81 pages • 2 hours read
Paolo BacigalupiShip Breaker
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 12-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
Content Warning: The Chapter 12 Summary references drug addiction, and the Chapters 12, 13, 14, and 15 Summaries contain violence and/or gore. The Analysis alludes to both violence and drug/alcohol addiction.
Richard moves across the sand spit towards the island with a group of dangerous heavies, including Blue Eyes and Tool. The speed at which Richard is moving means that Nailer, Pima, and Nita must find cover fast; Nailer’s father is probably high on slide amphetamines, and if the group catches the three teens, there is a chance they will kill them. Nita asks Nailer, “But aren’t you family?” (134), leading to Nailer and Pima attempting to explain what slide, or methamphetamine, is. In Nita’s world, the drug is only used on half-men—what she calls “animals”— to heighten their violent instincts. When Nailer replies, “Just a bunch of animals here, making money for you big bosses” (134), Nita is embarrassed. Nailer again asks about her people, and Nita tells him they won’t be there in time to rescue her from Richard.
The three return to their makeshift camp, but Nailer is feeling much worse, shivering and dizzy. Since he saved Nita, Nailer has taken on the role of the leader, but he cannot give Nita and Pima instructions about evading Richard because he is too sick. He bemoans the fact that they didn’t leave when they had the chance, and now they’re stuck “while the lions stalk[] through the ship’s carcass and laugh[]” (136). The girls wrap him in blankets and argue about taking Nailer to Lucky Strike, who has antibiotics. Nita offers to give herself up to the heavy crew, who are climbing over her clipper ship with the “feral grace of tiger monkeys” (136), but she has no idea what she is really offering or what the crew will do to her, so Pima refuses.
Just then, Richard peeks through the undergrowth and sees their group. He takes the girls prisoner and drags everyone down to the ship. Richard’s crewmembers slap and pinch the girls and pull the jewelry off Nita. Recognizing that if Nita is still alive, the ship cannot be considered salvage, Richard decides to “slit her open the way he gutted fish” (140). Pima lunges towards Richard with her own knife, but Richard is too fast and slams her to the deck. Richard shifts his focus to killing Pima, but Nailer advises him to spare Pima in order to cancel out the blood debt that Richard owes Sadna. Richard instead breaks two of Pima’s fingers as a lesson.
Nailer also convinces Richard to let Nita live so he can collect the reward from her people. In a rare moment of fatherly pride, Richard tells Nailer, “This is a lucky find, boy. We got to play it smart, though, or we’ll lose it all” (145). He reassures Nailer that after they get the light salvage off the ship and hide it from Lucky Strike, he will get the antibiotics for Nailer: “You’re my blood and I’ll take good care of you” (146).
Chapter 13 Summary
Nailer regains consciousness to find that he has been out for three days. Richard did get the antibiotics and a doctor, and Nita and Pima have been dosing Nailer with the medicine while the fever raged. Both girls have been manacled, but Nailer is unfettered. Once again, he asks Nita when her people will arrive, and she replies, “Soon I think” (149). Nailer is suspicious that Nita doesn’t have anyone to come for her.
Tool and another heavy, Moby, are guarding Nailer and Nita. Soon Pima and Blue Eyes arrive with food, and Blue Eyes sends Moby to tell Richard that his son is awake. While they eat, Pima tells Nailer that Richard wants to hand Nita over to the Cult of Life, a group that harvests organs and sacrifices unprotected kids to its god. Richard is jittery; he suspects that Nita doesn’t have people. Recognizing the danger they are still in, Nailer cruelly mocks Nita in order to make Richard’s thugs believe he is on their side. However, Nailer is also suspicious of Nita; although she told Nailer she was a Patel from Boston, she later told Richard that she was from the Uppadaya shipping family in Houston.
Richard now believes that Nita may be too dangerous to keep alive: He suspects that Nita’s people may be too powerful for him. Even though he could sell Nita anonymously back to her people, his own crew would talk eventually, which means he would need to kill some of them. Nita may be too valuable for Richard to salvage safely. He also offhandedly mentions that Sadna is looking for Pima.
Nailer again presses Nita about when her people will come to rescue her. She confesses that they won’t be coming; she and her clipper ship crew tossed the GPS and satellite trackers overboard because they were being chased by mutinous factions within her family’s corporation. If Pyce, her uncle and the leader of the takeover, catches her, he will use her as leverage against her father. Nita doesn’t seem to mourn her crew’s sacrifice in the storm, and Pima remarks that the swanks and scavengers are the same after all; both are “[...] looking to get a little blood on their hands” (163).
Nita now has no value. She isn’t strong enough, nor are Pima and Nailer, to keep her from the organ harvesters or the nailsheds (houses of sex workers). However, Nita’s family still has a fleet, and she knows some of the captains will be loyal to her if she can get to Orleans II (where the Patel ships put in). The only way they can get to Orleans II while still outrunning Pyce’s ship is by jumping on a maglev train while it’s running. Although it’s dangerous, Nailer decides to let the Fates judge if Nita is fast enough to catch the train, and Nita agrees, stating, “I ran out of chances a long time ago. It’s all Fates now” (165).
Chapter 14 Summary
Nailer sees an opportunity to escape when their guard drinks himself to sleep. Blue Eyes, sleeping nearby, holds the keys to the girl’s manacles. Nailer must slit her throat. Killing Blue Eyes is necessary, but Nailer doesn’t like the idea of violence, and he is terrified as he creeps up on her. Blue Eyes wakes and fights with Nailer, who soon loses. She holds a machete over his eye and prepares to slice it out, but Sadna suddenly explodes out of the undergrowth and knocks her aside.
Sadna and Blue Eyes fight, but Blue Eyes is too strong and fast. Blue Eyes comes out on top of Sadna and brings the machete to Sadna’s throat, but Nailer leaps on Blue Eyes’ back, stabbing her in the throat and killing her.
Sadna understands that Nailer is shocked from killing Blue Eyes, and she reassures him that he was there when Sadna needed him. Pima reassures him as well, stating, “You’re as fast as your dad. Even with that bad arm of yours” (174). Even Tool, who is a friend of Pima’s mother and who secretly helped Sadna rescue them, agrees. Nailer doesn’t want to be like his father, though, and resents being told he has any of his father’s characteristics.
Richard is down on the beach during the fight, negotiating with the newly arrived half-men who are looking for Nita. Nita confirms that these are Pyce’s people, the same ones who were hunting her before the storm. She needs to hide, and it’s not safe for Nailer anymore either, whose father will come after him for revenge. He and Nita will attempt to jump on the maglev train, but Pima will not leave; she has family and people on the beach. After a brief argument during which Sadna tries to dissuade Nailer from undertaking the dangerous journey to Orleans II, Nailer finally convinces them that he must leave with Nita. He knows turning Nita over would be the smartest thing to do, but he doesn’t have the stomach to betray her. Before Nita and Nailer leave for the train tracks, Sadna gives them a handful of money, and Tool announces he will accompany them. The half-men on the beach may have questions about him that he doesn’t want to answer.
Chapter 15 Summary
Tool, Nita, and Nailer hide in the undergrowth beside the train rails. The train is frighteningly fast; the ground shakes beneath them and the wind from its passage tears leaves from trees. Nailer is terrified, and to calm himself he tells Nita about his friend Reni, who jumped trains for fun until he misjudged one jump and was torn to pieces.
Surprising Nailer, Nita takes off as soon as he finishes and successfully jumps on the train. Nailer races towards the train but stumbles as he is running and falls to the ground near the tracks. He looks up and sees Tool sweep by on the train.
Nailer gets to his feet and runs again. The last car on the train rushes by, and he grabs the ladder and swings himself up: “[H]is feet were scraped and battered, his knee was oozing blood, his hands were raw, but he was safe and he was alive” (188). He says a prayer for Pima and Sadna’s safety, worried that his father will take revenge against them. Looking out at the ocean, he catches sight of Pyce’s moored clipper ship, and he grins because he’s fooled them.
Chapters 12-15 Analysis
Bacigalupi focuses on the brutality and deadliness of Richard and his thugs in this section; Richard is fast as he comes across the sand flats and “blurringly fast” when he fights other men (133). He is a force of nature like a city killer hurricane. He and the members of his crew are often compared to animals: They are feral like monkeys, they stalk the ship like lions, and Richard strikes “quick as a cobra” (140). They also bear the marks of violence. Tool’s face and torso are scarred, and he is rumored to fight alligators and pythons in the swamps. Richard has self-inflicted scars across his chest—a slash for every man he has killed. Blue Eyes is perhaps the scariest of all; she has “scars carved into her arms and legs, bits of scrap steel embedded in her face [...] a long zipper of scar tissue in her side where she had made a devotional sacrifice to the Harvesters and the Life Cult” (149). She is utterly ruthless and thrives on violence, as when she urges Richard to “open [Pima] wide” (141). The heavy crew are physically overwhelming and unscrupulously evil, intent on making money to finance their drug and alcohol addictions.
In comparison, Nailer’s crew is beginning to fracture apart. Pima doesn’t trust Nita, and Nailer grows suspicious of her as well when she continues to make excuses for why her people haven’t found her yet. When he finds out that Nita told his father a different story about her origins, Nailer knows that she is lying to him. This appears to push Nailer to hand Nita over to his father and her enemies; he mocks her when she makes a joke and suggests to his father that if Nita stays a secret, Richard can still sell her. However, Bacigalupi only builds the expectation that Nailer will betray Nita. Once the heavy crew is convinced that Nailer is on their side, he stages an escape. Nailer may be sick and weak, unable to help when his father threatens to gut Pima and Nita, but he is still smart. He convinces Richard not to kill Pima due to the blood quota that Richard owes Sadna, although Nailer is helpless to prevent his father from breaking Pima’s fingers. He argues against killing Nita by appealing to Richard’s greed, but it’s a slim reprieve, as Nita doesn’t actually have people to pay a reward. He is smart but unlucky at this time.
More important than smarts or luck in this section is speed. Bacigalupi describes Richard’s “crystallized speed” (140), which saves his life when Pima attempts to slit his throat. Both Pima and Tool remark on Nailer’s speed, even more remarkable compared to his father’s speed because Nailer isn’t on amphetamines and has a bad arm. Blue Eyes nearly bests Sadna because, while Sadna may be heavier and stronger, Blue Eyes is faster. Nita must be fast in order to escape on the train. Speed is also a consideration in Nailer and Nita’s means of flight from Bright Sands; the jungle is too slow and dangerous by foot, the clipper ship is so fast that it will overtake them if they try to go by water, but the maglev train is fastest of all.
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