINDOW.
She looked at the guard shack. The sliding window was closed, and behind it, under the fluorescent light, a man in a navy blue uniform shirt was sitting on a stool with his back half to her, looking at a phone propped against a coffee can. She tapped her horn once, lightly.
The man turned his head and looked at her through the glass. He looked at her for what felt like a long time, though it was probably three seconds. Then he put his phone face down on the counter, stood up slowly, the way a man with bad knees stands, and slid the window open.