sand

thalassic series

book two

Liz Shipton

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

SAND

First edition. March 13, 2023.

Copyright © 2023 Liz Shipton.

Written by Liz Shipton.

contents

Trigger Warning

Sand

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Get the Next Book

Newsletter

Social Media and Stuff

Playlist

Acknowledgments

About the Author

trigger warning

This book contains scenes depicting underage alcohol abuse, and discussion of possible non-consensual sex.

It also has swears.

I’m still putting those dollars in the swear jar.

sand

/sand/

NOUN

1. the granular substance that makes up the majority of sea and riverbeds

2. the characteristic of being brave or adventurous

3. firmness of purpose; tenacity; grit

chapter

one

IT’S A CLUMP OF HAIR.

That’s why the shower in the aft head won’t drain. A clump of hair is clogging up the pipe.

I press my eye up close to the drain hole to observe it: a tangled glob about six inches down, covered by an inch of scummy water. The sight of it—and the smell—turns my stomach. Something about a wet clump of someone else’s hair has always grossed me out. For some reason, I always have the irrational fear that it’s going to end up in my mouth.

The head is barely wide enough for one person. White fiberglass walls and floor, a small toilet on one side, and a sink with a handheld shower attachment opposite. The offending drain is in the middle of the floor. To use the shower, you pretty much have to stand perfectly upright in the middle of the coffin-sized room and let a tiny stream of water out of the shower head while you hold it directly against the part of your body that you want to clean. This is to avoid getting water all over the toilet, sink, and walls. There is no soap. The water is not hot. Showering in this room is a brief, chilly, and cramped experience. Cleaning it takes the skill of a contortionist.

I sit back on my heels and pull the sweaty shirt away from my skin to try to get some air moving around me. It doesn’t work. There's only one porthole in here, high in the wall, and we’ve been sitting stagnant on the Salt for three straight days now, without a lick of wind in sight. The air is so heavy I feel like I’m breathing through a warm, damp towel. ‘Comfortable’ is not a state I can imagine myself in ever again.

My knees are cramping, so I pull myself to my feet, twisting my torso out of the way of the sink as I rise. Brushing dust and other bathroom floor detritus from my hands, I duck out into the corridor and rifle through the ship’s box of cleaning supplies. There’s no plunger—of course, why would there be?—so I pull out a few of the unlabeled bottles and open them to see if I can discern what they are by smell. One is almost certainly vinegar and one smells vaguely fruity, but the rest are odorless.

I sling some vinegar down the drain and head off to find something to poke at the hair clump with. I remember seeing a wire hanger in the locker in my cabin and I’m almost certain it isn’t being used. I don’t have any clothes to hang, and Goliath, my cabin mate, doesn’t use the lockers. They keep their clothes tucked under their bunk with the rest of their things.

Goliath is sitting on their bunk against the wall when I open the cabin door, their enormous frame blocking all but a sliver of light from the room’s one tiny porthole. They’re cleaning a colossal knife and don’t look up or acknowledge me as I come in. The locker is on the opposite wall to the door, the two bunks on either side of me, against the walls. Like the head, this room is barely large enough for the people in it, and I have to squeeze past Goliath to get to the locker. I open it and pull out the wire hanger, holding it up to the sliver of light coming through the porthole to inspect it. Then I twist it in my hands to flatten it into a long pole with a hook on one end.

“What you do with this?”

It’s the first thing Goliath has said to me since I boarded the ship three days ago.

“The drain in the aft head is clogged with hair,” I say, turning to face them. “I’m going to fish it out.”

The shadow of a smirk crosses their face. “You clean head again?”

“Yes,” I sigh. “I clean head again.”

“Why Fetch make you clean head again? You stupid? Don’t do it right?”

“I assume,” I say, keeping my voice steady, “that Fetch is making me clean the head again because there’s a big digusting glob of hair blocking up the drain still.”

Goliath flips the knife over a couple of times. “She think you stupid.”

I open my mouth to spit something back, but think better of it. Goliath is an absolute giant. Muscles like coils of rope under their heavily tattooed, alabaster arms, a chest like a drum, and the steely eyes and thick black hair of a Northerner. At least, I think they’re from the north. Or east. Or…northeast. Krepost' maybe, I think is what Fid said. In any case—tough. Hardy. Used to the cold, but not bothered by the heat. I don’t know how old Goliath is—I think maybe mid-twenties—but something about their quiet, nonchalant presence feels ancient. My guess is Goliath is a person who has heard a lot of shit from people, and has learned not to worry about it, because those other people are so easy to crush. Goliath doesn't say much, because they don’t have to. And while they haven’t been openly hostile to me since I came aboard, they also haven’t been friendly. Swallowing my anger, I turn to leave.

“You pay, no?” Goliath says.

“What?”

“You pay. For trip? On boat.” They indicate the room around us. "Your brother pay."

I hesitate. The circumstances of how I came to be on this boat are not something I’m eager to discuss in great detail. “Why do you ask?”

“If you pay, then you guest. No crew. No have to work. So why you work?”

I scratch behind my neck. They’re asking a lot of questions. “I want to learn,” I tell them. “I want to be a better sailor.”

Goliath snorts. “Cleaning head make you better sailor?”

“I’m just trying to get to Alluvium,” I snap, unable to keep my nerves from edging into irritation. “What’s with the questions? You say nothing for three days and now I’m getting the third degree?”

Goliath’s thick brow wrinkles. “Third degree? What is?”

“Don’t worry about it.” I throw open the door. “Just keep your questions to yourself.”

The door slams behind me as I stride back down the corridor, my racing pulse and the heat in my face making the close, muggy air even more unbearable.

The answer to Goliath's question is that I’m doing degrading menial chores because Savage, the ship's captain, is making me earn my passage. He doesn't trust that my brother Shale will pay him once we make it to Alluvium. He doesn't trust me, period. The feeling is mutual.

The thing Savage doesn't know is that my brother would definitely pay for my passage, and would probably pay for my life many times over. Not because he cares about me or wants to protect me. That would be nice. No, it's because he's an unstable radical—Sargo would say ‘terrorist’ but I think that’s a bit strong—who works for the Anonymity, and he thinks I'm indispensable to his insane plot to overthrow Zenith. Right now, I'm honestly not sure who's a bigger threat to my life: Savage, the murderous Reckoner, or Shale, my lunatic brother.

Needless to say, I’m in a tight spot.

I'm not exactly in a hurry to see Shale again, and I have no intention of actually letting Savage deliver me to him. But I need to get to Alluvium, and passage aboard the Kingfisher is the only way. Right now, my plan is to bolt as soon as we make port, lose myself in the crowd at the dock, and disappear into the city. It's not a great plan, I'll admit, but Alluvium’s a huge city. It shouldn't be too hard to disappear. Savage and his crew can’t know every alley and side street.

Right?

The smell of sweat and stagnant water greet me upon my return to the head. I kneel on the grimy floor again and shove the hooked end of the wire hanger into the drain. For several minutes I jimmy it back and forth, trying not to think about the smell and the heat and my damp skin and the queasy loll of the becalmed boat. I try not to think about my lunatic brother, or the criminal organization he works for that almost killed me. I try not to think about blackouts and blips or my broken biochip or the fact that my only friend has been kidnapped and my dog may be dead and that I’m on my hands and knees in this filthy head, on a boat going nowhere, surrounded by murderers and—

There’s a small glug, followed by a harsh sucking sound. The water level in the pipe drops. As the last of it siphons away, I pull the hanger out and flop against the wall, wiping my brow with my free hand.

From the hook at the end of the hanger hangs a thick, straggly knot of greasy, gray hair. It drips with what I can only imagine is two days’ worth of shower water, spit and piss. It’s flecked with toenail clippings, and coated in a fine film of sandy grime. I hold it away from me like a dead animal and struggle to my feet, wondering, suddenly, what the hell I’m going to do with it. I look around for a garbage can, but there’s nothing.

I duck back through the door and jog down the corridor, holding the revolting thing out in front of me and leaving a trail of drops on the wood behind me. I run through the fancy main salon, trip up the companionway steps to the top deck and run to the bow, the clump of hair slipping from the hook with each step until it dangles by just a couple of strands. As I reach the rail and pull my arm sharply back to toss it over the side, it spins off the end of the hanger and straight up into the air. I tilt my head back and watch it arc like some kind of wet, slimy bird, and as I’m busy thinking “Wow, that is really getting up there,” it comes down and splats squarely into my mouth.

The gasp of horror I utter as it lands sucks it deeper into my throat. The reek of dirty hair, mildew, piss, and stagnant water fills my nose. Gagging, I tear it away from my face and hurl it over the side, then throw myself against the railing and retch. A slick of brown vomit lands directly on top of the ball of hair, and they float and mingle on the glassy surface like a weird, disgusting creature.

“Passage going well?”

I straighten up, gasping, and turn to see Fetch, the ship's first mate, standing behind me, her wiry, well-muscled arms folded, shaved head cocked to one side. In the last rays of the sinking orange sun, her skin is a deep mahogany. I wipe my mouth, glaring at her. “Fine. Thanks.”

“Great. When you’re done eating hair and throwing up over the side, could you spare a minute to go and see the captain?”

She unfolds one hand from across her chest to casually adjust one of the many small silver hoops adorning her ears, at the same time revealing the knife she keeps sheathed across her chest. As her head tilts, I glimpse the tiny tattoo above her ear. 4242.

She bares her teeth in an imitation of a smile. “He wants a word.”

“When you’re done being a bitch and ruining everyone’s day could you spare a minute to flog off and die?” I stop myself from saying. Instead, I nod. I'm starting to tire of her constant intimidation. Still, I'm not really in a position to argue with her. As much as it irritates me, I just have to keep my head down and do what she says.

Fetch returns my nod with a smug smile, then turns briskly, pulling a scarlet slate from the pouch on her hip, and strides across the deck, her low-heeled work-boots clip-clopping. I watch her go, fighting the urge to burst into tears, or laughter, or both.

What a fantastic eighteenth birthday this is turning out to be.

chapter

two

SAVAGE BRACES his hands on the edge of the navigation table, his back to the room. He doesn’t look up as I trip down the companionway steps into the Kingfisher’s once swanky salon and cross to the nook where the navigation table is tucked.

Spread out on the desk in front of him are several large sheets of paper. In one of his hands—the one that has HOLD tattooed across the knuckles—is a thin, perfectly flat, perfectly rectangular piece of wood about twelve inches long. In the other—the one whose knuckles sport the word FAST—is a slender, yellow stick with one end sharpened to a fine point.

“You wanted to see me?”

“Mm.”

He doesn’t look up, absorbed in carefully laying the rectangle of wood down on a sheet of paper and placing the point of the yellow stick against one side. The dim light above picks out faint lines around his sharp, gray eyes and the few flecks of salt and pepper in his scruffy blonde hair and scraggly beard. I'm reminded that I've never been sure exactly how old he is. Fifteen or fifty or somewhere in between. My current guess is thirty, but some days he looks better than others.

He drags the point of the yellow stick along the long side of the wood, then sets both of them aside and straightens up.

“Come in, my friend.”

Friend.

One of the first things I ever saw Savage do was uppercut a man in the jaw with a butterfly knife. Less than ten minutes later, he'd killed two other men in the same way, and about an hour after that, he was calling me ‘friend’ and offering to escort Sargo and me across the Salt because he thought I was the daughter of the most powerful woman in the world.

He considers himself an ‘upstanding member of society,’ but he talks like a serpent and looks like a hobo, and I strongly suspect that the only thing truly motivating him is coin. There's a dangerous undercurrent always lurking just below his surface, which unsettles me, but unlike Fetch, he at least has a sense of humor and a good side. Since boarding the Kingfisher this time around, I’ve been marginally less afraid of him than I was when I first met him.

I take a step closer and indicate the desk. “What’s this?”

“Charts.”

“Charts?”

“Navigational charts. You’ve probably never used them.” He picks up the small yellow stick and holds it out for me to examine. “In fact, you’ve probably never seen a pencil before.”

The sharp end of the yellow stick has a slate-gray tip that looks like stone. He takes it back, places the gray tip on the corner of a sheet of paper, and makes a few quick, flicking motions with his hand. Words appear.

Jameson Briggs-Savage.

I frown. “Huh. Interesting."

He scoffs. “Inside your head is a biochip that gives you access to the entire database of human knowledge and you think a grown man writing his name with a pencil is ‘interesting’.”

Actually, inside my head is a broken shard of useless metal that hasn’t worked as a biochip since I blacked out in Alluvium Bay and woke up on a flog-forsaken, bird-infested shithole in the middle of the Salt. But Savage doesn’t know my chip is broken.

I take a step closer and squint at the charts. They’re as large as the desk, and covered in irregularly shaped splotches that look like spilled tea. A grid of crisscrossed lines runs across each page. Indecipherable symbols and mathematical calculations written in pencil fill the margins. Words, printed over the various tea stains in a curly script, jog vague memories of geography and history classes at Azimuth. New American West Coast. La Federación de Nuevo Centroamérica y México. New Pacific.

Halfway down the New West Coast, I spot Brume. My home. Tucked into the jagged new coastline of California like a tiny green jewel. Along the northern west coast of Nuevo Centroamérica is Alluvium. The line Savage just drew on the chart is part of a larger cross-section of pencil marks that tracks our progress from the bird island where the Kingfisher picked me up, back to Alluvium. Further south and to the east, near the Central American Strait, is Pocosín.

Savage bends again to write something at the end of the line he just drew. 07/07/2192. Today’s date.

“Have you ever seen a map before?” he asks.

“Of course. Everyone’s biochip has mapping capability.”

“I mean a real map.” He straightens up and taps the sheet of paper. “Not a glowing arrow in your head that shows you where to go.”

“No." I suppress an impatient sigh. “I guess I haven’t seen a real map.”

It's not the first time Savage has told me I haven’t seen a real this or a real that. When Sargo and I first met Savage and he offered the Kingfisher's services as an ‘escort’, he asked us what our plan was if we sailed into a storm. I told him we already had sailed into a storm. He told me that wasn’t a real storm. He was right.

“This map,” he says, “works offline. Without a chip. Thousands of miles from shore. No landmarks. No GPS. Just paper, pencil, and the stars.”

I nod wearily. “Cool.”

“It is cool, Alluvium.”

I wish everyone on the crew would stop calling me Alluvium. I’ve told them repeatedly to call me Electra, but they refuse. I guess it doesn’t really matter. As long as they don’t know my real name, I’m happy.

“What is it you wanted to see me about?” I say.

“I’m putting you on the headsail. Tonight, midnight to four.”

“Oh.” I raise my eyebrows in surprise. “Okay.”

Savage and his crew haven’t let me touch anything important since I boarded the ship. None of them seemed to keen to let me ‘help’ after they learned that the reason I wound up on the the flog-forsaken, bird-infested island was because I abandoned ship after Panga’s mainsail ripped in half and Sargo went overboard.

I fold my arms. “I thought you didn’t want me anywhere near your sails.”

“Nana is sick. We’re shorthanded. Fetch will be at the helm during your shift, Red will be handling the main sheet. Any problems, you do exactly—and I mean exactly—as Fetch says. Clear?”

I nod, hoping my face doesn’t show my displeasure. I’m not exactly champing at the bit to take more orders from Fetch. But I told myself when I came aboard the Kingfisher that I would use my time here as best I can. Learning how to trim the headsail properly will be good for me. Plus, if Fetch sees I can handle the sails, maybe she’ll stop putting me on head-cleaning duty every day.

“Will there even be any wind?”

He looks at me sharply, a glimmer of that dangerous undercurrent appearing just below the surface of his good humor. “Are you questioning me?”

“No, just…we’ve been sitting here for three days.”

“I’ve been watching the clouds.” He turns back to the desk. “Any other part of my authority you’d like to call into question?”

I shake my head. He picks up the pencil and bends over the charts again, and I take that to mean that the conversation is over.

Out on deck, the sun is setting, and the air is as still as it has been for three days. The surface of the Salt is as smooth as glass. I raise a hand to Red Bread, who sits in his usual spot up in the rigging, one lanky leg swinging gently with the motion of the boat. He returns my wave with a weary nod of his shaggy, ginger head. I don’t blame him for being tired. Three days in the doldrums have everyone pretty run-down.

We’re still over seven hundred miles from Alluvium. We should be there already. With good wind, Fetch told me, a boat of this size should be able to make that distance in three days of straight sailing. With no wind, though…who knows how long it could take. I asked her on day one why they don’t just turn on the motor. She gave me the condescending look she reserves for when I’ve asked a truly stupid question, and said, “We can’t afford the diesel.”

I cross the silent deck and head down the companionway to my berth to get some sleep before dinner so I can work midnight to four. When I open the door to my cabin, however, I’m disappointed to find Goliath sprawled across their bunk. Their large mouth hangs open and a ragged snore gurgles from their throat, the knife they had been cleaning dangling limply from one hand. The sound immediately sets me on edge. I close the door and head back up to the deck.

I haven’t slept well since boarding the Kingfisher. I struggle to sleep at the best of times, and shared living situations have never really worked for me. I find the noises that people make while they sleep and eat to be intolerable. Something about the relentless, rhythmic sounds of chewing and snoring fills me with the desire to smash faces into walls. Even Sargo’s. It doesn’t matter that his smile makes my heart trip. When he snores I still fantasize about drowning him in his sleep.

I head to the bow, where the spare spinnaker sail is kept on deck. I hollow out a nook for myself in the rough canvas sail bag and tuck myself into it to watch the sunset. This is the first time I’ve ever been out of sight of land, and the endless miles of Salt stretching in all directions unnerves me. When Sargo and I sailed from Brume to Alluvium, it was all south, along the coast. We could always see the shore, and we dropped anchor every night. According to Savage, it’s actually safer out here in the middle of nowhere. Out here, there’s no risk of running into submerged rocks or hitting an un-plotted point or other landmass. But it doesn’t feel safer. It feels eerie and disorienting. I can’t help but think about how many miles of inky black water are beneath me. How many miles of empty blue sky above.

How long would it take someone to find me if I went over the side?

"They would never find you."

Sargo's voice in my head. I wrap my arms around my knees and turn to face the other direction, but I can’t escape it.

It’s been ten days since he went overboard in Alluvium Bay and was picked up by the Anonymity. I have no idea where he might be. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find him when I get to Alluvium. I don’t know if he’s being held captive by Shale, or has been taken back to Brume, or killed…

I’m chewing my nails again. I pull my hand away from my mouth and tuck it into my pocket. Three days off that island and the nails that had started to grow back there are already chewed down to the quick. I'm falling back into all my old habits, just like I'm falling back into my old, anxious thought patterns.

I thought I'd finally kicked them: on the island, my mind was so focused on the immediate problem of surviving that it didn’t have time to wander; to ruminate and get anxious and twist itself into knots. Now, aboard the Kingfisher, I have off-hours. Time to think. Time to worry.

“Alluvium!”

Fetch’s sharp bark pulls me out of my thoughts. I squint over my shoulder to see her tiny, shaved-headed figure striding across the deck toward me, work boots clopping, trademark hip pouch bouncing with every furious step. She would be comical if I wasn’t so genuinely afraid of her. I’m fairly sure she's younger than me—fifteen, maybe?—but somehow, in spite of her small stature and young age, she has the crew completely in line. She’s the ship’s first mate—a tiny bundle of solid muscle, too handy with a knife for someone so young, with the eyes of someone who’s already seen way too much. Eyes that give me the feeling she’s itching for an opportunity to indoctrinate me to some of those same horrors. Fortunately, Savage seems to be holding her back.

She reaches the bow and stands with her hands on her hips, glaring down at me with black, murderous eyes, her smooth brown jaw ticking with indignation.

What now? I shade my face with my hand and return her glare.

“Captain says you’re on starboard jib tonight.”

“Uh huh.”

“You ever manage a sail on a crew like this?”

“No.”

“You gonna mess it up?”

“No.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

She shifts her weight from side to side and folds her arms. “I told the captain I don’t think you’re ready. To be honest, I’d rather run the crew shorthanded than with you.”

Ouch.

“But,” she exhales irritatedly through her nose, which is decorated with a ring linked to one of her earrings by a fine, silver chain, “he’s the captain. He seems to think you can handle it.”

“Are you coming to some kind of point here?” I ask.

She looks back at me sharply. “If I see you have more than one drink at dinner tonight, I’m calling you off duty.”

I frown in surprise.

“I’m watching you, Alluvium. I see you. Two drinks deeper than everyone else, every night. That shit won’t fly when you’re on duty. So if I see it, you’re done. For good. I’ll have you cleaning out the head round the clock til we reach Alluvium. Understand?”

I clench my jaw. “Yup.”

“Good.” She turns on her heel and strides back toward the cockpit. I turn back to the sunset just in time to catch the last rays sinking into the horizon.

I decide not to drink anything at all at dinner. It seems easier that way; easier not to get into it than to try and stop once I’ve started. “Once you're two sheets to the wind and losing the third," as Sargo's uncle Blenny would say.

There was a moment, on the island, where I truly thought I would never drink grog again. I was going on three days without water and it rained. The first rain I'd ever seen. The taste of it was like nothing I'd ever known, and I was so thirsty and so grateful that I couldn't imagine drinking anything but fresh, clean water for the rest of my life. I actually told myself that day that I would quit drinking grog for good.

That lasted about one day once I got on the Kingfisher. It’s easy to make grand claims about quitting drinking when you're stranded on a deserted island with no drink in sight.

I make it through dinner by keeping my eyes on my plate and ignoring the itch that surfaces in my limbs every time someone passes a jug of barley across my field of vision. After dinner I return to my cabin to find it empty. I manage to snatch a few hours of restless sleep and report to the cockpit at midnight to start my shift. Savage was right: the wind has come up. A warm breeze lifts my hair and pulls the damp shirt away from my skin.

“Okay, Alluvium,” barks Fetch, “which way is the wind coming from?”

I blink. I wasn’t expecting to be quizzed. I know this, though; I learned it in Sargo’s class at Azimuth. The orange cone of light from the half-full moon illuminates the Salt in sharp relief as I scan the water.

“There.” I point over the port side of the stern. “The waves are coming from over there. Waves follow wind.” I glance at the top of the mast, where a small light illuminates a wind vane. “And the wind vane is pointing that way too.”

“That’s right,” grumbles Fetch, obviously disappointed that I knew the answer. “So what’s the wind angle?”

I hesitate. I know I learned this too, but it’s been so long since I thought about it. Sargo always handled that stuff when we were sailing together. I chew the inside of my cheek, feeling Fetch’s eyes on me. Heat rises in my face.

“I don’t know.”

Fetch sighs loudly. “To me—” she turns to face the stern and puts her hands on her hips, “—looks like about one hundred forty degrees. One-eighty is right behind us and this looks about forty degrees off from that. Right? Pretty easy?”

I nod, scowling. She doesn’t need to be snarky about it.

“Okay. So if the wind’s coming from one-forty to port, what tack will we be on?”

I glare at her and shrug. Again, this was always Sargo’s thing. I just did what he told me.

“Broad reach,” she says shortly. “Sails on the starboard side.” She looks at me pointedly. “You know what a broad reach is?”

I give her a look that clearly says, “You know I don’t, so stop rubbing it in.”

“Broad reach means the sails are way out over the water instead of pulled in close to the boat. We’re sailing downwind, so the sails act like parachutes to push us forward, instead of acting as a wing like they do upwind. Make sense?”

I nod, even though I’ve never really understood how a wing works. Something about air moving more quickly over one side than the other? Whenever anyone tries to explain it to me, I always get the feeling they don’t really understand it either.

Fetch claps her hands once and hops behind the helm, taking the wheel. “Okay crew. Let’s raise the sails.”

____________________

The next seven days go by in a blur. With Nana sick, I’m called for four hours of sail duty every eight hours, whether there's wind or not. The wind is inconsistent and we make slow progress, but the Salt is so unpredictable that I'm required to always be ready to manage the sail if it picks up during my shift. When I’m not on sail duty, I have six hours of off-time to sleep, and the rest of the time is filled with other chores.

As I start to get the hang of trimming the sails, Fetch starts giving me other odd jobs. She does so begrudgingly and I suspect it's at Savage’s prompting, but that’s fine with me. No longer am I scrubbing the galley or cleaning out the heads every day in the nauseating heat. I learn from Goliath how to epoxy a hole in the fiberglass. Red Bread shows me how to splice rope and make a soft shackle. I help Sterling, the diminutive, russet-skinned bald man who seems to be the ship’s master of coin, catalog and inventory weapons from their latest haul. Even Fid, the ship’s youngest crew member, is able to teach me something. His skinny brown fingers tie the quickest knots I’ve ever seen.

On the morning of my third day, Savage calls me into his cabin.

“Fetch says you’re getting the hang of things,” he says.

I’m surprised that Fetch would say anything positive about me, but I keep my expression neutral. “Does she?”

He surveys me, hands behind his head, feet crossed, as ever, up on the corner of the desk. “I’m going to teach you how to read the charts.”

“Oh—okay.” My brow furrows.

“If you’re going to be working proper shifts on my crew, you need to know how to do it. Otherwise, you’re a liability.”

“Okay.”

“What time do your off-hours start today?”

“1400.”

“Be here at 1405. I can teach you most of what you’ll need to know in a couple of afternoons. It’ll be your responsibility to study it and remember it.”

I nod nervously. Studying and remembering things are not exactly in my wheelhouse. Savage must clock my trepidation, because he says, "You’re smart. You’ll get it.”

My face flushes. It's the first remotely kind thing Savage has ever said to me. I nod again, a strange feeling stirring in my chest. A desire to prove him right, I guess. And—to earn his respect, maybe? Why? He's a filthy murderer who's only after my coin.

I swallow and say, “I guess we’ll see about that.”

He chuckles. “I guess we will.”

Fetch assigns me to plastic watch that morning, which means I get to sit in a hammock high up in the ship’s rigging, scanning the Salt for plasticbergs.

"But plastic was outlawed," I counter. "Nothing's been made from plastic for over a hundred years."

"This stuff is older than that," she says. "It doesn't go away. Currents carry it all together. Individual pieces becomes chunks large enough to put a hole in us. If we hit one, it will sink us. So don't screw this up."

Fetch makes me do a run down of all the boat’s systems when I come on watch that night, like she always does. She glowers at me from the helm while I check every winch and line, and take readings of all the navigational equipment. I write everything down—in pencil!—in the ship’s log at the beginning and end of the watch. I'm finally starting to understand what all the mysterious instruments in the cockpit are. It strikes me that in all the time I was sailing with Sargo, he never tried to teach me how to read them. Or maybe I just never tried to learn.

By the fifth day, I begin to feel more comfortable with the crew. Well, everyone except Fetch, who remains distant and cold. I start to feel like I can pull my weight. I make little jokes with Fid and pick up a few phrases in Sign from Red. I even get fewer reproachful glares from Goliath.

Savage and I meet in his cabin every afternoon when I go off-duty. I sit in the chair by his desk while he pulls out enormous paper charts and lays them in front of me, pointing out what each spot of the land is, explaining the symbols, showing me the calculations. I struggle to keep up, frantically writing everything down in pencil in something called a notebook, which he gave me.

The lessons ease a degree of the tension between Savage and me. He's sharp—impressively so—and seems to genuinely want me to succeed in understanding this stuff. I imagine it serves his interests—he can't have someone working his boat who doesn't know what they're doing—but I also feel a mutual understanding begin to form between us. He doesn’t seem to mind me asking questions, even about things unrelated to navigation, and mostly, he gives me straight answers. Once or twice, he even laughs at my jokes.

Every night, I emerge, my head spinning, and spend my free hours between dinner and midnight pouring over the notes, trying to make them stick in my head. Savage, as it turns out, was right. I do understand it.

On the evening of the seventh day, as the orange disk of the sun hovers over the steely gray horizon, I spot land.

I’m on plastic watch, swinging in the hammock chair at the top of the mast, my eyes heavy with the motion of the swell, my skin sticky with the lazy heat of the afternoon. A faint smudge appears the horizon, insubstantial; a mirage. I blink and it disappears. I struggle to sit up, thinking I must be dreaming. But when I rub my eyes and look again, it’s unmistakable.

“Land,” I croak, half to myself, half aloud.

“What’s that?” Sterling’s reedy voice floats up between my feet. I look down to see him swinging from the mast in a harness about ten feet below me, an electric drill in one hand and a bucket of screws tied to a loop at his waist, sweat beading all over his shiny, ruddy head.

“Land!” I say, more loudly. “Look!”

“So it is.” He squints at it over his spex, not seeming to share my excitement. I suppose for him, this sort of thing must happen all the time. “Well,” he turns his attention back to whatever he was fixing on the mast, “you spotted it. Call it out.”

“Call it out?”

“Let the crew know you saw it. And by the way, we call it Turf. Only Turf Rats call it ‘land’.”

Fid is the only crew member who seems to share my excitement about reaching Turf. At the sound of my holler from the top of the mast, he clambers enthusiastically out of a hatch in the deck, his skinny legs and too-big feet tripping over each other as he runs to the bow and hangs over the rail.

We're still a long way out, and it's over an hour before the rest of the crew does anything to indicate they’ve heard my announcement. They slowly filter onto the deck, falling into what look like well-practiced routines. There is no sense of urgency, no need to panic. I let myself down from the lookout spot and hover anxiously, not knowing what to do, until Fetch barks at me to help Goliath put out the dock lines.

Savage appears from his cabin to take the helm, and I note with some alarm that he looks frail and tired. He hunches over the wheel, dull-eyed, with sallow skin and big, hollow shadows in his cheeks. His eyes are obscured by the same pair of darx he wore the day he took us to Reckoner’s Row. That was also the last time I saw him looking like this. It looks like the world's worst hangover. I see a flicker of resentment from Fetch as she cedes the helm to him, and note the trembling in his fingers as he wraps them around the wheel.

Dusk has fallen by the time the crazy, mismatched skyline of Alluvium hoves into view. A spectrum of multicolored lights illuminates the city and reflects off the water as the crew drops the sails and we glide into the large, unprotected bay. Surf crashes on the shore. Savage steers us into the channel mouth that takes us up into the estuary where the protected inland harbor is. We glide up the glassy, narrow river and onto a wide lake covered in docks.

I strain my eyes in the fading light, trying to make out the details of the boats that we pass, my stomach churning with the idea that Sargo could be close, could be on one of those boats. It’s too dark to see anything properly though, and I resign myself to the fact that the earliest I’ll be able to start looking for him is tomorrow morning.

We slow alongside a pier with just one other boat—a large catamaran—docked at the far end. Goliath, Sterling, Fetch, and Red hop over the rail with lines in their hands, landing heavily on the wooden planks.

“Alluvium!” barks Fetch. “Where are you? Get out here!”

Startling into action, I jump over the rail onto the dock, turning just in time to catch the line thrown to me by Fid.

“Easy!” cries Fetch. She, Red, and Goliath plant their feet against cleats on the dock and lean back on the Kingfisher’s thick dock lines to slow the boat’s forward momentum. Sterling runs along the side of the boat, making sure the ship’s massive fenders are correctly placed between the hull and the dock.

I mimic Goliath, wedging my feet against a dock cleat and leaning back on the line with all my weight. The rope burns in my hands as I grit my teeth and pull. I’ve never tried to maneuver a boat this large in my life. The Kingfisher dwarfs Panga’s length by almost a hundred feet. It seems impossible to me that five people will be able to stop a hundred-foot, hundred-ton sailboat, but somehow, miraculously, the Kingfisher’s royal blue hull glides gracefully to a halt, the tip of her bow inches from the catamaran’s stern.

I watch as Goliath slips her line under the cleat beneath her feet and pulls directly up on the end of it, using the leverage to pull the boat closer to the dock. I do the same, then copy her as she kneels to tie off her line. For the first time in my life, I tie a cleat hitch the right way on my first try. I stand, brushing dust from my knees and allow myself a smile.

“Nice job, crew.” Fetch turns briskly, climbs back onto the deck, and disappears into the cockpit.

The sudden stillness of the dock after a week of constant motion on the boat makes me lightheaded, and exhaustion overwhelms me like a tidal wave. My hands limp at my sides, I stare, unseeing, at the lights of the city glinting off the water. I tilt my chin up and look up at the rosy slice of the moon, rendered even redder than usual by the light pollution from the city. Early evening stars are just starting to prick holes in the hazy sky. I breathe.

I made it.

chapter

three

“ALLUVIUM!” Fetch’s bark jolts me back to myself. “Captain wants to see you.”

My stomach turns. The thought that I managed to keep at bay with the relentless business of the last five days comes barreling back.

Shale. Savage is going to hand you over to Shale.

I can't let him contact Shale. My plan was to run for it as soon as we made port. I glance around, my heart beginning to beat fast; apart from a few oyster farmers hauling in their evening catch, the docks are empty. So much for disappearing into the crowd.

A weight lands on my shoulder and I turn to find Goliath towering over me. They shake their head, as if reading my thoughts.

“No run. You pay.”

A feeling of dread settles in my stomach like a stone. Goliath’s massive hand steers me back to the Kingfisher’s boarding steps and pushes me up over the side onto the deck. Glancing back, I see them fold their arms and position themselves across the width of the dock, blocking my escape.

Fid is coiling lines, Sterling and Red flake the mainsail into its bag, and Fetch records data from the cockpit instruments into the ship’s log book as I traipse to the cockpit. Savage has disappeared, I assume to the navigation table to mark our last step of progress on the chart. I climb past Fetch and walk heavily down the companionway.

Don't panic, I tell myself. He likes you now, remember? Maybe you can come to some kind of arrangement.

Savage slumps over the table, his head propped in one hand. As he hears my steps he looks up with clouded eyes. He doesn’t bother with pleasantries. His voice is thin.

“Until we make contact with your brother and receive the coin, you’ll remain on the Kingfisher.”

“What do you mean ‘remain’?”

“Goliath will watch you. It’s the only way I can be sure you won’t do something stupid.”

My pulse ticks up. “So I’m a prisoner?”

He waves a tired hand. “A tenured guest.”

“You can’t—”

“What did you think I was going to do? Pat you on the head and send you on your way? I don’t think so, Alluvium.”

My face burns. All those afternoons spent teaching me how to navigate—I was—

You were starting to like him.

I was starting to think we were building some kind of rapport. That’s all. I glare at the side of his scruffy blonde head.

“It won’t be more than a few days,” he says, his eyes still on the chart. “You’ll keep your berth. You’ll get meals with the crew. I think that’s more than fair. Enjoy it. I doubt you’ll find a better deal. In fact, I think Sterling is planning a little arrival party tonight. You can finally have that drink you’ve been pretending you didn’t need all week.”

His eyes catch mine and the air goes out of the room. How did he know that?

“I don’t need—”

He waves a frail hand again and turns his attention back to the chart. “Believe me, I understand.”

I climb back out into the cockpit, my heart racing. There’s no way I can just sit here and wait for them to hand me over to Shale and the Anonymity. Goliath is still on the dock, casually coiling a line, still planted firmly between me and freedom. They wink.

How am I going to get off this boat?

“Alluvium!” Fetch again. I whirl around, startled out of my thoughts. She smirks. “Plotting your escape?” She tucks her slate into the pouch slung around her hips. “You’re not shot of us yet. Get up to the bow and help Red and Sterling with the mainsail.”

I gape. “My brother is paying for my passage, you’ve taken me prisoner, and you still want me to work?”

“If you’d prefer, we could tie you up in the brig.”

I glare at her. What’s the point in arguing? I’m not going to be able to escape right now, with the whole crew above deck and all eyes on me. And being tied up in the brig certainly won’t help. Better to play along for now. Keep a low profile and wait for an opportunity, as Sargo would say. I set my mouth into a hard line and climb onto the bow.

It takes over an hour for us to get the boat cleaned up and everything stowed after the passage. By the time the last line has been coiled and the deck has been rinsed with freshwater, the sky is deep purple and scattered with stars. The crew retires to the galley, where Fetch has prepared dinner and poured three enormous brown jugs of barley.

Goliath sits next to me and produces a tiny silver flask from an inside pocket. To my surprise, they offer it to me.

“Don’t look sad. Is no bad.”

I squint sideways at them, taking the flask. “Oh no? I’m imprisoned. How is that not bad?”

Goliath shrugs. “You have food. Have drink. Nice bunk. Is good.”

“I’m a prisoner. I’m your prisoner.”

“Nah.” They scrunch up their face. “You guest.”

“Sure.”

I unscrew the cap of the flask and slug down a big gulp of grog, welcoming the burn in the center of my chest. Goliath and I pass the flask a few times and a familiar, heavy weightlessness settles in my limbs. I let my head rest on the wall behind me.

How long has it been since I had grog?

I have to think hard to answer that. I've drunk the fizzy, pale barley from the brown jugs at dinner, but the last time I had grog was long before this passage. Before the island. In fact, I realize, the last time I had grog was with Goliath. Almost a month ago, when Sargo and I had dinner on this boat after they rescued us from the Valkyrie. Sargo and I had an argument. He stormed off and took the skiff back to Panga. I stayed here and got drunk with Goliath and Red. Then I blipped.

Blipped. Another thing I haven't thought about in a long time. It hasn't happened since I blacked out in Alluvium Bay and woke up on the island.

Until I heard Shale’s insane theory about Zenith and the experimental tech they put in our biochips, I thought the blips were just blackouts. I figured I was just getting too drunk, doing a bunch of stuff I don’t remember, and waking up wherever I happened to end up. Then Shale said the word teleportation. Now I don’t know what to think.

Savage sidles through the swinging galley doors as I hand the flask back to Goliath. Something is different. His eyes are bright and clear; his skin has lost the sallow, gray color. He squeezes past Red and sits next to Fetch, crossing his steel-toed boots up on the edge of the table and producing a flask from his inside pocket. Fetch mutters something, and he laughs, throwing his head back, revealing the gap in his teeth. I’m so taken aback by the change in his appearance and demeanor that it isn’t until he catches my eye and cocks a brow that I realize I’m staring at him.

I turn away and down another swig from Goliath’s flask. My face is getting warm. It’s probably time I took myself to the head. I stand, maneuver around Fid and slip out into the cool, dark hallway. As I make my way toward the other end, the murmur of voices behind me fades and I feel a moment of blissful, isolated calm.

I don’t bother turning on the light in the head. I close my eyes and let my chin rest in my hands as I sit on the tiny toilet. For a long time after I finish, I just sit there.

Goliath’s silhouette emerges from the shadows as I duck back out into the corridor. “Long time. You fall in?”

“You can’t even let me take a piss in peace?”

“Captain tell me to watch you. So I watch.”

“You wanna come in with me next time? Get a good look?”

We stand face to face in the dark. I’m acutely aware of the narrowness of the space, the way the walls squeeze in around us. There’s no way to get around them.

“Can I go back to the party now, please?” I say, icily. Goliath turns sideways to make space for me to pass and sweeps their arm in the direction of the galley.

“Of course. You no prisoner.”

When I get back to the galley, Fid has already gone to bed. Fetch sits alone at the far end of the table, pouring over something on her slate. Savage, Red, and Sterling are making their way out. We meet in the doorway. Red signs over my shoulder to Goliath, who puts a heavy hand on me.

“He say we go up.”

“What?”

“We go up. To deck. Finish party there.”

I narrow my eyes over Red’s shoulder at Savage, standing behind him. “What if I don’t want to go up? What if I want to go to bed?”

Goliath’s voice in my ear is stern. “We go up.”

Red steps around me and through the door. I fall in behind him, and we traipse through the Kingfisher’s fine interior up to the deck. The night is warm, the air close and still. The faint jangle of music and the scent of grilled meat wafts across the docks. It must be a weekend.

Sterling flips on a few of the deck lights and settles himself into a small hammock strung across the stern. Savage kicks off his boots and lays along one of the cockpit’s long bench seats with one hand behind his head. He pulls a dart from his pocket, clicks it on, and takes a drag, releasing a plume of fruity smoke into the air. Goliath sits across from Savage, and Red lays his head in Goliath’s lap, stretching onto his back and closing his eyes. I stand at the top of the companionway.

“Sit,” says Savage. “You’re making me nervous.”

"I'm not a dog," I shoot back.

"Okay." He uncrosses and recrosses his legs. “Sit, please.”

I glare at him and perch on the end of the bench by his bare feet. On the sole of each foot is tattooed a large, black X. On the top of his left foot is a colorful rooster. On the top of the other, a shiny, pink pig. He sits up on one elbow, dragging on the dart again, then exhales another plume of smoke and holds it out to me. I raise my eyebrows warily.

“What’s in it?”

“Nothing that will kill you. Well…nothing that will kill you immediately.”

The dart is surprisingly heavy, the polished metal warm where Savage was holding it. Putting it to my lips, I click the button on the side and inhale. A fruity, ashy flavor fills my mouth. It hits the back of my throat like a blast of ice and I double over, choking.

When I finally catch my breath enough to stop coughing and straighten up, Savage is crying with laughter. “Okay, my friend?”

“I’m not your friend.” I shove the dart back at him. “I’m your prisoner.”

“Guest,” says Goliath from across the cockpit.

Savage’s brow twists in mock hurt. “Who ever said being a prisoner had to be bad?”

“The people who invented prison, I assume? I don't recall ever hearing that it was intended to be fun."

He shrugs. "What's not to like? Nice bunk, free food. I can't understand why you'd rather be out there, cold and starving."

“I have shit to do.”

“What shit?” Goliath says.

Find Malarkey. Rescue Sargo. Don't get caught by Shale and dragged into his insane terrorist plot.

I avoid their eyes. “None of your business.”

“That’s fair,” Savage says. “We're not here to pry. We just want our coin.”

He drags on the dart and holds it out to me again. The blast of thick smoke in the back of my throat is less harsh this time, and the flavor is sweeter. Pineapple. It’s not unpleasant. I hold the breath in my chest, and when I exhale, the cool rush of it leaving my lungs makes my head spin.

Savage takes the dart back and lays down again, crossing his ankles. “Fetch will make contact with your brother tomorrow.”

My stomach lurches. Tomorrow. I have until tomorrow to figure out a way off this boat. With my biochip broken, I can’t even send a message for help. Not that I have anyone to send a message to anyway. Goliath reaches across the cockpit to hand me their flask. Gratefully, I take it and swallow a large gulp.

“Easy,” says Savage, “that stuff doesn’t grow on trees.”

“You live on the Salt," I say, wiping my mouth. "What do you know about trees?”

He arches an eyebrow. “I know they’re the best cure for seasickness. You ever feel seasick, go and sit under a tree. Clears it right up.”

I stare at him.

“Come on, that was a good joke.” He pulls his own flask out of an inside pocket.

"It was a dad joke."

“A dad joke?" His face twists with horror. From the stern, I hear Sterling’s raspy chuckle.

“She right,” says Goliath. “Is terrible joke.”

Savage shakes his head. “Mutiny.”

I narrow my eyes at him. Once again, I don’t know whether to be put at ease or unsettled by his joviality. I assume he’s just in a good mood because he thinks he’s getting his coin from Shale tomorrow. Or maybe it’s just the grog. Either way, it feels as though the line that separates me from the rest of his crew is blurring. And why not? After all, haven't I been working shifts all week, just like them? Haven’t I been sitting watches, doing sail changes? Learning the charts?

And if he is feeling jovial—or even generous—then perhaps there’s a chance I can convince him not to hand me over to Shale tomorrow. Perhaps I can even convince him to let me go. I decide to put another toe across that line between Savage’s crew and I. Taking another swig, I hand the flask back to Goliath and fix Savage with a wobbly sideways look.

“What about your business in Alluvium? I guess there’s no way you’d ever tell me that?”

He puts an arm behind his head and looks down his nose at me. The collar of his shirt falls open, revealing a scraggle of gold hair and the edge of another tattoo. “You don’t want to know what kind of business I’m into.”

I roll my eyes. “Oh yeah? When we met, you told me you were an upstanding member of society.”

“Mostly,” he says.

Keeping my eyes on his, I inch my toe a little further over the line. “So what upstanding things do you have scheduled to do in Alluvium? Rescuing orphans? Feeding the hungry?”

“He teach.”

I turn to Goliath in surprise. “What?”

They nod at Savage. “He teach. How to read stars.”

“Is that true?”

“Dammit to Jones, Goliath,” Savage mutters, “what part of ‘we don’t share our business’ do you not understand?”

Goliath shrugs. “Is language barrier.”

Savage glares at them. “We don’t share our business outside the crew.”

Goliath waves an unconcerned hand. “She crew.”

Bingo. My pulse ticks up. I’m over the line—at least, as far as Goliath is concerned. I push a little further. “So you’re a teacher?”

He shrugs, and I catch a glimpse of something like embarrassment. Humility? Pride maybe? A small smile; a shrinking from the attention. It’s disarming: I’m used to ostentatious speeches and intimidation. He drops his gaze and uncaps his flask.

“I help out a few Reckoner kids. Navigation stuff.”

“Like you taught me?”

He shakes his head. “That was coastal navigation. This is celestial navigation. Stars. For navigating open water. Out in the middle of the Salt, where there’s no landmarks, you have to use stars to triangulate your position. And other stuff in the sky. The sun. Moon. Planets. Celestial bodies.”

“You can figure out where you are just by looking at the stars?” I try not to let on that I’m actually impressed. “How come you didn’t teach me that? That’s way cooler than what I learned.”

“It’s complicated. And frankly, I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

I feel slightly stung. “I’m interested.”

His eyes meet mine, and a rush of electricity passes between us. Something in the air between us changes. He regards me carefully, and I shift my gaze away from the intense keenness of his eyes, feeling exposed, feeling suddenly as though I may have stepped too far over that line.

I shrug. “I guess I do think it’s cool.”

A smirk twitches up one corner of his mouth. “Well, I could teach you. But I don’t let just anybody touch my sextant.”

“Excuse me?”

“My sextant. It’s a very delicate tool.” He grins.

The world tilts and squeezes as my grog-sloshy brain trips over what just happened. Did he just use a pickup line on me? A really, really terrible pickup line?

No. That would be insane. Wouldn’t it?

“I know what a sextant is,” I shoot back, feeling flustered and trying to cover it.

“Oh?” He looks genuinely surprised. “You know what a sextant is but you’ve never seen a pencil?”

I actually don’t know what a sextant is, but I’ve heard guys use that joke on girls at the harbor in Brume. I know it’s some kind of navigation instrument that has the word “sex” in its name, and for that reason, scumbags and twelve-year-olds think it’s hilarious to say it to girls.

I fix him with what I hope is a knowing look. “I’m full of surprises.”

He keeps his eyes on my face. “Okay. But do you know how to use one?”

I shake my head. Flicking his eyes away, he drags on the dart, then holds it out to me again. As I take it, the blackened tips of his fingers brush mine. My skin prickles. He exhales a plume of sweet smoke and flicks his eyes back to mine.

“Want to learn?”

A rush of heat surges between us again. At this point, the line is a faintly receding mark. I’m so far across it now I’m not sure if I can go back. Nervous anticipation buzzes just below the surface of my skin.

"Now?" I say.

"Why not?"

He’s looking at me properly now, with sharp, calculating eyes. A unique and not unattractive shade of steely gray. The flecks of salt and pepper in his beard remind me that I still have no idea how old he is—thirty? Older?—but in the warm light of the cockpit, no one would deny that he’s handsome. For a murderous scumbag.

He unfolds himself from the bench, stands, and ducks through the cockpit into the companionway, motioning for me to follow.

I pause, my pulse quickening, the dart still in my hand.

What are you doing, Bird?

I’m testing the waters.

You’re flirting with him.

Maybe I can convince him to ease up on the whole ‘keeping me prisoner’ thing. Maybe I can trick him into letting me go.

You’re drunk.

I’m not drunk. I’m tipsy.

“Where going?” Goliath’s voice from the corner of the cockpit is harsh as I stand.

“Relax.” Savage sticks his head back through the companionway. “I’ll keep my eye on her.” He winks at me and disappears. Steeling myself with a breath, I follow him.

As I descend the few steps into the salon, he leans against the navigation table, watching me. I reach the bottom and pause, not sure what to do next. His eyes narrow, as though he’s enjoying watching me flounder. I flick my hair off my shoulder, feigning confidence, as if that move is something I’ve ever done before, and say, “So, where is it then?”

“What?”

“Your sextant.”

He smirks, picks up a leather case from the table and removes from it a small brass triangle. Several small mirrors line one side, and the base of it is curved. A long, articulating arm runs from the point to the center of the base. He adjusts the arm while he holds the instrument’s small lens up to one eye. Then he hands it to me.

I put my eye to the lens. The room is a jumble in it.

“I don’t get it,” I murmur. “What am I looking at?”

“Well, really you should be looking at the sky,” he says. He takes it back and steps around me, touching my arm as he does. “Come on.”

He crosses the salon. At the bottom of the stairs, instead of turning toward the crew quarters, he turns the other way, toward the bow. I follow him along the narrow corridor until we reach the v-berth, the small sleeping quarters at the very front of the bow, which the crew has turned into a weapons storage room. He opens a hatch in the ceiling above his head, then hands me the sextant while he jumps, grabs hold of the edges of the hatch, and pulls himself through. His shirt rises enough to give me a view of the trail of blonde hair below his belly button disappearing through the hatch.

His face pops back through. “Coming?”

I step under the hatch and look up. Behind Savage, a few of the brightest stars and planets try valiantly to shine through the murky sky. He sticks his hand down to me. I hold out the sextant, but he shakes his head.

“Give me your hand.”

He lifts me off my feet and pulls me through the hatch, one hand in mine, the other gripping my forearm.

“Now try it,” he says, setting me on my feet. “Find the moon.”

I hold the sextant up, close one eye and look through the lens, strafing through the sky until I find the moon—a tiny, bright-red half-disk reflected in the lens’ mirror.

Suddenly, his hand is on mine. He moves closer, putting his other hand on my shoulder and letting his chest settle against my back. The sweet, ashy scent of his pineapple dart smoke envelopes me like a poisonous wreath. He brings his face so close I can feel whiskers of his beard on my cheek, smell the spice of grog on his breath.

“Got it?” he says.

I nod, trembling.

“Now, you bring the moon down to the horizon.” Using his hand to guide mine, he adjusts the sextant’s arm, and the moon’s reflection in the tiny mirror moves. He moves the arm until the angle of the mirror makes it look like the moon is sitting right on the horizon, like a pale red marble on the edge of a table.

“That’s step one,” he says.

“What’s step two?” I whisper.

“Math.”

I laugh out loud and lower the sextant. “Math?”

“Yup.”

“Well that’s a shame, because I’ve never been very good at math.” I hand the sextant back to him.

He squints at me. “I bet you could do it.”

I’m aware that his hand is still on my shoulder, and it suddenly feels very heavy. I swallow. “I think I’ll stick with the arrow in my head that tells me where to go.”

“Suit yourself. But you’ll be sorry one day when you’re stuck in the middle of the Salt with no chip to save you.”

“What makes you think I’d be stupid enough to get myself stuck in the middle of the Salt with no chip to save me?”

He frowns, his eyes slowly finding their way around my face. “I don’t think you’re stupid, Alluvium,” he says, in a surprisingly thoughtful voice. “Just a bit…reckless.”

The word catches me. Reckless. Sargo used to say that. A wave of nausea hits me like a brick wall and I press the backs of my hands to my cheeks to counteract the heat of the grog rising to my face. Or is it the closeness of his body that’s making me warm? The scent of him is suddenly overwhelming. I take a step back, disengaging his hand from my shoulder.

“I need to use the head.”

Without waiting for a reply I stumble across the deck and swing myself back through the hatch. The head at the end of the corridor is mercifully cool and dark. Leaning on the sink, I glare at my face in the mirror on the wall. It slips and blurs, duplicates and phases.

“For flog’s sake,” I tell myself, “he’s missing teeth.”

He’s missing one tooth, my self counters.

He’s at least ten years older than me. He’s holding me prisoner. I watched him kill a man—three men, actually.

What the hell am I thinking?

You’re thinking that this might be your only way off this boat. And you’re also thinking that he’s actually kind of cute, and that maybe this could be…fun.

I shut my eyes. I do not think he’s cute. Do I? What…all he had to do was teach me to navigate and tell a few terrible jokes and suddenly I have a thing for him?

No, I realize, all he had to do was believe I was capable of something, and then help me to see that he was right.

Okay, so there’s clearly more to him than I thought. Something…if not intriguing, then at least compelling. And he does have a certain…unexpected charm, scumbag pickup lines aside.

What about Sargo?

A bolt of remorse goes through me, but I open my eyes and glare at my woozy reflection in the mirror again, pushing it away. It’s not as if Sargo and I are together. Besides, if this works, and Savage lets me go, I’ll be one step closer to finding him.

His spare silhouette leans against the wall in the corridor just outside, half hidden in shadow. As I step out of the head he produces the flask again and holds it out without looking at me. I take it and lean against the wall next to him, letting my shoulder touch his, unscrewing the cap of the flask and taking a sip.

“Following me?”

“Just making sure you don’t do something…reckless.” He steps away from the wall, turning to me, offers a hand, and says quietly, “What’s your real name?”

I hesitate. His keen gray eyes seem to skewer me to the wall and the sweet, smoky scent of ash and grog and pineapple makes the already tilting world go even further sideways.

I step away from the wall and take his hand.

“It’s Bird.”

chapter

four

“NINETY NINE, A HUNDRED!”

Bird opened her eyes. The angry, red sun of Naze blazed into them from its squat upon the horizon. This would be the last game—once the sun went down they would have to stop. She wouldn’t have much time to find them.

“Ready or not, here I come!”

Bird uncrossed her legs and stood, brushing red dust from her skinny legs. Sweat made the dust smear in long, pinkish swatches on her shins and calves. Her body was sticky with a film of three-day-old grime. The dirt would not brush off. She briefly considered stepping into the creek to wash it off, but knew that she would be wasting valuable playing time. Besides, the water in the creek was probably dirtier than she was. Better to wait until tonight, when Mama K would make brackish and she could bathe in that.

The anemic saltnut tree she stood under dappled spots and long shadows onto her skin. She poked her head around the trunk and peered up into the branches. Last time they played, she remembered, Shale had hidden up there. She had spent hours searching for him under the huts around the veg patch. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Of course, this time, he wasn’t there. Silly, thought Bird. He wouldn’t hide there twice. She trotted along the perimeter, turning back edges of heavy canvas at the bottoms of tents, getting down on hands and knees to peer under huts and behind the great, knobby wheels of abandoned electric vehicles. The sun inched below the horizon. The shadows grew longer.

Hunger began to growl in Bird’s belly. It was nearly time for last meal. Nearly time for the game to end. Tomorrow, she and Shale would leave on the Zenith transport to Brume. It was Shale who had suggested they all play one last game together.

She squeezed herself between the planks of a lean-to with a corrugated tin roof at the edge of the settlement and stepped across the perimeter to Outside. She was determined to find at least one of them before the sun went down. Maybe Fife would be an easier target. Bird knew where Fife usually liked to hide.

Bird ran on skinny, filthy legs around the outside of the perimeter toward the veg patch. Fife loved the veg patch. Bird didn’t really understand why—tending veg was nowhere near as fun as hunting jackrats—but she knew that Fife took any chance she got to go and sit amongst the spindly green stalks of veg as they bravely pushed through the hard, red earth and struggled to survive. Hide-and-seek, Bird had been noticing, had recently become less a game for Fife, and more a chance to sneak away to the veg patch. Bird usually found her there.

Bird thought it must be because Fife was older. Fife was eleven now. Three years older than Bird. Even Bird knew that their ages were too different to stay friends for much longer. When they were younger, it hadn’t mattered so much. But Bird had started to notice the changes. Fife didn’t seem so interested in hunting jackrats or playing hide and seek anymore.

Bird came to the chain link fence that signaled the start of the veg patch. Just after the first fence post, there was a gap big enough for her tiny body to fit through. A broken link caught her shirt as she squeezed between the post and the jagged edges of the raw chain link.

She crouched behind a trellis with some limp tomato vines trailing pathetically up one side and, staying low, ran toward the plywood lean-to with the corrugated tin roof that served as a garden shed. She had found Fife here once before.

As Bird came close to the shed she slowed, quieting her steps. She liked to sneak up on Fife when she caught her, to see if she could scare her. She liked to scare Shale when she found him, too, but he was almost fourteen and much more difficult to catch unaware. Bird crouched by the entrance to the shed, grinning to herself. She could hear movement inside. She waited until she was sure she hadn’t been heard, then sprang around the corner, throwing open the door.

“Found y—”

Bird’s face froze. Fife was there. And so was Shale. Shale held Fife’s hands in his, and they were kissing. At the sound of Bird’s triumphant shout, Fife pulled away and turned wide, startled eyes to her.

“Bird!”

Shale dropped Fife’s hands as though they had burned him and seemed to scramble away from her, his face red.

“Birdie, we didn’t—”

But Bird couldn’t hear him. The blood pounded in her ears as she turned on numb, stumbling legs and ran.

chapter

five

MY EYES STRUGGLE OPEN.

I try to stop them. I can already tell I’m about to feel as rough as the inside of a jackrat’s asshole. Opening my eyes is about the last thing I want to do.

Mercifully, the light that crawls into them is dim. I glimpse an unfamiliar ceiling. The air is cool on my flushed, sticky skin. Groaning, I sit up and dig the heels of my hands into my pounding temples. I take a deep breath. I look around.

I’m in a bed. Not my bunk; a proper bed. The sheets smell faintly of smoke and something sweet. The room is unfamiliar. It’s narrow, oddly shaped, and rocking almost imperceptibly, so it’s obviously a ship’s cabin, but I don’t recognize it. The walls are made of fine, dark wood, and lined with shelves of trinkets. Set high into the wall to my left are two portholes, covered with thick cloth to shut out the light.

I turn back the blanket and swing my feet onto the floor, noting with a flicker of alarm that, although I'm wearing the same shirt I've been wearing for three days, my leggings are gone. I frown, glancing around the room, and spot them hung over the back of a chair bolted to the floor in front of a desk. I lurch to them and pull them on, blinking sleep from my eyes.

They're damp. Why are they damp?

I move aside some sheets of paper on the desk. Charts. A few small words, scrawled in pencil in a corner of one chart, catch my eye.

Jameson Briggs-Savage.

This is Savage’s cabin.

My legs turn to water and I sit down heavily in the chair. Why am I waking up in Savage’s cabin?

Bits and pieces of the previous night appear in my head like the shadows cast by a flickering flame: the feel of his beard against my cheek, the smell of ash and pineapple. Grog. A plan to escape.

Drunk Bird. Drunk Bird did something.

I put a hand on the desk as though it will stop the room from spinning; as though it will stop me plunging through space.

What have you done, Bird?

I don’t know. I don’t remember. I took his hand. We came through the door. I sat on this desk…

I stagger out of the chair and reel across the room. My shoes are at the foot of the bed, lined up next to one another. Blindly, I pull them on, a second realization hitting me out of nowhere as I finish lacing them up. My chip is broken. My birth control and STD prevention were in the chip.

My chest tightens. Nope, I tell myself. You’re panicking. Remain calm.

Remain calm?! my self retorts. You just woke up in the bed of a murderer.

That doesn’t mean anything. I think I would know if anything happened.

Something clearly happened.

Yes, but not that something, necessarily.

Thoughts are knocking against the inside of my head like flies in a jar. STDs. Nothing happened. You’re definitely pregnant. Nothing happened. I look around the room.

Where is Savage, anyway?

There's no sign of him—I don't see his boots or the dart; no clothes, no grog flask. The door is unlocked. I crack it open and peek into the dim corridor. Empty. Wreathed in the pale shadows of very early morning. The rest of the doors to the crew’s cabins are shut. To my right is the head, to my left, the corridor stretches away to the turn that leads upstairs to the salon.

Suddenly, it hits me. I’m alone. Unguarded. Savage left me unguarded. This is my chance. The hand that grips the handle of the door trembles as I look up and down the corridor.

Okay, Bird. Try not to flog this up. Try to think. For once in your goddamn life, try to think.

If it’s early morning, there’s a good chance that Goliath, Red, and Sterling are still asleep. All of them were up late, and all of them were drinking. And they all think Savage has his eye on me.

A wave of cold, sweaty nausea leeches through me. They all know. This is probably run-of-the-mill behavior from Savage. Just another night. But this was part of my plan, right? I did this on purpose.

I look down the corridor again. Who is on watch right now? Who do I need to worry about? Probably not Goliath, Red, or Sterling. Probably not Fid, either—he’s only seven. Nana…normally I’d be worried about that silver-toothed hag, but she’s still too sick to be up and about. I haven’t seen her since I boarded the Kingfisher a week ago.

That just leaves Savage and Fetch.

Where is Savage?

If he was as drunk as I was last night, which is likely, then he’s bound to be in rough shape this morning. Maybe rough enough that I can outrun him. And Fetch? She went to bed early. She’s probably in tip-top shape and ready to start making my life a living hell again. Can I outrun her? Unlikely.

But I have to try.

I close the door silently behind me and pad swiftly down the silent corridor. Pause at the end and peek around the corner. The salon is empty. I hold my breath as I steal silently across the salon to the companionway steps, then peer up the steps into the cockpit, barely lit in the gray dawn. Empty. A soft exhale of disbelief into the quiet morning.

How can this be?

There isn’t time to question it. I’m up the steps and climbing through the cockpit. I’m on the deck. Over the rail—

“Hey!”

Fetch’s angry shout splits the still air as my feet land on the dock and I take off. The planks shake with the pounding of my steps. Down the dock, around the corner, hard footsteps following me.

“Alluvium!” Fetch’s shout is hoarse, close behind me.

The main pier is too empty to hide anywhere. It must be very early. A few fishermen, a couple of merchants opening their stalls, some skeevy-looking Reckoners milling about. I dodge around them, the breath burning in my lungs.

“Alluvium, stop!”

I reach the top of the pier, shove my way through the few people at the gate, out onto a wide metal platform at the edge of a black swamp surrounded by lush vegetation. Look left and right. Stacks of shipping container homes and shops, raised out of the muck on stilted wooden foundations. Look up. A network of cabled bridges crisscrosses the sky. To my right, a low, narrow plank leads across the swamp to the metal tower that will take me up to those bridges. I remember that tower. I push past an old woman making her slow way onto the plank. Glance over my shoulder as I run across, my balance teetering, almost falling. Fetch steps onto the plank as I reach the tower.

I shove a man out of the way on the narrow spiral staircase inside the tower. Pop out onto the platform that surrounds it, thirty feet up. There are six footbridges connected to this deck. I choose one at random. Step off the platform.

I run blindly, trusting my gut. The bridge connects to another, then another. The city of Alluvium spreads below my feet: a vast, flat estuary with densely packed hubs of homes and businesses built into the dry spaces between stretches of swamp and mangroves, all connected by these towering cabled bridges. Stacks of shipping containers hundreds of feet high and the unmistakable curves of grain silos puncture the skyline. I keep running. Stars are beginning to flash in front of my eyes. Another bridge and Fetch is right behind me.

She’s faster than me.

I come to the end of the bridge and look down, nauseous, my lungs burning. A wide street, just getting busy.

I barrel down the steps. As my feet touch pavement, I stumble. Something crashes into me from behind and I go down hard, my hands breaking my fall on the stone, surprised pedestrians jumping out of the way. I roll onto my side, Fetch on top of me. We scrabble on the pavement between the legs of morning commuters, her strong fingers clawing at my face, the weight of her hips on mine. I get onto my back, shove her off me. She rolls sideways, pulling the knife from the sheath across her chest. Startled cries from the crowd.

I crawl backwards as she comes at me on her hands and knees. Aim a kick at her face, miss, roll onto my side again as she throws herself at me, the sound of her knife coming down hard on the stone next to my face.

Frantically, crawling on my hands and knees, stumbling to my feet, pushing past people, I run again.

“Don’t be stupid, Alluvium!”

Glancing over my shoulder as I shove my way through a small crowd of people, I see Fetch’s face falling behind, disappearing behind people’s shoulders. To my right, an alley. I duck into it. Empty, narrow, filled with crates, empty boxes, garbage dumpsters. Light at the end; a cross street. I run toward it, the sound of my footsteps ricocheting off the close, tall walls. I hear no footsteps echoing behind me as I turn the corner onto the next street.

A market. Stalls crowding the boulevard, just opening up, a few morning shoppers with baskets slung over their arms. The smell of bread and brew and smoking meat. The light already changing, brighter, harder. I shoulder past a woman with a baby on her hip, her angry shout receding as I plow on.

To my left is an already busy stall laden with fresh veg. Just to the side of the stall, a long table covered by a cloth that hangs over the side to the ground.

I duck around people’s legs and slide around the end of the table, lift the cloth, and shimmy underneath. It’s cramped, stacked with boxes of produce, barely enough space to squeeze in. The light is made orange by the color of the cloth. I wedge myself between two boxes and become still. Try to hold my breath, but my chest heaves to fill itself with lungfuls of burning air. I try to breathe silently. Squeeze my eyes shut against the dizzying, flashing stars. Wait.

Slowly, my breath returns. The spots in my eyes fade. The buzzing in my ears recedes. Around me, the market comes to life. A rumble of voices, punctuated by shouts. The sounds of goods being moved. At the edge of the cloth, feet shuffle and step around each other. A foot gets very close to mine and I scrunch myself tighter into my hiding place, pulling my knees into my chest and squeezing my arms tight around them. I hear haggling. People fighting over the best items. The table shakes above my head as things are moved around.

Time passes. I’m not sure how much, but enough to make my neck and back ache, curled up in this tiny space. Slowly, carefully, I uncurl myself and crawl to the other end of the table, move aside a corner of the cloth and look out. The market is packed now; I see nothing but thighs and crotches. Fetch won’t have given up. I’m sure she’s still out there. But I can’t stay here. I crawl out and get to my feet, squatting, staying low, and begin to snake through the throng.

I come to the edge of the crowd and find another alley. A few people make their way away from the market, their baskets and bags laden with goods. I fall in just behind a group of three women, talking loudly, laughing. I try not to glance over my shoulder, try to keep my eyes on my toes as I walk silently behind them. When we reach the other end of the alley they turn left onto a busy street. I allow myself a quick look back to confirm that Fetch isn’t following me, then turn right and disappear into the crowd.

chapter

six

IT’S LATE AFTERNOON. The air is still and muggy, exacerbating the smell of rotting veg, old brew grounds, and stinking meat scraps rising around me. I open my eyes, brushing a veil of flies away from my face and swallow a glob of nausea. It’s not the flies, the smell, and the heat making me ill. Or even the hangover. It’s remembering that this morning, I woke up in the bed of a murderer with missing teeth, black fingers, and a good ten years on me. It’s remembering that I don’t know what happened last night.

I guess it’s fitting that I spent the day hiding in a dumpster.

I feel like actual trash.

I pull myself up and over the side of the skip, stumbling on cracked pavement as I land. At some point during the day, I must have dozed off, because the shadows are growing long and the sunlight has mellowed to a gentle, rosy glow. I gently close the lid of the dumpster and take a look around.

I have no idea where I am. I was running in a blind panic this morning, taking footbridges at random, turning down streets I’d never seen. I’ve only been in this city once before, so it’s not as though I had a great mental map of the place, to begin with. Panic rises again and I take a deep breath against it, forcing it down. This is no time to panic. I need to get myself somewhere safe.

I pick a direction at random and start walking. At the end of the alley, I pick another direction at random and turn onto the main street. It’s busy but not packed. People in summer evening dresses and lightweight suits pick their way, hand in hand, along the cracked and crooked sidewalks. They step over exposed roots and green plants bursting through the garbage-covered pavement. Intrusive nature reclaiming its space in a city half-emptied by the apocalypse, half-buried in plastic. Lights are starting to turn on along the street. Through the dizzying mishmash of trees, wires, and stacks of shipping containers that rises all around me, I glimpse a beautiful, paisley sunset stretching itself across the sky.

Finding a quiet spot to sit on the crumbling curb, I sit to think. Night is coming and now that I’m shot of the Kingfisher, I have nowhere to go in this city.

Nowhere to go except Shale’s.

The sun is just starting to disappear behind the jagged Alluvium skyline. Shale’s house, if I remember correctly, sits on the south shore of the bay in a crumbling, once-wealthy beachfront neighborhood. I purse my lips. I just got done running away from the Kingfisher to prevent them handing me over to Shale. Am I seriously considering seeking out his house? He's only interested in me because he thinks I can be useful to his plot to take down Zenith, and the last time I saw him, he seemed dangerously unstable. I don't want to go anywhere near him. The problem is, the organization he works for—the Anonymity—is the same organization that took Sargo. Shale might be my only hope of finding him.

A breeze moves my hair and I shiver. The day’s sweat is drying and the air is growing colder. I need to go somewhere. I don’t have to walk right up and knock on Shale’s door. His neighborhood was quiet, and the beach was right across the street. Maybe I can find somewhere to sleep there. I’ll hide out, keep an eye on the house. Wait for him to leave and follow him. Maybe he’ll lead me to the Anonymity. Maybe he’ll lead me right to Sargo.

I shed the button-down I wear over my tank top in the hope that losing it might make me less recognizable to my pursuers. I stuff the shirt into a garbage can, then begin the long walk around the bay to Shale’s house. The sun disappears, and I skirt around pools of light from off-kilter street lamps as the daylight turns gray and starts to fade.

Thirty minutes of walking across the high footbridges brings me to the faded promenade that Shale's house sits on. On one side of the dark street, a beach littered with garbage stretches down to a furious surf break that fills the air with mist as it crashes onto the shore. On the other side sits a row of dilapidated mansions behind walls too high to see over.

I creep along the inland edge of the street in the dark until I reach the heavy gate and high concrete wall that I recognize as Shale’s house. On the other side of the wall, I remember, is a plot of bare earth and a half-finished mansion built by real estate prospectors during the population boom and abandoned during the pandemic. I grimace, feeling foolish. A plot of bare earth: that should have been my first clue that there was something off about Shale.

Pretty much all citizens grow their own veg. People started doing it after the pandemic when everything collapsed and no one could get food any other way. Then it stuck. Over the next decade, as things started to stabilize, Zenith encouraged it. Made it part of the ‘New Beginning.’ “Dig into the future!” People were into it. Global trade had been in shambles for a century anyway, and after the pandemic, citizens were open to relying on themselves. They were scared of sharing. Scared of spreading disease. Cities became self-contained. Now, to see a citizen without a garden, not growing their own food—that’s a surefire indicator that that person is not a supporter of Zenith or their policies. It’s like a big red flag sticking out of the ground that says “I don’t agree.” I can’t believe I missed it.

The faint clip-clop of boots on pavement reaches my ears. I freeze. I don’t look like I belong in this neighborhood at all. I duck into the shadows behind a tree and press my back against the cool wood. There’s something off about the approaching gait. An irregularity in the steps—a slight syncopation. Duh-DUM, duh-DUM, duh-DUM—as though the walker is favoring one leg, perhaps? I pick up the faint sound of a third tap. Tap-duh-DUM, tap-duh-DUM, tap-duh-DUM.

A person with three legs?

Craning my neck over my shoulder, I peer around the trunk. Emerging like a specter out of the fading dusk is the figure of a man; slender, tall, and with the stride of someone who is used to walking with purpose, even as he leans heavily on a cane. He’s a young man, I note, with broad shoulders, hair pulled into a low ponytail, and a thick beard. He stops less than ten feet from me under a pool of amber street light. I do a double take.

It’s Shale.

In the light, I pick out streaks of chestnut in his hair and beard; I note the quality of his fine shirt, buttoned all the way up to the neck. Despite the heat, he also wears a thick wax jacket with a high collar. The boots that alerted me to his approach shine with polish, as does the sturdy walnut cane in his hand.

I stare at the cane, my brow creasing. Why is Shale carrying a cane? I don’t remember him having a cane.

The image of Malarkey, pinning him to the ground, shaking him by the leg like a rag doll flashes through my head. The piercing wail of his agonized scream. The faint crack of breaking bone. I smile.

Good girl, Lark.

Shale touches his temple and the heavy gate swings open. He steps through and it closes behind him. I hear the scuffed tap-duh-DUM of his boots crossing the dirt on the other side of the wall, then the click of his front door opening and closing, then nothing.

I slink around the tree and swiftly run to the wall, pressing my back against the smooth cement, still warm from the sun. I strain to pick out sounds of Shale inside the house, but can hear nothing over the drone of surf on the beach across the street. Craning my neck, I look up at the twenty-foot edifice—far too tall and smooth to climb over. I slowly walk the perimeter, keeping low, squeezing into the tight gap between Shale’s wall and his neighbors’ on both sides. There is nowhere I can slip through, and no spot that offers foot and handholds for climbing. I return to the street and put my gaze out toward the dark shore with a sigh. I guess I’ll just sleep on the beach.

Last time I was here, Shale gave me dinner. He let me take a shower and sleep in a beautiful room that looked out over the ocean. Back then, I thought finding Shale was the answer. But if I’m honest with myself, I wasn’t really looking for answers. I was looking for a brother. Someone who would understand me. Someone who shares my history and knows who I am. I don't know if Shale is even that anymore.

My eyes are heavy, my legs and back sore from running and hiding all day. I cross the street and step onto the cold sand. The ground drops precipitously away from the edge of the street, forming a small ditch that I can tuck myself into the bottom of and remain hidden from the houses on the other side. I smooth out an indentation in the sand big enough to lay in and curl up in it, craning my head up to check over my shoulder and make sure that I am indeed out of sight of any windows across the street. Then I scoop together a small pillow of sand, rest my head on it, and close my eyes.

I’m overcome by the feeling of being alone in this vast, uncaring, city. This is the first night I’ve ever been without a home. Even on the island, I had a camp. It wasn’t much, but it was a space I could call my own. Somewhere to retreat to. Somewhere that I felt, if not comfortable, then at least safe. Here, curled up in the shadows like a dog, I feel wretched and anxious. Out of place. Hunted.

A breeze lifts my hair. I open my eyes. Above the horizon, the moon is rising like a slip of orange paper. I close my eyes again.

chapter

seven

FIFE AND BIRD sat in the branches of the saltnut tree, gazing down at the trickle of sludge that used to be the creek. Fife held a small branch between her hands, methodically stripping the leaves from it. Her fingers were coated in filth, the nails little black crescents, but they were nimble and strong. She stripped leaves faster than Bird could. She did everything faster and better than Bird did.

Sometimes, jealousy rose in Bird like an ugly shadow when she looked at Fife. Jealousy and anger. For a long time, Bird hadn’t been able to work out why, but she knew now. Hide and seek. She had only recently remembered the incident: the day she found Fife and Shale kissing in the shed. Bird remembered the pain she had felt that day. Confusion. Anger at being tricked and lied to. Jealousy at being left out of their game. It wasn't that she had feelings for either of them—of course not. Not for her brother or her best friend. It was that she had felt like a fool.

Fife was older now, Bird noticed. Her limbs were longer but not so skinny. She was slender, of course, as they both were, from lack of food and difficult living, but she was strong. Bird would have put Fife’s age somewhere around fifteen. That would make Bird thirteen or so, she reasoned.

“How is that possible?” Bird murmured aloud.

“What?” Fife turned to her, her startling blue eyes alight with curiosity.

“How can I be thirteen?”

“What do you mean?”

“I left Naze when I was eight. Zenith came. They took me away. By the time I was thirteen, I was in Brume. I never sat in a saltnut tree when I was thirteen. I have no memories like this.”

“This isn’t a memory.” Fife looked at her sideways. “And you’ve always been thirteen, Bird.”

I blink. The light has changed.

Fife’s face seems to shift. In the dappled sunlight that filters through the tree’s few, brittle leaves, the shadows on her face split and multiply. I feel reality slipping.

“What do you mean, ‘always’?”

“I mean ‘always.’ Just like we’ve always been sitting in this tree.”

The dappled spots on Fife’s face continue to split and multiply. Her face splits and multiplies. The dappled spots become spots of light, become needles of light, become—

“What’s happening?” I cry.

“The same thing that’s always happening, Bird,” says Fife. “You’re dreaming.”

Fife’s face begins to dissolve, to pulverize into a trillion needle-like spots.

“Fife!” I try to cup my hands around Fife’s face. They clutch at nothing, but I feel the sizzle of Fife’s dissolving skin on mine, like carbonated bubbles. “You can’t go!”

“I’m not going, Bird. You are. You always are.”

I look at my own hands. They prick and needle with points of light. I’m disappearing. “I didn’t mean to!”

“Why did you leave?” says Fife, her eyes filled with disintegrating tears.

“Why didn’t you come to say goodbye?” I feel sharp tears stinging my eyes too. They split and multiply, sizzle and evaporate. A fine mist of drops hangs in the air between us. “You never came to say goodbye.”

I feel the stretch and split of myself exploding into a trillion specks, like dust, or light, or static.

Fife’s voice comes to me from everywhere and nowhere. “Find me, Bird.”

chapter

eight

WHY DID YOU LEAVE?

My mouth floods with the acid sting of metal, like a spoon against my teeth. Behind my closed eyes, points of light dance and flicker. My skin prickles.

Why didn’t you come to say goodbye?

A wisp of dream evaporates from my head. Fife. My dreams about her are becoming strange. Not like the flashbacks I had when I blipped. These are not memories.

The sun is hot on my face. I hear the crash of surf. My neck is stiff, my back aching. The ground beneath me is cold and damp. Remembering where I am with a jolt, I snap my eyes open.

It’s early morning, the muggy heat already brutally oppressive. I sit up, brushing sand from the side of my face and shoulder. Instinctively, I tap my left brow to check the time. It’s an automatic movement, engrained in me by years of using the chip. As my finger touches my brow, shrieking, silver static rakes the inside of my head.

I yank my hand away. Chip is broken. I keep forgetting. Early morning. I’m not thinking clearly yet. Need some tea or some brew or something.

Turning my head from side to side to try and relieve some of the stiffness in my neck, I twist to peer over the edge of the ditch, to the row of mansions across the street. Shale’s house squats behind its impenetrable wall and wooden gate.

As I watch, the gate clicks and begins to swing open. I duck back down behind the bank, my heart pounding. After about a minute, I tentatively poke my head up over the edge of the street again. Shale, cane in hand, is turning out of the gate and onto the street. I watch him hobble half the length of it, then carefully rise and follow him, staying on the beach, keeping a good distance back and trying to act like a normal citizen out for an early morning stroll.

He reaches the footbridge tower at the end of his street and I follow him up to the connecting platform. He takes the footbridges across town, making slow progress, leaning heavily on the cane. I recognize the route: it’s the way he took me on the morning we went to his shop together.

We come to a large tree, sandwiched between two towering, crumbling concrete structures. A spiral of rough wooden planks winds around the tree’s massive trunk. I watch from a corner across the street as Shale slowly climbs the stairs, one hand on the trunk, his cane tucked under his arm. I know the tree. It’s a brew shop Shale took me to last time I was here. Set into the branches at the top of those stairs is a wide platform arranged with tables and chairs, and a busy counter serving brew and sweet bread.

As I watch Shale disappear into the branches at the top of the steps, my chest burns with longing. I remember climbing those stairs with him, watching him flirt with a woman behind the counter, remember teasing him about her. We drank coarse, bitter brew together. I was dizzy with excitement and the newness of everything. Dazzled by my big brother and his life in the city.

A few minutes pass and Shale reappears at the top of the stairs, holding a thermos and a small paper bag. I watch as he slowly makes his way down to the street. He turns right. He’s going to the shop. I let him get about halfway down the block, then step away from the corner to follow him.

“Stop right there.”

The voice in my ear is unmistakable. The sharp point of a blade is against my ribcage, a tight grip on my elbow. I freeze.

“Don’t make any sudden moves,” says the voice.

People stream around me without seeming to see me, pushing past me to step off the curb. I stand like a rock in a river, invisible in an uncaring crowd, my heart in my throat, the sounds of the city suddenly muted. In the distance, I can see Shale rounding a corner, disappearing out of sight.

“You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” Fetch’s voice is low, her breath hot on my neck. I twist my arm impotently. “Don’t struggle,” she says. “Don’t make a scene. You’re going to come with me, slowly, without a fuss.”

“Or else what? You’re gonna stab me? How are you planning to get your coin when I’m dead?”

“You let me worry about that.”

My eyes flit left and right, taking in the oblivious crowd, the busy intersection. Run, says the voice in my head. You’re bigger than her, you can get away.

Fetch’s grip around my elbow tightens as though she’s reading my thoughts. “This is not the time for another stupid decision, Alluvium.”

“You know what?” I mutter. “I think this is the perfect time for another stupid decision.”

I dive to the left, twisting like a fish and wrenching my arm from her grasp. My foot slips off the curb and I stumble, crashing into a stooped old woman carrying a basket on her head. Not bothering to apologize, I tumble around her and dive into the intersection.

Fetch sends up a furious snarl. I hear her steps after me as I dip and duck through the crowd, shouldering people out of my way. Don’t glance over my shoulder because I know she’s right behind me. Make it to the other side of the street, Fetch’s steps hard on my tail.

At the corner where Shale disappeared, I turn, skidding, tripping over my feet. Dodge around a cart laden with some kind of street food. I quickly scan and spot Shale, already high up on a footbridge heading away from the city center. I don’t know why I’m still following him, but I just have to run; any direction is as good as another.

The bridge is a long one, connecting Alluvium’s center with an industrial district near the shore on the other side of the harbor. Shale has already disappeared from it by the time I’m halfway across. Warehouses and scrapyards, empty dirt lots filled with abandoned EVs and construction equipment sprawl below me. I make it to the end of the bridge and down to ground level, dodging into a narrow alley between two warehouses, filled with crates and stacks of boxes. I clamber over and around them, sensing, rather than hearing, Fetch behind me.

She catches my shirt, wrenches me backward as I pull myself over a box. I land on my back in the alley, Fetch on top of me before I even know what’s happening. Our hands scrabble at each other, mine trying to wrangle the knife from her grip. But she’s skilled. Trained to fight. She catches my wrist in one strong hand, pins it to the ground, gets a knee on my other arm, leans across my neck on her forearm, the point of the knife against my cheek. Her nose is almost touching mine, her breath hot on my face, her eyes wild with fury.

“That was stupid Alluvium. That was really stupid.”

I thrash my legs and buck my hips but she’s got me pinned, straddling me with all her weight. The air squeezes in my chest. I stop struggling and lay rigid, glaring back into her eyes. My lungs won’t fill. She leans on me harder, forcing her forearm up against my windpipe, her eyes shining.

Blackness creeps around the edges of my vision and tears blur Fetch’s features. Blood pounds in my ears. Breathe! screams a voice in my head. Breathe!

But I can’t. I’m disappearing. The world is becoming distant. My vision tunneling, sounds muffling. Something is pulling me away from it all, down into cold, lonely darkness. This is how it ends. In the dirt, in an alley, thousands of miles from my home. High above, a pinprick of light is all that’s left of the world.

Sargo.

Suddenly, the weight on my chest lifts. I catapult back to earth. Air rushes into my lungs and I clutch my throat, choking. The sound of my own breathing clamors back into my ears; light explodes in my eyes. I roll onto my side.

“Bird?”

Gasping, tears blurring my vision, I look up. Shale stands over me, gripping his cane like a club.

“No!”

I roll away from him, staggering to my feet, my head spinning, stumble to a wall and fall against it with my shoulder. Shale makes no move to come after me. I lean on the wall, breathing hard, the world beginning to right itself. He sets the tip of his cane on the ground and leans on it with both hands, watching me.

Fetch lays on her side in the middle of the alley, unmoving. When I have enough air to speak, I say, “Is she—is she dead?”

Shale glances at her. “Probably not.”

“How did you—where did you come from?”

“I’m surprised you don’t remember this place.” He tilts his chin to indicate over my shoulder. Glancing behind me I see the red door of his shop set into the warehouse wall. “You’re not the first pair of filthy vagrants I’ve found wrestling in my alley.” He prods Fetch with the tip of his cane. “She’s breathing. We should move her.”

He taps his right temple and gestures in the air. Composing a message, I guess. He gestures to send it and turns his attention back to me. “Someone will come to deal with it.”

We look at each other in silence. My breath has slowed and my heart rate has come down, but a new fear is settling on me. Someone will come to deal with it. Someone from the Anonymity.

“What are you doing here, Bird?” he says finally.

I hold his stare. “Looking for you.”

“Oh? The way you ran out of here last time, I figured I wouldn’t see you again.” A look of nervousness flashes briefly behind his eyes. “Where’s the dog?”

“I’m looking for her too.”

“And your boyfriend?”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Of course not.” He takes a couple of hobbling steps toward me and instinctively, I step away. “Relax,” he says impatiently. He hobbles past me, pushes open the little red door, and walks through it, leaving it open behind him. I stare after him, my mind racing.

This wasn’t the plan. He wasn’t supposed to know you’re here.

Well, too late. He knows. And he did just save me from a fifteen-year-old Reckoner with a dagger and a grudge. Plus, he’s walking with a cane. He doesn’t exactly seem like a threat. I steel myself, and follow him through the door.

The musty smell of a room that doesn’t get much traffic enters my nose. Shale’s warehouse stretches before me, still crammed with stacks of boxes. Boxes all labeled Zenith Biotech. Boxes that I found out last time I was here are full of black market goods. The single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling emits a queasy greenish light. I wind my way between the stacks of crates, Shale ahead of me. He waves a hand over his shoulder.

“Come into the office.”

I note with surprise that there’s another door on the opposite wall. I didn’t see it last time I was here. I follow him through it into a small, windowless room, also crammed with boxes, with a desk and chair barely accessible in the middle of them. Shale has trouble maneuvering around the desk to get to the chair. He leans his cane against the table and sits down heavily, then leans back, surveying me.

“Why are you here?”

His eyes are hard, his voice cold.

“You know why I’m here.”

He raises a brow. “Actually Bird, I have to say I’m pretty baffled. Last time we talked, you set your dog on me, kicked me in the face and ran off. And I was nothing but kind to you. Offered you a job, gave you a place to stay, fed you—”

“Sent a gang of criminals after me,” I cut in sharply.

“I didn’t send anyone after you.”

“You may as well have.”

Shale sighs. “Okay, Birdie. Why don’t we just get to the point. Are you here to join the organization or what?”

“Where’s Sargo?”

He blinks. “I’m sorry?”

“Where. Is. Sargo?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play dumb. You sent a boat after us. After Sargo and Malarkey rescued me from here, your Anonymity buddies ran us down in the bay and took Sargo. Where did they take him?”

“I—really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“Flog’s sake, Bird! I’m telling you the truth. After you ran out of here last time, you know what I did? I called a doctor. I called a guy I know who deals painkillers. I don’t know if you remember, but I was mauled by your dog.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I didn’t send anyone after you,” he says.

“Then where did the boat come from?”

“I have no idea, Bird. I’m not the godsdamn port captain. Maybe you should ask your buddy Savage. He’s into shady shit.”

At the mention of Savage’s name, my throat goes tight. “He’s not my buddy.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” says Shale. “If you’re looking for answers, you came to the wrong place.”

“I don’t believe you. That boat was an Anonymity boat. It had a motor. It was fast. It didn’t even have sails. That wasn’t a Reckoner ship. I saw plenty of Reckoner ships at the Row, and none of them looked like that.”

“Wait…” Shale’s eyes flick back to mine. “This was a speed boat?”

“Yes.”

His brow furrows. “That wasn’t the Anonymity.”

“The Anonymity runs the black market. You’re the only people who would have access to enough diesel to run something like that.”

“No one has access to enough diesel to run something like that,” he counters, “except…” He shakes his head. “No, that wasn’t us.” He tents his fingers and regards me over them, his brow narrow. “What happened, exactly?”

I stare at him. If this is some kind of tactic, I don’t know what it’s in aid of. “The boat came out of nowhere,” I say carefully. “Around the point. It came right at us. We lost the mainsail. Torn in half by the wind. Sargo—” I swallow, “—went over the side. They picked him up.”

“Why didn’t they get you?”

I pause.

“They tried,” I say slowly. “Once they had him, they came after me. I jumped, but…I never hit the water. I blacked out. I had a—a flashback. About the settlement. And I woke up on an island. Way out in the middle of the Salt.”

Shale leans toward me, his eyes bright. “You blacked out? And you woke up on an island?” His eyes gleam with a trace of his familiar wild-eyed, fervent stare. The hair on the back of my neck prickles. “And you have no memory of how you got there?”

“No.”

“And your chip—”

“Hasn’t worked since. It’s fried.”

His eyebrows, already raised, shoot even higher. “Fried?” He says it with relish. Like this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him. “This is interesting, Bird. This is really interesting.”

I watch his face carefully. “You know something.”

He strokes his beard. “I think I was right.”

“About what?”

“About the blackouts.” He grabs his cane and struggles to his feet. “They’re not blackouts. Not even just flashbacks. Whatever Zenith is doing, whatever they put in our chips, it’s causing something else. And that boat that picked up your boyfriend—”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“—I think it was a Zenith ship.”

My stomach drops. “A Zenith ship?”

“I think they were tracking you.” He squeezes around the table and shoves past me, back into the warehouse.

I follow him. “Tracking me? They can’t do that.”

Shale makes a dismissive noise. “Of course they can. Zenith can track whoever they like. But they usually don’t bother. Unless there’s somebody worth tracking. Like you.”

My pulse quickens. “Why me?”

“Because they know it’s working. Whatever they’re trying to do with the biochips is working. Or at least…yours is.”

“What do you mean ‘working’? What is it supposed to be doing?”

He stops short and I almost bump into him. He turns, his eyes scanning my face. “I told you, Bird. Teleporting.”

That word again. I make a dismissive noise.

He leans on his cane with both hands. “How far did you go?”

“What do you mean? Go where?”

“When you woke up on the island. How far were you from Alluvium?”

“A thousand miles.”

Shale claps his hand to his forehead. “A thousand miles?! Flogging Molly! There’s no way you drifted a thousand miles unconscious. You would have drowned!” He looks positively ecstatic at the idea. His energy is starting to unsettle me.

He sets his cane against the wall and pulls open the lid of a box, rummaging through it. I eye the door to the outside behind him, still open, the sunlight pouring in. Fetch’s crumpled silhouette is still in the alley.

“What about you?” I say to the back of his head. “You have the same tech in your chip. You told me you saw the flashbacks. You got the blackouts. How come you didn’t teleport? How come Zenith isn’t after you?”

His rummaging stops. He glances over his shoulder at me. “They were.” He returns to his rummaging. “When it started happening to me, after I left Brume, they tracked me here. But by the time they found me, it had already stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“For me, it started when I was a little younger than you. Sixteen, maybe. For six months it was really bad, but by the time I got here, it was happening less and less. Eventually it just…stopped. A Zenith team tracked me down, wanted to run a bunch of tests on me. But when I told them the blackouts had stopped, they lost interest.”

“It stopped?” He nods. “Why?”

“I don’t know for sure. But it happened around the time I stopped drinking.”

“You think it was grog that caused the blips?”

He wrinkles his face at the word ‘blips’ and I blush, remembering that that’s just my dumb name for them.

“Caused?" he says. "I don’t know. Triggered? Maybe. But it’s just a theory. I don’t know anything for sure.”

A sick feeling settles in my stomach. It’s what I feared: that somehow grog is responsible for this. That whatever technology Zenith put into our chips was somehow activated by grog. That if I keep drinking it, the blips will get worse. I already somehow blipped almost a thousand miles to a deserted island and nearly died. What if next time, I end up in the middle of the Turf? Or at the bottom of the Salt?

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this when I was here before?” I ask. “If you had told me Zenith had come after you—”

“I would have, Birb. But you barged out of here before I had the chance.”

I open my mouth and close it again. An hour ago I thought my brother was a dangerous, raving psychopath. Now…I don’t know what to think. Shale continues to rummage through the box.

“When it—happened to you," I ask, "did you…see things?”

He nods, not taking his attention from the box. “Flashbacks. Like you. Of the settlement at Naze.”

“Did you…see Fife?”

His hands go still.

I watch him carefully. “You saw her. She was real. She’s not just…something I dreamed up?”

He shakes his head.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“No. I imagine she’s still in Naze.”

In my mind, I see him hiding in a shed. Holding Fife’s hands. Kissing her.

“You loved her.”

A shadow flickers through his eyes. He shrugs, sniffing, pulling an unconcerned face. His hands begin slowly moving through the box again. “We were kids.”

For more than a minute, the only sound in the room is the sound of Shale digging through the box.

“You think Zenith took Sargo?” I ask finally.

“It’s possible.” His voice becomes easier. “It definitely wasn’t the Anonymity.”

“Where would they have taken him? Back to Brume? Headquarters?”

He shakes his head. “No. They wouldn’t want to risk people in Brume finding out what they’re up to. Too many powerful people there. Too much wealth. There’s a Zenith compound in Grike. A manufacturing plant where they produce biochips. At least…that’s what they say it is. I’m not convinced.”

“In Grike?" New Australia. Eight thousand miles west across the Salt. I swallow the spike of fear that surges up into my throat. "What do you think it is?”

“The compound? A lab. Testing facility maybe.”

“How do you know?”

Footsteps fall in the alley outside. Boots. They sound like Shale’s, only lighter, and regularly paced. Shale’s stands abruptly, closing the lid of the box. His face goes taut.

“Shit. I forgot I called them to come deal with your friend. You need to hide.”

“What?”

“Hide. Now.”

Something about his tone makes me do it. I duck behind a stack of crates as a shadow falls across the long rectangle of light from the open door.

“Hi, Rooster.” A woman’s voice, deep, flinty, edged with metal filagree.

Rooster? I hear Shale tap-duh-DUM his way across the warehouse floor.

“Hey, Ladybird,” he says. His voice is deeper. Gravelly. Trying to impress her?

I edge my face to the corner of the crate I’m squatting behind and peek around it. A woman stands in the doorway, the light from behind rendering her completely in silhouette. I can only discern that she’s petite, with a sleek, chin-length bob of pin-straight, jet black hair around her face. She’s clad in a long jacket like Shale’s, the collar turned up around her jaw. Just behind her, in the alley, another figure is nudging Fetch’s limp body with his toe.

“Delphic.” Shale nods to the other figure as he and Ladybird step outside, closing the door behind them. I stare at it, my mind reeling. I can hear the low murmur of their voices through the door, but I can’t discern what they’re saying. Staying low, on quiet feet, I steal across the room and press my ear against it.

“...some Reckoner kid probably,” Ladybird is saying. “Looks like that girl from the Kingfisher. One of Savage’s. I’ll leave her at the docks.”

“I don’t care where she ends up,” Shale replies. “Just make sure it doesn’t come back to me.”

“Did she see your face?”

“No.”

“You need to watch yourself, Rooster,” says a man's voice—Delphic, I assume. All three voices are metallic and ludicrously deep. “You’re on thin ice as it is. If your anonymity is compromised—”

“It’s not.” Shale’s voice is sharp.

“All I’m saying is Martinet knows you’re up to something,” says Delphic. “He’s waiting for an excuse to go after you. If that Reckoner saw your face, you’re dead in a week. And so is she.”

My stomach drops. Dead in a week?

“Don’t worry about it,” says Shale. “Concentrate on your own job.”

“Help me lift her,” says Ladybird.

I hear them wrestle Fetch’s limp body down the alley, hear the distant thud of them dumping her into something, then footsteps coming back toward the door. I bolt back to my hiding place as it swings open and Shale’s syncopated triple-step rings through the room.

“Do you have the key for tomorrow’s shipment?” Ladybird says, her steps following his. “I might as well take it while I’m here.”

“In the office.”

The door closes behind them. My heart pounds in time with two sets of footsteps growing closer. I shrink further into the shadows, pressing my back to the wall. Shale’s cane passes inches from my face, and the hem of Ladybird’s long jacket brushes my shoulder. They step past me into the office, leaving the door open. Ladybird stands with her back to the door while Shale squeezes behind the desk. My stomach does a queasy flip.

Shale has no face.

The front of his head is a smooth, pale sphere, with two gaping brown smudges where eyes should be, and a warped hole of a mouth, twisted into a scream. I cover my own mouth with my hands to keep from crying out. The mask glitches and shudders, and always seems to be looking at me no matter which way he turns his head.

The memory of the two men who broke into my house in Brume comes flooding back. The blood splattered on my clean, white sheets. The smell of a leather-gloved hand around my mouth. It’s been a long time since I saw a mask like that. I had forgotten how frightening they are. I knew Shale worked for the Anonymity. But seeing him like this, right in front of me; the mask, the same thick wax jacket and knee-high boots that those creeps in Brume wore. It hits me like a wall:

Shale hurts people.

“You think what Delphic said is true?”

Ladybird’s voice is low. She glances over her shoulder at the closed door to the alley outside. Her face is a pallid, pixelated sphere with deep, black chasms where eyes and a mouth should be.

“Delphic can’t be trusted,” says Shale. “He has ties to Zenith.”

Now that his voice is no longer muffled by the door, I realize that the deep gravel wasn’t some affectation he was putting on for show. His voice has been altered, lowered and warped. It phases and flanges, the metallic frill of digital enhancement shimmering around the edges of words.

Ladybird nods, and her faceless head pauses on me as she turns it back from the door. I freeze, the blood cold in my veins. But she doesn’t see me; just folds her arms and turns back to Shale. “I’ll keep my eye on him,” she says.

“Be careful,” Shale replies. “It would be…a real shame if things went wrong at this moment.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Let’s just say—” Shale lowers his voice so that I have trouble making out what he says, “—something promising may have just turned up.”

My heart skips.

Ladybird pauses for a long moment before responding. “I’ll be fine. You need to watch your own back. If it comes out that Reckoner girl saw your face, I won’t go to bat for you. The rest of the organization is starting to catch on to what we’re up to.”

She turns on her heel and strides past me, the tail of her coat nearly whipping my face as she does. I hear her steps echo through the warehouse and out into the alley, hear her give a brief word to Delphic, then the rickety rumble of a tuk-tuk starting up and driving away.

I remain paralyzed against the wall behind the crate, staring at Shale’s face. He touches the back of his head and the mask flickers and disappears as his eyes find me in the dark. My heart flutters in my chest like a trapped sparrow. I feel my lungs filling and emptying, filling and emptying.

“The thing that turned up,” I say quietly, “is it me?”

He doesn’t move.

I stand, stumbling toward the alley.

“Bird! Wait!”

chapter

nine

I RUN through warehouses and scrapyards in a blind panic until I spot a footbridge connection point; sprint up the stairs inside to the platform and push my way at random onto a bridge. I come to the end of the bridge and stall, doubled over, my hands on my knees. The breath burns in my lungs. My legs shake.

This is ridiculous. You have to stop.

I stay like that in the walkway, breathing hard, buffeted by passersby as they shove their way around me. Catching my breath and straightening up, I walk to the edge of the bridge, out of the way of the stream of pedestrians, clutching a stitch in my side. I lean on the taut metal cable that serves as a handrail and look toward the bay. I have to stop running. I have to find somewhere to land.

Turning slowly, I scan the sprawl of interconnected hubs below me, trying to get my bearings. To my left is the bay, with Shale’s neighborhood on the south end of the shore behind me, and the warehouse district where his shop is in front of me. Below me is the hub that comprises Alluvium’s center. A narrow channel winds from the bay, past the hub of city center, to the large inland lake that serves as Alluvium’s harbor. From this vantage point, I can make out a few boats. I spot the enormous Kingfisher, still tied up where I left her, her polished aluminum fittings reflecting the clean morning sun. I let my eyes rove over the rest of the docks, taking in boats large and small until they fall on a tiny, yellow sloop, listing at the end of a derelict pier at the far end of the harbor.

My heart skips. Panga.

She’s here. She didn’t sink. Someone must have gotten aboard and brought her back to the dock after I jumped. My heart begins to beat fast. Maybe they found Malarkey too.

The beating in my chest intensifies. Going back to Panga means going back to the harbor—which means going back to the Kingfisher. From what I can see, the two boats aren’t docked near each other, but just walking around the docks will be risky.

Then again…walking around any streets here is risky. Savage’s crew know the city better than I thought. Fetch somehow found me on a random street in a totally different neighborhood this morning. But they don’t know that Panga is docked in Alluvium. If I could somehow sneak through the harbor without being spotted, then Panga might actually be the safest place for me. I’d be hiding right under their noses.

I feel the tightness melting from my chest. It feels like a plan. It feels like hope.

The gate at Alluvium harbor is packed. Merchants and sailors, Reckoners, beggars, vagrants. I tuck my chin and walk briskly through the gate, weaving my way through the throng, keeping my head down. The sun is high in the sky and hot on the planks of the dock. It leaves no shadows for me to cling to. As I approach the Kingfisher’s pier, my heart starts to race.

I need to get a look at the ship first, make sure the coast is clear before I go by. I spot a barrel of fish in front of a fishmonger’s stall and duck behind it.

Red Bread swings high on the mast in a harness, fixing something in the rigging, his ginger frizz a halo in the sun. On the deck below, Sterling picks through a pile of scrap metal and parts, and mops his sweaty bald head with a bandana. I squint back toward the cockpit, trying to spot Fetch or Goliath. It occurs to me that Fetch may not even be here. She might still be unconscious in a tuk-tuk somewhere.

Then I see him. Standing at the helm, writing something down in the ship’s log, balanced on his open palm. His filthy blonde hair falls around his face as he stoops over the instruments, tapping his pencil against the displays. When he stands, his black shirt, unbuttoned, hangs open, revealing a lean, bronze torso, covered in tattoos. A swallow on each side of his chest, just below the collar bone, and in the middle of his sternum, so large that it takes up most of his chest, an enormous, fully-rigged, old-fashioned merchant ship. His short sleeves reveal more tattoos, although I’ve seen these before: a girl in a grass skirt, a five-pointed nautical star, an anchor. He tilts his chin toward the sky and scratches at the scruff under his neck. I recognize his thinking pose. I saw it many times when he was teaching me coastal navigation.

My insides wobble.

Scumbag. Filthy, wretched…bronze…muscular…tattooed…scumbag.

My hands are trembling. I take a breath to steady them. He’s just…there. Just walking around, going about his life like nothing happened.

What did you expect? says the voice in my head.

I don’t know. That he would be…changed somehow? That the next time I saw him, he might be unable to do anything but stare longingly into the distance? A wrecked man?

He doesn’t care about you. He took advantage of you.

Did he, though? I remember being involved in that decision. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was my idea.

Then why do you feel so awful about it?

I squeeze my eyes shut, shoving the image of him out of my head. I don’t know how I feel. I don’t even know what happened.

I breathe in. Breathe out. Open my eyes. He’s gone. I stare at the spot where he stood, part of me glad to see him go. Part of me wishing he would come back.

Focus!

I turn my attention back to the main deck. It’s still just Red and Sterling there. Still absorbed in their tasks. The back of my neck prickles. I feel as though, at any moment, I’ll feel Fetch’s knife against my throat, hear her voice in my ear. But I don’t see her anywhere. How long will it take Ladybird and Delphic to get her across town? Tuk-tuks can’t take the footbridges.

Steeling myself with a breath, I step out from behind the barrel and continue briskly along the dock, turning my face away from the Kingfisher, the sensation that someone is following me creeping up my spine like a shadow.

I reach the end of the pier and turn left. My chest releases, the chill on my neck dissipates. I exhale and allow myself a quick glance over my shoulder. No one behind me. No commotion on the dock or cries from the Kingfisher. I keep walking.

The dock that Panga is tied up at is sinking into the Salt, and the rotten planks creak treacherously under my feet. I step around missing boards and pick my way through a blanket of bird shit and molted feathers. About three-quarters of the way along the dock is a large, round lump. I squint at it, slowing. A vagrant, maybe? Someone sleeping on the dock?

Suddenly, the lump rears up and the air splits with three short, sharp blasts like a foghorn. I stop short, clamping my hands over my ears. A sleek, earless head and a thick, powerful neck rise from the lump, turning it into a fat, S-shaped curve. A wide tail drapes over the edge of the dock, two fins spreading like paddles across the planks. It’s a Salt doggerel. A big one. It points its triangular face toward me, barking, its open mouth revealing a row of tiny teeth.

They don’t eat people, I tell myself. It won’t attack you. I stand very still and wait for it to stop barking, which it does, eventually. It settles back into its fat folds and observes me through squinted eyes. I note bright pink gashes and faded scars mottling its short, slick coat.

I take a tentative step forward. “Go on. Shoo.”

The Salt dog expels a large, airy breath through its slitted nostrils. I jump, my heart fluttering.

“Go on,” I say again, louder, taking another step. “Shoo!”

It regards me with unconcerned eyes, then sighs and flops onto its side. I stand there, flummoxed. Every Salt dog I’ve ever seen in Brume you could chase off with a harsh word and a loud step. Then again, no Salt dog I ever saw in Brume was as big as this one. It slumps across the dock, blocking my way. I glance over its hulking form to Panga’s cheerful yellow hull, bobbing gently in the mellow water, so close, and yet so far. With a frustrated huff, I stomp toward the dog and wave my arms above my head.

“Go on now!” I shout. “Git!”

It rears it head again and rolls toward me, pulling itself up onto its front flippers, deafening me with a blast of foghorn shouts. I stumble backward, realizing now exactly how big it is.

A volley of barks rends the air behind me. New barks; sharper, faster, more aggressive. A brown and white streak shoots past my knees and barrels down the dock. My heart soars.

“Malarkey!”

Malarkey bounces to a halt in front of the Salt dog, stiff-legged, a rigid mohawk of fur bristling from the top of her head to the tip of her tail. Her chest puffs with the effort of the incredible racket she is sustaining, barking in rapid fire like an alarm bell going off. The Salt dog, either stunned or simply unwilling to deal with her nonsense, plunges over the side of the dock with surprising grace and disappears silently into the water. Malarkey charges after it, stopping abruptly at the edge, snorting and huffing, glaring into the depths as it slips away.

I crumple to my knees, my arms open as Malarkey turns, her tail spinning like a propellor. The force of that tail twists her body like a snake as she gallops toward me, head down, tongue lolling. She barrels into my arms, her tongue splashing around my tear-stained, snot-covered face as I sob and clutch at her and gasp big, heaving breaths.

“I’m so sorry, Malarkey.” I bury my wet face in her fur and try to get my arms around her ecstatic, wriggling body. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you. I’ll never do it again.”

____________________

The steam curling from the spout of the teapot fills Panga’s tiny cabin with the scent of cinnamon and oranges.

Malarkey curls on the sofa with her tail over her nose. She spent the last thirty minutes watching my every move with her piercing, blue-white eyes as I darted back and forth in the cramped galley, filling the kettle, scooping fragrant leaves into the teapot, lighting the stove. When I popped up to the deck to dump old water from the kettle over the side, she jumped up in alarm and followed me.

“It’s okay, Lark,” I soothed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She looks surprisingly well for having been on her own so long. I guess there’s plenty of discarded food around here for here to scavenge. Fish guts, garbage cans. She’s probably eating better than she ever has. It’s clear she’s been living aboard Panga—there’s a hair-covered, Malarkey-shaped hollow in the canvas sail bag on the bow, and the remnants of her scavenging are all over the deck.

As for Panga, she’s filthy, but sound. Covered in grime from being docked in a city, and of course the mainsail is still busted, but it doesn’t look like she suffered any damage after I abandoned her in the bay. The companionway hatch was shut when I got on board, but not locked. Whoever rescued her and brought her here wasn’t able to find the key, I guess. I wonder how he fared against Malarkey. I have to grin, imagining someone boarding what he thinks is an empty ship floating in the bay, thinking he’s found a great prize, only to be greeted by an eighty-pound doggerel with eyes like angry stars and patch that makes her look like a pirate. She’s not exactly friendly, even under the best circumstances.

I take my tea and flop onto the sofa next to Malarkey, who thumps her tail as I approach and puts a paw on my leg. I pull her big dumb head into my lap with my free hand and squeeze her ears.

The tea is hot and sweet and spicy, and I sip it carefully as I gaze around the cabin, my heart filling with a mix of relief and anxiety. As reassuring as it is to be back, I know I can’t stay here for long. It’s a miracle Malarkey hasn’t already been recognized by someone aboard the Kingfisher. Not only that, whoever rescued Panga from the bay will almost certainly be back to check on his prize.

I need to get myself and Malarkey away from Alluvium. Away from the Kingfisher and away from the Anonymity. I need to find Sargo. Right now, all I have to go on is what Shale told me. And if what he told me is true, then Sargo is a very, very long way away. To hear he wasn’t captured by the Anonymity is a relief, but my conversation with Shale left me with questions about Zenith that make me nervous. Zenith aren’t the Anonymity, I know that. But I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they’re capable of. What they might do to Sargo.

Malarkey sighs in my lap and I squeeze her ears almost instinctively.

A wisp of an idea is wriggling its way into my brain. A plan. A plan I don’t like. A plan that even I think would be foolish to attempt. I try to shut it out, but it’s in there now, needling at me. I stare over the top of my mug without seeing, gripping it tightly with both hands.

Since when have you thought something was too risky to attempt? says a voice.

Since I decided I don’t want to wind up at the bottom of Jones’ locker.

You learned a lot when you were on the Kingfisher. It might be different this time.

On the Kingfisher I was part of a crew. At the end of the day I was still taking orders. This would be totally different.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

It also doesn’t mean I can. Eight thousand miles. No coast to follow. No harbors. Just open water and nothing. And me. Alone.

I down the last of my tea and set the cup on the floor. Malarkey stirs as I lean over her, stretches her big paws and gives me a single, slow thump of her tail. I gaze down into her face. If I try this and fail, Malarkey and I could wind up at the bottom of the Salt.

And if you don’t try, you might never see Sargo again.

A big, primal fear wells up inside me like a tidal wave, taking the breath from me, drowning me. I’ve never felt more scared to lose something. I’ve never felt more sure of what I have to do.

I have to go to Grike. I have to sail Panga, by myself, to Grike.

chapter

ten

IF I’M GOING to attempt a suicide mission to Grike, I’m going to need a few things. Food being at the top of the list. I actually can’t remember the last time I ate; it must have been aboard the Kingfisher the night we made port. I’ve been running on pure adrenaline. Now that I’ve stopped, my hollow stomach is making its presence known, loudly.

I poke my head up through Panga’s main hatch and scan the harbor. The sun balances low and orange on the edge of the horizon, casting long shadows like slender fingers across the docks. A few oyster farmers and fishermen haul in their nets, a fishmonger, stooped and shuffling, closes up her stall. The scent of spiced meat floats across the water from the busy street, twisting the knife of hunger deeper into my belly. But as starved as I am, I’ll have to wait. Now is not a good time to go out there. The docks are already too empty to disappear into the crowd, but not dark enough yet to hide under the cover of night. I glance down at Malarkey.

“You can show me where to find the good stuff, right?”

She wags her tail, which I assume means, “Sure can!”

Fortunately, there’s plenty here to keep my mind off the hunger stabbing at my insides while I wait for dark. I make another cup of tea and take it up to the cockpit with me to do an inventory of Panga. I start with the instrument panels at the helm, which I realize, with a surge of joy, are very similar to the Kingfisher’s. I find the speed indicator, depth sensor, and wind direction, and check out the old-fashioned brass compass mounted behind the wheel.

Next, a walk-through of all the lines, rigging, and winches, just like Fetch made me do when I came up for my shift aboard the Kingfisher. I notice right away that the lines securing Panga aren’t properly tied. Frowning, I swing myself down onto the dock to examine them. I’m actually surprised they’ve held this long without coming completely undone. I set down my mug and take a minute to retie them, snugging Panga up against the pier. Whoever rescued her from the bay must have been in a hurry when they left, or maybe they just didn’t know how to tie a proper cleat hitch.

Climbing back onto the deck, I check for damage to the fiberglass, loose nuts and bolts, missing screws, and chafed lines. Everything looks more or less fine, except for the sails. The jib hasn’t been furled correctly and the mainsail hasn’t even been put away. Again, it gives me pause. Someone rescued Panga, but it seems they didn’t know what to do with her once they had her. Or perhaps they just didn’t care. I carefully unfurl and re-furl the jib, and spend about half an hour gently re-flaking the shredded mainsail along the boom.

I step back to admire my handiwork. If Sargo was here to see this…

A lump wells in my throat. If Sargo was here, I’d tell him I’m sorry I never took his class seriously. I’d tell him I’m sorry I never thanked him for helping me get all the way to Alluvium. If Sargo was here, I wouldn’t be about to embark on a suicide mission across the Salt.

Thoughts that I didn’t even realize I’d been trying to keep down come scrambling from the depths of my brain.

Sure, you can trim the sails on your own now, but trimming the sails on a boat by yourself all day and night is a million miles away from managing one sail for four hours on a crew of eight. Not to mention steering, navigating, watching for danger, planning your next tack…and then there’s the fact that you don’t even know how to start the motor, which you’ll need to even get off the dock and out of the slip.

How, exactly, are you planning to sail this boat alone?

Shoving the voice down and fiercely swallowing tears, I swing myself down onto the bottom step of the companionway and head below deck.

One thing at a time. Just keep doing one thing at a time. I scan the salon. Where to begin?

To my right is the galley nook, just big enough for one person to stand in. Well, two if you’re nearly touching. The memory of Sargo standing opposite me in the nook swims into my head. The closeness of his chest. The smell of his sweat. I breathe it out of me.

A gimbaled electric stove, large enough to hold a single pot, sits against the wall with a cheerful copper kettle on it. Kiddie-corner to that is a tiny metal sink, just big enough to wash one dish at a time. Above the stove is the small cupboard where we keep two mugs, two plates, and a chipped and peeling frying pan. Below the sink is a drawer containing a random assortment of mismatched knives, forks, spoons, and other utensils.

My eye lingers on the drawer. I happen to know that Sargo’s uncle Blenny kept a grog flask in that drawer, and that it’s still there. I pull the drawer open and move a few things aside. The corner of the flask glints at me. I dig it out and unscrew the cap.

Empty.

You drank it, says the voice in my head. Before you were boarded by the Valkyrie.

Probably for the best. I shouldn’t be drinking right now. Things didn't go well last time I did. Savage’s face flashes through my head. The feel of his black, calloused fingers. The smell of him—ash and grog and pineapple. I shove the flask back in the drawer and slam it shut, turning my attention to the rest of the salon.

On the opposite side of the cabin is the nav station—a small table with a single stool bolted to the floor in front of it, where the ship’s navigator sits and plots a course using big paper charts. Savage’s smug grin flickers on inside me like a neon sign; his boots crossed on the edge of the Kingfisher’s nav table as he sat with his hands behind his head explaining coastal navigation to me. I push it out of my mind and move on.

Unless…

Something pulls me back to that table. This is an old boat; it belonged to Sargo’s great-great grandfather, so…it’s possible there may still be some old stuff on it. Old navigational stuff. Stuff I’m going to need if I have any hope of making this insane journey happen.

The top of the navigation table is a lid that lifts open on a hinge. I prop it up on its small wooden leg so I can peer inside. Like the kitchen drawer, it’s filled with a mismatched assortment of bits and bobs. My eyes fall on the nox Sargo and I used in Naze. Two magnifying lenses joined together in the middle on a hinge, a thick canvas neck strap to hang them. Heavy and unwieldy. I pull them out and set them aside, along with the other junk, making a small pile on the floor.

Something reveals itself as I pull things out of the table. A large, brown sheet of paper. My heart skips. I remove the last few items and gently pick it up by one corner. It turns out to be a stack of papers. I pull them out, close the lid of the table, and spread the papers on top of it, my heart beating in earnest now as I gently rifle through them. Charts. Exactly what I was hoping for.

I never cared all that much for history at Azimuth, but now, handling these ancient, fragile papers, I feel as though I’m touching the past. Sargo’s great-great grandfather touched these charts. Sargo’s mom—Mama Marlin—probably used them to navigate from Pocosín to Brume. These charts show land masses that are millions of years old. Things that have been here since long before anyone on this planet was born and will be here long, long, long after we’re gone. Unchanged, apart from what we’ve already destroyed.

I run a finger along the familiar lines, the tea-stain-looking land masses, the hatch marks of latitude and longitude. I wonder what the charts looked like before the Salt covered most of the world. How many more land masses would this chart show? How much less of it would be brutal, unforgiving water?

My eyes stick on the enormous, empty space between where I am in Alluvium, on the west edge of Nuevo México y Centroamérica, and the eastern edge of New Australia, where Grike sits. Halfway across the New Pacific is the island of Île Tor, so tiny it's little more than a speck in the endless expanse of water. The Salt is even bigger than I thought.

“What makes you think I’d be stupid enough to get myself stuck in the middle of the Salt with no chip to save me?”

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Alluvium. Just a bit…reckless.”

Savage's voice in my head. I shove it away. Joke’s on you, Savage. These charts are going to guide me out of Alluvium. With these, I’ll never have to rely on someone like Savage again. Bet he didn’t think of that when he was teaching me how to read them.

I gently lay the charts on the sofa and open the table again. Buried in a back corner I find the rest of the tools I’ll need to navigate: a small yellow pencil, a ruler, and a pair of metal calipers. I pull them out and set them on top of the charts. Then I shove the rest of the bits and bobs back into the table, close the lid, and carefully lay the navigation stuff on top of it. My stomach twists noisily.

Poking my head out of the companionway, I take another look around. The docks are shrouded in darkness. It’s time to go.

I hop back down below and empty out my pack to make space for food, then I dig my bandana out of my pack pocket and tie it around my face to cover my nose and mouth, and gather my hair into a frizzy knot on top of my head to keep it out of the way. I sling the pack across my shoulders and pull myself up out of the hatch, crouching on the deck, scanning the docks again. Malarkey bounds up next to me, her nose immediately shooting into the air, the sound of her inhalations eager and husky.

We steal down the decrepit pier toward the main wharf, me quietly sidestepping holes and rotten boards, Malarkey pausing to shove her nose into them, inspecting and sniffing. I pause when we reach the main walkway, looking left and right. Malarkey comes to a halt by my side, her ribs expanding and contracting as she aggressively sniffs the salty night.

“Alright Lark,“ I say quietly, “take me to the good stuff.”

I let her lope ahead of me down the wide main dock, hugging the shadows, giving her a soft click of my tongue when she pauses to glance back over her shoulder at me. Her blazing, blue-white eyes and her white fur, splotched with brown, make her look like an enormous, ghostly hellhound. I can’t help but glance constantly over my shoulder. She’s not exactly inconspicuous.

We make our way toward the harbor gate, me following Malarkey, Malarkey following her nose. Every so often, she takes a detour, slinking off down one of the piers to inspect some pile of feathers or lump of God knows what. But she always comes back, loping up behind me like a white shadow, bumping the back of my hand with her nose as she passes me to take the lead again.

She turns right just before we reach the harbor gate, leading me down a walkway that I’ve never seen before. It dead ends next to a squat, shabby building with a small, official-looking door in it. Above the door, a sign says “Port Captain.” Etched in the glass of the door are some hours of operation. I’m busy reading them when I realize that Malarkey has disappeared around the back of the building. Cursing under my breath, I follow her.

I find her with her two massive front paws on the edge of an enormous skip, sniffing hard around the edge of the lid. Shooing her out of the way, I get a hand under the lip of the lid, put my shoulder against it, and heave it open. A hot, moist, putrid smell erupts from inside, along with a cloud of flies. I turn away, squeezing my eyes shut, but Malarkey, tail wagging, coils her massive hind legs and launches herself over the side and into the pile of garbage.

“Really?” I don’t hide my scorn or disappointment. “This is the good stuff?”

She ignores me, her nose already buried. My eyes fall upon a fairly intact-looking box sitting on top of the pile of refuse. I pull it out, open it up, and am surprised to discover twelve fresh, red apples, neatly aligned in rows on shredded paper.

“Huh. Guess you were right,” I admit.

Setting the box of apples aside, I hop to pull my hips up onto the edge of the skiff and lean my torso over the side, my feet dangling. Using both hands, I hunt through the remaining bags and boxes. After about ten minutes of digging, in addition to the apples, I’ve turned up a full loaf of bread, a half-full jar of some kind of pickled veg, and a lump of white cheese wrapped in cloth. The cheese is damp and has several chunks taken out of it. I sniff it long and hard before tucking it into my pack. I’m not convinced it won’t kill me, but if I run out of everything else it may have to do. Plus…it’s cheese. Something so delicious, and something I get my hands on so rarely, I’d pretty much eat it if it was obviously poisoned.

Malarkey busies herself chowing down on whatever disgusting scraps she can find as I fill my pack. I leave enough space in the top to tuck a couple of fish heads in for her, carefully wrapping them in the canvas that I took off the cheese before I do. Then with her belly and my pack full, we hop back down onto the dock.

I hunch myself as low as possible and tuck into the shadows as we slink back toward Panga, passing the Kingfisher, silent and stately as a royal clipper in the dark. As we round the end of the main walkway and turn onto Panga’s pier, I freeze.

Someone is on my boat.

chapter

eleven

WARM, yellow light spills through the port holes and the companionway hatch, casting small, slanted ovals on the slick, dark planks of the pier. I didn’t turn on the lights before I left.

A shadow crosses the light from the companionway and seconds later a head pops up through the hatch. Instinctively, I recoil, pressing myself behind a smooth stone pillar at the end of the dock. I can’t make out much but a voluminous head of dark hair. I stand rooted by indecision, my fingers gripping the pillar, heat from the day still rising from the stone. Half of me wants to turn and run, half of me wants to stride up there and start a fight. Before I can make the decision, Malarkey makes it for me.

“Malarkey!” I hiss, too late. She bounds down the derelict dock, the rotting planks shaking beneath her feet, and launches herself over Panga’s rail. To my surprise, her usual eruption of cannon-fire barks doesn’t commence. In fact, as she lands on the deck, her tail is wagging.

“Hola, Pirata!” a female voice cries in the dark.

Malarkey, her tail going like a propeller, bounds up to the shadowed figure, who grabs her head in both hands and fusses with her ears.

I hover at the end of the dock, baffled and suspicious. What is this person doing on my boat, and why isn’t my attack dog trying to attack her? I shift my weight from one foot to the other, and the planks beneath me squeak noisily.

“Quién pasa?” shouts the voice. I freeze. “I know someone is there.” The figure stands, a small silhouette, lit from below by the warm yellow light from Panga’s hatch. “Ven! Come where I can see you!”

Come on, Bird, says a voice in the back of my head. What are you doing? That’s your boat!

Taking a breath, I step out of the shadows and stride down the dock, arranging my face into what I hope is an expression that masks my racing pulse. The silhouette stands with one fist clenched and the other hand on top of Malarkey’s head as I approach. When I draw level with her I stop, putting my own hands on my hips and glaring up at her.

“What are you doing on my boat?” I demand, speaking loudly to keep the tremor out of my voice.

She glares back. “What do you mean ‘your boat’?“ A rounding of her vowels and softening of her consonants betray a slight accent. The light from the companionway lights only half her face, but I can see enough to see that she’s about my age, with olive-brown skin and thick, wavy, black hair that lands below her waist.

“The boat that you are standing on,” I say, slowly and evenly, “is my boat. And this dog? Is my dog.”

She laughs. “Your dog? I don’t think so, muñeca.”

“You don’t think so? Malarkey, come here.” I stretch my hand toward Malarkey, who immediately wags her tail and comes to me.

“Okay, so she knows you…” the girl says, the ‘s’ of ‘knows’ coming out soft, so it sounds like ‘noss.’ “But that doesn’t prove anything. Pirata, ven!”

To my surprise and chagrin, Malarkey trots back to her outstretched hand. The girl gives her ears a scratch and Malarkey sits between us, thumping her tail against the deck like a drum. The girl shoots me a triumphant look, which I return with a suspicious glare.

I can only assume that this is the person who rescued Panga and Malarkey from the bay. If that’s the case, she’s also the person who improperly tied off the lines and failed to put the sails away correctly. That tells me she probably doesn’t have much sailing experience, which tells me she’s not a Reckoner. She looks to be about my height and build—a bit heavier, maybe, softer around the middle, and with an actual ass and tits where I have none, but nowhere near as well-muscled as Fetch or as imposing as Goliath. I could probably take her in a fight if I had to. Her eyes tell me she’s thinking the same thing.

“Let me guess,” I say, “you found this boat floating abandoned in the bay? With the dog in it?”

Her eyes narrow. “Okay, so maybe it was your boat. But you abandon it.” She shrugs. “And you abandon your dog.”

“That was a temporary setback,” I growl. Malarkey stands and begins to walk a loop between us, alternately bumping my hand and the girl's knee with her nose, wagging her tail as if to say, “Isn’t this the best? I’m so glad you guys are finally meeting!”

“Sounds like this boat and this dog is too much for you.” The girl shrugs casually. “Maybe is better for everyone that I have them.”

A spark of anger ignites in my chest and I take a hard step toward her, grabbing hold of Panga’s rail. “Maybe it’s better for everyone if you—”

Her eyes dart over my shoulder. “Mierda!” She drops to a crouch on the deck, her eyes fixed over my head. “Bájate!”

“What?” I start to look over my shoulder but she reaches through the rail and shoves me roughly down toward the dock.

“Get down, gringa!”

I drop to one knee, my senses suddenly tingling as the sound of footsteps echoes off the water. Glancing over my shoulder through the hulls of tied-up boats, I can just make out a short, shaved-headed silhouette walking down the main dock.

Fetch.

I hold my breath. After a few seconds, however, it becomes clear that Fetch is walking the other way. She rounds a corner at the end of the main pier and disappears. The breath comes out of me in a rush.

“That was close,” whispers the girl.

“Yeah. Wait—” the realization jolts me to my feet, “—why are you hiding from Fetch?”

The girl stands too, fixing me with a suspicious stare. “How you know Fetch?”

For what feels like a minute, neither of us moves or speaks. Our eyes rake over each other.

“Let’s just say…we have a history,” I say finally.

“Okay,” she says. “Then we can just say I have history with her too.”

I narrow my eyes. This girl is hiding from Fetch, but I don’t think she’s a Reckoner. At least, she doesn't look like one. Is she someone like me, who just got caught up with the wrong crew? If she is, maybe we can find some common ground.

“Listen,” I say slowly, “I appreciate you finding my boat and my dog. But I sailed this boat a long way to get here, and there’s no way I’m just going to step back and let you take it from me.”

“Oh yeah?” Her eyes are defiant. Hostile, even. “Where you sail from?”

I hold her gaze while I do a few mental calculations. I don’t like the idea of telling some stranger my business. Then again, she is an enemy of Fetch, and people always say the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

“From Brume,” I say. Her eyes widen.

“From Brume? You came all that way by yourself?”

“Well…” I hesitate. She grabs the front of my shirt again, dragging me to my knees.

“She come back!”

Fetch’s footsteps echo around the corner of the main pier again. I strain to hear over the pounding of my heart as the footsteps grow closer, then abruptly turn and disappear.

“She went back to the Kingfisher,” breathes the girl.

I stand, brushing dust from my knees. “Okay look. We clearly have a common enemy here. Maybe we can help each other.”

She folds her arms. “Maybe.”

“If you stole this boat—”

“I didn’t steal—”

“—then you must need it for a reason. You’re going somewhere. Where?”

She shifts her weight to her other hip and glares at me, tight-lipped. Her eyes tell me she’s as unwilling to divulge information about herself as I am. It’s like we’re playing a game of ‘who’ll show their hand first?’ The only way to win that game is to never tell anyone anything. I like to think I’m pretty good at it.

I look her over again. A sleeveless shirt that has been roughly cut to show most of the skin on her midriff. Loose silk pants with an intricate pattern woven through them, holes in both knees. No shoes. Something about her bare feet is comforting to me. I dig through my brain to put my finger on why.

Sargo hates shoes.

A thought wriggles its way into my head. Even if she doesn't know how to sail—and judging by the way she tried those dock lines, she doesn’t—Sargo would always say it's better to have an extra pair of hands than not.

“Okay,” I sigh, “how’s this: I need to get somewhere. If you tell me where you’re going, maybe we can…come to an arrangement.” She simply raises an eyebrow. I’m going to have to show my hand. I take a breath. “I’m going to Grike.”

She’s silent for a long moment. Then, “I need to go to Île Tor.”

“Okay,” I nod, feeling a measure of tension dissipate between us, “okay, great. So we all need to go somewhere. Wait—Tor?” My heart spikes. “That’s the Reckoner island.”

“Relax, chica. I’m not a pirata.” She pauses, her eyes narrowing. “You?”

“Me? No way. I don’t trust those guys as far as I could throw them.”

She blinks. “Throw them? Why would you throw them?”

“It’s just an expression.” I fold my arms. “So what do you think? Help each other out?”

“Why you think I need your help?”

I indicate the work I did tidying up her slipshod job putting Panga away. “You didn’t tie the dock lines properly and you didn’t even bother to put the sails away. That tells me you’re either very careless, or you don’t have a lot of sailing experience. Which is it?”

She says nothing.

I put a hand on Panga’s rail and step one foot up to the deck. “Permission to come aboard?”

She doesn’t move. “Fine. But I’m watching you, gringa.” I swing myself up over the side and stand up to face her. Eye-to-eye, we are almost exactly the same height.

“I have food,” I say slowly, indicating my pack. “I’m going to go below and stow it. Okay?”

She nods, and I duck down the companionway. Malarkey bounds down beside me and the girl squats at the top of the stairs, watching.

“What’s your name?” I ask as I pull Malarkey’s fish heads out of my pack and stow them in the cold chest in the galley. When she doesn’t respond, I grit my teeth and say, “I’m Bird.”

“Locuaz,” she replies.

“Are you from Alluvium?” My stomach twists sharply with hunger. I dig through the pack until my hand falls on one of the apples. I pull it out, and taking a large bite, empty the pack onto one of the sofas with my other hand.

“No. Pocosín.”

“Really?” I look at her sharply. No wonder she reminds me so much of Sargo. “How did you end up here.”

She shrugs. “A series of mistakes.”

I can’t help but smile grimly. “I hear that.” I pick up one of the apples and hold it out to her. Suspiciously, she takes it.

“Grike is a long way,” she says. She bites into the apple, fixing me with a pointed look.

“So is Tor,” I say, equally pointedly.

She chews in silence. Then says, “Okay, gringa. Let’s say we gonna help each other. How do I know I can trust you? How do I know you won’t try to kill me as soon as we get out of the harbor?”

I return her narrow-eyed glare with one of my own. I don't want to tell her that I need her, but it could be the only way to gain her trust. “I’ve never sailed solo,” I confess. “I need a second pair of hands.”

She nods slowly. “So we get to Tor. Then what? It’s only halfway to Grike.”

“Then you get off and I sail the rest of the way.”

“So you take my boat.”

I exhale impatiently. “For the last time, it is not your boat!”

“Well, it’s not your boat either!”

I open my mouth and close it. How does she know that? “What makes you say that?” I demand, furiously.

“You expect me to believe some gringa from Brume name her boat Panga? You even know what that word means?”

I hesitate. She’s got me there. I actually didn’t know Panga meant anything at all. I thought it was just a name.

She studies me with quick eyes. “It’s a little boat. Like a skiff. Not with sails, with an electric motor. In Pocosín, we use them for fishing. Sometimes we paint them different colors for what part of the city you are from. This boat is yellow, so I think whoever owns it is maybe from the East Side.”

She sits back with a satisfied smile and takes a big, crunchy bite of the apple.

I stare at her, inwardly cursing. “Okay, fine. You’re right. It’s not my boat. But it is my friend’s boat, and I’m very anxious to get it back to him. I think I’m being more than fair here. Passage to Tor. You get where you want to go. You won’t need the boat after that.”

She takes another bite of the apple, chews slowly. “Okay. Fine. So when you wanna leave?”

The abruptness of her decision takes me aback. “Uh—I guess I hadn’t figured that out yet. But…as soon as possible. We could go tonight. As soon as we’re ready to get underway.”

She shakes her head. “I think tomorrow is better. There is a regatta. A lot of boats will be out on the bay. It will be more cover. If we leave tonight, alone, Fetch will hear us for sure.”

“A regatta? Like a race? What about the Kingfisher? You don’t think they’ll participate?”

Again, she shakes her head. “Savage doesn’t care about these things. Unless there is coin involved. The race tomorrow is no cash prize. I don’t think the Kingfisher will leave the dock.”

I pause again. She seems pretty confident in her evaluation of Savage. “How do I know I can trust you?” I ask. “How do I know you’re not working for Fetch?”

She looks impatient. “Believe me, I’m not. I hope I never see that puta again.” She glares at me and sighs. “I guess you just gonna have to trust me.”

I don’t like that at all, but I’m desperate. This girl is my best bet at getting to Grike. “Fine,” I say shortly. “What time does the race start?”

“Mid-morning. But it’s gonna be busy right away. I think we should go early. As soon as the sun is up.”

“Works for me.” I take a last bite of the apple and pop my head out of the hatch to throw the core over the side into the water. “I’m gonna get some sleep.”

“Me too.” She steps up next to me to throw her core over the side too, so close that her voluminous black waves block most of my view. I smell roasted brew beans and cloves through the grease of her unwashed hair. She turns, steps down, and heads toward the big sleeping bunk in the v-berth.

“Uh—excuse me,” I call after her. “Where are you going?”

She turns. “To sleep?”

I shake my head. “Uh uh. No way. That’s my bunk. You can sleep out here on the sofa.”

She puts her hands on her hips. “Your bunk? I don’t think so. I been sleeping in there for two weeks. You are new here. You can sleep out here on the sofa.”

An angry silence descends as we square off and stare each other down again. Malarkey, seeming to sense the tension, stands up from her spot on the sofa, where she’s been observing us with her tail over her nose. She jumps down and sits on the floor directly in front of me, thumping her tail and gazing up into my eyes.

“Fine,” I say through gritted teeth. “I’ll sleep out here. But only because Malarkey told me to.”

“Why you keep calling her that?” Locuaz says. “Her name is Pirata.”

“Her name is Malarkey.”

“Okay. Call her what you like. I’m going to sleep. In my bunk.” She ruffles Malarkey’s ears. “Good night, Pirata.”

She turns on her heel and disappears into the v-berth, closing the door behind her. I hear the click of the lock sliding into place. In the sudden silence, exhaustion descends on me like fog. I sink onto the sofa, letting my head fall into my hands.

“What do you think, Malark?” I mumble. “Is this the worst decision I’ve ever made?”

Malarkey’s cold, wet nose comes poking through my fingers to lick what I can only assume is fish residue from them. I shoo her away, and she snorts and sits back on her haunches, regarding me with soft eyes.

“I think we both know you’ve made far worse decisions than this,” says the look on her face.

chapter

twelve

“YOU NEVER CAME TO SAY GOODBYE.”

A brackish pot appears in my hand. I kneel by the creek and dip it into the cloudy water, then cover it with the lid and set it on a collapsible metal stand erected on the bank. Beneath the stand is a small pile of sticks and kindling. The hard, red sun of Naze bakes the earth and draws large, rounds drops of sweat from my brow, like it always has. Like it always will.

“I was angry,” says Fife, as she appears at my elbow. She kneels next to me and places a few more twigs on the pile. She’s older than the last time I saw her. Twenty, maybe. A dream, then. I have no memory of Fife at this age. The age she would be now, if I still knew her.

Fife pulls a straight, slender wooden drill from the air and places the tip into the center of the pile. I watch with a flicker of jealousy as she sandwiches her nimbler, older, more skillful hands around the drill and begins to spin it. In no time at all, smoke curls from the tip of the drill and the fire lights.

“I wish it had been that easy on the island,” I mutter.

“What island?” says Fife, and I remember that Fife has never seen the island because this is only a dream.

I blow gently on the sputtering flame and together the we coax the fire to life.

“Angry why?” I sit back on my heels and wrap my arms around my knees.

“Because you were leaving. And Shale was leaving. You were leaving me behind. And it wasn’t fair.” Fife crosses her feet under herself and stares into the flames.

“It wasn’t my fault. You never came to say goodbye.” I know I’ve said it before, and I know I’ll say it again. It seems to be the only thing to say, in this world with Fife.

Fife says nothing. Fife always says nothing. The meager light from the flames flickers on her face. Her face flickers too; begins to dissolve and warp.

Somewhere behind me, I hear the deep rumble of a motor. I frown and glance over my shoulder. The shiny, metallic, tortoise-like EV rumbles over the hard, red earth toward us, its big, knobbly tires kicking out dust.

"Don't let them take me," says a voice that isn't Fife's, and turning in alarm I see Sargo. His face flickers in the firelight, looks insubstantial. He fixes his stare on the approaching EV. His eyes are hollow, fearful.

The vehicle rumbles to a halt, and doors on the side swing up and open, spilling out people in uniforms that say Zenith across the chests. There are so many of them—they seem to tumble out of the doors in a never-ending stream. They surround us and fall upon Sargo, grabbing him under the arms and hauling him to his feet.

"Bird, don't let them take me!" he cries.

"Sargo!" I clutch at his hand as they drag him away, crawling on all fours, stumbling to my feet, grabbing at his shirt, at the arms of the people holding him. But the crowd closes in around me, separating us.

"No!" I trip and land on my hands and knees in the dirt as the sea of Zenith employees drag Sargo into the EV. The doors swing closed and the vehicle rumbles to life again.

Sargo's muffled screaming reaches my ears as it crunches away in a cloud of red dust.

chapter

thirteen

“DON'T LET THEM TAKE ME.”

I wake with a snort, sitting bolt upright, slick with cold sweat and trembling. The sour sting of metal is in my mouth. Bright sun slants through Panga’s tiny porthole. Fresh morning air and the sounds of a lively, bustling port stream through the open companionway. My head crackles with spots of light.

It was a dream. Just a dream.

Shoving away Malarkey's concerned, snuffling nose and wiping the dog spit out of my ear, I sit up.

“Buenos días.”

I start and look around. Locuaz sits on the opposite sofa, cross-legged, watching me over a cup of tea.

“Good morning,” I say carefully. Thoughts like ‘how long has she been sitting there?’ and ‘she could have killed me while I was sleeping,’ crowd into my head, pushing the remnants of the dream away.

I eye her cautiously. “What time is it?”

“0900. You slept late.”

Jumping to my feet, I step onto the bottom step to look through the companionway hatch. “Why didn’t you wake me? We need to get going!”

“Relax,” says Locuaz. “You seemed like you needed to sleep, and it wasn’t as busy earlier as I thought it would be. Better for us to leave now.”

Something’s changed in her manner. She seems more at ease than she did last night. Relaxed. Friendly, even. I try not to let it unsettle me. Friendly is better than killing you in your sleep, I tell myself.

I can’t argue with her evaluation of the timing: the harbor is a hive of race day activity. The docks are crowded with more merchants, sailors, Reckoners, and vagrants than I’ve ever seen. Well-dressed citizens move among the usual crowd—wealthy passengers who have most likely paid for the experience of ‘crewing’ on a boat for the day. Sargo would say they are people who will mostly stand around holding drinks and getting in the way.

The boats tied along the pier next to us crawl with people readying sails, untying dock lines, polishing winches, and washing the decks. In the distance, groups of white, triangular sails already flit back and forth like flocks of birds across the bay.

“Great,” I say slowly, nervous anxiety already clenching its cold fist around my chest, “great. Busy. Busy is good.” Busy means cover. Busy means tight maneuvering and potential collisions, says the voice my head. And you still don’t even know how to start the motor.

I shove down the voice and turn to Locuaz. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to have to work together. So what do you know about sailing?”

“I’ll be honest, mija, you were right: I’m not really a sailor. I don’t really know how to tie the lines or do the sails right or anything like that.” My heart sinks. “But,” she continues, “I know a lot about motors.”

I blink. “You know how to run the motor?”

“Uh-huh. In Pocosín my step-father is a mechanic. I helped him in his shop.”

“So you can start this thing? Get us off the dock? Out into the bay?”

She nods. “That’s how I got Panga back to the dock when I found her.”

“How are you at driving?”

“It’s not my strong suit. I can tell you how to do it—you know, shift the gear, forward, reverse, but…” She glances apprehensively up at the helm. “I don’t like to do it. ”

“Okay,” my pulse spikes again, “I never actually did it myself. But okay. I’ll drive.”

“We need to slip out without the Kingfisher spotting us,” says Locuaz. “I think we should wait until these guys go.” She indicates the boat next to us with her mug. Osprey. “It’s a big boat. If we leave at the same time, it will block the Kingfisher from seeing us.”

I nod. “When we get away from the docks and out in open water, we’ll kill the motor and raise the headsail. We can’t use the main—it’s busted. But I think we’ll do okay with just the jib. I’ll raise it, but I’ll need you to take the helm and keep us steady while I do it. Can you do that?”

She nods, looking as nervous as I feel. Suddenly, the feeling that this is a half-cocked plan, formulated by two half-cocked people stampedes through my head.

“It’ll be fine,” I say, half to her, half to myself.

Thirty minutes later, I stand at the helm, gripping the wheel with white knuckles.

“Okay,” says Locuaz. “See that lever?” She puts a finger on a short lever to the right of the wheel. “Make sure it moves. If it’s stuck, it means the engine is in gear, and we can’t start the motor.”

I jiggle the lever. “It moves.”

“Okay.” She ducks down and fiddles with a panel on the floor of the cockpit. My mind spins. All these things I never noticed before—levers next to the wheel, instrument panels on the floor. I should have paid more attention when I was sailing with Sargo. All this stuff I just…let him do. Didn’t even question.

“Are you listening?” Locuaz’s voice pulls me back.

“Sorry. What?”

“I turned on the battery. Now all I have to do is—” she produces a key from her pocket and sticks it into a keyhole on the floor panel, “—turn this key, and…”

With a deep rumble and a violent shudder, Panga springs to life. The big diesel motor sounds like a beast waking from sleep, and the deck beneath my feet trembles with its effort. Locuaz grins, and stands, wiping her brow.

“I’m really glad that worked.”

“What do you mean ‘glad it worked’?! I thought you knew how to do this!”

“I do.” She shoots me a defensive look. “But sometimes, with these old motors, they sit for a while…who knows if they still work?”

“Fine. What’s next?”

“Next, you push that lever,” she indicates the lever by the wheel again, “up. That engages the gears to go forward. Then this lever,” she points to another, smaller stick on the other side of the wheel, “is your accelerator. Move it slowly. Slowly. Muy lento. Understand?”

I nod. “Move that one up to engage the gear, move this one to accelerate.”

“Slowly.”

“Slowly. Got it.” I squeeze my knuckles tighter around the wheel. “I need you on the dock, managing the lines. Untie the bow line first—that’s the one at the front. Then run back and untie the stern. I need you to help guide the boat out while I accelerate. Then, when we’re clear you hop on.”

“Wait—” her brows knit in confusion. “I’m not gonna be on the boat?”

“Not right away. You need to be on the dock to help push us away. When we’re clear, you hop over the rail. Just make sure you don’t wait too long, or the boat will be too far away for you to make the jump.”

“What if I don’t make it?”

I look at her firmly. “You’d better make it. I can’t turn around; that’s way beyond my skill level. This is a one-way trip.”

Her eyes go wide. “Okay.”

I take a breath, holding her gaze. “Ready?”

She nods. “Listo.”

The Osprey is easing out of her slip. It’s now or never. Malarkey bounds up from below deck and runs to the bow to sniff the air as Locuaz hops onto the dock and begins untying the lines. I engage the first lever, feeling a jolt and a low clunk as the engine shunts into gear. Panga glides slowly forward as I inch the accelerator higher. Locuaz walks beside the boat on the dock, gripping the dock line, her face tight, lips pursed, brows knitted.

“That’s good,” I call. “Pull the stern in a little. We need to point the nose away from the dock.”

She leans back against the line and Panga’s nose eases into the channel. I keep one eye on the Osprey and one eye on the instruments and find myself wishing for a third eye so I can watch Locuaz too. Is this how Sargo used to feel when he sailed with me?

His face invades my mind and I push it away. “Okay, that’s it! We’re clear. Hop on!”

I glance over my shoulder and a wave of panic washes through me. The gap between Panga and the dock looks almost too wide to jump, and we’re getting further away by the second. Locuaz hovers on the edge, dancing from foot to foot.

“Bird! It’s too far! What do I do?”

“You’re just gonna have to jump!” I shout. She hesitates, glancing around as though some other answer will present itself. “Jump!” I yell again.

A look of determination crosses her face. I see her shoulders rise and fall with a single decisive breath. She takes four big steps back, hoisting her swishing, silky pants around her waist, then charges to the edge of the dock at a flat-out run and leaps. My mouth drops as she sails through the air and barely catches hold of Panga’s stern rigging with one hand. Her hips slam into the outside of the hull, her feet hitting the water.

“Maldita sea!” She swings her other hand up to catch the rail, kicking her feet to find purchase against the side of the hull. With an enormous, undignified grunt, she hauls herself over the side, landing in a heap on the deck.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” She rolls to her hands and knees and staggers to her feet, rubbing her hip and shaking her hair out of her face. “If that didn’t blow our cover, I don’t know what will.”

I glance to port, where the Osprey is still easing out of the docks alongside us, still blocking the Kingfisher from sight.

“I think we’re okay,” I mutter, instinctively hunching over the wheel as though that will hide us any better. On the deck of the Osprey, I spot three young men in crisp collared shirts and pressed shorts, doubled over with laughter, pointing their cocktail glasses our way.

“They laughing at us?” Locuaz asks hotly.

“Just ignore them. They’re just passengers. Probably don’t know the first about sailing or motors.” I glance at her sideways. “That was quite a jump.”

She smiles slyly. “It was pretty far, huh? I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

Malarkey appears from the bow and jumps down into the cockpit, shoving her nose into Locuaz’s face. Locuaz takes hold of Malarkey’s ears with both hands and squeezes them.

“Sí, Pirata, estoy bién, gracias.”

Pirata. A hot needle of jealousy shoots through me. “Alright,” I say sharply, “we need to get ready to put the sail up.”

Locuaz shoots me a look, but gently releases Malarkey and shoos her away.

We come to the mouth of the narrow channel that will dump us out into the bay. As we leave the lee of the harbor, the wind suddenly gusts around my face, whipping my hair into a stinging frenzy of vicious snakes. I take one hand off the wheel to tie as much of it as I can in a sloppy knot on top of my head.

Panga pitches and rolls in the choppy water and I brace my feet against the sides of the cockpit to stop myself from sliding. To port, the Osprey peels away, turning downwind, and glancing around, I see for the first time just how many boats are out on the water today.

The day I first arrived in Alluvium there were hundreds of boats in this bay. Today, it feels like a thousand. Boats heel so far over with the speed and pressure of the wind that they look as though they’re about to capsize as they careen across the bay. Some clip along so fast that physics demands their hydro-foiling hulls lift completely out of the water. We pass a catamaran, its white, double hulls as slick and shiny as a pair of glass slippers. In contrast, our tiny, salt-covered Panga looks like a worn-out work boot.

“Bird, watch out!”

Locuaz’s sharp cry whips my head to starboard just in time to see a massive trimaran bearing down on us, her triple hulls shredding the water like silver knives. I crank the wheel hard to port and the tri banks sharply to starboard, blazing past us so close that I can see the deep lines on the furious face of her captain, shaking his middle finger at me and screaming obscenities that are mercifully carried away by the wind.

“This is a really bad idea!” I yell, my voice barely audible over the sound of Panga’s motor and the gusting wind.

“I agree!” screams Locuaz. “But we are here now. What else can we do?”

Steeling myself with a breath and tightening my grip on the wheel with one hand, I reach down to loosen the port jib sheet. “We need to get the sail up. I need you to take the helm.”

Locuaz’s eyes go wide. “Now?”

“Yes, Locuaz!” I yell, feeling a strange sense of deja vu. “Now! I don’t have time to tell you everything twice!”

“I don’t have time to tell you everything twice, Bird!”

Sargo’s voice again, so clear in my head he could be standing next to me. Standing at this helm, his eyes steely, jaw firm with determination, wrestling Panga over the same rough water of this bay. Our mainsail shredded, the black boat bearing down on us.

I shove the image away, forcing myself to see Locuaz and Malarkey instead. Locuaz clambers around the helm and steps in beside me. I sense the trembling of her hands, the way she gingerly takes the wheel, as though it might bite her.

“Just keep us steady,” I say.

“Just keep us steady!” Sargo’s voice echoes inside my head.

And I couldn’t do it, I think.

I shout over the thoughts. “Keep us pointed downwind. I’m going to put up the jib.”

“Keep us pointed toward that sandbar. I’m going to pull down the main,” echoes Sargo. I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head, as if I can shake him out of there. Come on, Bird, I tell myself fiercely, focus!

Hopping down into the cockpit, I pick up the port jib sheet and wrap it twice around the winch. “Ready?” I yell over my shoulder.

Locuaz nods, her wide eyes fixed over the bow.

“Here we go!” I pull the line and the sail slowly begins to unfurl. Hand over hand, one foot up on the side of the cockpit, I heave until the muscles in my arms burn. Finally, the last few feet unfurl and catch the wind, snapping open and almost wrenching the line from my hands. I tie it off and wipe sweaty hair from my face with the back of my hand.

“Bird! Help!”

Locuaz’s shriek whips my head around. A massive maroon hull and crisp white sails fill my vision.

“Move!” I jump behind the helm, wresting the wheel from Locuaz’s grasp and cranking it hard to port. “Sheet in the port side!” I yell. Locuaz’s face registers no understanding. “The rope! The one I just used to get the sail out! Make it tighter!” She stumbles to pick up the line, pulling it tentatively with one hand. “Pull hard!” I shout. “Use two hands!”

I haul the wheel around, hand over hand, and we barely eke out of the path of the oncoming ship, snatches of expletives and curses from her angry crew finding my ears on the wind. I wave my middle finger over my shoulder without looking at them as my heart hammers against my sternum.

“Okay,” I call to Locuaz. “I think we’re okay.”

Blood pounds in my ears as I scan the water for more potential collisions and let the wheel spin back through my hands to its center position. We’re near the edge of the fray but not out of the woods yet. Shoving more sticky, itchy hair from my face, I squint up at the sail. Three little red flags—the telltales—flutter feebly and sag at the back edge of the sail, struggling to find the breeze.

“Those telltales are luffing,” I hear Fetch say in my head. “Ease the sail out.”

“Ease the sail out,” I call to Locuaz. “We pulled it in too tight when we had to turn. We need to give it some slack to angle it better to the wind.”

“Like make it looser?”

“Yes!” The harshness of my voice startles me, and I catch my breath. Calm down, I tell myself. You’re fine.

Locuaz loosens the sheet and the telltales catch the breeze and lift, streaming behind the sail like proud red banners. The sail fills, curving poetically against the blue sky, and suddenly, I feel it: Panga finds her pocket.

When you’re under sail, Sargo used to tell me, and you’re doing it right—I mean, really doing it right—it feels like flying. There’s an ease to the motion of the boat, like skating, even when the waves are big, even when the water is rough. You can feel the power of the Salt through your feet, the power of the wind on the sails deep in your core, like a tug of opposing forces, perfectly in balance. Not a rhythm, exactly—waves don’t come at regular intervals and the wind is always changing—but a pocket. As though you’ve slotted into some elemental groove that slips between wind and water, inhabiting the space between the Salt and the sky.

I could never get it right, but sailing with Sargo felt like riding on the back of some giant creature. Like he had somehow tamed the Salt; put a harness on it and made it acquiesce.

I feel it now. Feel Panga slip into that ephemeral groove, feel the tug of the opposing forces of wind and waves as we ride the ever-shifting line between water and sky. It feels like flying. It feels like magic.

“Holy shit,” I say out loud. I’m sailing.

chapter

fourteen

“SO THIS FRIEND…HE’S CUTE?”

Locuaz reclines along the starboard bench seat in the cockpit, her long brown legs crossed at the ankles, feet propped on a winch. We're sailing north, hugging the coast until we reach the point where we'll be able to catch the Trade Winds, turn left and head west across open water.

After so many weeks spent sailing south with Sargo from Brume to Alluvium, it feels bizarre to now be sailing north. Everything is on the wrong side. The sun. The land. It feels like going backwards. But the best spot to leave this coast is either just a few days north of Alluvium, or another thousand or so miles south to Pocosín. Another thousand miles south sounded like too much. So north it is.

Locuaz lifts her chin and squints across her recumbent chest at me in the blazing afternoon sun.

I raise my eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” She stretches two lazy fingers down toward Malarkey, sprawled on the cockpit floor, and gently flicks her behind the ear. “Is your friend cute?”

I sit up a little straighter, taking the helm in both hands and fixing my gaze over the bow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She tuts and pulls herself to a seat. “Oh come on, mija.”

“What friend?”

“The friend you sailed with from Brume. The one who owns this boat. Is he cute?”

I keep my gaze forward and my face impassive. “I guess I never really thought about it.”

“You never thought about it? You expect me to believe you going all the way to Grike for this boy, and you never thought about if he’s cute or not?”

My skin prickles and my face grows warm. We’ve been out here less than two days, and this girl is already turning into more than I’d bargained for. I think I preferred her when she was insulting me and trying to steal my boat. I shift on my seat.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, too bad. We out here in the middle of nowhere with nothing else to talk about. What does he look like? What color is his hair?”

I inhale a deep, frustrated breath, stretching my chest from the inside. “His hair is black.”

“Okay!” A clap of her hands startles me enough to glance at her. She’s pulling herself to a full seat and crossing her legs, leaning toward me with an eager face. “So black hair. Eyes?”

I sigh. “Brown.”

“Beard? Or no?”

“I don’t…know. He was kind of getting one last time I saw him.”

“Mm, okay. Beards are sexy.”

I flush. “I really don’t wanna talk about this.”

“Why not?” She fixes me with a genuinely confused, serious look. “Oh shit. Was it like…a bad breakup?”

“No—we—” I’m getting flustered. “We’re not a thing. It’s not a thing. Just—drop it.”

She studies me silently. “You don’t like to talk about stuff, huh?”

I put my gaze back over the bow. “I guess not.”

“Let me guess.” She folds her arms and leans back against the side of the cockpit. “You’re one of those girls who’s not friends with other girls.”

It’s such a surprisingly accurate appraisal, and so out of the blue, that I don’t know how to respond.

“Thought so.” She sighs. “So, what, you’re too cool? You’re one of the guys? You’re not like other girls?”

“What? No, I—I just never really had a…like a girlfriend.”

“Never?”

“Well…” Fife’s face swims before my eyes. I push it away. “I had one when I was a kid. But that’s it.”

“That’s sad.”

Defensive irritation flares in me. “I guess. I never felt like I was missing anything.”

“Really?” Her voice is incredulous. “So who do you talk to about boys?”

“I don’t talk to anyone about boys.”

“How is that possible? Who do you hang out with?”

I don’t respond.

“Wait—” she leans toward me, her eyes wide. “Please tell me this boy is not, like…your only friend.”

I set my jaw.

“Oh, no, chica. That isn’t healthy. He could be a murderer.”

“He’s not a murderer.”

“You sure about tha—”

“I know what murderer looks like!” I snap. “And he’s not.”

Locuaz recoils. “Okay, okay.” She’s silent for a few minutes. I stare over the water, twisting my hands around the wheel, anger boiling in my chest. “How do you know what a murderer looks like?” she asks finally.

The image of Savage’s knife puncturing a man’s jaw flashes through my head. The black blood bubbling out of the wound, the strangled gurgling, the convulsing body. Savage’s hand on mine; the smell of ash and pineapple. His tattooed chest. I close my eyes tight and open them again.

“I saw someone get killed too,” says Locuaz. Her face is drawn, clouded by the memory. For one anxious heartbeat I’m afraid that she’s going to talk about what she saw—going to make me talk about what I saw, but to my relief, she turns away, sending her gaze across the Salt.

“I guess some things are better not to talk about,” she says.

I nod, even though a creeping feeling from somewhere deep inside tells me that’s not true. We let quiet envelop us again. Malarkey raises her head to look at me, then lets it flop back onto the deck. She stretches, extending her paws like fingers, and sighs herself back into sleep. The soothing hush of water against the hull and the snap of the sails fills my ears, but I can’t keep the image of Savage’s knife out of my head. He did it so casually. So easily. And everyone just…watched. Like it was nothing. Goliath, Red, Fetch.

Fetch. The name jolts a question into my head.

“Wait—so how do you know Fetch?”

Locuaz tuts again and hisses quietly through her teeth. “Let’s just say…it was a bad breakup.”

“Oh.” My eyes widen. “Oh.”

“What?” She eyes me. “You got a problem with that kind of thing?”

“A problem? No, of course not. I just…Fetch? I can’t really imagine her in a relationship.” The thought of Fetch being intimate with anyone—the thought of her doing anything but barking orders—is so discordant that I literally cannot picture it.

Locuaz smiles bitterly. “Yeah. Well…she’s not in one anymore.”

“Wait…you just said beards are sexy.”

She shrugs. “I can think they’re sexy and not want to have sex with them.”

“Fair enough.” I steal a sideways glance at her. "So…a relationship with Fetch. What was that like?”

“I thought you didn’t like to talk about this stuff?” She returns the look with a measuring one of her own, but I catch a glint in her eye that tells me she’s kidding. “I’ll tell you. But first you gotta tell me how you know that puta.”

I sigh. Either Locuaz is getting to me the way Sargo used to get to me, or I’m just too exhausted to lie anymore.

“I worked for her,” I say. “On the Kingfisher. They gave me passage to Alluvium.”

Locuaz grins. “I bet that was hell.”

“It was.”

She sighs and shakes her head. “I’m being unkind. Fetch is tough, but she’s smart. She works hard. And she has a hard life. It’s not her fault she’s…so difficult.”

“What kind of hard life?” I can’t help but be curious. As much as I hated taking orders from her, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to myself that I’ve always been secretly impressed by Fetch.

Locuaz studies me carefully, as if she’s deciding how much to tell me. “Her sister died,” she says finally.

My gut lurches. It’s like the feeling I got when my moms told me Shale had died. “That’s awful.”

She nods. “They were really close. Her sister was two years older than Fetch. I guess like our age? Fetch really looked up to her. After she died, it screwed her up for a long time. And, after her sister died, her mom…took her own life.”

“Jesus.” I shake my head, unable to think of anything else to say.

“So now it’s just Fetch and her brother. Well, and her dad, but he’s…unreliable.”

“Wait, what brother? Is he on the Kingfisher?”

“Mhm. Little boy. About seven. Fid.”

My eyes go wide. “Fid is Fetch’s brother?”

“Síp. And Savage is her father.”

“What?” My mouth falls open. In my shock, I let go of the helm, and Panga banks suddenly to port, cresting over a small swell. Cursing, I grab the wheel and wrestle us back on course. “Her father?”

“Síp.”

My mind reels. “Savage is…white.”

She shrugs. “So?”

“But he’s not that old, though, is he? He must have been really young…”

“Oh yeah. Like sixteen, maybe? Fetch told me Reckoners aren't chipped. So they don't have birth control. A lot of them have kids young."

Birth control. I shove that thought away quickly, along with the vaguely nauseous feeling it triggers.

If Savage was sixteen when he had his first daughter, and that daughter was two years older than Fetch, that would make him…what? Thirty now? Thirty one? Almost twice my age. I swallow another greasy slick of nausea. Does it really matter? I can’t really get hung up on his age when I’m still hung up on watching him stab a man to death in front of me, can I? But finding out that he’s someone’s father…

Pieces start to fall into place. The way the crew defer to Fetch. Her impatience with Savage, her boredom, her intolerance for his grandiose displays.

“Fetch runs that ship,” I say. “The crew does exactly what she tells them. It’s because they know she’s the captain’s daughter?”

“No way. Nobody knows. I only know because…well, as you can see, I’m good at getting people to talk.” She shoots me a sly grin and I roll my eyes. Her expression turns serious. “And I’m only telling you because you told me you don’t talk.”

“Who am I going to tell?" I say. "I don't have any friends, remember?"

She nods. “So no, they don’t know. Fetch earned that crew’s respect on her own.”

I can’t do anything but shake my head in disbelief. “And Savage…he just…puts that all on her?”

Locuaz sighs. “He has his own problems. That family has…a lot of pain.”

Can’t argue with that. Savage certainly has his own problems. “But it’s like he doesn’t even run his own ship.”

“Of course not. He’s too whacked on pelo most of the time to do much of anything except talk shit and intimidate people.”

“Pelo?”

“I think you would call it…haar?”

Haar.

“He’s doing haar?”

Locuaz nods. “All the time. You ever seen him get real gray and tired-looking? It’s because he’s out. Then he stops at the Row, or picks some up in port. ¡Y listo! All better.”

That day he disappeared at the Row. That’s what he was up to. Suddenly, it all clicks. Savage’s bouts of exhaustion. His blackened fingertips. I knew I’d seen them somewhere before; Five offered me haar, that night at the Flats, right before he drugged me and stole Electra’s necklace. The tips of the fingers he used to hold the pipe were black, just like Savage’s. I turned it down that night because even I know haar’s the worst thing you can put in your body. He’s missing teeth. I shudder.

Wow, Bird. You really know how to pick them.

My eyes meet Locuaz’s. “So Fetch knows. She runs the crew for him…because she knows he can’t.”

Locuaz nods sadly.

“Why? Why does she put up with that? Why not just leave?”

“I mean, because he’s her father? His daughter died. And his wife. It’s the kind of thing that either tears a family apart or makes them cling to each other tighter. Fetch says he blames himself. She said he only started doing that stuff after they died. He hid it from her and the crew for a long time. But you can’t hide that kind of thing forever.”

My mind goes back to Brume, to Sargo’s uncle Blenny. Drinking to forget the guilt of causing his sister’s death. Too sozzled on grog to pay off his own debt, leaning on Sargo to help him. An unfamiliar pain goes through me. Pity. At least Savage has Fetch. Blenny doesn’t even have Sargo anymore.

Because of me.

Locuaz stretches her legs along the seat again, and reaches down to scratch behind Malarkey’s ears. Malarkey gives her a sleepy tail thump. I form and reform sentences in my mind, trying to figure out the best way to ask Locuaz what I want to ask her.

Finally I settle on, “You know a lot about Fetch. You must have been together a while.”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time, gazing down at Malarkey, putting all her attention on those ears. I know that trick. I use that trick all the time when I don’t want to talk about something.

“We were,” she says, not looking up or removing her hands from Malarkey’s ears. “And to answer your question from before—what was it like? It was…a lot. Sometimes it was really good. And sometimes it was not. I’m pretty easy, mija, you know? I like to keep things simple, I don’t want a lot of craziness. And Fetch is a lot of craziness. There’s a lot going on underneath that’s kind of a mess. Eventually, I just…got tired of cleaning up the mess.”

Her voice is sad and quiet, and she keeps her eyes on Malarkey’s. It’s another trick I recognize: telling Malarkey the hard thing when you can’t look anyone else in the eye to tell them. Ten minutes ago she was calling Fetch puta. But I suspect that’s not really how she feels.

“When did you break up?”

She sighs. “Like…two weeks maybe? Last time they came through Alluvium. Right before I found Panga.”

Recently, then. I guess that explains why Fetch was such a grumpy bitch while I was sailing with the Kingfisher.

“When I found Panga,” Locuaz continues, “I was like, ‘okay. I’m gonna go.’ You know? It’s crazy—I don’t even know how to sail, but I was like…I just need to go somewhere. Away. Anywhere.”

“So you picked…Île Tor?” She nods. “That’s a pretty long, dangerous way to go on a whim.”

“I don’t know, mija. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m…kind of lost, I guess.” She lets go of Malarkey and sits up, fixing me with another probing look. “What about you? Are you making the mess or cleaning it up?”

I almost have to laugh out loud at that one. “Oh, I’m definitely making the mess.”

She nods sagely. “Just be careful. One day your boy’s gonna get tired of cleaning it up.”

I purse my lips and look over the bow. “Yeah okay.” We sit in silence until the next question pops into my head. “Hey, what is the deal with Fetch’s tattoo? The little numbers.”

Locuaz tuts and shakes her head. “I don’t know. She won’t tell me. Forty-two forty-two. Maybe it’s a code for something?” She seems uninterested in discussing it and lays long on the bench again, bending an arm behind her head. “So tell me more about your boy. Is he a good kisser?”

I flush. “No. I mean—I don’t know. We’re not... I mean, we haven’t—”

“You haven’t even kissed?” She sits up on her elbows, her eyebrows in her hairline. “Wow, you got it bad, mija. You’re sailing across the Salt for this guy and you haven’t even kissed?”

I stare straight ahead. I can sense her grinning out of the corner of my eye, and it makes my cheeks burn.

“Well, he better be a really good kisser if you going all the way to Grike for that shit,” she says.

A small smile creeps into the corners of my mouth. I can’t help it. She’s right. What I’m doing is ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. It feels good to smile about it.

She unfolds a long, brown leg and nudges my knee with her big toe. “You gonna message me, okay? When you get there. When you kiss, you gonna tell me how it is.”

“Wait—” I frown. “You have Messenger? Are you chipped?”

She knits her eyebrows in incredulous surprise. “Sí, claro. Are you not?”

I blow air hard through my cheeks. That’s a whole road of explanation that I don’t want to go down right now. “I am.” She regards me with a clearly suspicious look, and I move on quickly. “Does yours work? Out here?”

“I haven’t tried.” She taps her right temple. “Huh. It says ‘Out of range.’”

I nod grimly. “Yeah. We’re too far from the Turf to pick up the Net.”

“Turf?”

“Turf, you know, land. Not the Salt.”

“Ohhh. Tierra.”

“Sure.”

We lapse into silence again. I turn my gaze over the starboard side, where the sun is beginning its descent into the horizon, then to port, where the coast is darkening with black shadows. My stomach twists noisily with hunger, pulling me roughly out of the sleepy afternoon chat and back to reality.

We’re already running out of food. In two days, Locuaz and I have each eaten four apples, two slices of bread, and most of the pickled veg. Malarkey has one fish head left. I rub my eyes, wishing I could ignore these needs and just sit here in the sun with Locuaz and chat forever. I didn’t realize how much I needed it.

“You okay?” Locuaz nudges me with her toe again.

I start. “Yeah. Sorry. Just thinking.”

“You do that a lot.”

“What, thinking?”

“No. Spacing out.”

I set my jaw and nod. “Yeah. Well, this time I was actually thinking. We need food. We’re going to run out.”

She sits up, scratching the top of her head. “Sí. I was thinking about that too. I was gonna ask—do you have a fishing pole?”

I blink. “Actually, yeah. Sargo had one, somewhere.”

“Sargo? Oh, is that your boy?”

I flush. “Yes.”

“Sargo.” She rolls the name around on her tongue. “You said he’s from Pocosín?”

“His family is. Well, half his family.”

“It’s a cute name. I like it. You know what it means?”

I nod. I do actually know this one. “It’s a fish. Xantic Sargo. They’re native to the part of the Salt where we’re from.”

She nods. “That’s why I think it’s cute. He’s a fish and you’re a bird. It’s perfect.”

“Perfect?” I scrunch my face. “It’s a little…sappy.”

“Sappy? I don’t know this word.”

“Uh…” I rack my brain. “It means, like, too cute.”

She shrugs. “So what’s wrong with that? Okay gringa, where’s your boy’s fishing pole?” She unfolds herself from the seat and stands, stretching her arms over her head, her tiny shirt exposing even more of her round belly.

“It’s down below. Hanging in the galley, I think. But I don’t know how to use it.”

“You sailed here all the way from Brume, and you don’t know how to fish?” She puts her hands on her hips, incredulous again.

I drop my eyes, embarrassment coloring my face.

She snaps her fingers and when I look up, she winks. “Well, you’re in luck, mija. Because I do.”

chapter

fifteen

I START up the autopilot so I can sit with Locuaz and learn how to rig up the fishing pole. She spent about ten minutes digging around in various lockers and cabinets below deck before returning with it. She also returned with a small wooden box I’ve never seen before and a thick cudgel, almost a foot long and four inches around, with a rusty, lethal-looking hook sticking out of one end.

“Where did you find that?” I ask, eyeing the hook.

She shrugs. “Some cupboard.” She sets the cudgel down and flips open the lid of the box. “Okay, so these are your lures. You know which ones your boy uses?”

I shake my head. “I’ve never seen him open that box. I don’t think he even knows that box exists. Truthfully…I don’t think he really knows much about fishing. He hasn’t caught much.”

“Really?” She arches an eyebrow. “Well I guess I’m gonna teach him something too then. He actually has some good stuff in here—see this?” She pulls out a cylindrical cork about six inches long and one inch in diameter with a hook sticking out of the end. “This is a popping cork. This is what we gonna use.”

“That?” I can’t help but look skeptical. “It’s just a piece of wood. What fish is gonna go for that?”

She taps the side of her nose and rummages through the box again, extracting a short length of fishing line. With deft, nimble fingers, she ties the line to the cork, then ties it to the line on the fishing pole with a swift, complicated knot.

I try not to goggle. “That was cool.”

She grins. “The Bimini Twist. I’ll teach you, but not right now. We need to get this in the water.” She glances over her shoulder at the sinking sun. “Right now is perfect for fishing. Sunset and sunrise. But we don’t have a lot of time. Okay!” She scoops up the pole and steps to the stern. “Now we gonna cast it.”

She bends her right arm behind her. The muscles in her back twitch as she flicks the line with a quick, powerful throw, and the lure arcs gracefully through the air. I lose sight of it, but I hear the quiet sizzle of the uncoiling line, followed by a small plop as the cork lands in the water.

“Where is it?” I shield my face with my hand and squint behind us. Panga is still churning through the water under sail, and the bubbles of her wake make seeing the spot where the lure went in impossible.

“Right there.” Locuaz’s point guides my gaze and I spot the cork, bobbing at the surface of the water, about twenty feet back, dragging behind the boat.

“It’s not even under the water,” I say.

“It’s not supposed to be. It makes a lot of noise and fuss on the surface and the fish come because they think it’s a feeding frenzy.”

As she speaks, a gull dips out of the sky and dives for the cork. It skims the surface of the water, peeling away at the last moment, beating its wings and screeching its displeasure at having been tricked.

“See? Birds like it too. Hey!” She turns to me, her eyes bright, a mischievous smile playing at her mouth. “How about that? The fish and the birds like it. So you and your boy can do this together.”

I roll my eyes. “Okay, so what’s next?”

She shrugs. “Now we wait.” She sets the handle of the rod in a small cylindrical holder attached to Panga’s rail that I had never noticed was there before. “We’ll leave this here and listen. If you hear the line spooling out,” she tugs on her earlobe, “then it means we got one. Then we reel it in, and when it’s close enough for us to reach, we hit it with that.” She indicates the cudgel. “Get the hook in its side and pull it on deck.”

I nod, but I can’t help feeling that this won’t work. In all the time Sargo and I spent sailing from Brume, he only ever caught one fish, and it wasn’t like this.

“You think there are even fish out here to catch?” I ask. “Where I’m from, the Salt is pretty depleted. There isn’t anything left.”

Locuaz’s face darkens. “It’s true. Things are bad. But I think since the pandemic maybe it’s getting better. I never fail to catch a fish like this. Trust me.” She swings herself back into the cockpit to tidy up the lures.

Thirty minutes pass as we sit in the slowly darkening cockpit. With every minute that goes by, the sun sinks lower and the sense of dread knots tighter in my gut. Even Locuaz’s face begins to cloud with worry and I notice her glancing frequently back at the pole on the stern, untouched in its holder.

Finally, when the light is so gray I can barely make out her features, I say, “I don’t think this is working.”

She keeps her gaze fixed steadfastly on the sinking sun, silent.

“Should we pull in the line?” I offer, tentatively. She doesn’t respond.

I watch her anxiously, not sure what to do. Is she the kind of person who cheerfully says “oh well, we’ll try again tomorrow!” Or is she the kind of person who stews and gets vicious when things go wrong?

Like me.

“We can pull it in when it’s dark,” she says eventually. “There’s still some light left.”

I open my mouth to protest, but think better of it and shut it again, sinking back into my seat and folding my arms. Malarkey, who took herself up for a sniff around on the bow after we rigged the line, comes padding back. It’s so quiet I hear her claws clicking softly against the deck. She bumps my hand with her nose and looks up into my eyes with a slow, expectant wag of her tail.

“Yes, Larkabout,” I sigh. “It’s time for dinner.”

I pull myself up and hop down the companionway steps to pull her last fish head from the cooler. She sticks her head down the steps after me, watching every motion of the slimy, reeking thing in my hands as I rinse it quickly in the sink and put it on a plate for her. I reach up the steps and set the plate on the cockpit floor and she pounces on it, devouring it in less than thirty seconds. She licks every drop of juice from the plate and floor and then turns her face back to me, licking her chops.

“That’s it,” I tell her, reaching up to fuss her ears. Another knot of dread twists in my stomach as I gaze into her trusting blue-white eyes. That’s really it.

“Bird!” Locuaz’s excited shriek pierces the air. “We got one!”

Malarkey’s ears flick up and she bounds to the stern. A rush of excitement ripples down my spine. I pop my head up through the companionway.

“A fish?”

“Yes!” Locuaz shoos Malarkey away with her foot as she lifts the rod from its holder with two hands. “I need your help! Quick! Get the gaff hook!”

“The what?”

“The big club with the hook sticking out of it! Now! I don’t have time to tell you everything twice!” The snarky repetition of my own words back to me does not go unnoticed, but there isn’t time to for a snippy response, so I leap up the steps in a single bound, snatching the gaff hook from where it lays on the cockpit floor.

Locuaz has the handle of the fishing rod in one hand and is cranking the reel on the side with the other. The muscles in her back ripple and the veins on her arms pop as she puts one foot up on the rail, heaving hard against the line.

“He’s a fighter!” She gasps. “Big! Really big!” Her eyes are bright, her brow already glistening with sweat.

I hover, the gaff hook in my hand. “What should I do?”

“Right now, nothing, but I may need you to take over for a while if he keeps fighting me.”

“Take over? Like…reel him in?”

“Yes, chica! This is a big fish. It’s gonna take both of us. He may fight us for a while.”

With the sun almost gone the water is a deep purple, steely and opaque. I step up beside Locuaz and try to spot the fish. A flourish of bubbles draws my eyes to the right, and as they land on the spot, the water churns frighteningly, and the fish explodes through the surface. His powerful tail beats against the water as he rises, sending him into a wide arc. His body twists, silver scales catching the last orange rays of the sun as they skate low across the horizon. The breath stills in my chest.

“Holy shit.” That thing is as big as I am.

He crashes into the water sideways and disappears with another flick of his thick tail.

“He’s diving!” cries Locuaz.

“Is that bad?!”

To my horror, she puts the front of her hips against the rail and leans over the side, shoving the tip of the rod into the water.

“What are you doing?!”

“If the line touches the bottom of the boat, it will chafe and break and that will be it!” She gasps. “I gotta get the line lower than the boat.”

Panga pitches over a wave and tips sideways. In a split second, Locuaz’s feet have left the deck and she is see-sawing over the rail.

“Locuaz!”

I leap across the cockpit and catch her by the back of her waistband just before she tips over the side. Getting my other arm around her legs, I wedge my feet against the deck and throw my weight backwards. I feel our balance shift toward the center of the boat and she tumbles back onto the deck, stumbling and regaining her feet. Somehow, miraculously, she is still clutching the pole. Her disheveled hair clings to her sweat-slicked face as she immediately tugs upward on the line, barely missing a beat, her brow knitted in concentration and her teeth bared.

“There he is! See him?” I put my hands on the rail and peer down into the water and see the great beast emerging from the black depths again.

“Get the hook!“ she cries. “We almost got him!”

I scramble to pick up the hook and by the time I return to the rail, the fish is breaking the surface of the water again. Only this time, he’s not jumping. Locuaz’s steady, insistent, upward pumps on the rod draw him out of the water, twisting and jerking like a sandcat, furiously fighting for life with his last breath. Up close I can see that he’s not actually as big as me, but probably about half as big, with a vivid golden-green sheen that catches the dying rays of the light like an oil slick, reflecting glimmers of blue, silver and purple. His head is blunt like a bludgeon, his forehead like a great, round helmet, his sleek, long body lined with close, rounded fins.

“Okay,” she grunts, “gaff him!”

“What?”

“Hit him in the head with that hook. Hard. It needs to go in.”

“You mean, like…kill it?”

“Hopefully!”

I freeze. You’re about to kill this thing, says a voice in my head. You’re going to slam a hook into its head and drag it out of the water and watch it suffocate and bleed to death.

“Bird!” Locuaz’s angry shout snaps me out of my thoughts. “What are you waiting for? Do it now!”

Gathering my courage with a breath, I cling to the rail with one hand, lean my torso over the side, raise the cudgel high, and bring it down as hard as I can against the fish’s head, my core contracting hard as it lands. The hook sinks in with a sickening, wet thud, and the fish jerks violently.

“You got him!” Locuaz cries. “Now pull!”

Letting go of the rail, I wrap both hands around the cudgel and sit back with my hips, hauling the thrashing monster out of the water. He clears the surface and I stagger backward, lose my balance, and tumble onto my ass in the bottom of the cockpit, the massive fish landing on top of me, still bucking and fighting. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse Malarkey, teeth bared in a snarl, coiling to pounce.

Locuaz’s hand shoves Malarkey roughly aside as she jumps down next to me. She wrenches the hook of the cudgel free from the fish’s side and pulls the fish off me in a single motion, then raises the bludgeon high, and slams it once again into its head. The hook buries itself in the fish’s eye and it twists and convulses, still lurching around the floor of the cockpit between my feet, splattering blood all over my face and clothes, all over the sides of the cockpit, on Malarkey and Locuaz. Again, Locuaz frees the hook and again she buries it in its head. It trembles, its flapping body beginning to slow, its thrashing mellowing to twitching.

The fish’s vivid, yellow-green color begins to fade before my eyes as the life leeches out of him. Blood pools on the floor of the cockpit. Malarkey, rigid, covered in blood, trembles and snarls behind Locuaz as she drops the cudgel with a clatter. Locuaz collapses backward onto the cockpit bench and drags her arm across her face, smearing blood and hair across her already sweat-soaked skin. The rank mix of salt and sweat and fish in the warm air brings a retch to my throat and I cover my mouth with my arm and swallow it down. The fish’s tail thumps thickly once—twice—against the floor, and he lays still.

My ears ring in the abrupt quiet. Locuaz’s ragged breathing and Malarkey’s low growl blend and disappear into the rush of water passing Panga’s hull as we sail quietly onward. Darkness seems to descend very quickly. Locuaz nudges the fish with her foot.

“Buen trabajo, chica,” she says, her voice hoarse. “We got him.”

I shake my head slowly, unable to take my eyes off the fish. “Now…what?”

She chuckles roughly. “Now we clean him, gut him, hang him, and eat him. But first—” with an exhausted groan, she pulls herself to her feet and kneels by the fish, bowing her head, “we thank him.”

chapter

sixteen

THE SALT STRETCHES before us to the horizon like an undulating tundra. A warm offshore breeze creeps up behind me, gently lifting the matted hair from my damp neck and filling my nose with the rich, earthy scent of Turf. It’s a scent I won’t smell again for weeks. We’ve been going north along the coast for five days, and according to the chart, this is where we should turn left. This is where we leave the land behind and head west, straight across the Salt.

“So this is it, huh?” says Locuaz, a slight tremor in her voice.

“This is it.” I try to keep my voice from betraying my own apprehension. We stand on the bow, watching as the blazing red disc of the sun settles its bottommost edge against the severe, silver horizon.

“Into the sunset,” says Locuaz, too jovially.

I swallow hard. “Yup.”

It’s three thousand miles directly across the Salt from here to Île Tor. No stopping. Nowhere to hide. We’ll be out of sight of land; a tiny speck in a vast, uncaring expanse of water. If my estimations are right, it will take us over two weeks. Two weeks before we can stand on solid ground again. And then I still have to get to Grike.

I tell myself for the thousandth time that it’ll be fine. Locuaz can fish, and Panga’s desalinator works, as far as I know. The solar panels are working. The weather has been holding out. But my gut swoops continuously with the sensation of falling, and the tremor doesn’t seem to want to remove itself from my hands. I’m not worried about running out of food or water. I’m not even worried about the state of the weather. The thing I’m worried about is me.

I look down at Malarkey, sitting on my foot with her back against my leg. She has no idea why we’re all up here in the bow together. She’s just happy to be involved. I steal a glance at Locuaz, shading her face with one hand and squinting into the sunset, her other hand on her hip. Souls. That’s what Sargo used to call them. People aboard boats are called ‘souls.’ When we practiced radioing for help in his class we always had to report how many souls were on the boat. Three souls on board. I am the captain of sailing vessel Panga. I am responsible for three souls.

Locuaz and I already talked about taking watches. For the next two weeks, our lives will be lived in three-hour increments. Three hours on watch, three hours off. A grueling, unrelenting schedule that doesn’t allow for breaks or sick days. We talked about who would cook and when, who would clean up after Malarkey and when, who would be responsible for checking what systems and when. I’m starting to understand why Sargo is such a stickler for rules and schedules and everything being perfect all the time. It’s not just about being orderly. It’s about surviving.

The thing Locuaz and I haven’t talked about, the thing that I can’t bring myself to tell her but that keeps niggling at the back of my brain like a pebble in my shoe, is that once we turn away from the coast, I will have no idea how to navigate. Everything Savage taught me was coastal. It was based on spotting landmarks along the shore and triangulating my position from those. Without landmarks to anchor me, I would have to rely on the stars to figure out our position. And not that’s something we ever covered.

Well, not something we ever covered seriously.

My mind floods with the memory of that night. The scent of ash and pineapple, the feeling of Savage’s hand on mine, the coarse hairs of his beard against my cheek as he showed me how to position the sextant to view the moon. I push it away, but it doesn’t go far. It swims just below the surface of my consciousness all the time now, ready to breech and invade my thoughts at the slightest provocation. It must be because I’m so nervous about this passage. I keep remembering what Savage said to me—that you’re safer out there in the middle of the Salt where there's nothing to wreck you—but it brings me no comfort.

I haven’t told Locuaz about that night, although we’ve talked about lots of other things. It's not that I think she would judge me for ending up in the bed of someone like Savage. I just don't want to have to admit to Locuaz that I have absolutely no idea what happened because the decision was fueled by grog. Like all my bad decisions.

Well, all my bad decisions except this one. This reckless, terrible decision, I’m making stone-cold sober. Heading into the middle of the Salt without a clear idea of how to navigate. When you say it out loud it sounds like a really bad idea, which is why I haven’t said it out loud, to Locuaz or to myself

Instead, I keep reminding myself that it’s not as though there are a lot of obstacles out there, or confusing roads to turn you around. It’s literally a straight shot across the water. I have a compass heading. If I keep us true to that it shouldn’t be too hard.

Right?

I turn to Locuaz, forcing a smile. “Ready?”

She looks back at me with bright, nervous, determined eyes. “Sí. Listo. How you say—it’s now or never?”

“Yep, that’s what they say.”

“Okay. Then I guess it’s now.”

I nod once, reminding myself of Fetch, and turn to head back to the cockpit. I sense Locuaz lingering, some unspoken question on her tongue, and glance over my shoulder at her, silhouetted against the sunset. She scratches the top of her head and shifts her weight from foot to foot.

“Out with it Locuaz,” I say, “we need to get going.”

“It’s only—you know what you’re doing…”

It’s unclear whether what she’s just said is a question or a statement, but I know what it means. She doesn’t believe, deep down, that we can do this. That I can do this. My stomach swoops again, because what if she’s right? I take a deep breath, pushing that question down. Pushing it down with thoughts of Savage, and shame about grog, and longing for Sargo, and wishing I was safe at home in Brume. I shove it all down and I close it into a box, and I lock the box and I immediately lose the key because I’m reckless and irresponsible.

“Yes,” I lie. “I know what I’m doing.”

____________________

For a while, it seems. I do. For a week, we sail without incident. The Salt is calm, and the wind blows in the right direction. I rack my brain for the reason this would be, and the only thing I can come up with is sheer dumb luck. Somehow, I actually found the Trade Winds.

I learned about the Trade Winds in Sargo’s class. They blow steady from this coast, west across the Salt and throughout most of the world. They are how ancient people first explored distant lands. They’re how certain groups of those ancient people—let’s call them ‘assholes’—colonized and subjugated many of those lands. They’re called ‘Trade Winds’ because ancient ships caught and followed them to carry goods and materials—and people. Valuable riches, unjustly taken from ‘uncivilized’ nations so they could be brought back and used by the rich ‘civilized’ ones.

If you think about it, discovering the Trade Winds was really the beginning of the end for us as a species. What we started with the Trade Winds is what ultimately lead to the decimation of the planet and exhaustion of its natural resources. Without these winds, I wonder, would we have wound up creating a global society that was so hungry for progress, with such an insatiable appetite for consumption and convenience? Without that greed, would we have managed to so thoroughly screw up the delicate balance of the natural world that the natural world started screwing us back?

I never thought about the Trade Winds much before, but thoughts like these weave their way haphazardly through my head as I spend long, listless days staring across the water. They’re a welcome relief, to be honest. As long as I’m waxing philosophical about the nature of humanity, I’m not thinking about grog, or Sargo, or Savage.

My nails disappear within the first two days, chewed down to the quick with nervous anxiety, or boredom, or both. I struggle to keep my mind on the tasks that matter, with so many long stretches with nothing to do. I don’t sleep at all for the first three days. I don’t trust that Locuaz will know what to do in an emergency, so while she’s on watch I lie on my bunk, wide awake, my body vibrating with nervous energy, every little sound spiking my heart rate. Did we hit something? Are we sinking? Have we drifted off course? Is this how Sargo felt, sailing with me?

By the seventh day, though, we’ve found a groove. I learn how to use the autopilot properly, and it alleviates some of the stress when Locuaz is on watch. At night, we trade off sleeping below deck. When I do manage to sleep, my dreams are haunted by Fife, and I wake with a headache, my skin prickling, light needling my eyelids, and the faint, sour sting of metal on my tongue.

During the day, Locuaz and I lay in the cockpit, regardless of who is on watch, napping, talking, baking in the sun. She teaches me the Bimini Twist and I teach her what I know about sailing. Malarkey dozes on the floor between us. We translate words for each other. We take turns cooking. The time passes. Night comes. The hours between 0200 and 0600 are always dark, long and cold, but then the sun rises in a spectacular wash of pink and gold, and we regroup, make hot, bitter brew and eat cold fish for breakfast.

Then we run out of water.

It happens on the morning of the thirteenth day. Locuaz and I have just finished picking fish bones from our teeth in the chilly pre-dawn light. I hop down the companionway into the galley to make some brew. No water comes out of the faucet—tank must be empty—so I reach under the sink to flip the switch that starts the desalinator.

An unearthly grinding noise emits from under the sink. Like nails on a chalkboard, if the nails were six inches wide and made of metal. Before I can flip the switch off again, the machine shudders and stops. A sharp, chemical smell burns the inside of my nose.

“What the hell was that?” Locuaz’s voice floats down from the cockpit.

“Uh—just our—watermaker.”

“The watermaker? Is it broken?”

“I’m not sure yet.” I kneel and stick my head into the tiny space under the sink. The smell of burning chemicals is so strong it makes my eyes water.

“But we have water in the tanks, right?” Locuaz’s voice again.

“Nope!”

“So what does that mean?”

“I said I don’t know yet!”

I peer into the dark corner where the watermaker sits, but it’s just an inscrutable black box. I never thought we’d have to deal with something like this. This is way, way above my pay grade. Panic is seeping up my windpipe and my pulse is starting to patter inside my wrists when I feel a hand on my shoulder and Locuaz’s bushy, voluminous hair crams into the cupboard next to me. Angry heat rises in my chest as her hair pokes me in the eye and her shoulder jostles mine.

“So what does that mean?” she says again, her voice amplified by the tight box around us. “We need to fix it?”

“How many times can I say I don’t know?” I snap. “Why don’t you look at it? You’re the mechanic!” I withdraw my head, banging it sharply on the bottom of the sink. “God dammit!”

She looks up at me sharply. “Don’t be angry at me, gringa. I didn’t break it!”

“It doesn’t matter who broke it,” I spit back. “If we don’t fix it, we don’t have water. And if we don’t have water, we die.”

“Okay, okay, calm down!” She pulls her head from under the sink and stands to face me in the galley. Beads of sweat are already forming on her brow. The sun is barely up and already it’s getting hot. “We don’t need to panic. We close to Tor, right? One day maybe? We can go without water for one day.”

I feel the look of guilty uncertainty passing across my face before I can stop it. The truth is, I have no idea how close we are to Tor.

She raises her eyebrows. “What? What was that look?”

“Nothing. There was no look.”

She sets her lips into a hard line, her eyes aggressively searching mine. “You better tell me what’s going on, gringa.”

I try to hold her gaze, but the fear and guilt and uncertainty are bubbling up from my gut like boiling water, making the skin of my face warm and prickly. I drop my eyes.

“It might be more than a day til we reach Tor."

“What?”

“I don’t…know exactly how far away we are.”

“I thought you said we would be there in two weeks.”

“Yes, but…okay, look. I don’t know exactly where we are out here. I—I only know how to work out our exact position when we’re near the coast.”

“You don’t know where we are?!” Her eyes go wide.

“I have a good guess! We’ve been holding a course—”

“You told me you knew what you were doing! I trusted you!”

“I know what I’m doing! I just—I didn’t expect something like this to happen!”

She presses a hand to her sticky forehead. As she moves I smell sweat and cloves and brew beans. “We gonna die out here.”

“We’re not.” Even I’m not convinced by my tone.

She turns abruptly and paces to the table, a flood of words I don’t understand pouring out of her mouth at such a rapid clip I can’t help but think she must have grown a second tongue. Then she turns to me again.

“I’m gonna look at it. Maybe it’s something easy.” A small scoff escapes my lips. She arches an angry eyebrow. “Oh, you got a better idea?”

“I just don’t think you can fix it.”

“Maybe you should go somewhere else,” she says, folding her arms and fixing me with a hard stare. “I don’t think you going to be helpful here.”

I glare back at her. Her dark eyes are like a thunderous sky.

“Fine.”

I pull myself up into the cockpit and stomp to the bow. Malarkey rolls to her feet and follows me, her nails clicking against the deck. Into the big canvas bag that holds our spare sail I punch a hollow big enough to fit my body into, then drop into it with my elbows on my knees, shoving itchy hair out of my face.

Malarkey bumps my hand with her nose and settles next to me, leaning her weight on my shoulder. She bumps my hand with her nose again and gives me three good, hard tail thumps. I shift my glare to her face, furious at her stupidity, her blind trust. I want to push her away, tell her to go and find someone else to follow around. Instead I blow air through my cheeks and redirect my angry glare where it belongs: at the water.

“You’re an idiot for trusting me,” I mutter.

An hour later, I feel Locuaz drop down into the sail bag next to me. I don’t look at her. The heat, sweat, and frustration rising from her are palpable.

“I can’t fix it,” she says.

My heart sinks. As furious and discouraged as I was an hour ago, I had secretly hoped she might pull it off.

“Okay,” I say. “I guess it’s time for plan B.”

“What’s plan B?”

“I don’t have one. I meant it’s time to make one.”

She snorts and I look at her in surprise. Her body is trembling with silent laughter as she drops her forehead into one hand, shaking her head.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing! I don’t know why I’m laughing. This is not funny. This is really bad.”

“Yeah.” My chest contracts with giggles. “Really, really bad.”

“So, so bad, gringa!” She grips my arm so tightly it hurts as she tries to suppress the snorts, tears squeezing from the corners of her eyes. The laughter is nonsensical and contagious. I can’t stop it from erupting out of me too.

“Would you believe me if I told you,” I gasp through uncontrollable giggles, “that I’ve actually been in worse situations?”

“I would!” She throws her head back and howls. “You’re very bad at this!”

We dissolve into laughter, collapsing backward into the sail bag, swatting at each other, struggling to breathe. Malarkey, sensing that something amazing is happening and not wanting to be left out, tries to climb in on top of us, which only makes us laugh harder. Finally, my face wet with tears, Malarkey's heavy foot on my chest and Locuaz still clinging to my arm, I pull myself together enough to say, “I’m really, really sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Locuaz sighs and convulses slightly as the last giggle escapes her. “Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking either.” We settle, our breathing slowing, the rush of the water against the hull again filling my ears. Locuaz sighs. “It was my decision to come. You told me you never did this before, I knew what I was getting into.”

I stare at the sky, so empty and blue it feels as though I should be able to see clear through to the other side of the universe. The guilt, fear and shame settle back on top of me like a dense, heavy fog. I close my eyes.

“What are we gonna do?” says Locuaz, her voice quiet.

“The only thing we can do is keep going. Keep going and keep watch. If I’m right, and we’ve been roughly on the right heading, we should be near the island. Maybe we’ll be a little off, but it’s not like we’re a thousand miles away.”

I’m speaking more to myself than to Locuaz, my eyes still closed, the words forming slowly.

“We can still get there before we…before…We can still get there. We just need to keep an eye out, all the time.”

To punctuate my point I roll to a seat and shield my face with my hand, squinting over the bow.

“It could be on any horizon. So keep looking. Everywhere. All the time.”

Locuaz sits up and puts her back to mine, shielding her face with her hand and looking over the other side of the boat.

“Okay, gringa. Pirata,” she addresses Malarkey, “you heard her. Are you looking?” Malarkey wags her tail. “You need to be looking, Pirata. Do something useful, for once.”

A lump rises so suddenly in my throat that I almost choke on it. I blink back tears and swallow it.

“How are you still making jokes?”

“What else am I gonna do?” she says. I feel her hand reach down and grip mine. “We just gonna make jokes until we can’t anymore.”

____________________

The thirst is unbearable.

It burns my throat and swells my tongue and dries the inside of my mouth so thoroughly that it sticks when I try to open and close it. The corners of my mouth crack and sting, and my lips chap and bleed. I can feel the drought in my bones, like everything inside them is turning to dust. I feel light and heavy. I’m floating and I’m drowning.

The last time I remember being this thirsty was on the island. I try to take comfort in the memory of that nightmare. Last time you survived, I tell myself. This time you will, too.

It’s been four days. Yesterday, we tried to make brackish by boiling saltwater in the kettle, but without a proper pot to collect the steam it didn’t work. Locuaz asked me how I knew how to do it, so I lied and told her Sargo taught me. I didn’t tell her that I learned it growing up starving in a climate settlement, or that I only remembered how to do it a month ago when I got my memory back after an evil biotech corporation wiped it putting a chip in my head that makes me teleport.

Somehow, it didn’t seem relevant.

I try not to think about how incredibly useful teleporting would be right now.

“It’s your turn to look,” mumbles Locuaz, her voice brittle as dry grass.

I claw my way out of half-consciousness and open my eyes. The white sun burns into them from directly overhead. It’s stupid, I know, lying out here in the sun when we could easily be below deck, but climbing up and down the companionway every time we wanted to check for the island was becoming exhausting.

I grip the side of the cockpit and haul myself to a seat, then squeeze my eyes shut as my vision tunnels and the world goes momentarily sideways. I wait for everything to stop spinning, then open my eyes and look around.

What I spot on the horizon is so unexpected, so incomprehensible, that I have to shut to my eyes again to make sure I’ve actually seen it. I rub my face and sit up taller, reaching for the nox that lay beside me on the seat.

Locuaz, sensing my shift in energy, struggles up from where she’s been sprawled in the cockpit floor. “What is it?” Her voice is strained and thin. “Do you see the island?”

“No.” I hand her the nox so she can look too. “It’s a boat.”

chapter

seventeen

MY IMPULSE IS TO FLEE. But as I scramble to my feet to take the helm, my vision tunnels again and the world seems to collapse. I sit down hard and close my eyes. Locuaz reaches up from the floor to put a heavy hand on my knee.

“I can’t run, mija,” she says. “Maybe we just see who it is?”

The boat tacks back and forth across the water from the horizon. As it draws nearer I see it’s a sloop not much larger than Panga, in rough shape, with yellowing, weathered sails, cracked fiberglass, and gray, splintering wood around the edge of the deck. Across the hull is painted the name Man O' War.

I count three souls aboard, one at the helm, one hustling to trim the sails, and another standing on the bow, a pair of nox trained on us, shouting directions over his sunburned shoulder. With astonishing ease the boat circles us and comes alongside, matching our speed and keeping so close I could reach out and touch them.

At the helm stands a slender woman with plum-black skin and a mane of waist-length dreadlocks tumbling out of a blue bandana tied around her head. From her hip, a thick, nail-studded club hangs on a length of leather. Her salutation comes without humor, judgment, or sarcasm.

“Lost?”

“¡Sí!” cries Locuaz before I can open my mouth. Her voice is hoarse, her croak barely audible over the sound of rushing water against the hull. “Can you help us?”

The woman observes our cracked lips and sunburned faces with grim severity. “Where are you going?”

“Tor,” replies Locuaz.

I grab her arm. “What are you doing? Are you crazy? We have no idea if we can trust these people!”

Locuaz turns to me with a look halfway between disbelief and exasperation. “Are you serious, mija? We about to die out here.”

“We’re heading to Tor too,” the woman calls. “You can follow us.”

She waves to the fat little man trimming the sails, who loosens the sheets, and without another word, they pull ahead of us and tack back toward the horizon.

“See?” says Locuaz.

I grit my teeth and struggle to my feet to take the helm. Until now, I hadn’t fully comprehended what going to Tor meant: sailing into a Reckoner haven. Now, coming face-to-face with a boat full of them, a creeping feeling of doubt begins to make its cold way up my spine. I twist my hands on the wheel and chew the inside of my cheek.

“Do you…know anyone in Tor?”

Locuaz shakes her head. “Maybe some friends of Fetch are there. But nobody I know well.”

“And you’re sure this is a good idea?”

“As good as your idea to sail into the middle of the Salt without a map?” She raises an exhausted but derisive eyebrow. “I think so.”

____________________

The island of Tor is a steeply sloped cone covered in dense, green jungle, rising abruptly from the water like a monument. At Azimuth we learned that it's the largest in a series of islands, but as the Salt rose, the rest of the archipelago was submerged so much that the other islands became uninhabitable.

Tor itself is mostly lost to Jones too; only the highest point on the island—the tip of a volcano known as La Flèche—remains above the surface. What's left of the island is so steep and so tiny that nobody actually lives on it. But Reckoner ships are rumored to have dropped anchor in its protected coves for decades. No one in Brume actually believed they were still out here. Everyone assumed they had died in the pandemic along with the climate refugees.

The Man O' War leads us to a small cove where we drop anchor alongside five other boats of all different sizes and styles. All in varying degrees of disrepair. The cove is surrounded on three sides by steep, striated black and rose cliffs, and blanketed with layers of vibrant vegetation in every shade of green. Vines and waterfalls tumble out of the smooth rock face. The air is sultry, thick with the scent of jasmine.

The Reckoners, to my surprise, welcome us warmly and energetically. No sooner have we dropped the anchor than every boat in the anchorage seems to send a welcoming committee. Skiffs buzz across the water from every direction, congregating around Panga, chattering with us and each other as though our arrival is the most exciting thing that’s happened in months.

Locuaz and I, overwhelmed and exhausted, do our best to graciously accept mugs of fresh water, crackers, salted meat, and dried fruit. Malarkey, as weak and dehydrated as we are, doesn’t even have the energy to bark at anyone. She retreats to her bunk in the cabin below deck and covers her nose with her tail.

The populace seems as diverse as their vessels. Two cheerful, middle-aged blonde women with deeply tanned, leathery white skin, thick arms, and big, warm smiles call us both ‘honey.’ Twin boys of no more than seven, as black as the captain who guided us here, climb unabashedly onto our deck and take themselves on a tour. A stooped old woman with thick silver braids and a russet face is delighted to discover that Locuaz speaks the southern language, and launches into a monologue so dense and rapidly spoken that even Locuaz, in her exhausted state, seems to have trouble understanding her. I escape below deck to give Malarkey a mug of water and sit on the bunk for a few minutes with my head in my hands, the chatter from above washing over me like the noise of rain.

Eventually, the excitement of our arrival wears off and the skiffs return to their ships. Our guides aboard the Man O' War, who had been busy dropping anchor and putting their own sails away, make their way over as the other skiffs retreat, bearing two metal canisters as tall as my waist. The fat little man who trimmed the sails and the sunburned man who stood on the bow with the nox sling them easily over Panga’s rail and climb aboard after them.

“Water,” says the captain. She pulls herself over the rail too, and motions to the men, who begin hauling the two canisters down our companionway.

Malarkey, refreshed and hydrated, pokes her head out of the companionway and growls. I scramble to corral her before she welcomes our saviors with her massive jaws, pulling her between my knees as I sit behind the helm.

The captain indicates the empty cockpit bench across from me.

“May I sit?”

I gently close my hand around Malarkey’s snout and hold it firmly. “Go ahead.”

With a faintly amused smile, the captain sits. She moves without apology, hurry, or apparent fear of Malarkey, stretching one long, sinewy arm along the back of the seat and extending her legs in front of her, crossing her ankles.

Her feet are bare, her ankles, wrists and neck adorned with loops of chain and leather. Her loose cotton pants are rolled to mid-calf, the sleeves of her linen shirt rolled to the elbows. Apart from the soft clinking of her jewelry, everything about her is quiet and still. Her face is angular and smooth, with high cheekbones and a vaguely regal quality. Judging by her physical appearance I would guess she was only a little older than me. Mid-twenties, maybe? Goliath's age. But based on her manner I might put her closer to sixty. She observes us both. When she speaks, her voice is as rich and dark as her skin.

“You’re tired,” she says. “I won’t keep you. You’re welcome here for as long as you’d like to stay, but don’t expect the community’s generosity with gifts to extend beyond today. You’re responsible for providing your own food, water, and power while you’re here. If you’re unable to do that, we can give you a few things and help you get on your way. Clear?”

“Our desalinator is broken,” I croak, my throat still dry even after downing three cups of water.

“Dreggs can help you with that,” says the captain, indicating the pale man as he emerges from the companionway, wiping his brow. “My name is Yote, like Coyote. We’ll be here for a week before we sail on to Pocosín. If you have any questions you can bring them to me. How long do you plan to stay?”

I open and close my mouth like a fish, thrown by the abrupt question. “I don’t—know. Not long.” I turn to Locuaz, who shrugs.

Yote nods. “That’s fine. Some people in this bay have been here for decades.” I gape. Decades? She fixes me with her quiet gaze. “Where are you going next?”

“Uh—Grike. Well—I’m going to Grike.”

“I don’t know where I’m going,” confesses Locuaz.

The captain purses her lips. “I would think twice about going to Grike. That’s a very dangerous passage.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Rainy season. Lightning. Big storms between here and there.” She shrugs. “Of course, I can’t stop you. But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

My heart sinks. I feel the last reserve of strength seeping out of me. It’s already taken me so long to get here. “I—I have to go,” I mumble.

Her eyes flicker with a kind of curiosity. She shrugs again, a slight, casual movement. “As I said, I can’t stop you. But the mast of a lonely ship in a flat sea is very enticing to a bolt of lightning.”

“Why is that?”

“Lightning always strikes the tallest thing it can find. Out there…that’s you.”

“When will the season end?”

“The same as all the other seasons: it doesn’t anymore.”

I try to keep my face impassive and nod, a faintly sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“How is your navigation?” says Yote.

I almost laugh. It’s as though her eyes are seeing into me and exposing all the cracks one by one, picking me apart bit by bit.

“It’s not great,” Locuaz answers for me. I shoot her a look. “What?” she says. “Es la verdad.”

“I know how to navigate,” I say through clenched teeth, “just not…out here.”

Yote’s face registers no judgment or surprise. “You need to learn celestial. Josser can help you with that,” she says. “She’s on Papagayo. She may even have a sextant you can borrow. If you really are set on going to Grike, I would highly recommend asking for her help before you go.”

I nod again, dropping my eyes. I expected my reckless stupidity to elicit judgment and ridicule, but somehow Yote’s cool, dispassionate tone is worse. At least if she had been judgmental I could have argued back at her. This way I feel like there’s nothing to do but…accept my mistake.

“There are twelve other coves on this island,” Yote continues. “You can anchor in any of them, but check the weather before you choose one. Your chips should work out here—there’s a satellite ground station on the island. Some coves are better protected than others. Some you can get ashore from, but we don’t recommend you stay on shore.”

“Why not?”

She holds up one hand, her five fingers spread wide. “Spiders.”

Next to me, Locuaz makes a small, feeble noise in her throat. I hastily change the subject. “Twelve anchorages? How many people live out here?”

“It depends on the time of year,” says Yote. “Right now there are about a hundred and fifty boats here. So…about five hundred people.”

“Five hundred?”

“Give or take. You two are the first boat to arrive from the mainland this year. Next week I go back to Pocosín to bring more people.”

“Is that where you’re from?” I ask.

Yote shakes her head. “I was born in Qanat. But I left a long time ago. I volunteer with a movement in Pocosín. They need boats to transport girls.”

“Girls?”

“The black market in Pocosín is very bad. In Qanat too. We try to get people out.”

“You’re a Neozapa,” gasps Locuaz. Yote nods.

I frown. “What’s a Neozapa?”

“The Settlers and indigenous people around Pocosín are very politically active,” says Yote. “Citizens don’t even know these people exist, but the Big Four have been stealing their natural resources for centuries—medicinal plants, minerals.”

“Stealing?”

“They call it biopiratería. Bioparacy. For pharmaceuticals, biotech. Not just natural resources. Animals. People.” She shakes her head bitterly. "People talk about Reckoners like we're pirates. We're not the pirates."

The memory of a squat, metal transport vehicle lumbering over hard, red earth flashes into my head. Stealing people. Stealing children. Not a lottery. Piracy. Biopiratería.

“Zenith are well known for it out there. Neozapas have been organizing against Zenith for a long time.”

"Think about it, Bird," says Shale's voice in my head. "If you needed human lab rats, where would you go? Destitute families. Children who won't be missed."

I meet Yote’s hard gaze. “So you’re like the Anonymity?”

Her eyes narrow. “No,” she says. “We don’t agree with the way the Anonymity operates. They perpetuate violence and contribute to the black market.” She looks me over. “But I assume I don’t need to tell you that. You two are clearly running from something.”

I drop my gaze and examine my bare, filthy feet. “It’s…more complicated than that.”

An uncomfortable silence descends on the tiny cockpit. I sense Locuaz’s eyes on me. I never told her about my history with the Anonymity or Zenith. Finally, Yote stands, her necklaces and bangles clinking softly.

“Anyway, as I said, stay as long as you’d like,” she says. “You’ll be asked for nothing and given nothing.”

She climbs out of the cockpit and hops over Panga’s rail into the skiff, where Dreggs and the little fat man are waiting for her.

“Bring the water jugs back whenever you’re ready,” she says. “There’s no rush.”

She motions to Dreggs, who starts the engine, and the skiff whips around in a tight, well-controlled circle and buzzes back to the Man O' War. The wake from the skiff knocks against Panga’s hull as the wake of our conversation knocks against the inside of my head.

“She was kind of intense,” says Locuaz.

____________________

Dreggs comes to look at our watermaker the next morning. To my dismay, after two hours of banging around under the sink, he emerges with a defeated look. He needs a part, he says, from the mainland. A friend of his is leaving Alluvium tomorrow and can bring it, but it will take them a week to get here.

“A week?” I croak.

He shrugs. “It takes as long as it takes.”

Even I’m not reckless enough to venture out into the Salt without a watermaker. Going out into lightning season will be dangerous enough as it is.

I chew my thumbnail and pace up and down Panga’s tiny deck in the sultry, jasmine-scented morning. A stern old woman glares at me from the hammock strung across the bow of her boat. The jangling of my nerves and my tense, jittery impatience seem to be in direct contrast to the vibe of this place.

“Hey.” Locuaz’s pokes her head up through the companionway. “You’ll wear a hole through the deck. Come on. Let’s get the hell off this boat. You gonna be stuck here for a week, we might as well make the most of it.”

We get the skiff in the water, then load ourselves and Malarkey into it. Zipping across the turquoise bay toward the shore, watching Malarkey’s ears flapping jauntily in the wind, I almost feel my spirits lift. Almost.

We land on a beach that looks more like fresh snow than sand. Malarkey, overjoyed to be on solid ground again, begins tearing up and down the shore like a hurricane, kicking sand in every direction, digging holes, barking in a frenzy at trees full of arrogant creatures with long, prehensile tails and nearly human faces.

We keep close to the water's edge, hesitant to stray too close to the jungle for fear we might come across some of Yote’s palm-sized spiders. We walk to the end of the sand where a ridge of black, volcanic rock juts out into the water. The rough stone cuts our palms and scratches our knees, but it feels so good to use our bodies again after a week confined to thirty-five feet of space that we climb with gusto, entering into an unspoken race halfway up and tying at the top, huffing and sweaty. We balance on the narrow crest of the ridge, doubled over, gasping and grinning as Malarkey scrambles up next to us.

On the other side of the ridge is a lagoon with five or six boats bobbing over their anchors in serene, crystalline water. My eyes probe the ragged banners flying from their masts, and the letters scrawled across their hulls. I spot a familiar name, Tomahawk, and then another, Beowulf and then—

My blood runs cold as my gaze falls on the hideous, hulking form of a metal warship.

The Valkyrie.

Mojave Stark and her crew of mercenaries. Without thinking, I step back. My foot slips on a loose rock and I almost lose my balance. Locuaz catches me by the elbow.

“Whoa, mija!”

Righting myself, I gape at the Valkyrie, my heart palpitating. What are they doing here?

Locuaz follows my gaze out to the boat. “Friends of yours?”

“Uh—not exactly.”

I shake the adrenaline out of my trembling hands and duck behind the ridge to sit, partly to catch my breath and partly to get out of sight of the Valkyrie.

“When I left Brume, I was—in trouble with an organization there. An underground gang, I guess, called the Anonymity.”

Locuaz sits next to me. “The ones Yote doesn’t like?”

“Yeah. They…uh, well I made some bad decisions and they came after me. Sargo and I escaped, but halfway to Alluvium those guys—” I jerk my head at the Valkyrie over my shoulder, “—caught up to us. They tried to kidnap us. Mercenaries. I’m pretty sure the Anonymity hired them to track us down.”

“How’d you get away?”

I laugh bitterly. “The Kingfisher. Savage swooped down in the nick of time and saved us—for a fee.”

Locuaz nods slowly. “Sounds about right.”

“I guess I figured I was shot of them. Or I guess I forgot they were out there.”

“You think they still looking for you?”

“I don’t know. My problems with the Anonymity turned out to be…more complicated than I thought. The only thing I can think is that maybe…my brother sent them after me.”

Locuaz’s eyes widen. “Your brother? Is he—”

“He works for the Anonymity. He’s the only one of them who saw me in Alluvium.”

“You think your brother sent mercenaries after you? Your own family?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. It’s—”

“Complicated.”

“Yeah.”

Locuaz drums her fingers against her lips and squints over her shoulder at the Valkyrie. “Well…you never know. If they Reckoners, maybe they come out here all the time. Maybe they not here for you. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”

“Yeah,” I try to sound convinced. “Maybe.”

“Maybe they on vacations.”

I snort. “Yeah, okay.”

Malarkey comes snuffling back along the ridge, wagging her tail, sticking her nose into every available crevice, and bashes us both with her big snout before settling against my feet. Locuaz stands, brushing dust from the seat of her pants, and offers her hand.

“I’m not gonna let some ugly metal boat spoil our day. Let’s take the skiff around the other side of the island. Dreggs told me there are caves over there.”

The rest of the day passes in a bizarre, halcyon haze. We motor the skiff deep into cathedral-like caves full of water, where the darkness is as profound as sleep and the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks outside shakes the walls around us like thunder. We zip around cragged points and trace the frilly rocks of tiny coves, spotting fish, stopping where we like to jump into the water. We land the skiff on white sand beaches, or simply stare from the water, open-mouthed at the incredible variety of the shades of green that make up the island’s dense jungle.

At sunset, we return to Panga and grill the last of the meat from Locuaz’s most recent catch. The sun sinks in a spectacular lavender-orange display, and we stretch out in the cockpit to sleep under the stars, the jasmine-scented breeze warming my skin, the gentle lull of the tide rocking Panga like a cradle.

____________________

“Get her up.”

My nose fills with the scent of grog, the reek of stale breath. A hand is around my mouth, a forearm across my chest. My eyes snap open, finding nothing in the dark, blurry pinpricks of stars refusing to come into focus.

I hear a muffled cry to my left and try to turn my head, but the hand around my mouth stays firm. A second grabs me roughly by the collar, wrenches me to my feet. As the world turns sideways and then reorients itself I begin to make out forms in the dark.

“Put the other one in the skiff.”

Another muffled cry, and I recognize Locuaz’s mane of hair, stooped, held from behind by a man’s big hand. Groggy with sleep, I struggle to put the world back together. Where are we? Who are these people? Where is Malarkey? Why didn’t she wake us?

My final question is answered as I’m shoved roughly out of the cockpit and stumble to the edge of the deck. A large skiff is in the water below us, and in the bottom of it, illuminated by the sickening red light of the moon, Malarkey’s limp body.

“No!”

I wrench myself free from the hand that holds my neck, twisting, stumbling sideways. For a brief moment, I’m free and I hesitate, unsure what to do. In that moment, something clobbers the side of my head and as I reel, two rough hands grab me again. They wrestle me to my knees and shove a rough, stinking wad of canvas into my mouth.

“If I were you,” growls a husky voice in my ear, “I wouldn’t try that again.”

My blood runs cold. Stark. She yanks me to my feet and shoves me again to the edge of the deck. I topple into the skiff, landing on top of Malarkey and grab for her fur, trying to get my arms around her—but another pair of hands is already pulling me away, throwing me back toward the stern.

Locuaz tumbles in after me, and then Mojave Stark and two massive Reckoners climb in. One sets about binding my hands behind my back while the other shoves the skiff away from Panga and takes up a pair of oars. The skiff slinks silently across the black water, away from Panga, away from the Man O' War, away from the safety of the cozy lagoon and around the jagged, black rock of the point. They’re taking us to the Valkyrie.

Stark sits in the bow of the boat and leers at me, black lips glistening against ivory skin in the ruddy moonlight. Across her left eye is a white gauze patch, strapped around her head with elastic. I frown. I don’t remember her having that…

“Maybe she has an eyeball left for you to extract.”

Savage’s parting words to Nana, the day the Valkyrie caught Panga. His crew tortured Stark for information about why she had chased us down. I shudder, remembering the tiny sliver of a knife that Nana had used to pick her teeth as she watched Savage interrogate me and Sargo that day. Did she also use that knife to ‘extract’ Stark’s eye?

Stark turns up one side of her leering mouth into a salutary snarl.

“Miss Howsley.”

I glare at her, silent. She turns her one-eyed gaze down to Malarkey and kicks her crumpled body with the pointed toe of her boot.

“Not much of a mutt after all.”

I launch myself at her, but something catches me around the ribs, knocking the wind out of me, throwing me back to the floor in the stern of the skiff. I roll onto my side, gasping around the lump of fabric in my mouth.

Stark chuckles. “I suppose you thought you were rid of us?” She shakes her head as though genuinely amused. “Mm mm. I always get my coin.”

Locuaz, crumpled in the corner of the skiff with her hair around her face like a shield makes a small, terrified noise. I struggle to push myself up from the floor of the skiff and crouch, glaring at Stark, shaking with fear or impotent rage, I can’t tell which.

“You know the bounty on your head has gone up, Howsley?” says Stark. “I ought to thank Savage for blundering in and flogging everything up last time we met. And this one—” she pouts her lips and makes a disgusting, wet kissing noise at Locuaz, “—is quite the find.”

We round the point and pull up alongside the Valkyrie, the oars making barely the swish of a sound in the water. As the man with the big hands pulls Locuaz and I to our feet I look around desperately at the other anchored boats, silent and still, their crews sleeping peacefully below.

Stark and her crew wrestle us nearly silently out of the skiff and onto the Valkyrie’ deck. I glance over my shoulder, tears blurring Malarkey’s crumpled form in the bottom of the skiff.

She can’t be dead. This can’t be happening.

Blindly, I stumble across the vast, dark deck toward the stern, cold dread washing over me as I realize they’re taking us right back to the same cell that Sargo and I occupied on our last visit. A converted walk-in freezer with an impenetrable door, six inches thick. We’ll never get out.

We’re ten feet from the hateful room when Stark, a few paces ahead of me abruptly stops.

I trip to a halt, registering the glint of steel in the moonlight as a blade flashes around the corner ahead of us, cutting the night in half with a flourish and coming to a halt inches from Stark’s throat. My head whips around as another blade flashes to life in the corner of my vision, and then another. I step backward, my back coming up hard against Locuaz’s, recognizing Dreggs and the little fat man from the Man O' War. Five Reckoners surround us. A deep voice murmurs through the night.

“That’s far enough, I think, Stark.”

Yote steps around the corner into a shaft of moonlight, her nail-studded club grasped firmly in one hand. Stark draws her blade faster than I would have thought it possible, swinging it expertly off her hip and up, deflecting the two swords pointed at her chin with a single move. She spins to the right, her large form surprisingly nimble, knocking away a third blade. Yote leaps after her.

Stark’s two crew members, slower off the mark, go for their weapons. Dreggs ducks sideways, bringing his knife up to block the blow from the mercenary nearest him, who has drawn a scimitar as long as my arm. The air rends with the stinging clang of metal on metal. I grab Locuaz’s arm and dive for the stern, narrowly avoiding taking a club to the head.

Yote leaps nimbly around us, finding a foothold on the Valkyrie’s metal rail and using it to launch herself in front of Stark, blocking her path to the skiff, brandishing her club at eye-level. The two stand firm, glaring at each other.

“Where are you going, Stark?“ Yote says calmly. “Isn’t this your ship?”

I hear a shout and turn to see three more of Stark’s crew climbing out of the companionway. As they lay into Yote’s crew the zing of clashing swords makes Stark’s next words almost unintelligible.

“An ambush?” snarls Stark. “That’s pretty low, Coyote.”

“So is kidnapping,” Yote replies.

Stark glowers. Then, with startling speed, she twirls a second blade from inside her coat and lunges at Yote with two swords. Yote brings her studded club up in the nick of time and both blades sink into the soft wood. She yanks the club back and the two swords go with it, wrenched from Stark’s hands.

Another shout from behind turns my head just in time to see Dreggs pin his opponent against the wall. The little fat man charges at a second mercenary, head down, like a tiny bull, catching the man around the waist and dragging him to the ground. They wrestle, and the fat man gets his knees on the mercenary’s chest, wresting his scimitar away from him.

Two more Reckoners drive Stark’s other crew members to their knees, their hands raised in surrender. The air goes deathly still in the sudden absence of clashing weapons. Across the black water, a single bird cries into the night.

One of Yote’s Reckoners frees my hands and then Locuaz’s, while the rest tie Stark’s crew to the Valkyrie’s rail. I rip the gag from my mouth and round on Stark.

“Who sent you?!”

Stark, smug as ever despite having her own blade against her toad-like throat, smirks. “That information is on a need-to-know basis, sweetheart.”

I shove her hard in the chest. “Tell me!”

Stark’s massive frame is barely affected by my attack. She regards me with amusement. I want to rip the black smile off her face.

“Was it the Anonymity? Was it my brother?”

“The Anonymity?” Her eyes flicker with genuine surprise. “Oh no, sweetheart, the Anonymity doesn’t hire Reckoners. They do their own dirty work.”

I stop short, my mouth open. “Then who—?”

“If I had to guess,” says Yote, putting a hand on my shoulder as she hangs her club and one of Stark’s swords on her hip, and regarding Stark with an expression halfway between disgust and fury, “I’d say it was Zenith. Am I right, Stark?”

Stark scowls. “Zenith have been trying to get their hands on Miss Howsley for some time. They offered me double this time what they offered last time.”

“Last time…” I reel. “It was Zenith who sent you last time? When you chased me and Sargo down between Brume and Alluvium?”

My mind stumbles over the new information. That can’t be possible. How did Zenith know we had left Brume? Why would they care? Were they tracking me even then?

Yote, apparently unsurprised, is already motioning to her crew, who put away their weapons and begin readying a skiff tied up on the Valkyrie’s other side.

“I think we’re done here, Stark. These girls are coming with me. And if you try anything like this on Tor again, you’ll have more than my crew to deal with. There’s no shortage of Reckoners in this bay who will happily put a dagger in your back, and they won't necessarily wait for my word to do it.” She motions for me and Locuaz to follow her.

Suddenly, the only thing I can think of is Malarkey. I shove past Yote and swing myself over the Valkyrie’s rail, taking the ladder two rungs at a time, dropping into the skiff so hard I topple sideways.

“Malarkey!” I grab her big head in my hands, pulling it into my lap, raking my fingers through her fur, scouring her body for some sign of life.

“Let me see.”

Yote drops down next to me and puts a hand on Malarkey’s chest. She remains very still, her eyes closed. I hold my breath and go still as well, as though I might hear whatever it is that Yote is feeling for.

“Her heart is beating,” Yote says finally. “Feel here.”

She takes my hand and places it under hers. I feel the faint throb of Malarkey’s heart under her ribs. Yote gently peels one of Malarkey’s eyes open and peers into it. It rolls back, showing nothing but white. She pries open her mouth and bends to sniff.

“Rat poison,” she mutters.

My throat closes as I try to say, “Is she going to die?”

Yote stands briskly. “Dreggs!”

Dreggs swings over the side of the Valkyrie and drops down into the skiff next to us. From the crossbody pack slung over his shoulder he pulls a flexible plastic tube and a small, round ball with a valve on one side. I stare at the items in his hands.

“What are you going to do?”

Neither Yote or Dreggs responds. Yote moves me aside and kneels by Malarkey’s head again. She lifts it and pries open her jaws. Dreggs pushes the open end of the tube into Malarkey’s mouth. I stand frozen, unable to look away or move as the tube disappears down her throat. Malarkey’s eyes flutter and she begins to struggle. Yote tightens her grip around Malarkey’s head.

"What are you doing?!" I pull at Yote’s shoulders, but she shrugs me off with a decisive motion.

"We're pumping her stomach. If you want to be useful, help me hold her still."

Not knowing what else to do, I drop to my knees and get my arms around Malarkey’s massive chest. The tube has almost completely disappeared by the time Dreggs stops pushing it and takes the small ball in his hand.

He plunges the ball over the side of the skiff into the water, brings it up, then fits the valve into the end of the tube and squeezes the ball until water runs through it. Malarkey jerks and twists under my hands.

“It’s good that she’s fighting us,” says Yote quietly.

It takes ten minutes for the liquid that runs back out of the tube to run clear. Dreggs pumps enough water through Malarkey’s stomach to drown a small city. When he finally wipes his brow and carefully removes the tube, Malarkey retches, shudders, and lays panting, her eyes wide, staring up at me.

The air reeks of vomit and rust. The contents of Malarkey’s stomach slosh around my knees in the bottom of the skiff. Dreggs pulls two small bottles from his pack.

“Antacids.” He hands them to me one at a time. “And activated charcoal.”

I take them with numb, trembling fingers, staring but not seeing.

“Give her both, every morning, for the next five days.”

I manage to nod. Over my shoulder, I hear Locuaz sobbing softly from the Valkyrie’s deck. I try to say “thank you,” but I’m still reeling from the speed at which everything just happened. The quickness of Yote’s response; Dreggs’ skill and sureness. The preparedness.

“How did you…know?” I finally say.

Yote sets her jaw grimly. “Stark doesn’t just use that shit on dogs.”

____________________

Locuaz and I sit up in the cockpit with Malarkey all night. The next morning, the Valkyrie is gone. By the time Yote comes by to check on us that evening, Malarkey is well enough to greet her with her usual unfriendly snarl. Yote regards her with amusement.

“A fighter in every sense.”

The next few days on Tor pass like a blurry dream. The crystal water of the anchorage is warm enough to swim in at any time of the day or night. At night, bioluminescent creatures spark and glitter from the ends of our fingers and toes as we bathe in it. In the afternoons, the howls of long-tailed, human-faced monos and screeches of bright red parley birds reverberate across the bay from the trees that stretch like wooly green fingers from the cliffs.

I spot Josser the day after the Valkyrie leaves. The first time I see her, she’s put-put-putting across the bay in a wooden skiff that sits so low in the water it looks as though it might sink at any moment. I recognize her immediately as the wizened old woman who glared at me from her hammock aboard the Papagayo on the first day I was here.

She has a parley bird on one shoulder, a mangy orange cat on the other, and a small, ratty doggerel in her lap. I’m so thrown by the circus of animals, and so put off by the severity of the expression on her stern face, that it takes me three days to summon up the courage to approach her about navigation lessons.

As it turns out, my anxiety was misplaced—Josser is a hilarious, wiry spitfire of a woman whose love of decrepit animals is matched only by her fervor for the stars. She has pale skin, frizzy gray-brown hair, and massive, crooked spex. Her accent is bright, unplaceable, and nearly impossible to understand.

I spend five afternoons sitting in the cabin of the Papagayo, breathing in feathers and fur, Josser’s impassioned patter washing over me as she points me to various pages in at least five enormous almanacs, so densely packed with tables and numbers that they make my head spin. It’s the first time I’ve seen or used a book. Josser tells me that there are digitized versions of the almanacs available for biochips, but as no Reckoners are chipped, they do it the old fashioned way. Thankfully, Josser seems to assume that I’m a Reckoner, or at least, she doesn’t seem suspicious that I don’t have a chip.

The math, it turns out, is tedious but not complicated. It takes her just five days to teach me how to use a sextant, and how to determine my latitude and longitude using the sun.

Beneath the haze of those five days, the next leg of my journey looms like a rorqual—a dark specter in an even darker depth. Every beautiful afternoon spent diving off Panga, every evening spent sampling grilled rockfish from Josser’s barbecue, every morning that I wake to the cries of the parley birds and review my lesson from the day before is colored by the knowledge that it’s one more day wasted. One more day that I should be sailing to Sargo.

Eventually, the boat arrives from Alluvium with our part. Dreggs fixes our watermaker. The next afternoon, as Josser and I come to the end of our lesson, she snaps her book shut with a decisive smile and exclaims, “Whell, Birt, I haf taught you all I know!”

That evening, Locuaz and I sprawl in the sail bag on the bow, Malarkey squeezing herself between us, apparently thinking we might not notice an eighty pound dog if she keeps very still. The sky is a deep, velvety black, flecked with early stars. The air is thick with the buzz of insects, the smell of grilled fish, and the dissipating heat of the day.

“So when you gonna leave?” asks Locuaz, stretching onto her back and raising one hand over her head to block out the moon with her thumb.

I settle back next to her and stare up at the sky. “Tomorrow?”

I’m afraid to go. But there’s no reason for me to stay any longer.

She’s quiet for a few moments. “You sure you’re ready?”

“No.”

We let silence envelop us. I open my mouth and close it again. For three days now, a ghost of an idea has been intermittently skating through my mind. I begin, tentatively, to bring it to my lips.

“Locuaz…”

She turns her head toward me, her eyes nearly black in the dark, reflecting points of stars. I keep my own gaze skyward.

“Do you think—would you…I guess I was wondering—”

“If I’ll come with you to Grike?”

I let the air rush out of me and nod.

“Ah, mija.” She sighs and turns her gaze back up to the sliver of orange moon. “No. I don’t think so.”

The weight of disappointment settles on my chest like a brick, and a prickle of fear flutters in my gut. I knew she would say no. But as long as she hadn’t yet, I could pretend she might say yes.

“Why not?”

“I thought about it. But there’s nothing for me there.” She lets the words float into the night. Then says, “You’re scared to go alone.”

I clamp my mouth shut and nod, a single tear leaking from the corner of my eye. Her hand finds mine in the dark and squeezes.

“You should be scared. It would be crazy if you weren’t.”

I take the deepest, quietest breath that I can to control the fear and disappointment boiling in my chest. When I feel stable enough to speak I say, “Where will you go, then?”

“Yote’s leaving tomorrow to pick up some girls from Pocosín. I think I’m gonna go with her.”

“Really?”

She shrugs. “I want to know more about the Neozapas. And I haven’t seen my mother or my sister for a long time.”

“Will you stay? In Pocosín?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I need to go home for a while. Out here, I feel…I don’t know what is the word in your language, but in Pocosín we say ‘alma sin ataduras.’ It means…like an untied person.”

“A lost soul.”

She nods. “Alluvium was amazing. And Tor is beautiful. But Pocosín is my home.”

She reaches into the front of her shirt and pulls out a tiny vial hung from a long loop of silver chain. She rolls it between her fingers.

“This is white sand from one of the beaches near my home. I brought it with me when I left.” She shrugs. “I don’t know why. I think maybe I was going to collect sand from all the beaches I could find. Like a grand collection of my adventures. But all the time now, I just keep thinking about that beach. About my home. We have a lot of problems there. I wanted to get away from them. When I met Fetch, she made me feel like I could escape. But now, I talk to Yote, and…all this week, I can’t help thinking…maybe I should be there, helping to fix the problems, instead of here, running away from them.”

I nod, feeling the truth of her words settle in me me. How long has it been since you saw your moms? I ask myself. I never thought I would miss them. I never thought I would miss Brume. The sharp citrus scent of the fogwood needles. The damp air and the close, gray sky like a lid over the Salt. The melancholic smell of petrichor. I close my eyes.

Locuaz squeezes my hand again. “But you gotta keep going. You gotta find your boy. Find him and tell him how you feel. No! Better: show him how you feel.”

She nudges my shoulder with hers. I roll my eyes. “You just want to hear all the juicy details.”

“¡Sí, claro!” She nods emphatically. “Yes, obviously that is what I want. I don’t have anyone right now, gringa. You gotta give me the—how you say? Chismorreo.”

“Gossip.”

“Sí. Gossip.”

We settle back into silence and watch the moon hunt the stars across the sky.

chapter

eighteen

ÎLE TOR RECEDES into the distance off the starboard stern, a blob that becomes a smudge, that becomes a speck, that disappears. When I glance over my shoulder one last time and see that it is well and truly gone, the fist that closes around my heart is so tight that it stops my breath and squeezes tears from my eyes.

This morning Locuaz gripped me in a tight, clove-and-brew-scented hug. Something about it was familiar. The sharp, spicy scent of her skin, the way her thick, wavy hair poked my eyes. I was transported back to my last day in Brume, when Mama K clutched me in a bony, trembling hug, her sweet-tea-and-leather scent filling my nose, her scratchy hair poking my cheeks.

“Be careful, mija,” Locuaz said.

“You too.”

She pulled away and held me at arms length. “And don’t forget to eat, chalaca!”

“What are you, my mom?”

She squatted in front of Malarkey, wiping her eyes, and took one of those big ears between her fingers, lifting it and lowering her face, dropping her voice to an exaggerated whisper.

“Adios, Pirata. I’m sorry you have to go with this crazy puta. If I had my own boat, I would take you.”

“You would not,” I said fiercely. “And her name is Malarkey.”

Locuaz stood and fixed me with a hard stare. I glared back. Then she smiled and hugged me again.

Then she got on Yote’s boat and I watched them haul anchor and sail out of the bay. Locuaz stood on the stern and waved until they were so far away, I could no longer see her. I darted below deck and returned with the nox, training them on her tiny figure until it shrunk to a speck. I lowered the nox and stood for a long time, watching the Man O' War disappear into the horizon. Then I readied Panga, hauled the anchor, and put Tor behind me.

And now, I’m alone.

Malarkey, as though hearing my thoughts, stirs, stretches and looks around. She gives me a few tail thumps and a big sigh. I swallow the pain in my chest and aggressively rub the tears out of my eyes.

Get it together, Howsley. You’re not alone.

Malarkey rolls to her feet and shakes herself, her ears flapping against her head with a raucous clatter. Then she stretches—once to the front, once to the back—and saunters up to the bow to sniff the air.

I smile through my tears as I call after her. “Careful, Larkabout.”

Fortunately, there is plenty to keep me busy. The sun is getting high; the deck is hot and the shadows are disappearing. I check the time on the small round watch that Josser gave me. Yet another ancient device I had to learn how to use if I’m going to survive in the middle of the Salt with no biochip.

The two small hands point almost to the twelve. I count the little hatch marks between the eleven and the big hand. 1157. Time to take the noonsite.

I pull Josser’s sextant from its leather pouch and hold it up to my eye, finding the sun in the tool’s small silver mirror, then carefully adjust the angle until the sun appears to sit on the horizon. It’s not as easy to hold the sextant steady now as it was when Panga was motionless at anchor, so I reset and shoot it again. And again. I’m terrified of misjudging the angle. The last thing I need is to calculate my position incorrectly and overshoot Grike by a thousand miles. Locuaz and I were lucky we made it to Tor. If Yote hadn’t found us we’d be dead. I don’t expect to get so lucky again.

I write down the angle I recorded and pull out the five almanacs that Josser sent with me.

“You joost make chure you bring dese back to me,” she had said as she handed them over, glaring at me sternly over the top of her spex. “Dey are a loan, not a gift. I expec you back here som day.”

This, I suspect, was as close to an admission that she gave a shit about me as I would ever hear from a Reckoner.

It takes me an hour to look up all the conversions and make all the calculations needed to figure out my latitude. Just my latitude. I don’t even know my exact longitude yet—that will only be discoverable tonight, when I do this all over again and have two points to work with. Then, tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and do it again. Then again tomorrow at noon, and again before sunset. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Three times a day, every day until I reach Grike. That’s three hours every day, just to know where I am. I really, really miss my biochip right now.

I put away the sextant, the almanacs, pencil and other navigational tools, turn on the autopilot and try to relax. I don’t need to start panicking about the long journey to Grike quite yet: today I’m only going as far as Infime Tor, a day’s sail west of Île Tor.

Infime is much smaller than Île, and unpopulated. It’s barely even an island really, more like a pile of rocks, but according to Yote, Reckoners sometimes anchor there, and I can regroup for a night before the real journey begins. I’m grateful for that: knowing I would have somewhere to stop tonight made leaving Île this morning a little easier.

Will I be any more ready to start the real journey tomorrow? I don’t know. That’s a problem for tomorrow Bird.

I reach Infime an hour before sunset, but I feel no sense of pride or even relief at having made it. The wind is cold, the sky a blank slate, the Salt a gray, unforgiving slab. Infime looks bleak and unwelcoming, its jagged gray rocks stark and streaked with white birdshit. I see only one other boat bobbing forlornly in the dark water, just off a small spit of dismal sand in the crook of a cove at the north end of the island. I tuck Panga into the cove and prepare to drop the anchor.

As I stand on the bow, unhitching the line that secures the anchor into its cradle, a bright thought cuts through my miserable gray stupor. I suddenly remember that I’ve been itching to try out one of the fancy new anchoring knots I learned from Fid when I was on the Kingfisher.

I only ever showed Locuaz the tried-and-true knot that I learned with Sargo years ago. Fid’s knot seemed too complicated to try and teach her. Now that I’m on my own, though, I’m free to experiment. The realization buoys me, drives away the heavy cloud of loneliness weighing all around me, and gives me something new to think about.

Energized and determined, I lash a strong rope around the anchor chain and carefully tie Fid’s knot to secure it. I stand back to admire my work: the way the rope weaves over and under itself in a complex, inscrutable maze. Then I continue dropping the anchor as usual: I take the free end of the rope firmly in my hands. Wedging my feet against the deck, I sit my hips back, putting all my weight on the rope to lift the anchor from its cradle. It teeters on the edge of the bow.

Suddenly, the rope goes slack in my hands and the anchor plunges over the side. I stumble backward and sit down hard on my ass. The chain screams out of the cradle as the anchor plummets, out of control, into the depths. Malarkey jumps sideways and runs for the stern. I’m about to lose the anchor and all of the chain to Jones.

Scrambling to my feet, I find the brake on the side of the cradle that locks the chain and flip it on. With the horrendous, heavy clunk of metal on metal, and a sickening jolt that shakes Panga, the chain stops. I stand, breathing hard, my hands trembling, and lift the rope to examine it.

I tied the wrong knot.

Growling with frustration, I throw the rope down on the deck.

“Check and double-check. Then, when you’re sure you’ve got it right, check it again,” says Sargo’s voice in my head.

That’s what I get for being over-confident. That’s what Sargo would say. Should have double-checked the knot. Shouldn’t have used a brand new knot my first time dropping the anchor by myself. Should have, should have, should have…

I finish setting the anchor and prepare to drop the skiff so I can take Malarkey to shore for her last run before the crossing. I’ve never tried to put it in the water by myself; it’s heavy and unwieldy, and by the time I get it off the bow and over the side, I’m shaking and drenched in sweat, my hair and clothes sticking to me, exacerbating the chill of the wind.

Malarkey, sensing that a trip to the beach is in her very near future, races up and down the length of the deck, waving her tail like a flag and snorting with enthusiasm. When it comes time to load her in, she’s so excited she barges right past me, leaping from Panga into the skiff and almost knocking me over the side.

“Gods-flog-it, Malarkey!” I scream, the cold, loneliness, and irritation finally boiling over into anger.

She cocks her head. “What’s the problem?” says her face. “It’s beach time!”

We skim across the bay toward the shore in the skiff, Malarkey hanging her head over the bow, tail up, ears flapping. As we near the shore, I kill the motor and let the tide carry us, pulling off my shoes and socks and rolling up my pants. When I sense that it’s shallow enough to land, I hop over the side.

The water is deeper than I thought. I land up to my waist, my knees buckling in surprise. As I stumble in the surf, a wave lifts the skiff behind me. It crashes into me hard and knocks me down like a ragdoll, my ears and nose filling with gurgling water as it mows over me. I roll head over heels in the surf and emerge gasping, staggering to my feet, my eyes stinging with salt water. The skiff drifts to a halt in the sand ten feet ahead of me, Malarkey’s bemused face peering over the side.

“What are you doing?” she says. “It wasn’t time to get out yet.”

We slog along the shore, me fuming, Malarkey bounding up and down the beach like a maniac, racing in circles, stopping randomly to sniff, dig holes, and roll in the sand. My soaking clothes and hair turn frigid as the sun disappears. By the time we return to the skiff and make our way back across the bay to Panga, Malarkey’s more filthy than I’ve ever seen her, covered in wet sand and stinking like a dead thing.

Back aboard Panga I strip off my sodden clothes, towel us both off as best I can and make dinner—two bread rolls slathered with canned fish I traded from a Reckoner. The bread is stale and hard, the fish so dry I almost choke. I wash it down with water from the desalinator, which is bitter and metallic after the recent repair.

By the time I crawl into the sleeping bunk in the v-berth, I’m so exhausted, sore, and cold that even the damp reek of musty old bedding doesn’t bother me.

Can’t wait to wake up tomorrow and do this all again, I think, as my eyes drag themselves together and sleep pulls me into its warm, welcome embrace.

Something cold and wet touches the back of my neck. My eyes snap open, my brain clawing its way back to consciousness as I twist to peer over my shoulder. Malarkey stands over me, her quizzical eyes gazing down into mine.

“Sargo would not approve of you being on the bunk,” I mumble, my eyes already growing heavy again. She snorts and turns in a tight circle, then curls herself next to me, the tip of her nose touching mine. She sighs heavily and blinks at me.

“Sorry today was such a shitshow,” I tell her. “I’ll do better tomorrow.”

chapter

nineteen

I CAN SEE GRIKE.

Or can I? There’s no one here to corroborate. After twelve days on the Salt with no one to talk to but Malarkey, I’m no longer sure if I can trust what I see. Yesterday I thought I saw a plasticberg, but it turned out to be a trick of the light. I’ve started hearing things. Whispers in the Salt. Fife. She’s not just in my dreams anymore. I hear her voice. Or is it just the gurgling of water against the hull?

I haven’t been sleeping much. Three hours on, three hours off is more an aspiration than a schedule. When I do sleep, I am plagued by dreams. Dreams of Fife. Of Savage. Of rorquals and delfíns and the crushing, black infinity of the Salt below the boat. It’s nerves, probably. Fear of the deep. An over-active imagination and an intimate knowledge of my own shortcomings. These things breed fear.

Rubbing my eyes, I sit up. A dark, squat smudge smears like a thumbprint across the horizon. I pull out the chart to check our last position. That’s Grike. It has to be.

I fix my eyes on the distant smudge and watch it for the next two hours. It doesn’t grow much bigger, which tells me we’re still quite a long way from actually reaching it. A day, maybe?

There’s a squall brewing to the west. Storm clouds pile over the horizon, flickering purple and white, obscuring the land. The dense, black edge of cloud makes a hard line against the bright gray sky, as though someone is pulling a blanket over the Salt. From that direction blows a warm, crackling wind that fills my hair with static.

I was starting to think we might make it to Grike without hitting lightning. I was kidding myself.

I use Josser’s watch and some quick mental math to estimate our current position. The squall is dead ahead, right between me and Grike. God dammit. We were so close.

With a sigh, I switch off the autopilot and take the helm, turning us five degrees to port. The squall is far enough away that a simple course correction should take us around the edge of it, but changing course now will mean adding days to the journey. I drum impatiently on the wheel and squint furiously across the water at the smear of Turf half obscured by clouds. I don’t want to add extra days. I don’t have extra days.

Our course adjusted, I flip the autopilot back on and go below to make myself some tea. As my feet land on the galley floor with a thud, Malarkey scurries out of the v-berth with a guilty look on her face. I arch an eyebrow as she slinks past me and up the steps into the cockpit.

“Sleeping on my bunk again, Lark-a-bark? You know that’s against the rules.”

When I take my tea back up into the cockpit, I find that the air has turned chilly. We’ve escaped the warm, electric current from the squall and now, with the sun obscured by the clouds, the temperature has dropped. Malarkey curls in a corner and puts her tail over her nose, closing one eye and keeping the other on me.

“Alright for those of us with tails,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself.

I set my tea on the floor and swing myself below again to see if I can rummage up a coat or sweatshirt from somewhere. I find one in the locker next to the nav table—a soft, thick hoodie with fleece lining and a coarse, hardy exterior.

As I pull it off the hanger, the sharp citrus of fogwood washes over me. I freeze, clutching the fabric between my fingers. Then I bury my face in it, and breathe like I’m coming up for air from the depths of the Salt. The smell of Sargo is overpowering—somehow both comforting and exciting at the same time. It makes my heart beat throughout my entire body.

I pull the sweatshirt over my head, the soft warmth and intoxicating smell enveloping me like a cloud. Then I wrap my arms around myself again and stand for a long time, holding the neck of the sweater open around my nose.

Finally, a voice snaps me out of it.

Get it together, Howsley. You’re not going to do anyone any good standing around smelling his clothes all day.

I climb back up to the cockpit and scoop my tea off the floor, cupping it between my hands and holding it close to my chest to let the steam warm me. The tea smells like Sargo too. Cinnamon and orange. I stand on the top step of the companionway, sipping off the top and gazing back over the stern at the miles and miles of water I’ve already crossed.

And just off the starboard side, I spot the sail again.

There’s no second-guessing myself this time. I’ve seen that telltale white triangle enough now that there’s no doubt in my mind. In the last three days, it’s popped up on the horizon behind me every afternoon. I grab the nox and train them on the shape. It’s closer today. I can see that it’s not just one sail, it’s three, stacked one behind the other, and the sails are not normal sails. They fly like parachutes above a monstrous, hulking lump of a boat that plows through the water like a moving island.

It’s the Valkyrie. And it’s gaining on me, fast. They’ve been hanging back for three days, probably to put as much distance between us and Tor—and Yote—as possible before swooping in. But apparently they’ve decided now is the time to strike.

I swing myself behind the helm and flip off the autopilot. Malarkey scrambles to her feet and puts her front paws up on the side of the cockpit, sticking her nose into the air, catching the scent of the other ship. I trim the jib and we pick up half a knot of speed, but glancing over my shoulder, I know it won’t be enough. Even if we had the mainsail, it wouldn’t be enough.

A deafening crash shakes the sky and a blinding flash lights up the Salt, rendering the Valkyrie in sharp black and white contrast. Malarkey dives off her seat and tears down the companionway steps. Heart in my throat, I turn my attention back over the bow. I was so preoccupied with the Valkyrie that I didn’t notice the squall shifting course. Another thunderous crash splits my eardrums, and lightning shreds the sky.

I clutch the wheel and cast my gaze in every direction. Trapped. Black, flickering storm clouds loom ahead off the starboard side. Behind me, the Valkyrie is slowly closing the gap. I stifle a frustrated howl. I’m so close to Grike. Another day and I’ll be there.

Another crooked finger of lightning escapes the clouds and I find myself momentarily entranced by the bright tendril of light snaking through the air. It looks almost alive; like a creature crawling through the sky, testing, probing, searching for a path to the ground.

“Lightning always strikes the tallest thing it can find.” Yote’s words in my head. “Out there, that’s you.”

An idea flashes through me like wildfire.

Out there that’s you. Except right now, it's not me. It’s the Valkyrie.

“Coming to starboard!” I scream to no one. I snatch up the jib sheet with one hand, cranking the wheel hard to starboard with the other. Panga turns, exploding through the crest of an oncoming wave and drenching me with spray. I fight to keep the bow pointed the right way with one hand as I adjust the headsail with the other, setting a new course straight toward the lightning storm.

Grabbing the nox again, I point them at the Valkyrie. She's adjusting course to follow me. Perfect. I scan the deck, picking out four or five crew members, and then I spot her: Mojave Stark. Her great, hulking silhouette is like a boulder behind the Valkyrie’s helm.

“That’s it, Stark,” I mutter. “Right this way.”

The two boats tear through the steely water until the flickering purple clouds are all around us. Another crash of thunder and a fat fork of lightning rent the air, directly on top of each other. The Valkyrie is gaining fast, so close that I no longer need the nox to pick out Stark on the deck. I fix my gaze on her beady eyes. She glares back. Her black lips form a silent, threatening salutation.

“Miss Howsley.”

I return her sneer with a grin. She's so hellbent in getting her coin that she hasn’t figured out what I’m up to. The Valkyrie’s mast see-saws back and forth in the rough swell, so tall it makes Panga's tiny mast look like a matchstick. Keeping my eyes locked on Stark’s, I raise one hand in a casual wave, then point my finger to the sky. At the same moment, a fork of lightning rips through the clouds and stretches toward the water, probing, seeking, searching for its path to the ground. Searching for the tallest thing it can find.

Stark’s vicious snarl twists into a look of horror as she realizes what’s happening. Her gaze darts skyward.

With an ear-splitting crack and a blinding flash, the finger of lightning finds the Valkyrie’ mast. It explodes in a dazzling fireball, lighting up the Salt for a mile around and sending a shockwave across the water. The blast socks me in the chest, knocking the air out of me and flinging me backwards like a ragdoll. I hit the rail and crumple onto the deck.

I glimpse a dazzling shower of sparks raining down into the water around us like thousands of falling stars. The Valkyrie lists, flames pouring down her shattered mast like water. As darkness crowds the edges of my vision, I hear shouts and screams. Someone jumps over the side.

Flames are consuming her deck as I fall into blackness.

chapter

twenty

I APPEAR at the top of the ridge surrounding the settlement at Naze, a hand on my brow, squinting into the unrelenting sun. I have the feeling that I have been standing here for a long time; that perhaps I have always been standing here; that maybe I will always be standing here.

The settlement below is drawn in broad strokes: incomplete, missing detail, reconstructed from barely recalled memories. A dreamscape imagined from flashbacks and a single visit. The color red, the hard, dry earth, a need for water.

A dream.

At the bottom of the ridge, a small congregation of huts and tents. People emerge as I approach, just like they did when I arrived with Sargo. Their faces this time, though, are generic and poorly remembered. A hard people. That’s what I remember.

I touch my finger to the center of my brow and bow my head. The crowd returns the gesture. A man steps forward. He’s spare-framed and ruddy skinned. My mind draws him quite well—the man who, in real life, traded us veg for Sargo’s desalinator filter. Flecked with white sunspots. Cruel to Malarkey, but only out of necessity. The girl who took care of Malarkey—the girl who grew the veg—died. Malarkey was a burden these people didn’t need. The man was only doing what was necessary.

“We can’t spare any more,” he says.

“I’m not here to trade,” I reply. “I’m looking for Fife.” I’m worried the man won’t know who I’m talking about, but his eyes register recognition.

“That’s her.” He points over his shoulder, across the compound to the sparse vegetable patch. I squint at a young girl stooping to pull something from the ground.

The crowd parts to let me through. Their faces flicker and change as I walk among them, and I note with alarm that all of their faces are becoming the same. All of them are becoming Fife. Fife at ten. At eleven. At twenty. At sixty.

As the girl in the veg patch stands, tucking a bunch of greens into a basket at her hip, a second figure steps out of the hut. I recognize Shale’s ponytail and cane. He’s older—much older than Fife. Fife is just a little girl and Shale is a man now. He walks up behind Fife and puts his arms around her.

I start to run as Fife turns to Shale with a smile and stands on tiptoe to kiss him. Shale stoops to meet her lips and takes her small hands in his. I reach the fence at the edge of the patch and Fife pulls away, and as Shale turns to me, his cane and ponytail evaporate. His skin turns olive brown. His shoes vanish.

“Sargo?”

“Hey, Bird,” says Sargo. He pulls a knife from the air. I fix my eyes on the knife as he flips it open with a flourish and begins to toss it end over end. His other hand wraps firmly around Fife’s frail, tiny shoulders. My heart begins to beat fast: I recognize that knife.

“What are you doing?” I say, my eyes fixed on the lazy, repetitive arc of the knife as it twirls again and again out of Sargo’s hand.

“Don’t worry, Alluvium,” says Sargo, and his voice is not as I remember it. “I’ll make sure not to do anything reckless.”

I pull my eyes away from the hypnotic motion of the knife and look at his face.

The eyes of the man whose gaze I meet are not Sargo’s. They are dull; gray. Haunted by a pain so deep that I cannot begin to fathom it. His handsome face is aged beyond its years, to an age I can’t quite place. His skin is sallow and wretched with lines, his blonde hair matted with filth.

“I’m sorry about your daughter,” I say.

Savage says nothing. His eyes hold mine so firmly I cannot look away, even as he closes the knife in his fist and drives it into Fife’s jaw.

chapter

twenty-one

I’M sorry about your daughter.

My head is in two pieces, and I am tumbling through space. A searing, blinding pain radiates from the center of my skull, opening the top of my head like a bag. I’m sure the thick goop of my brain is spilling out like nopal soup.

Don’t worry, Alluvium. I’ll make sure not to do anything reckless.

The blackness of unconsciousness gives way to the spinning half-darkness of half-consciousness. I am clawing my way out of unconsciousness. Yes, that’s what I’m doing.

Sounds now, faint, muted, tinny, like a song played underwater. Voices. The soft drone of some piece of machinery. Beeping. Incessant beeping. Spinning around my head; growing louder, sharper. I recoil from it. I fall back into the dark.

____________________

My eyes open. I didn’t give them permission to do that. Light like two knives in my skull. I snap them closed again, sick, dizzy, my head split in three places now. I shouldn’t open my eyes again. If I do, my brain will spill out of them.

“Bird?”

Another fragment of a dream.

“Bird.” Not a dream. A voice. “Are you there, Bird?”

No. I am not here. I am not anywhere.

____________________

The white blade of light pierces my skull again as my treacherous eyes open themselves. I close them. I try to raise a hand to touch the splitting pain behind my ear. Some part of me understands that surely, my brain must still be inside my head, but some other part needs to confirm it. If my brain is not inside my head then I am not alive. If I am not alive, then I have fallen through space into hell or somewhere beyond.

But I can’t raise my hand. I can’t even feel my hand. Fear begins to burble.

I am alive. I’m sure I am alive.

I send my mind into my body, feeling for my legs, hands, and feet. They are there. I can feel them. I try to lift my arm. It takes everything I have, but I do it. I let the arm drop. I wiggle one foot.

I am alive. I knew it.

There is pain in my chest. A dull, suffocating ache. There is an incessant, regular beeping in my ear. The hum of machinery. In my nose, the tart, clean smell of bleach and fresh linen. The air is cool.

Maybe you should open your eyes.

Everything is white. So bright it makes my eyes water. I force myself to adjust. Through tears, a blurry, incoherent world becomes coherent. A ceiling. A white ceiling with a light in it.

Instinctively, I lift my hand to my throbbing head. The movement happens more easily this time. I can move. I place my palm gently against the side of my head.

A small, cold spike of fear. Where is my hair?

I press my fingers against my head, feeling coarse stubble. I walk them back until they come to a soft edge. Fabric of some kind. Under the fabric, my head is too tender to touch. Panic rising now. The incessant beeping drowned out by the pounding of blood in my ears. I sit up on my elbows.

The world spins and goes away.

I close my eyes and wait for it to come back.

When I open them again, I see I’m in a bed. A crisp white sheet covers my legs. On one side of the bed is a small table made of blonde wood, with a glass of water on it. Beyond the table is a stark, white wall with a single door in it, the same blonde wood as the table.

I turn the other way. The soft sound of the sheet crinkling, the scent of clean linen. In the other wall is a window, the curtains drawn. A second door. Next to the bed is a metal pole with a bag hanging on it. From the bag runs a thin, clear tube. I follow the tube with my eyes. It disappears into my arm.

Panic rising faster now. I find the edge of the sheet with my hand, pull it back. My legs are bare. What am I wearing? A sleeveless vest. A pair of shorts. Both white. Soft and clean. I grab clumsily at the tube. A pinch of pain as the needle comes out of my arm. A dot of blood. A shrill, high-pitched tone. I drop the tube, cover my ears with both hands. The door in the far wall flings open. People rush in. Hands on my shoulders, pushing me down. The shrill tone silences.

“Easy. Don’t struggle.”

Am I struggling? If I am then I’m not doing it very well. The hands wrestle me down. They hold me by the shoulders and ankles, strong fingers digging into my skin.

“Where am I?” That’s my voice, hoarse and quiet. “Where am I?” Again, the same question. Say something else. “Who are you?”

“It’s okay. Everything’s fine.” A woman’s voice, gently accented. Her face appears, blocking my view of the light on the ceiling. “You’re not in danger.” Terracotta skin, black hair, a plump jaw, wrinkles around the eyes, delicate spex. She smiles kindly. “I’m glad to see you up.”

“Where am I?” The breath burns in my chest.

“You’re in a hospital room. You’ve been in stasis.”

I must be struggling because I feel the grip around my ankles tighten, weight pressing harder on my shoulders. The pain in my chest sharpens as I strain against it.

“Relax.”

“Who are you?!”

“My name is Dr. Lysett. You are quite safe. Please stop struggling.”

“Why am I here?”

“You needed medical attention.”

“What happened?”

The kind eyes close. The woman takes a slow breath. The eyes open, find mine. Another patient smile.

“I will be quite happy to tell you everything you want to know, but I need you to relax, please. Can you do that for me?”

I stare into the eyes. They are frozen in that kind, patient smile. I tilt my chin up to take in the person holding my shoulders. Big, muscular, dark hair, firm jaw, bored-looking. I tilt my chin down. The one holding my feet could be his twin.

I find the eyes again. I nod. Her smile broadens. “Good, thank you.”

The grip around my ankles releases, the weight lifts off my shoulders. A rush of air fills my chest, stretching it painfully. The twins retreat from the bed.

The woman with the kind eyes reaches over me and taps a few times on something on the wall behind me. Twisting my head, I see the machine responsible for the incessant beeping. The backstabbing machine that set off the alarm on me, now silent.

The woman steps back from the bed and holds a finger against her temple, her eyes scanning my body, bright but weirdly unfocused.

“Your vitals look good.” She drops her finger, her eyes refocusing, and addresses the twins. “I don’t think we’ll need to reset the IV.” She turns to me again with another gentle smile. “Now, you have some questions.”

I get my elbows under me, push myself up on them. My chest aches. “What am I doing here?”

“One of our patrol scouts found your boat. You appeared to have undergone some kind of trauma. Do you remember what happened?”

The Valkyrie. Lightning. A shower of sparks.

“Lightning.” My voice is weak. “It was a lightning strike.”

She nods, as though a suspicion has been confirmed. “You weren’t hit directly though.”

I can’t tell if it’s a question. “No, it was…like a blast.”

Another nod. “You’ve sustained bruising to the ribs, as well as a rather serious concussion.”

My hand goes to the stubble on the side of my head. “What happened to my hair?”

“Ah—yes.” Another kind smile. “In addition to treating the injuries you sustained from the lightning blast, we were able to fix your biochip.”

The wind goes out of me. “You what?”

“I’m afraid some of your hair needed to be shaved in order for us to do the surgery.”

“How did you know my chip was broken?”

Another patient smile. “I’m afraid that’s not a question I can answer.”

“What happened to the Valkyrie.”

“Again, that’s not something I know anything about.”

“Where’s Malarkey?” Another spike of panic. My eyes dart around the room. “Where’s my dog?”

She raises a placating hand. “Your dog is quite safe, as is your boat. Your dog…is a handful. She gave us quite a run for our money.”

“Where is she? Let me see her.”

“You’ll see her very soon. I just need to make sure you’re strong enough to come out of stasis permanently. How is your pain?”

I put a hand to my chest. Tender. I gingerly touch my head. Tender. “It’s…fine.”

She purses her lips, taps the side of her head, and gestures in the air, I guess making a note in her biochip.

“You’re very weak. And you’ll be sore for some time. We’ll give you medication for the pain. You need to rest. I would very much appreciate it if you didn’t attempt to leave this bed again.”

“For how long?”

“Not too long. A few days. We need to monitor your condition.”

“When can I see my dog?”

“Very soon.”

“What is this place?”

“This is the Zenith facility at Grike.”

Zenith. Lab rats. Killing children. The Valkyrie.

Alarm bells clang in my head. I’m out of the bed before I know what’s happening. As my feet touch the ground, my knees buckle. I grab wildly, feebly at the air, feel hands catch me under the arms; haul me back onto the bed. The breath burns in my chest. Another sharp pinch in my arm. The edges of my vision disappear. I claw at the light, trying to maintain my grip on consciousness, but I’m falling backward, into darkness again.

____________________

“Bird?”

A familiar voice. The light is less invasive as I open my eyes this time. I blink twice, a dizzy memory coming back to me.

The Zenith facility at Grike.

A wave of panic. I struggle to my elbows.

“Bird, it’s okay!” A hand is on my shoulder. The familiar crisp scent of fogwood needles, salt and sand washes over me. A new ache carves out a place to lay in my chest. Home. A tawny face swims into view. A shadow of stubble. Tousled, sable hair. Dark brown eyes.

My heart clamors against my ribs. “You’re here…”

“Hey. Yeah, I’m here.”

“Your…hair is longer.” It’s the only thing that comes into my head.

The corner of his lip twitches. “Yours is…interesting.”

I close my eyes and open them again. “How…”

“Dr. Lysett thought it might be better if you woke up to a familiar face this time.”

Something cold and wet touches my wrist.

“Oh,” says Sargo, “and Malarkey’s here too.”

I look down. She gazes up at me and bumps my wrist with her nose again, spinning her tail like a maniac.

“But—”

“How do you feel?” His face is drawn, his eyes hunting mine for information.

“I don’t—know. Confused? I’m…I thought—you were kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped?” His brow creases. “I guess you could call it that. I meant how do you feel, like…physically. Are you okay?”

I take a breath, feeling the dull, stretching pain in my chest. I gently press my fingers to the bandage on my head. “I’m okay.”

“They said you got struck by lightning?” His eyes flicker away from mine, searching the rest of my body.

“Not struck. It didn’t strike me. It was the Valkyrie.”

“The Valkyrie? That warship the Anonymity sent to chase us down outside Naze?”

“The Anonymity didn’t send them.” My pulse spikes, panic rising again. “It was Zenith. Zenith sent the Valkyrie after us. We aren’t safe—” I try to sit up.

His hand gently squeezes my shoulder. “Relax. What do you mean, Zenith sent them?”

“It wasn’t the Anonymity after me. It was never the Anonymity. It was Zenith. Zenith hired the Valkyrie. Zenith kidnapped you in Alluvium—”

A wash of dizziness. There’s too much to explain. I sink back into the pillow.

“Hey.” Sargo leans closer. “Everything’s okay.”

“This is the Zenith facility.”

“Yes. You’re safe here.”

“No.” I struggle to sit up again. “No, they’ve been tracking me—”

“Bird, it’s okay. They’ve been trying to find you.”

“They put something in my chip—”

“I know. They told me about your chip.”

What? My eyes go wide. Sargo knows about my chip? He’s alive, unharmed, walking around the Zenith facility freely? I stare back into his eyes. “I thought you were…in danger.”

“I’m not in danger.” His lips twitch again. “Did you come here to rescue me?”

Heat rises to my cheeks. It sounds ridiculous when he says it out loud. “I guess so.”

He smirks. “How do you feel like it’s going so far?”

“Wow, I’ve been conscious less than five minutes and you’re already giving me shit?”

“Of course.” He grins. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I can’t believe you’re here either.”

“No.” Something shifts; the grin becomes mischievous. “I mean, I can’t believe you finally learned how to sail.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m impressed, Howsley.” The grin fades. His eyes roam across my face as though he’s seeing me for the first time. “Really impressed,” he says quietly. "That took…a lot of sand."

I wrinkle my brow. "Sand?"

"Grit. Guts. Courage." His eyes hold mine, alight with that strange new look, and I look away, blushing. Three soft knocks come through the door. Malarkey, who had settled herself under the bed, leaps to her feet with an ear-splitting bark.

“Jesus, Malarkey!” I croak.

Sargo jumps up and shoos her away from the door. It slides open with a hiss, startling me almost as much as Malarkey's outburst, and the face of the woman with the kind eyes appears.

“Ah, we’re awake!” she says. She steps into the room. “How are we feeling today, Miss Howsley?”

“Fine. Thanks.”

“Oh, you’re far from fine,” says the woman, archly, as she crosses to stand beside my bed. “But I am glad to see that you’re no longer trying to escape.”

She presses a finger to the side of her head, her eyes scanning my body again. My skin prickles; it feels invasive not to be asked or warned. What is she looking at? Under my clothes? Under my skin?

“Vitals look good,” she says. “Showing some improvement since yesterday. However,” she turns to Sargo, “I do think it’s best if we let Bird get her rest.”

From under the bed, I hear Malarkey’s low growl. Sargo turns to me, his eyes fixing mine with a look just shy of worried. “I’ll see you later. Okay?”

No, I say inside my head. It’s not okay at all. Don’t go. Outside my head, I say, "Okay.”

“And shall we take the dog out?” says the woman.

“No!” I blurt. “Leave her.”

The woman hesitates. She glances nervously at Malarkey.

“Please,” I say.

“Okay,” she says finally. “Perhaps it’s better she stays here. She is a bit…difficult.”

She gives me a final unsettled smile, then turns and walks briskly to the door. Sargo lingers by the bed, scratching the back of his neck. He opens his mouth to say something, hesitates, and closes it again.

“I’ll see you later,” he says. And he follows the woman out of the room.

chapter

twenty-two

I MUST HAVE FALLEN asleep at some point because I wake again. The room is filled with a different, fresher light. It pours under and around the edges of the curtain at the window, crisp and bright. My body feels fresher too. The aches in my chest and my head are still there, but the grogginess, the heaviness of yesterday, or whenever that was, are gone.

I hear the skitter of nails on the floor that tells me Malarkey is awake. She rises from her curled-up position as I push myself to a seat, and pads over to the bed to greet me, her tail wagging slowly, her head down. I let her bump my knees with her head, and catch her ears in my hands, squeezing them as I yawn and blink.

I lower my feet onto the cool stone floor. Gently, keeping one hand firmly braced on the bed, I test my weight. My knees wobble dangerously, but they hold. I take a tentative step and let go of the bed. So far so good. I shuffle slowly to the window and pull back the curtain.

The view that greets me is of a garden. A green, well-manicured lawn stretches away from the window, flanked on either side by tall, trimmed hedges. A series of stone slabs runs down the center of the grass, leading to a large fountain. Splashes of red and purple spill out of large terracotta pots placed at intervals that I can only assume have been carefully calculated to look random. A small, red-breasted bird swoops from above the window down the garden, and lands in the fountain. He flutters his wings and splashes water on himself in a hurried way before darting off and disappearing into a tree.

I turn away from the window and see a chair and table on the other side of the room that I hadn’t noticed yesterday. On the chair is a pile of clothes. My clothes. They’ve been washed and pressed. I shuffle over and pick up the faded, soft denim button-down and hold it to my nose. Lavender.

On the table is a covered plate with a knife and fork next to it, wrapped in a white linen napkin. I lift the cover from the plate and the rich smell of buttered toast reaches my nose. Flinging the cover on the floor, I scoop the clothes off the chair and fall into it, stuffing a piece of toast into my mouth. I don’t stop eating until every piece of toast is gone. Then I devour the eggs.

As I’m sticking the last bite into my mouth and licking grease from my fingers, three knocks sound at the door.

“Miss Howsley?” I freeze. It’s a woman’s voice.

“Yes?”

“May I open the door?”

“...yes?”

I startle as the door hisses and slides open. Lysett appears. She smiles. “Ah good. You’re up. We were starting to worry.”

“Worry?”

She steps into the room. Malarkey growls. Lysett falters, steps to the side, but seems determined to push on with a warm smile.

“It appears you took my instructions to heart. You slept for three days.”

Three days? No wonder I was so hungry. Lysett presses a finger to the side of her head and scans me again with unfocused eyes. I fold my arms across my chest and turn my face away, a flicker of irritation rising at yet again not being asked or warned.

“Vitals look good,” she says. “How do you feel today?”

“Fine. Better.”

“Good!” She gestures in the air to input the data into her chip. “If you’re feeling up to it, our director would like to meet you and take you on a little tour of our facility. No rush!” She holds up a hand. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Director?”

“That’s right.” She nods. “Just turn right out of this door,” she indicates the door behind her, “and go all the way to the end of the hallway. She’ll meet you there."

“She’ll meet me? How will she know I’m there?”

“Don’t worry about that.” She smiles again.

“Where’s Sargo?” I say as she turns and places her hand on a palm-sized rectangle to the right of the door. The door hisses open behind her.

“I believe Mr. Paz is working on his boat. I’m sure you’ll run into him with the director at some point. Any other questions?”

“Is there a shower?”

“Yes. Through that door.” She indicates the door next to the window on the opposite wall. “Is that all?”

I nod slowly, my eyes on hers, searching, I suppose, for some indication that I shouldn’t trust her. I find none.

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

She smiles again, and leaves.

I turn up the shower until it is almost too hot to stand under and pour all of the soaps, shampoos, conditioners, and lotions into a big puddle in my hand. The steam becomes laden with the scent of fruit and flowers.

The stubble on one side of my head is bizarre and alien, but I try not to get too hung up on it, focusing instead on keeping the bandage dry. I’ll have to wash my hair another day, but I revel in being able to properly clean myself for the first time in weeks, remembering the last shower I took: chilly and cramped aboard the Kingfisher, standing ankle-deep in grimy water from the clogged drain.

A thick, soft towel waits on a warmed rack when I step out. I dry myself slowly, carefully, my chest still tender. A faint, greenish bruise is blooming over the damaged area, startlingly large, covering my whole chest and wrapping around the right side of my ribs. I examine my half-shaved head in the mirror and decide I don’t totally hate it. Once the bandage is removed I might even be able to pull it off.

Showered and dressed, I linger by the window, gazing at the garden. Now that I’m fully awake and cognizant, all I can think about, looking at it, is the water it must take to keep it so green. Where are they getting all that water from?

Finally, having exhausted everything there is to do in the room, I gingerly pull on my beanie, fresh and fluffy and smelling, bizarrely, of lavender. I briefly wonder what time it is, and remember that I can check that now. My chip is fixed. I have a clock.

My hand hovers over my brow, trembling. Screaming static, the metallic taste in my mouth, searing pain. These are all things I would rather not experience when my head is already fragile. I suck in air sharply through my teeth and press my finger to my brow, squeezing my eyes shut.

Nothing. I open my eyes.

>>> 0930

The air rushes out of me. It’s like seeing an old friend. The text glows sharp white against the vibrant green lawn in the window. The text is the wrong color—I’ll have to go in and change all my settings from the factory default. But it’s there. I feel like I could cry.

I open the door to the outside. The hallway stretches endlessly to my left, and very nearly endlessly to my right. The walls look like stone—pale, rosy pink, roughly textured. The floor is stone too, with small lights recessed into it every twenty feet or so. There are no windows.

I step across the threshold, standing to the side to let Malarkey slink past me before closing the door. She lopes ahead as I make my way slowly down the corridor, keeping one hand on the wall and pausing to catch my breath every twenty feet or so. Every time I stop, Malarkey loops anxiously back to give me a bump with her nose and a wag of her tail before loping ahead again. When I get to the end, I find another corridor intersecting this one at a T, and stop, leaning my back against the wall.

The clock of boots draws my gaze to the right and elicits a soft growl from Malarkey.

“Miss Howsley?”

Walking down the corridor toward me is a short, slight woman with augmented jet black hair, wearing a pair of sleek but very bold black spex. A crisp, white suit jacket comes to mid-thigh over her tight black pants, and the clock of her highly polished black boots on the stone floor reverberates around the corridor.

She reaches me quickly and offers a hand, her hazel eyes level with mine, a wash of smoke and lavender scent settling around her. She seems completely unfazed by Malarkey’s low snarling. In fact, she seems not to notice her at all.

“Axioma Nation,” she says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

I goggle, taking her strong, small hand. “Nation? Axioma Nation?”

She smiles. “Yes.”

“The CEO of Zenith? You’re like…in charge of the world.”

She laughs. “I’m flattered, but not quite.”

Her face is deeply lined, with fine, creamy skin. Her age is almost as difficult to pin down as Savage’s, but I would guess somewhere around fifty. She releases my hand and sweeps an arm ahead of her.

“Please. You set the pace. From what I’ve heard, you’ve had a rough few days.”

Malarkey finally peels her maddog stare off Axioma, but carefully positions herself between us. I turn away and begin to walk numbly down the corridor, my mind buzzing with questions. What could the CEO of Zenith possibly want with me? Did she come here all the way from Brume? And, somewhere deeper, buried in memory: this is Electra’s mother. Did she know about the necklace? Did she send the Anonymity after me? Did she send the Valkyrie?

“How are you feeling?” she says.

I glance sideways at her. She walks with her hands behind her back, her head high, gaze in front, not looking at me.

“Uh—fine.” I feel tongue-tied, acutely aware of my scruffy hat and sneakers.

“That was quite the journey you took to get here.”

“I—guess so.”

“Don’t be modest, Miss Howsley. You crossed the Salt alone. Not many people can claim to have done that. Your boyfriend included.”

Blood rushes to my face. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I mumble.

“Oh no? But he is the reason you came.”

“I—” How does she know that? “I guess so.”

“Well, in any case,” she continues, “whatever brought you here, I’m happy that it did. You see—to your right—”

We’ve come to another T-junction; she turns down the corridor on the right and pauses, waiting for me to catch up.

“You see, I’ve been very interested in meeting you. In fact, you may have heard that we’ve been looking for you for some time.”

She pauses, as if waiting for me to respond. I carefully avoid her eyes and stay quiet.

“We’ve been working on something for some time now,” she continues, unfazed. “An update to the biochip. You may or may not be aware of that. It’s an incredibly important project. We’ve been testing iterations of it for decades. But it wasn’t until recently that any of those iterations yielded satisfying results.”

She stops abruptly, turning toward me, and I’m compelled for some reason to stop and face her too.

“In fact,” she says, “until you came along, none of our iterations had been successful at all.”

I meet her eyes. They’re bright and inquisitive, and not unfriendly. They peer into mine with a curious intensity, and a glimmer of something like hope.

“Thousands of experiments,” she continues, “all failures. All teaching us nothing.” Her eyes dart around my face. “Until you.”

I watch her carefully in the ensuing silence. She looks at me for another long moment, smiles briefly, then turns and begins to walk along the corridor again.

“I’d like to show you what we’ve been working on,” she says, walking slowly, clasping her hands behind her back.

I follow cautiously. “Why?”

“Because I think you might be able to help us.”

“Why me?”

She chuckles. “That’s exactly what I’m hoping to discover, Miss Howsley.”

I put my eyes on the floor, and she seems content to let the silence settle between us. We come to the end of the corridor and she stops again. She searches my eyes with a gentle, hopeful expression. I stare back, questions pinging around my head like flies, bumping into each other, bouncing off the inside of my skull. I manage to grab hold of two of them and ask the first.

“Did you send the Valkyrie after me?”

Her expression becomes pained.

“Yes. We did. Please understand that we were very keen to find you. We felt we needed to explore every option available to us. It is with regret that I admit that as a world leader, I sometimes find that I must maintain relations with…less than savory characters. Captain Stark is one of those characters. I was…naive. About her methods.”

She keeps her eyes on mine. I reach into my mind for the next question. “How did you know my chip was broken?”

“When we lost the ability to track you in Alluvium, we assumed that was why.”

“Did you put more experimental tech in it? When you fixed it?”

Her eyebrows shoot up. Was she expecting me not to know about the experimental tech that was already in there? She draws a firm breath.

“Of course not. Bird, you must understand; we don’t go around randomly putting stuff into people’s heads. And we would never do something like that without your consent.”

“Except you did. When my family won the Lottery and came to Brume.”

Her eyes narrow. “So you are aware of the Lottery?”

I stare back silently.

“Well…” She hesitates. “At that time, you were too young to provide consent. We obtained consent from your mothers, as we did for your brother. As we did for all the children who were involved in this project. Your mothers saw the benefit of the program. They wanted you to be involved. They thought it would be the best thing for you.”

“Why? Why children?”

“Children’s minds are flexible. I don’t expect you to understand the complexity of how the biochip interacts with the brain, but…a certain degree of plasticity is beneficial. That’s why we install the chips into people when they’re young. We gave biochips to your mothers, of course, and to all the other adults in the families involved in the Lottery project, but…I’m sure your mothers never truly interfaced with their chips as naturally as you did.”

I snatch another question from the tumult inside my head. “Did you know about Electra’s necklace? That I stole it?”

The pained expression returns. She draws and releases a long breath.

“I did. But not until after someone alerted me that your chip had been tracked outside Brume. I assume you’re wondering if it was me who involved the criminal organization the Anonymity in that matter. I’m afraid that was out of my hands. My husband…suffered a serious lapse in judgment. I am truly sorry about that.”

“But you sent the Valkyrie.”

“And that was my own lapse in judgment.” She steps back, clasping her hands in front of her. “Like I said, I have been very eager to find you. If you would just allow me to show you our work…perhaps you will understand why.”

We stare at each other for another long breath. Malarkey settles herself against my leg and glares up at Axioma, but this time, she doesn’t growl.

“Okay,” I say. “Show me.”

chapter

twenty-three

THE DOOR that Axioma leads me through is unassuming. The room beyond is anything but.

We step onto a floor made of glass. It stretches ahead of me for hundreds of feet, and hundreds more feet on either side. Axioma’s boots echo magnificently around the cavernous space as she marches briskly onto the floor. I follow her, my sneakers squeaking, Malarkey’s nails clicking next to me. Axioma comes to the center of the room and stops. She surveys me thoughtfully.

“Tell me Bird, how much do you know about the Lottery? The technology we put in your chip?”

I narrow my eyes. How much should I know?

Seeing my hesitation, Axioma continues. “You don’t need to hide anything from me. I think we’re well past that, don’t you? Do you know what the new tech does?”

“I know what I think it does,” I say slowly.

“And what’s that?”

I hesitate, both afraid of and embarrassed by the word on my tongue. It’s always seemed like a ridiculous notion to me, and now, standing in front of this powerful woman, on the brink of discovering whether I’m right or not, saying it out loud feels ludicrous. After all, what do I really have to go on? Shale’s semi-coherent rambling? Where is he getting his information? A hunch?

My stomach twists into a knot and unties itself. I take a breath.

“Teleportation.”

Axioma’s face cracks into a half-delighted, half-thoughtful expression. She doesn’t say anything right away, just nods slowly.

“Yes,” she says, “I suppose you could call it that.”

My insides jump.

“Of course,” she continues, “we have a much more complicated technical name for it here.”

“What do you call it?”

“QMTP. Quantum Matter Transfer Protocol.” She makes a face. “To be honest, I think I prefer ‘teleportation’.”

My hands and feet tingle. Shale was right?

“Are you serious?” I say.

She nods. “Very serious, Bird.”

“But…why? What is the…point? What is it for?”

She smiles knowingly. “That’s what I am about to show you.”

She touches a spot on the back of her head—a biochip command I’ve only ever seen once before when Shale engaged his anonymity mask in Alluvium.

“I’m dropping you an update,” she says. As she does, a ping ricochets around my skull and a file transfer appears. I swipe it open. A wall of text cascades in front of my eyes, so fast it’s a blur. It disappears, replaced by a single sentence:

>>> UPDATE COMPLETE

I reel, feeling blindsided; feeling the same creepy, violated feeling I get when Lysett does her body scans. Axioma didn’t ask if she could update my chip. She just did it. What did she just put in my head?

“You’ve never used holochat before,” says Axioma, continuing as though nothing out of the ordinary just happened. “It was discontinued twenty years ago when we started working on QMTP in earnest. Most of Zenith’s resources are funneled into the QMTP project now. But this room relies on some of the holochat legacy code. I just dropped you the old holochat beta, it should allow you to interface with this room.”

“Holochat?”

“It was a communication protocol we tested. Nice to have, but not a necessity, as it turned out. Interestingly, we learned that people would rather communicate across long distances with text-based messages. They found chatting with a hologram exhausting. It never really took off. After the pandemic, we just couldn’t spare the people to work on it.”

“The command you just used to drop me the update—”

“Ah!” Her eyes shine and I glimpse the person Axioma might have been twenty years ago: vigorous, passionate, excited by technology. “That’s a nifty little trick not many people know about.” She points to the back of her head. “A free command space. You can program it with anything you like. Okay, ready?”

“For what?”

“Touch behind your right ear.”

My skin prickles. Hesitantly, I raise my hand and hover a finger over the spot behind my right ear. Something inside tells me not to do it, but something else, something stronger, compels me to. Curiosity? No, more than that. I need to know. I need to find out what’s happening to me.

I touch the spot. My stomach heaves and I fall through the floor.

I clutch wildly at nothing, as massive, translucent oblong structures shoot past me. I’m plummeting through them, free-falling through space. Turning my head wildly, I see Axioma standing calmly in front of me, a mildly amused look on her face.

“You’re not falling Bird.”

I look down at my feet. I pick one up and put it down, feeling the solid glass floor beneath my shoe. Malarkey, apparently floating in space, walks placidly through the oblong structures screaming past us, her nose sniffing an invisible floor. The bizarre juxtaposition and dissonant motion make my stomach churn queasily and I reach for something—anything—to steady me. As I do, we stop.

I find myself standing on short, green grass. It’s some kind of park—a square of green about fifty feet wide, with a stone path cutting across the middle and a few trees scattered at random intervals. Something about it is familiar. The trees look like fogwood trees; the way the path cuts across the green gives me a creeping sense of deja vu. But the oblong structures are alien to me. They tower around the edge of the square, hundreds of feet high, dwarfing me and Axioma, a monumental forest of steel, glass, and stone.

“They’re buildings.”

Axioma nods. “This is a harbor city. But not a city you or I have ever seen. This is Brume, one hundred years in the future. Well—it’s a projection of what Brume could look like, one hundred years in the future.”

A bird swoops over my head and lands on a tree twenty yards away. Looking up, I see more birds flitting from building to building. A ribbon of fog weaves through the structures and curls around the trunks of the fogwood trees.

Axioma taps the side of her head and my stomach lurches as though someone has shoved me from behind. I stumble forward as the buildings fall away. We’re falling up this time.

The structures disappear below us as we soar dizzyingly into the sky and come to rest on a large, hexagonal glass platform, hung from steel cables attached to great supporting girders, swaying gently hundreds of feet above a lush, green estuary. Stone bridges swoop past my head and curve through towering trees. Long-necked birds dive in the estuary and wheel into the sky around us.

“This is the main square in Alluvium,” says Axioma. “One hundred years from now.”

I catch my breath, my stomach slowly settling back into its usual position, then take a few tentative steps toward the edge of the platform. A strong, steel railing lines the outside and I stretch my hand toward it. My fingers pass right through it and I reel backward away from the edge of the platform, gasping.

Axioma laughs gently. “You’re quite safe. These are models. Holograms.”

“Models?” I gaze down through my feet at the estuary below us. “Of the future?”

“Based on projections made by our scientists from data we’ve been collecting and analyzing for the past few decades. These show us the way our cities could look a century from now if the QMTP project is successful. Let me show you the alternative.”

She touches the side of her head again and the falling sensation returns as we plummet through the glass platform and crash through the estuary. We land in another square. The ground is hard, dry dirt with a network of cracks spiderwebbing from one side of the square to the other. The buildings that surround the square are squat and dilapidated; exposed rebar and crumbling concrete, gaping, glassless windows. I see no trees and not a single bird. The sky is a dull, dirty yellow and the air is so hazy and filled with particulate that I instinctively reach for my bandana.

“This,” says Axioma, stepping into the square and turning to face me, “is also Brume. One hundred years in the future. This is what the city will look like if our efforts with QMTP do not come to fruition.”

I slowly follow her, my legs trembling, my head spinning with the rush through space and the onslaught of information.

“What happened?”

“What happened? Nothing. And that’s the problem.”

Axioma looks at me thoughtfully, as though trying to decide how best to phrase whatever she is about to say.

“Do you know, Bird, what it is that has made human beings such an incredibly successful species on this planet?”

I stare blankly. Snatches of phrases from history class at Azimuth float through my head. Big brains. Language. Tools. “Uh—opposable thumbs?”

She chuckles. “Good answer, but no. The thing that has made humans successful throughout history is cooperation. We are the only species on the planet capable of cooperating flexibly and in large numbers. It’s what’s enabled us to build the incredible things we have built and progress to such a high level of being.”

She turns and begins to walk across the square.

A high level of being? Sure doesn’t feel like that’s where we’re at. I trip after her, frowning, not really seeing how this is related to what I’m seeing, but figuring it must be going somewhere.

“Cooperation,” she continues, “is crucial for progress. But not only for progress: in a world like the one we currently inhabit, cooperation will mean the difference between the survival of our species and its demise.”

“O—kay…”

“But cooperation at the global level is no longer possible.”

“Why?”

“Because we are a world in crisis. Global pandemics. Climate disasters. An inhospitable landscape that prevents most ordinary people from doing anything but surviving. Even in the cities, where people are under the illusion that life is fairly stable, you are really only one poor decision away from disaster.”

I guess I can’t argue with that. I’m literally the queen of making poor decisions that lead to disaster.

We reach the other side of the square and come to a small alley between two crumbling buildings. Axioma ducks down it.

“As I’m sure you know, the burden that our ancestors put on this planet became too much for the planet to bear long ago. But of course, we refused to see it until it was impossible to ignore it. As a result, desperate measures had to be taken to curtail our destructive activities. Of course, those desperate measures were just that: desperate. Last-ditch. Too little, too late.”

She turns down another side street and I stumble after her. The streets are becoming narrower, more claustrophobic. I hear a baby crying, a doggerel barking.

“The world continued to burn. It didn’t matter that we outlawed fossil fuels, or put a stop to deforestation, or learned how to sequester carbon in the rocks and Salt. It wasn’t enough.”

“I know all this,” I can’t help interrupting. “But I still don’t see how…QPM—”

“QMTP.”

“…is going to make a difference.”

She smiles. “Cooperation, Bird. People have become siloed. We are trapped. The State is an unforgiving wasteland. Nobody can cross it. To date, I haven’t heard of a single person that has survived it. Other countries are in similar states. The Salt is hardly better. It may be marginally easier to survive out there than on land—the Reckoners are proof of that—but not much easier. Crossing the Salt alone on a thirty-five-foot sailboat is an almost unheard-of feat.”

She looks at me sideways. “And forgive me, but I don’t say that to boost your ego. I’m sure you appreciate the incredible amount of luck that befell you at every stage of your journey in order for it to be successful. By all calculations, Miss Howsley, you should be dead.”

I look at my shoes. To be honest, I hadn’t fully appreciated it.

“People must be free to move. They must be free to cooperate with each other, to build things, and spread ideas. Goods and materials too. There is no other way that we can make progress.”

Whispers of thought drift through my head. Progress. Trade winds. Something about that word—progress—niggles at me, but I can’t quite put my finger on what.

“Progress toward…what?” I ask.

“Toward a solution.”

Something about the way Axioma’s eyes gleam a little too brightly reminds me of Shale.

“You know it takes eight weeks to move a part from Qanat to Pocosín?” Axioma continues. “Eight weeks. That’s just on the water. That doesn’t even include processing or manufacturing. And did you know that right now, if a Reckoner fell ill on Île Tor, it would take over a week to get specialized medicine to them, and that’s only if the medicine was readily available in Alluvium. The odds of them surviving would be slim to none.”

I think about the week I spent on Tor, waiting for my desalinator part. I think of Yote and Josser. Of Locuaz. I feel an abrupt and overwhelming sense of fear for them. There’s no hospital on Tor. What if Dreggs hadn’t been prepared with the tools he needed to pump Malarkey’s stomach? How do Reckoners care for their sick and injured?

“The world has stopped,” Axioma says. “We’ve stagnated. In fact, since the pandemic, I would say we’ve moved backwards. But we must move forward, Bird.”

“Why?”

“To find solutions to the problems we’ve created. The thing that frees our species from this precarious, siloed, stagnated existence will be the thing that saves us. I believe QMTP is that thing. Imagine it: instant connection. The freedom for anyone or anything to move anywhere, immediately, and sustainably. Without fossil fuels. Without tremendous energy expenditure. We would leapfrog centuries of technology. We would be free to move again, to connect and share knowledge and spread ideas and make progress. To do the most good for the most people. To fix the world. If we don’t—if we do nothing—” she bleakly indicates the hell-scape around us “—then I fear that this is our future.”

She places a firm hand on my shoulder, those bright, frank eyes holding mine.

“QMTP may be our only hope to fix the future,” she finishes, quietly. “And as of right now, the only indication we have that it works at all is inside your head.”

I stare into Axioma’s eyes without seeing them; stare past them. Through the clamor of thoughts banging around in my brain, one thought begins to echo. A familiar, nagging itch of a thought. I try to push it down like I’ve been doing for weeks, but this time, it refuses to go. I don’t want to think about that again. I had finally stopped thinking about it.

“Listen,” she removes her hand. “You don’t have to make a decision right away. I know I’ve just blindsided you with an earth-shattering load of information, and what I’m asking you to do is…well, I’m sure it wasn’t in your plans.”

“What are you asking me to do, exactly?”

“I’d like you to stay here. Work with us. Let us study you, let us—to put it bluntly—poke around in your head and find out what’s different about you. What’s making QMTP work in your chip. So far, you’re the only subject who has successfully and repeatedly triggered QMTP. You’re the only one that has given us any hope that this project might be a success, and naturally, my team is anxious to figure out why.”

“What about my brother?” I counter. “He told me you tracked him down, too.”

“Ah,” she nods. “We did. But unfortunately, as he may have told you, by the time we reached him, the protocol was no longer being triggered in his chip.”

The itchy thought grows, warps, intensifies. It clangs inside my head like a bell.

Shale told me the blips stopped happening when he stopped drinking. This woman wants to know why the blips happen to me and no one else. I already know why. They’re happening to me for the same reason they happened to Shale.

Grog.

It’s grog that triggers the blips.

chapter

twenty-four

“BIRD? HELLO?” I sense something moving in front of my face. “Are you there?” My eyes refocus. Axioma’s sharp, candid face fills my vision.

“Stay. For how long?”

She takes a deep breath. “To be honest, I don’t know. This is new ground for us too. It could be a week. It could be a month. It could be more. But—” she continues quickly, seeing the look of doubt crossing my face, “what I can guarantee is that while you’re here, you’ll have everything you want. You’ll be assigned a very comfortable living space. Your meals will be provided. You’ll have free range of the facility. Your dog can stay, of course, Mr. Paz too, if he wants. My team will take excellent care of you all.”

I narrow my eyes. “Free range of the facility? What about outside the facility? Am I allowed to leave in this scenario?”

She meets my scrupulous look with one of her own. “No, I’m afraid we would not be able to allow you to leave the facility. The risk of something happening to you would just be too high. You have to understand—right now, you may be the most valuable person on the planet.”

“So I’d be a prisoner.”

“I’d rather think of you as a colleague or guest.”

Guest. The last person to call me that was Savage, right after he trapped me on the Kingfisher.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Sounds an awful lot like prison to me.”

Axioma sighs. “Can I show you the rest of the facility? You might be pleasantly surprised. Maybe it will help you decide.”

I chew the inside of my cheek. “I’m not committing to anything.”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t expect you to do anything rash.”

I smirk inwardly. You clearly don’t know me very well. “What if I say no?”

Her eyes dart around my face. She opens her palms. “Then I would wish you the best and send you on your way. But I truly hope you won’t.”

She taps the side of her head and the half-destroyed buildings, the cracked, hard earth, and the dismal yellowing sky evaporate. We’re standing in the glass room again. She crosses to the door, Malarkey and I behind, the clicking of claws and squeaking of my shoes joining the tap of Axioma’s boots in a syncopated rhythmic chatter that fills the chamber.

On the other side of the door we turn right. Axioma leads me down a series of interconnecting passages, some lined with doors, some with vast rooms branching away from them. All of them are windowless, the walls made of the same smooth, rosy stone, the floor set with small lights, flush to the surface. The corridor is dim, the soft yellow glow from the floor only just providing enough light to see.

“Where are the windows?” I ask.

Axioma smiles. “We don’t see much point in having them. Being underground and all.”

I come to a halt. “We’re underground?”

“Yes. The whole city is underground. These tunnels extend for about five miles.” She doesn’t stop or look back.

I hurry to catch up. “Five miles?”

“Our facility makes up most of Grike. We employ just about everyone in the city. The hospital is in the northern quadrant, with housing, where you were this morning. We’re now coming to the eastern quadrant, near the coast.”

The tunnels have been growing progressively larger as we walk. They gradually become so wide that twenty people could easily walk abreast, and the ceiling is so far above me I can hardly make it out. The air grows cooler, and I detect the faint trace of a breeze, which brings with it a familiar smell that I can’t quite place.

A massive stone arch yawns at the end of the passage, and as we come to it, my mouth falls open. The tunnel opens onto a massive underground cave—so high and so wide that the ceiling and walls disappear into darkness. A stone embankment rolls gently down to a vast lake that stretches so far in every direction I can’t make out the edges of it. The light in the cave seems to radiate up from the water, which glows an eerie yet brilliant green.

Axioma smiles and says, “Welcome to the harbor.”

She steps through the archway onto a wide stone road that curves along the top edge of the embankment. I stumble after her, trying to keep an eye on where I’m putting my feet.

“This is the only freshwater underground lake left in the world,” she continues as we walk. “It’s almost three square miles. The green light you’re seeing in the water comes from outside. Sunlight reflects off the bottom of the Salt at the entrance to this cave, bounces off the white sand and lights the lake.”

My eyes follow the road stretching away around the edge of the water. It leads to a harbor on the far shore. A full-on underground harbor, almost the size of the harbor at Brume. Sounds carry across the water—the hum of voices, the sharp clatter of busy docks, magnified, duplicated, echoing off the stone ceiling and walls of the cave. A cool gust of wind surprises me and I suddenly place the familiar smell: the Salt.

“Where is the wind coming from?”

“The entrance to this cave is a mile-long canyon that empties directly into the Salt.” Axioma gestures to where the other side of the lake disappears into darkness. “The canyon funnels the wind from the outside. It can get quite breezy in here—we have a lot of good sailing days.”

“You sail in here?”

“Oh yes. This harbor is how the city receives all of its goods from the outside. It’s an incredibly important hub for the city.”

It takes us ten minutes to traverse the road around the near edge of the lake and come to the harbor.

“Four main piers and a hundred slips,” says Axioma as we step onto a wooden dock and begin to make our way along the main pier.

It’s nowhere near as busy as the harbor at Alluvium, but I still find myself tripping over and sidestepping around people. Malarkey, catching a whiff of something, plants her nose on the ground and wanders away toward a row of covered stalls. About halfway along the pier, Axioma makes an abrupt left, disappearing onto a smaller dock, and as I turn the corner to follow her, my heart leaps.

Panga bobs gently against the wooden platform, weirdly illuminated by the green light emanating from the water below her, bright patterns of ripples reflecting on her yellow hull. Her sails have been neatly furled, her dock lines coiled and carefully stowed. Steel cleats and trimmings gleam with new polish. As we reach her, I stretch out a hand without thinking to touch her, tears pricking my eyes at the feel of the familiar fiberglass hull under my fingers.

“As I said,” says Axioma, coming to a halt and turning to me with a smile, “we’ll take good care of everything for you.”

I swallow. “Thank you.”

“Of course.” She raps sharply on the side of the hull three times. “And I think we may also find something else here you’ll be happy to see.”

A head of tousled sable hair pops out of the companionway hatch and my stomach does a double flip. Sargo greets Axioma with a pleasant smile.

“Hey! What can I—”

He spots me and pauses. A current passes between us and his face cracks open like a book. I drop my eyes, afraid of what my own face is doing as he scrambles out of the cockpit and hops down onto the dock.

“Hey!” His bare feet stop inches in front of my shoes. Too close. I make myself look up and find those concerned, searching eyes. “How are you doing?” he says.

“Better.”

“That’s good.” He shifts his weight away from me as though he suddenly feels the too-closeness as well. “Uh—yeah, good.”

My eyes dart away and silence fills the small space between us, pressing against me, making me buzz with nervousness.

Axioma gently clears her throat. “Well, I’ve got plenty to be doing. Bird?” She touches my arm and I jump. “I’ll be in the main office early tomorrow morning. I’d love to finish our conversation then. Sargo can tell you how to find it.”

She gives me a final smile, then turns and walks away. I watch her go, snatches of our conversation tumbling around my head.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Sargo says, his voice cutting through the noise of my thoughts and pulling me back to reality, “because there’s like a hundred things I need you to fix on my boat.”

I whirl around. “Excuse me?”

His eyes crinkle with mischief. “I’m kidding. She actually looks great. You did a nice job.”

I exhale through my nose, trying to calm the confusing tumult of panic, relief, and confusion battling for space in my brain. “You know, I’m not exactly having, like, a super easy week. I could do with a little less sass.”

“Sass? When have I ever given you sass?”

I eye him. “Seems to be a recent development.”

He grins. “Alright. Sorry. No more sass.” He swings himself up onto Panga’s deck. “I actually just finished up here. Give me five minutes?”

“Sure.”

As Sargo disappears below deck to finish tidying up, Malarkey appears at the top of the dock, spots me and trots down the pier, reaching me just as Sargo climbs back out of the cockpit.

“Hey, Malark!”

He hops down next to me and stoops to ruffle her ears in both hands while she wags her tail and wriggles with glee.

“You know,” he says, pressing his forehead to hers, “she hardly left your side while you were sleeping.” A warm bubble of strange, melancholic sadness swells inside my chest. He straightens up and gives me a wide shrug.

“Well, I have nothing to do for the rest of the day. What about you?”

“I think I’m free.”

“Wanna see something cool?”

“Cooler than an underground lake with a full-blown harbor on it?”

“Maybe not cooler than that,” he concedes. “But maybe cooler than ninety-nine percent of any other things you’ve seen?”

I eye him suspiciously. Usually, Sargo’s definition of ‘cool’ is a chunk of greasy metal or a long conversation about storm tactics. But something in my gut tells me this won’t be that. Something tells me to be excited. Or…nervous? Or both.

I nod. “Okay.”

He leads me through the harbor to the other end of the main dock. The wooden planks end and the road picks up again, winding away around the edge of the lake. Slippery, moss-covered stone slopes down to the water on our left; the rough cave wall rises up to our right. We pick our way along the road, around stalagmites and boulders, until we come to a dark recess in the wall.

Sargo stops. “In here.”

“In? Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

He ducks into the shadowed alcove and I follow him. It’s a tunnel, sloping down away from the road, deep into the cave wall, about twice as high as I am tall, and only just wider than me. The light disappears almost immediately. I put a hand out in front of me and feel it come up against something soft and warm. A hand closes over mine and my breath disappears as I realize my hand is on Sargo’s chest and his hand is around mine.

“Can you see?” he says softly.

My voice comes out about two pitches too high. “Not really.”

“Okay.” He drops my hand and I feel him take hold of my shoulders. He gently moves me to the side, squeezing around and behind me, our bodies briefly pressed together in the narrow space. “I’ll show you where to go.”

“Can you see?”

“Zenith gave me access to an old feature they never released.” He squeezes my arm. “Okay, go ahead.”

I take a small step. “An old feature?”

“Night vision.”

“No way.”

“Keep going,” he says, “I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“So you can see?”

“Yep.”

“In the dark?”

“Yep.”

“That’s insane.”

He’s quiet for a long time. Then takes a long, slow breath. “As insane as teleporting?” he says.

I stop short and he runs into me, the firmness of his chest coming up hard against my back.

“Shit, sorry!” He steps backward, and I turn around, my eyes searching for him in the dark, finding nothing.

“You know about that?”

“So it’s true?”

I can feel his eyes on me. I stare into the pitch black, wishing I could see him, feeling exposed and vulnerable. I can’t really think of anything to say except, “Yeah.”

He breathes out in a quiet whoosh. “That’s insane.”

“How did you know?”

“Axioma told me.”

“She told you?” Before she told me? “What did she tell you?”

I sense him shift his weight. “Not much. Just that you’re the only hope for humanity and you’re going to save us all.”

“I—” The words fail on my tongue. Why would she tell him that? What else did she tell him?

“Is that true?” he presses.

“I…don’t know. If you believe her then…I guess it is?” I search the darkness again. “What else did she tell you?”

I feel his hands around my shoulders. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

The ground grows gravelly and begins to slope down. I take small steps, pressing my hands outward against the walls to keep myself from sliding.

Sargo squeezes my arm. “You’re not going to fall. I got you.”

“What else did Axioma tell you?” I repeat, trying to take my mind off the swaying of my stomach. I’m not sure what’s triggered that: the endless, impenetrable darkness, or the warmth of his hands.

He sighs. “She told me about QMTP, and the Lottery program. She said so far, you’re the only one showing any kind of promise that the project might work. She said she wants you to stay here and let Zenith study you.”

His voice is so calm, so logical, and unshaken. I feel as though I’m being swallowed by the dark; like I’m drowning while everyone else swims to shore.

"When did she tell you this?” I manage to say.

“About a week ago.”

“A week—so…”

“So I’ve had a lot longer to process it. Whoa whoa, hold up!”

His arm loops around my waist, pulling me backward, and I feel the press of his hips against mine.

“Sorry, forgot this part was here.” He steps back and steadies me with a hand between my shoulders. “Just take a big step.”

I tentatively stretch my foot in front of me.

“Bigger…bigger…yep. There.”

My foot lands tentatively on firm ground and he gives me a little push as I bring my other foot to meet it. I stumble slightly and feel him catch my arm.

“Okay?”

I nod. He grips my other arm and gives them both a small squeeze.

“Keep going.”

I step into the dark again. Neither of us says anything. The sound of our steps echoing off the close walls fills my ears. I hear the soft scuff of Malarkey’s paws on the rocks somewhere behind us.

“Why?” I say finally. “I don’t understand.”

“Why what?”

“Why would she tell you all that?”

“The better question, Howsley,” he says, a note of scorn in his voice, “is why you didn’t.”

I open my mouth and close it again. Why didn’t I tell him?

Because you knew if you did you’d have to tell him about the grog. Like you’re going to have to tell Axioma about the grog. You knew he would be disappointed in you. And concerned. Like she will be.

“I don’t know,” I say finally. “I guess…I barely knew what was going on myself. I didn’t know I was some kind of key to the future of humanity. All I knew was that—”

I kept getting so drunk I would black out and wake up in new places.

“—weird stuff was happening.”

He’s quiet and I sense that he’s trying to say something. “Just so you know…” he says finally, his voice tight, “you can tell me anything.”

I nod in the dark, not finding my voice, wishing I hadn’t just lied to him again. We walk a few more paces in silence. He squeezes my shoulders again and lets them go.

“We’re here.” I feel him step around me.

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

I hear him walking away from me and feel a sudden jolt of fear at being left alone in the dark.

“Don’t panic,” he calls, as if sensing my alarm, “I’m not going anywhere. I just have to turn on the lights.”

“What li—” The world explodes with dazzling brightness. I throw an arm over my face. Sargo’s footsteps return.

“Open your eyes.”

I drop my arm and squint. A thousand tiny lights hang suspended in mid-air in front of me like jewels in a gossamer curtain; pinpricks of twinkling yellow-white that flit back and forth, disappearing and reappearing.

As my eyes adjust, I see we’re in a vast, round cavern. The lights render the smooth, pink sandstone walls in a soft, golden glow. Veins of crystalline minerals ribbon the surface of the stone, catching and reflecting the light, shattering it into rainbows that flash around us like strobes; pink and purple, orange, blue.

Sargo steps past me, the lights parting around him. I follow, closing my astonished mouth so I don’t swallow any. They swirl around us like lighted snowflakes in a blizzard.

We stop in the middle of the cave and I tilt my head to gaze up at the ceiling, which curves over us, twinkling, like a rose-gold sunset pricked with early evening stars.

"What are they?" My voice is a whisper.

He stands next to me and tilts his head back too, folding his arms. "Pyrebeetles. Like fireflies. But they're bioengineered. Zenith made them."

“How did you make them do that?”

“Light up? The light is their—uh—mating call. You can trigger it with pheromones. One of the Zenith lab techs gave me this.” He holds up a tiny bottle between two fingers. “Said it would…" he tilts his head to look at me from the corner of his eye, "turn them on.”

Turn them on? My stomach swoops. Is he…flirting with me? Our eyes lock and the air between us goes still. Too still. I reach over and shove his shoulder to break the tension.

“Pheromones? Trying to seduce me, Paz?”

He catches my wrist so smoothly and suddenly it steals my breath and turns, pulling me toward him until we stand nearly chest to chest. So close I can see the shadows of his eyelashes on his cheeks. He tilts his head slightly, his hand still tight around my wrist, his thoughtful eyes carefully making their way around my face.

“Maybe,” he says.

I swallow a confusing tumult of heat and nerves. “How do you feel like it’s going so far?”

"So far, I feel like my seduction mission is going better than your rescue mission.”

I stand very still, as though by doing so I can disguise the carnival that's happening just under my skin. I can feel my heart in my ribs, in my hands, in my ears, my feet. He must be able to feel that, I think. There's no way he can't. My pulse is beating under his fingers like someone's playing a tambourine inside my wrist.

As if reading my thoughts, he skates his thumb across the inside of my wrist, sending a bolt of lightning from my hand to my toes. Then he lets go. He tucks his hands into his pockets with a small smile and steps away.

I stare after him, light an fractured color filling the air around me, my heart flinging itself against my ribs like a confused, rapturous bird.

chapter

twenty-five

I WAKE IN THE DARK. A dark so profound I feel it pressing against my face. A dark that makes my mind shoot sparks and fireworks into nothing. A dark so difficult to look at that I simply close my eyes again.

By the time Sargo walked me back to my room, my knees were weak. Unfortunately, it wasn’t entirely due to that unexpected and very disarming moment in the cave. In all the morning’s excitement, I’d almost forgotten that I’m still recovering from a lightning strike. It was pretty much all I could do to crawl into bed and pass out. I have no idea what time I went to sleep—no idea if it was day or night.

I touch my brow to check the time now.

>>> 0230

Somewhere in the room, something moves. My pulse spikes. But it’s just Malarkey. She yawns. I hear her stretching out on the floor, then a big sigh.

“You there, Larkaboo?” I whisper.

The dull thud of two tail thumps on the floor answers. I smile, my fear receding. My head throbs. I lift my hand, gently touch the soft stubble of my hair, and let my fingers creep back until they find the un-hemmed edge of the bandage.

Don’t mess with it, says a voice in my head. Just leave it alone.

I sigh and drop my hand. I open my eyes again, stretching them wide against the darkness and smile as images from yesterday paint the void before me. The fine shadows of Sargo’s lashes, dancing against his cheeks under the twinkling light of the Pyrebeetles.

The way he said ‘maybe’ gives me pause. It wasn't teasing or suggestive. It wasn’t meant to be enticing or coy. It wasn't a ‘maybe’ that's really a ‘yes.’ It was thoughtful. Considered. As though he really didn't know and was giving me the most honest answer he could. And although the uncertainty of that ‘maybe’ makes me feel like I'm teetering on a ledge thousands of feet above the ground, I know better than to expect anything but a thoughtful, considered, honest answer from Sargo Paz.

My thoughts wander further back, to the morning. To my meeting with Axioma. My smile fades. How am I supposed to tell her that the reason I ever blipped in the first place was because I was drunk? That nearly every subsequent time it’s happened has been when I was drinking?

As if on cue, thoughts of grog find their way back into my head and start marching noisily around in there. They know the old paths so well that it’s hopeless to try and keep them out.

I roll onto my side, feeling hot and irritated, and push myself to a seat. Invisible in the total darkness, I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Malarkey yawns and stretches again. I hear her stand, hear the clatter of her ears against the side of her head as she shakes, the soft click of her nails on the floor as she pads to the bed. A moment later, her nose touches the back of my hand.

I fumble for her ears in the dark and squeeze them. “I think I need to take a walk,” I tell her.

I hear her turn in the dark and pad to the door. Carefully, I lower my feet onto the floor, shuffle across the room until I bump into the wall, grope along it until I find the scanner that opens the door, and press my palm to it.

It occurs to me as the door opens that they could have locked me in. Should I have expected that? If I stayed, would they lock me in every night? I feel Malarkey brush past me, hear her slink invisibly into the hallway. In the distance, a dim bulb set into the floor casts a pool of yellow light around it. I keep one hand on the wall and head toward it.

As I come to the bulb and my eyes adjust, a shape moves in the dark. I freeze. The ghost of Malarkey lopes past me, her nails clicking on the floor.

“Malarkey! No!” My voice is barely a whisper.

“Malarkey?” A deep familiar voice, hushed, disembodied. My heart leaps.

“Sargo?”

“Bird?” The shape halts, turns, comes toward me, Malarkey on his heels, wagging her tail. He stops in front of me, obscure, shadowed. “What are you doing?”

I lean my back against the wall. “I couldn’t sleep.”

I hear him settle against the wall next to me. “Me neither.”

We stand in silence. Malarkey, clearly disappointed that we’re not all going on a nighttime adventure, puts her nose to the floor and wanders off down the hall.

“You shouldn’t be up,” Sargo says.

“Neither should you.”

“I don’t have six bruised ribs and a concussion.”

“Fair.”

He shifts slightly, his clothes rustling. “Couldn’t sleep why?”

“Just…thinking about a lot of things.”

“Thinking, huh?” His voice has a mirthful edge. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

I wish he could see me rolling my eyes in the dark. “Very funny.”

“Thinking about what?”

There’s a chip in my head full of tech I didn’t consent to be there. The biotech corporation that I came here to rescue you from just told me I’m their sole hope to save the world. Biopiratism. Your eyes. Murdered children. Grog. The future of humanity.

“It’s complicated.”

“Try me.”

I take a breath. “Okay…well, for starters, I still don’t understand how you and Axioma are such good buddies that she somehow wound up telling you my whole life story.”

“I told you before, our families go back a long way. We’re not…buddies, but I do know her a bit, from when I was a kid. And Electra’s a good friend of mine.”

A spike of jealousy shoots through me. Good friend. I push it down and change the subject.

“What happened? After Alluvium. How did you get here?”

“Well…” I hear him rubbing his jaw in the dark. "The first thing I remember is Zenith pulling me out of the water. I must have fallen overboard. Off Panga. But I don't remember how."

My gut twists. I hesitate, staring at the ground at my feet, and finally admit, “It was me.”

"What do you mean?"

"I'm the reason you fell overboard in Alluvium. I stopped paying attention. I was just…I don’t know, overwhelmed with thoughts, I guess. You told me to keep us steady, and I was thinking about what a mess I had made of everything, and then I looked up, and we were about to crash. I turned too sharply…and you—" Tightness in my chest chokes the last two words.

He's quiet for a long time. Then he sighs. "It's not your fault. I shouldn't have put you at the helm. I wasn't really thinking; I was panicking. We should have turned—you were right to do that. If you hadn’t, Panga would have hit that boat and sunk. I just kept saying 'keep us steady' because…I didn't know what else to do."

I stare into the darkness ahead of me, letting his words sink in. They don't make me feel much better. But I guess they help a bit.

He takes another breath. "Anyway, after they pulled me out I pretty much just passed out again. We were well shot of the city already by the time I woke up…halfway across the Salt. I picked up bits of conversation as we went. They were looking for you. They saw you jump from Panga, but you never hit the water. They brought me here.”

“When was that?”

“It took fifteen days to get here from Alluvium. I’ve been here since then. They’ve been good to me. They’ve been showing me what they’re working on, training me up on some things. But they were really interested in you. They kept asking me what I knew about you, if I knew where you had gone, what happened in Alluvium. I just kept saying I didn’t know.”

An enormous yawn erupts from my throat. I clap my hand over my mouth, horrified, trying to stifle it, but it seizes me in an unyielding grip and won’t relent. I fight through it then turn to Sargo, mortified.

“I’m so sorry! That wasn’t—I’m not…I’m listening!”

He chuckles. “It’s fine. It’s the middle of the night and you’re exhausted.”

I shake my head, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. We can talk in the morning.”

“No. I want to talk now. But…can we sit?”

I peer around him, through the dim floor light to a bench against the wall. It’s a solid piece of carved stone and it looks cold and uninviting.

“Sure.” He moves away from the wall. “My room is across the hall.”

I hesitate.

“It’s a lot more comfortable in there,” he says. He presses his hand to the palm scanner on the outside of the door and it opens with a quiet hiss. Malarkey, sensing a change of location, returns from her wandering.

On the other side of the door is a room very much like mine; a bed with a bedside table, a dining table and a chair, a window covered by a curtain, and another door on the opposite wall. The only difference is the bed is not a hospital bed, and Sargo’s pack sits on the floor, leaning against the table.

Malarkey barges across the threshold and immediately makes herself at home, investigating every piece of furniture with a rude, inquisitive nose. I hover in the doorway as Sargo picks up an empty water glass from the table by the bed. He tilts it toward me.

“Water?”

I actually can’t remember the last time I drank water. I nod and he disappears into the bathroom. Malarkey finishes her shakedown of the place and, satisfied, curls herself into a ball at the foot of the bed.

“You’re letting the warm air out,” Sargo says when he returns with a full glass to find me still standing in the doorway.

I hesitate another moment, watching him, then step over the threshold, the door hissing closed behind me. He hands me the water and watches me sip it with an amused expression.

“Are you going to sit, Howsley,” he says when I lower the glass, “or are you going to hover?”

I glance around the room. There is only one chair, pulled up to the table, and the bed. I’ve never sat on Sargo’s bed before. Slept on his couch, sure, but…

I level my gaze at him. “Where should I sit?”

He spreads his arms wide. “Anywhere you’d like.”

I take a slow silent breath and cross to the far side of the bed, perching on its edge with my back to him and setting the water glass down on the bedside table. I turn back to find him watching me with half-amused, half-calculating eyes.

“And where are you going to sit?”

Again, he spreads his arms, this time with a slight shrug and the hint of a smile. “Anywhere you’d like.”

My stomach sways. “Okay.” I pull my legs up and cross them under me. “Sit here.”

He keeps his eyes on mine as he walks across the room and sits on the other side of the bed, leaning toward me on one hand, the inside of his shoulder brushing the back of mine. Everything becomes still. The nearness of him overwhelms me; the sound of his breath; the shape of his shoulders. I feel myself pull away, even as something deeper pulls me toward him.

He notices it, a tiny hesitation, and his brow creases. He pulls back a hair too. “Is this okay?”

I find my voice somewhere deep inside and manage to say, “Yes.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “You seem nervous.”

I try to lift one back, but casual confidence is not something I’m anywhere close to pulling off. “Oh really? Why would I be nervous?”

His eyes travel around my face, finding my brows, my cheeks, my nose. My lips. Fire lights under my skin; a heat more intense than grog or anger or anything I’ve ever felt before. When his eyes meet mine again, they are weighted with a dark, hungry look. When he speaks, his voice is rough.

“You tell me,” he says.

The mattress suddenly shakes and I startle, breaking his gaze and glancing toward the foot of the bed where Malarkey has just jumped up and invited herself to join us.

“Malarkey…” Sargo’s voice is exasperated.

She barges clumsily across the comforter and greets us both by shoving her nose into our faces before turning a tight circle and plopping down directly between us, taking up most of the space and thumping her tail against the pillow. She looks up at both of us as if to say, “This is really nice, you guys. I’m glad we’re all here together.”

I look up at Sargo, squeezing my lips together to keep a laugh from bursting out of them.

He sighs. “Dammit Malarkey. This was supposed to be grownup time.”

I let myself flop back onto the pillow, a weird rush of disappointment and relief cascading out of me. Sargo stretches long on the bed on the other side of Malarkey, crossing his feet and bending one arm behind his head. We lay in silence, staring at the ceiling until my heart stops beating enough for me to say, “So you were telling me about Alluvium.”

He lets out a short laugh. “Is that what I was doing?”

“Maybe you thought you were seducing me. But I was pretty sure you were telling me about Alluvium.”

“Mm.” He rubs the stubble around his jaw with the hand that isn’t behind his head. “Where did we get to before you rudely interrupted me with a very obviously bored yawn?”

“You were telling me the very boring bit about Zenith bringing you here.”

“Right." He inhales and releases a long breath. "So they set me up with this room, and they started showing me around the lab and the harbor. But they kept asking me about you, where you were, how well I knew you, that kind of thing Then about a week ago, Axioma showed up on a boat from Brume. I knew who she was—I actually remember her pretty well from when I was young—but I hadn’t talked to her in probably…fifteen years. But she was very interested in talking to me. About you. She asked me if we were—uh—a thing, and when I said no she launched into this story about…well, you know. About your life, I guess. The Lottery and you came to Brume. Then she asked me if I thought you would try to find me. If you would come looking for me.”

“What did you say?”

He looks sideways at me over his arm. “I said I sure hoped so.”

I flick my eyes up to the ceiling and try to will the color out of my cheeks as he goes on.

“So she said I should stay here. She said they were looking for you and that if they found you, they’d bring you here. She also said it would be great if you figured out where I was and found your way here on your own.”

I frown. “She used you as…bait?”

He shrugs. “I guess so.”

“That’s…why did you agree to that?”

He looks back up at the ceiling. “I figured it was my best shot at seeing you again."

My chest squeezes.

"Oh and also, I didn't have a boat. You sort of…threw me off mine. So I kind of had to stay. But,” he continues, “it’s pretty cool here. I’ve been getting to know a lot of people. I've actually been helping with some of the stuff they're working on. It's pretty amazing. Did Axioma show you the room with the cities?”

“She did. So…what, you're working for Zenith now?"

"Kind of. Not like officially. I just kept bugging people because I had nothing else to do. Mostly I was trying to find people who would take me out sailing. Then we started chatting and one thing led to another."

"So…now what? Are you gonna keep working for them?"

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

I take a breath. “I don’t know…how I feel about this whole thing. Do you really feel like what they're doing here is going to save the world? QMTP? Connecting people? Because to me it kind of sounds like tech nonsense. Why doesn’t Zenith spend that money on relocating people out of the settlements? Or building desalinators? How do we know this whole 'future of humanity' thing isn't just cover for something? Like a way to…justify horrible stuff they've done."

He frowns. "What stuff?"

"I don't know for sure that they have, but...look, I know you’re a big fan of Zenith and ‘Brume pride’ and all that but…I heard a lot of messed up things about them.”

“Like what?”

“Like that a lot of kids in the Lottery program before me died. Like that Zenith steals resources from indigenous communities around Pocosín. Like that they enable the black market because they profit from it.”

He sits up on his elbows and looks at me. “Where did you hear that?”

“My brother.”

"Your brother the terrorist?” He scoffs and lies down again.

I bite back a flare of irritation. “And other people. This woman I met on Tor told me that Zenith and the other Big Four companies have been doing some crazy shit—robbing people of their land, stealing medicinal plants, minerals, children…They call it ‘biopiratería’.”

“Does anyone have proof of this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask Axioma about it?”

“I asked her why she sent dangerous mercenaries after us.”

“And what did she say?”

“That it was a lapse of judgment.”

“Mm.” He stares thoughtfully at the ceiling.

“What are you thinking?”

“That I know Axioma a little. And I just…I don’t think she’s, like…evil. When I was young, my moms were very close to her.”

I look over my arm at his face. “You told me. But you never told me why that was.”

He sighs. “They came to Brume when Gamma was pregnant with me because she wanted to deliver in her hometown, with her family. But the pandemic hit, and Brume was locked down when they got there. They couldn’t go ashore. They were trapped on Panga when I was born. I guess I breeched, and…Gnamma could have died. I could have died.

“Axioma and her family were fleeing Brume on their catamaran, and they heard Marlin calling for help on the radio. Axioma helped deliver me. She saved my life. Over the years, our families drifted apart, but…she was always good to us. She’s a good person. I just don’t think…she would lie about something like that.”

He rubs his eyes with one hand and draws a deep breath.

“Look, I know this is a lot. And it all happened to you, like—yesterday. I can’t imagine how you’re feeling. And I don’t want to…” he sighs, “turn into your teacher. But…honestly? I think what they're doing here is important. It feels like a big deal. Like something I'd be proud to be involved in. And I guess…I don't know. I can't tell you what to do. But if it was a chip in my head that was going to save humanity, I guess I’d be inclined to…help.”

I feel a flicker of indignation. It's not a chip in his head. And helping Zenith was never part of my plan. Find Malarkey. Find Sargo. That was the plan.

What about figuring out what’s going on with your chip? says a voice. What about answering your questions about the blips? About grog? You came all this way. Are you really going to leave without finding out?

I turn my head toward Sargo. “If you stayed…how long would you stay for? What about Pocosín?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t think I’m gonna go.”

"What?" I sit up on my elbows, staring at him. “But—your family? I thought that was the whole reason you left Brume.”

He laughs once and looks at me, his eyes betraying some long-held secret. “That wasn’t why I left Brume.”

My stomach swoops again and I lay back and fix my eyes on the ceiling. Thoughts dive through my head like birds. Sargo trusts Axioma. He thinks what Zenith is doing is important enough to give up Pocosín. He wants to stay and help. He wants me to stay and help.

I sigh, inwardly cursing him and his stupid, thoughtful generosity. Why can’t he be selfish and reckless like me? Why does he always have to do the right thing? Like the day he jumped out of the skiff to rescue Malarkey in Naze. It wasn’t his idea to take Malarkey from that settlement. That was my dumb decision. He didn't want her. He just knew that leaving her behind was wrong. He went back for her because it was the right thing to do.

I reach down to find Malarkey’s ears and give them a squeeze. She stretches her paws long on the bed in front of her and sighs.

Sargo’s hand covers mine and I freeze, my heart racing again. He gently lifts it and turns it over so the palm faces up, then weaves his fingers through mine so our palms press together. He squeezes my hand. I smile and squeeze back.

For a long time, we lie like that, staring at the ceiling, our steady breaths and the beating of my heart the only sounds I can hear.

chapter

twenty-six

I WAKE to the sound of a shower and the smell of an unfamiliar bed, and for one terrifying breath, I don’t know where I am. Fear grips my chest as the memory of Savage’s cabin returns. I sit up, my bruised sternum painfully throbbing, and stare groggily around a room that looks almost exactly like mine but isn’t. Then I spot Sargo's pack leaning against the table and remember.

I rub my aching chest with my palm. I remember—that’s nice. I remember everything that happened. Or…didn’t happen, I guess. We held hands. At some point, I fell asleep.

From the floor, Malarkey stretches, yawns, and fixes me with a knowing look.

“Don’t give me that look,” I tell her. “If I recall correctly, you slept on this bed last night too.”

The shower stops and I’m seized by a bizarre, panicked impulse to flee. I roll off the bed as silently as I can and scan the room hurriedly for my things until I remember I didn’t have any with me when I came in. I beckon Malarkey to me and creep toward the door.

“Sneaking out?”

Sargo’s voice as my hand lands on the scanner sends my heart into my mouth. I spin around to find him standing in the bathroom doorway, pulling on a shirt. I catch a glimpse of his stomach creasing and flexing as he pulls it down over his chest.

“Uh—just…” The words stick in my throat. “Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly what I was doing.”

He smoothes the shirt, then turns and reaches up to pull a towel off the door. A few inches of his smooth, brown stomach appear again as his shirt rises, and I note two lines cutting the front of his hips into a wide V.

Sargo Paz has those lines? I think to myself.

That doesn't seem fair, my self agrees.

He towels off his hair, then turns, and I flick my eyes away and plant them on the floor. I hear him chuckle.

“Keep it in your pants, Howsley,” he says.

Heat erupts into my face. I keep my eyes on the floor while he hangs the towel back over the bathroom door and sits in the chair next to the table to pull on his shoes.

“You’re going to talk to Axioma this morning, right?”

“I…guess.”

My eyes dart around the room, at the bed, the table, the window, the door, anywhere that isn't him. I feel like I no longer know if I want to stay, go, stand up, sit down, or just give up and lie on the floor.

“Do you want me to show you where the office is?” He finishes tying his shoes and stands.

“Sure.”

“Do you want to take a shower first?”

A confusing rush of excitement and nerves explodes behind my sternum. “With…you?”

“What?” His face crinkles into a look of complete bafflement. A beat goes by, then a light of understanding comes into his face and it splits into a grin. “No, Howsley, by yourself. I meant I’ll wait for you.”

“Oh.” The inescapable heat of embarrassment blazes away the nervous excitement. “I—”

He’s fully laughing now. “I mean, yeah, obviously, if you want to, but it seems a little premature, don’t you think?”

I pivot and stalk for the door, my face burning. “Yeah, yeah, alright.”

“I did literally just shower, but—”

“I said alright!”

He follows me out into the hallway, still shaking with laughter.

“Okay, okay, sorry. Seriously though, I can show you where the office is. And if you want to shower first, I’ll wait.”

I shower in my room, where I also find food waiting for myself and Malarkey, then leave Malarky and meet him on the bench in the corridor fifteen minutes later. I force myself not to picture what's under his shirt as he stands up, smiling, and falls into step just ahead of me.

The walk to the lab is ten minutes of winding through a labyrinth of tunnels that I’m certain I’ll never find my way out of. Finally, we come to a vast, high-ceilinged cavern that reminds me vaguely of Reckoner’s Row—but about fifty times the size. This cave isn’t as big as the one with the lake in it—I can just about make out the walls—but it’s not far from it.

“This is Grike’s city center,” says Sargo, stepping through the stone archway at the end of the tunnel that adjoins the cavern. “The office is on the other side.”

The tunnel opens onto a large plaza, surrounded by low, utilitarian buildings. The square is fairly empty, I guess because it’s early in the morning. A few of the shop fronts that line the perimeter are opening. Everything is clean, but run down. It has the feeling of a military base, or a climate settlement—functional but sparse. It’s surprisingly light in the cave, and I peer around for the source.

“UV lights,” says Sargo, pointing to the ceiling. It’s too high for me to see and too bright to look at directly, but I take his word for it.

We cross the square and head to a nondescript, single-story building in the far corner. An unassuming glass door with ‘Zenith’ printed on it in small letters tells me this is the office. Sargo presses his palm to a hand scanner, the door hisses open, and he waves me through ahead of him.

A thin, pretty girl with pale skin and blonde hair sits behind a desk just inside the door. Like the outside, everything in the building looks tidy but worn, including her. She smiles at Sargo and he smiles back.

“Is Axioma here?”

“Yep. In her office.”

We walk past the desk and down a long, narrow corridor until we come to a frosted glass door. Sargo stops in front of it and turns to me, his eyes suddenly serious.

“Hey, so…what I said last night. About how if it was a chip in my head…that was stupid. It’s not my head. You should do what you want.”

“Thanks.”

He pauses, pursing his lips as though he wants to say something else. I have an abrupt and vivid vision of being kissed goodbye by those lips. I blink hard to shake it loose.

"Okay. Good luck.” He steps aside. I nod and step past him, placing my palm against the scanner. The door opens with a hiss.

Inside is a bright, clean office. The door hisses closed behind me. A glass and steel desk and swivel chair dominate most of the space. Axioma sits in the chair, facing away from me, her feet pulled up under her. Her head is tilted to one side, her chin in her hand, and she appears to be studying an enormous black slate that takes up most of the office’s far wall. The surface of the desk is free from clutter—in fact, there’s nothing on it but a small, bright green rubber ball.

As I enter, Axioma uncrosses her legs and swivels the chair around, her eyes finding me with an enthusiastic smile.

“Good morning!” She taps her right brow, I assume to clear some visual clutter from her biochip.

I stand awkwardly in front of the desk, feeling very much as though I’m in Principle Yip’s office again, about to be expelled from Azimuth.

“Morning.”

“How are you doing today?”

“Better.”

“Good! That's great, I’m glad you’re healing.” She picks up the green rubber ball as if by impulse and turns it over in her hands as she talks. “And I’m glad you came to see me. Would you like to walk and talk? We could get some brew. There’s an excellent shop just around the corner.”

I shake my head. “No—no, I just want…I don’t think this will take long.”

Her eyebrows twitch upward. “Okay.” She sets the ball down, clasps her hands and rests her chin on them, elbows on the desk.

I rush the words out as quickly as I can, before I change my mind and say something else instead. “I’ve…decided to stay.”

She tilts her head slightly, her smile widening.

“But I want—” I pause, backtrack inside my head, tell myself to press on, take a breath, “—coin.”

Her eyebrows move imperceptibly higher. “Coin. I see.”

She doesn’t say anything else for a few moments, just studies me with a frank expression, and I make myself return her look without shifting or looking away. Finally, she says, “I think that could be arranged.”

I try not to let the air leave me all at once. “Great.”

“How much coin were you thinking?”

I don’t know. I hadn’t gotten that far.

“At least enough for a new mainsail for Panga,” I say, thinking quickly. “And enough to provision me and Sargo for Pocosín when we leave here.”

“Anything else?”

“My moms.” The idea forms in real-time. “I want you to transfer coin to my moms. And to Sargo’s uncle.”

She nods, releasing her fingers from their clasp and laying her hands flat on the table. “Okay, Bird. I think that all sounds fine.”

“Oh. Okay.” I stand somewhat dumbfounded, having prepared myself for an argument. The impulse to fiddle with my nails niggles at me and I squeeze my hands into fists to stop myself from doing it.

“So when do we…start?”

“That’s really up to you,” says Axioma, standing and walking around to the front of the desk. She sets her palms behind herself on its edge and leans back on it. “As I’m sure you can imagine, we’re anxious to begin as soon as possible. But I want you to feel you’re ready.”

“I am.”

"Well—let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I wouldn’t want you to rush into anything without thinking—”

“That’s kind of how I do everything. Look, I just want to get this over with so Sargo and I can get out of here.”

She purses her lips. “Okay. If you’re sure—”

“I am.”

“—then we can start today. Give me some time to let my team know. Why don’t you meet me back here in…an hour?”

An hour. The reality of an actual time limit settles around me like a cloak. An hour. I guess I thought it wouldn't be as soon as that.

“Okay,” I say. “Sure.”

Sargo isn’t there when I step back into the hallway, and I try not to let that crush me. I wander back down the corridor and find the girl at the front desk.

“Hey—uh, did you see where Sargo went?”

She observes me with what I can’t help but think are surly eyes and says, “Yeah he got called away to the harbor.”

“Oh…did he say if he’d be back?”

She shakes her head once with tight lips.

“Okay—well, if you see him can you tell him I’m going to start with Axioma today? He’ll know what it means.”

Her cold gaze doesn’t relent. “How do you know Sargo?” she says, her voice as icy as her eyes.

“We’re friends.”

“And who are you, exactly?”

Her tone makes my insides prickle, but I manage to keep my face impassive and say, “I’m Bird. Who are you?”

“Helva.”

We glare at each other. "How do you know Sargo?" I want to say. But I don’t. Instead I force a smile and repeat, “So…if you could just let him know…?”

A tiny huff escapes her flared nostrils. “Sure,” she snips.

“Thanks.” I duck through the door and find myself in the square.

Not wanting to stray into the labyrinth of tunnels alone in case I get lost and never find my way out, I decide to stick to the plaza. It turns out to be very easy and surprisingly pleasant to kill an hour in the main square of a new city when you aren’t running for your life. I can barely recall what Alluvium’s city center looks like—every time I was there it went by in a panicked blur.

I poke around listlessly, reveling in the feeling of being unhurried, well-fed, and on solid ground, until about fifteen minutes before the hour is up.

My stomach begins to twist into knots and sweat creeps down my spine as I drag myself back to the office. I skulk past Helva without even pretending to be friendly, and she does me the courtesy of returning my palpable animosity. Then I hover outside the door to Axioma’s office until I am officially two minutes late and I can’t justify procrastinating any longer.

She greets me with her familiar, enthusiastic smile. “Are you sure you’re ready?” she repeats. “It’s okay if you change your mind.”

I shake my head, swallowing down the clamor of protestations that rise in my throat. If she sees the hesitation on my face, she pretends not to.

“Okay.” She steps past me and crosses to the door. “Follow me.”

____________________

We make our way through Grike’s city center to the perimeter of the cave, where I’m awed to discover that there are thousands of homes built into the cave wall. The facade slopes gently away from us as it rises away from the ground, and a staircase has been carved into the massive face of stone, winding its way up between doors set into the wall, and small, narrow windows spilling light from inside the rock.

We climb for nearly ten minutes and the main square becomes a dizzyingly small dot below me before we stop in front of one of the doors. Behind it is a small waiting room, sparsely furnished with mismatched chairs and a coffee table that clearly used to be someone’s home furnishings. A mother and her small boy sit on one side of the room.

I can’t help but feel nervous and slightly disappointed as we step into the room. Something about having someone poke at the experimental teleportation technology inside my head makes me want a grandiose, sparkling clean facility with state-of-the-art machines from some futuristic Sci-Fi world. Instead, I get a doctor’s office in someone’s living room. Zenith runs the world, for flog’s sake; they couldn’t spring for a nicer facility?

Axioma sees the apprehension on my face.

“Everyone assumes that Zenith is still operating at our pre-pandemic level,” she says, “as if we were somehow immune to the effects. We used to run a big medical lab here, but the truth is, we just don’t have the staff anymore to maintain that kind of facility.”

“What happened to it?”

“Shut down. It’s just a complex of unused rooms now.”

She ushers me through the waiting room and down a very dim, low-ceilinged corridor. At the end is a small examination room. I feel somewhat relieved to see the typical things I’d expect to see in a doctor’s office: examination table with a tall light crooked over it, a small stool, blood-pressure monitoring machine, a receptacle for used syringes, a wall of cabinets stocked with rubber gloves, swabs, medicine, and specimen containers. A small refrigerator sits against the far wall, next to a black box with a pinprick of blue light faintly ebbing and waning on its front corner.

“What’s that?” I frown at the box.

Axioma smiles with her usual candid enthusiasm. “A biochip interfacing unit.”

She steps over to the machine and picks up a mesh of fine wires in the shape of a cranium. Small, white electrodes dot the mesh at regular intervals.

“You’ll wear this during the session so we can record readouts from the chip’s operating system.”

So there’s the Sci-Fi machine.

I perch on the edge of the exam table while Axioma taps some things on the biochip interface, taps her head to activate various things in her own chip, and makes gestures in the air. There’s a soft knock on the door.

“Come in,” calls Axioma.

Dr. Lysett’s head pokes into the room. “Are you ready for us?” Her kind brown eyes are expectant, and they don’t look at me right away, focusing instead on Axioma.

“Absolutely,” says Axioma. “Bird, I think you’ve already met Dr. Lysett?”

I nod, forcing myself to smile. I half expect Lysett to start gleefully body scanning me before she’s even come into the room.

She steps across the threshold, followed by two more women in white lab coats, both holding slates, who silently take themselves into a corner of the room and stand there looking serious but vaguely eager.

Lysett crosses to the wall of cabinets and sets a small, gray slate on it, then begins pulling on white exam gloves. Axioma pulls her own slate from inside a coat pocket. The two women ignore me for a few moments as they quietly finish making their preparations. Then, Lysett pulls up the stool and sits in front of me, her too-kind eyes beaming out of that smiling face. Smiling. Always smiling. Axioma stands against the wall by the machine, quietly observing.

“I think that bandage can probably come off now,” Lysett says. She reaches for my head before I have time to respond and I flinch as she gently tugs the tape away from my buzzed hair. She tosses the patch in a receptacle by the door, then returns and gently probes the newly exposed area with her fingers. To my surprise, the tenderness is gone.

“It’s healed up well,” she says. “Hardly even a scar.”

“Already?” I frown.

“Mhm.” Lysett removes her hands. “Feel for yourself.”

I tentatively touch the spot, shocked to find no lump, wound, or stitches beneath my fingers—just a sliver of smooth skin notched out of the surrounding stubble, about half an inch long and so narrow I can hardly feel it.

Lysett winks. “We have some pretty neat tricks these days.”

“Couldn’t make my hair grow back any faster, could you?” I grumble. Lysett chuckles and turns away, pointedly not answering my question.

“Okay Bird, we’re going to fit you with the interface,” she says as she returns with the mesh skull cap from the machine in the corner. “And then I just want to ask you some questions. Does that sound okay?”

I nod nervously.

Her already smiling eyes crinkle even more, to tiny, squinted slits. “Don’t worry. We’ll start easy.”

She fits the cap over my head, then picks up her slate and taps the back of her head. Her eyes unfocus as she gestures in the air, and the machine in the corner beeps and begins to hum. A cool, tingly feeling begins to creep from the nape of my neck. It wraps around the back of my head and across my scalp, sending a shiver down my spine.

“Feel okay?” asks Lysett.

I nod. It’s not an unpleasant feeling. I actually kind of like it.

“Okay.” She picks up her slate, pulls the stool up again and sits in front of me. “Let’s just get some baseline readings to start. What’s your name?”

“Uh—Bird Howsley.”

Lysett smiles. “Excellent. Where do you live?”

“Right now?”

She arches an eyebrow. “Where are you from?”

“Oh. Brume.”

“Great. And how old are you?”

“Seventeen. No wait—eighteen. I just turned eighteen.”

Lysett’s smile broadens. “Happy birthday.” She gestures to input something into the slate, then crinkles her eyes at me again. “Okay. Can you tell me about the first time you experienced QMTP?”

“Uh—” I glance at Axioma, who smiles. Do I really have to say out loud that the first time I blipped, I was drunk, stealing her daughter’s necklace after having been expelled from Azimuth? Or…my eyes dart to the ominous black box with the blinking light in the corner. What if I don’t have to say it out loud? Can they read my thoughts? Are they reading them now? Are they reading this?

No. Be sensible, Bird. If they could do that, Lysett wouldn’t be asking you questions.

I take a breath. “I was…in the girl’s bathroom at school.”

Lysett nods slowly, gesturing to input the answer into her slate. “And was there anything unusual about what you were doing?”

I study my nails, resisting the impulse to chew on them. “I was…stealing.”

“Stealing?”

“A necklace.”

In the corner, one of the silent women gently clears her throat. Axioma unfolds and refolds her arms.

“I see,” says Lysett. “Was there something special about this necklace that made it appealing to you?”

It belonged to an absolute cow who needed to be taken down a peg or two. “No. I just…it was an impulse, I guess.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see one of the women busily gesturing at her slate.

“I see,” Lysett murmurs. “Had anything unusual happened that day?”

I squirm. “I was expelled.”

“Expelled?” Lysett’s professional tone cracks. I keep my eyes fixed firmly on my hands. “May I ask what for?”

“I had an argument with another student. And I…nearly caused a wreck in sailing class.”

And I was drunk at school.

Lysett is quiet for what feels like an uncomfortably long time. I expect she’s processing the information that her hotly anticipated savior is turning out to be a bit of a wreck. Finally, she turns to her slate again and gestures deliberately.

“I see,” she repeats.

An uncomfortable silence fills the room. I realize I’m chewing my thumbnail and quickly shove my hands under my legs to keep them out of trouble.

Lysett recovers her professional tone. “Can you describe your physical and mental state at the time QMTP was triggered? How were you feeling?”

Angry. Afraid I was about to be caught stealing. A bit drunk.

“Uh—stressed, I guess?”

Lysett leans forward. “Uh huh—can you elaborate on that?”

“I guess I was afraid I was going to be caught.”

“Caught stealing.”

“Yeah.”

“And how did that fear make you feel? Was your heart racing? Were you sweating?”

“I think so.”

Lysett gestures energetically at her slate again. “Anything else unusual about your physical and mental state at the moment it occurred?”

I hesitate. The words form deep in my gut, begin to crawl slowly toward my throat. I was drinking. Every time it happened, I was drinking.

But something holds them back. How can I tell these women that the person they’re pinning the future of the world on is not just a shithead, but a shithead with a drinking problem? I can already picture the disappointment in their faces. The concern.

I drop my eyes. “No. Nothing else unusual.”

Lysett finishes inputting the last thing into her slate. “Okay, Bird. Thank you. If you remember anything else about that first time, it’s important that you let me know. We had to repair your chip when you came to us, so it’s possible that something may have reset or changed. It’s possible we may need to recreate the conditions of that first jump as closely as we can in order to trigger the protocol again. Does that make sense?”

Her too-kind eyes smile into mine. I swallow and nod.

“Good.” She stands briskly and crosses to the other side of the room. The other two women nod briskly and see themselves out. Lysett catches Axiom’s eye and a brief look passes between them.

“In the meantime,” Lysett says, “I want to try a little test. Is that okay with you?”

“What kind of test?”

She opens a drawer and pulls out a small, metal implement that looks alarmingly like a gun. She returns with it, pulling the stool up and sitting in front of me again. In the corner of my eye, I see Axioma shift.

“We’ve suspected for some time that QMTP might be triggered by heightened emotional states. Stress, anger, fear, these kinds of things. From what you’ve just told me, I think our hypothesis may be on the right track. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to try provoking a slightly heightened state in you now, to see if we can trigger your stress response.”

I glance at Axioma, my pulse already beginning to accelerate.

“Don’t worry,” Lysett soothes, seeing my anxiety, “it won’t hurt. But it may cause some…mild discomfort.”

I eye the gun. “What are you going to do?”

She holds it out for me to examine. “This is called a calidifier. It produces non-harmful radiation. It will heat your skin without burning it. We use it to seal up sutures—in fact, we used it on your head earlier this week.” She smiles. “Normally, of course, we only use it when the patient is anesthetized, because, as I said, it does cause some discomfort.”

“And you want to use it on me now?”

Axioma unfolds her arms and appears to be about to say something, but doesn’t.

“Only if you’re willing,” says Lysett. “We can do a trial on a small patch of skin—the back of your hand, say. It will leave no mark.”

I feel myself recoiling slightly. “You’re going to burn me?”

Axioma steps away from the wall. “Of course not, Bird. We aren’t trying to hurt you. We only want to raise your heart rate a little.”

Lysett’s smile remains plastered across her face. “Mild discomfort,” she repeats.

She unfolds a small armrest from under the exam table and places my arm flat on it. She spends a minute starting up the gun, which beeps and hums ominously just like the machine in the corner, then without warning, taps the side of her head and scans me with her eyes. I angle my body away.

“Vitals look good,” she smiles. “I’ll need to monitor you throughout the process, if that’s okay.”

Oh, so now you’re asking? I hide my bitterness and nod.

“Axioma, can you keep an eye on the biochip readout for me?”

Axioma nods and returns to the machine at the wall. Lysett turns to me. “Alright, Bird, I’m going to place the calidifier over your hand. You’ll feel a warming sensation. As the gun heats up, the sensation will increase. The maximum temperature it reaches is two hundred degrees Celsius, but I in no way expect you to attempt to withstand more than about forty degrees. You can tell me to stop at any time. Okay?”

I swallow. “Okay.”

She holds the gun over my hand. “Ready?”

I nod.

The gun begins to heat up almost immediately. At first, it’s quite a pleasant sensation—like a warm patch of sun on my skin. Quickly, though, it becomes hot. My hand starts to feel as though it’s been submerged in hot water. Very hot water. I fight the impulse to pull it away, shifting my weight.

“Okay?” asks Lysett.

I close my lips hard and nod as the heat becomes scalding, the sensation of heat bizarrely shifting to one of cold. A nauseous, dizzy feeling starts to turn my stomach and the edges of my vision darken. My legs itch with the impulse to stand up and move. Finally, I can't take it any more.

“Stop!”

Lysett pulls the gun back. “Alright?”

I nod, my breath a little shallow. My hand throbs gently, the burning sensation slowly ebbing. I hold it up in front of my face, convinced I’ll see smoke, blisters, curling skin shrinking away from the bone. But it’s as smooth as ever. Lysett holds her hand out and I give mine to her. She turns it over, inspecting it, then smiles up at me.

“Well, it looks like we were certainly successful in triggering your stress response,” says Lysett, standing and returning the gun to the drawer on the opposite wall. She turns and abruptly scans my body again. “Your heart rate is elevated, adrenaline and cortisol levels increased. Axioma? Anything on your end?”

Axioma taps the back of her head and swipes through the air, I presume reading whatever output the little black box gives her. She sighs and shakes her head. “No indication here that the QMTP module was accessed.”

“Ah well,” Lysett’s smile becomes conciliatory, “of course we’re not expecting to get it right on the first try, are we?” She sits on the stool again, picking up her slate. “How are you feeling, Bird? Everything okay?”

I turn my hand over, the warmth entirely gone from it now. I take a deep breath, my pulse dropping. “Yeah—I guess so. Fine.”

“Good.” She makes more gestures at her slate. “You did really well.”

“Really well,” emphasizes Axioma, stepping over to us with a smile. “And I think that’s probably enough for today.”

Lysett folds away the armrest and scoots her stool away so I have room to stand. I move away from the exam table then turn to face them both.

“So…now what?”

Lysett stands. “I’d like to have you come back here every few days and run some more tests.”

“What kind of tests?”

“I am still fairly convinced that the QMTP module in your chip has been responding to stress. Of course, there are ways to invoke stress other than what we just did. Many ways that don’t involve physical discomfort of any kind. I’d like to…throw a few things at the wall with you. See if we can make something stick.”

I glance at Axioma. “Will you be here?”

“Sometimes. I do have other things that need my attention, but I’m happy to come here as often as I can if that would make you feel more comfortable.”

I chew the inside of my cheek. “And you’re going to send the coin? To my moms?”

Axioma smiles. “It’s already done.”

“Okay. When should I come back?”

Lysett gestures into her slate. “How about the day after tomorrow? We don’t want to overload you with too much right away.”

“Sure.”

She tucks her slate under her arm and smiles briefly at Axioma. “Well, I for one think this was a very promising start.” She turns to me. “I look forward to seeing you in two days, Bird.”

____________________

A new message pops up as I’m leaving the lab. I swipe to open it.

>>> HEY BIRD. SORRY I HAD TO RUN. I’M AT THE HARBOR. COME BY WHEN YOU’RE DONE IF YOU’RE FEELING UP TO IT.

I stand on the stone steps outside the lab door, staring half-focused at Grike’s city center hundreds of feet below, a wave of exhaustion rising around me. I guess I must still be recovering from the lightning strike; the session with Lysett took more out of me than I realized. As much as I want to see Sargo, the need for a soft bed and a cool, dimly lit room is even greater. Plus, I left Malarkey alone in there. She probably needs a walk. With a sigh, I gesture in the air to send a message back.

>>> JUST FINISHED. FEELING PRETTY TIRED. GONNA LAY LOW FOR A BIT. SEE YOU LATER?

The reply comes back almost immediately

>>> DEFINITELY :)

My heart skips. How does a single word and stupid smiley face make it do that?

I close Messenger and make my way down the stairs and back through the square. Thoughts about the session follow me like shadows. Should I have told Lysett about the grog? Yes, probably. But she said she already has a theory about what triggers the blips. Who am I to go against what a Zenith scientist says about their own invention?

I reach the entrance to a tunnel I vaguely recognize and turn down it. The maze of tunnels barely registers as I follow them away from the city center, consumed by thoughts.

What if Lysett’s right? What if it is ‘heightened emotional states’ that trigger QMTP, and it has nothing to do with grog? It’s not as though I’m sure that’s what triggered QMTP. After all, didn’t I blip a thousand miles from Alluvium Bay to that island stone cold sober? It fried my chip, but…it happened.

I find myself opening the door to my room, and Malarkey greets me with her usual wagging tail and wiggly body. I step aside to let her pass and then close the door behind us, letting her choose the direction for our walk.

I could be completely wrong about the grog, and in that case, bringing it up is only going to confuse things and throw Lysett off track. No, better to keep my theories to myself. Let the scientists handle that.

Ten minutes later, Malarkey and I head back to the room. My mind is still buzzing as I open the door and step into the blissfully cool, blissfully dark interior. Malarkey drinks from a large, metal bowl in the corner that I suddenly realize someone must have provided for her, and also must be filling regularly, because I’ve certainly been too distracted to stay on top of her care.

I feel a twinge of guilt as I kick off my shoes, strip off my shirt and throw myself down on the bed, rolling onto my back and trying to shut down the carousel jangling around in my head.

If Lysett thinks the trigger for QMTP is stress, then it probably is. And if I'm wrong about the grog, not only will it be muddling the experiments, it would also mean disclosing things to Lysett and Axioma that I really would rather not disclose. To anyone.

But, says a voice in my head, what if you’re right?

What if it is the grog?

I put an arm over my face and close my eyes against the rush of feelings that thought sets loose. What if, in order to blip, I have to drink? What if the only way for Lysett to see any kind of results from our sessions is…to give me grog? I try to focus on the feel of cool, soft sheets against my back, the smell of clean linen, the sound of Malarkey settling herself at the foot of the bed. I try to ignore the specter of grog worming its way back into my consciousness.

But it’s too late. All of it comes rushing back. The expulsion. Stealing the necklace. Fleeing Brume. Fighting with Sargo. Savage’s beard against my cheek. Every stupid, reckless decision I've made. The guilt, the shame, the anger and confusion. And, sidling along underneath it all, the itch. The itch for grog even though it makes me do stupid, reckless things.

I fling my arm away from my face and sit up. Malarkey looks up at me, startled.

“Sorry, Lark.”

Swinging my legs off the bed, I stalk to the window, yank the curtain back and lean on the sill, pressing my head to the glass and gazing at the garden, trying to focus on the cool feel of the window against my forehead.

Except…the window isn’t cool. I frown and straighten up, placing my palm flat against it. The window is warm. And humming. A red-breasted bird swoops from just above my head and soars to the fountain at the far end of the lawn. He alights on the edge and dips into the water, hurriedly bathing himself in a flurry of feathers before darting away toward the trees.

Exactly like he did last time.

Stepping back, I examine the window more closely. A tiny leaf, caught in a spiderweb, twists sharply in a breeze just above the sill. Except as I bend down and peer closer, I can see it isn’t a leaf in a spiderweb at all. It’s some kind of…glitch. A crack in whatever material this window is made of. I tentatively press my finger to it, expecting to find a sharp edge. But it’s perfectly smooth. The gap flickers, twists, flits in and out of existence. An uneasy sense of foreboding creeps through me as I understand what I’m looking at.

This isn’t a window. It’s a hologram.

chapter

twenty-seven

I RACE THROUGH THE HARBOR, my breath short and panicked, and find Sargo sitting on the dock next to Panga, a length of rope and a short knife in his hands. He hears me approach and looks up with a smile.

“Hey!” His face immediately registers my distress. “Everything okay?” He scrambles to his feet. “Where’s Malarkey?”

“I left her in my room." My voice is breathless, partly from shock, partly from running all the way here. "My window is a hologram," I gasp, bracing my hands on my knees and dropping my head to catch my breath. When I straighten up, Sargo is grinning.

“Did you run all the way here to tell me that?”

My face creases. “You knew?”

“All the windows are holograms. We’re underground.” I stare at him with my mouth open, breathing hard. He shakes his head, still smiling, and sits back down on the dock. “You feeling okay? I thought you were going to lay low for a while.”

I clasp my hands on top of my head and stare across the lake. I don’t feel okay. I feel wired and unstable. My pulse slows incrementally.

“I’m fine.”

He squints up at me. “You don’t seem fine.”

“The window just freaked me out.”

“And that’s all?”

And I recently woke up in the bed of a murderer. And I think I may have a drinking problem. And my drinking problem is supposed to save humanity. And I have a big, embarrassing crush on you.

“Yeah. That’s all.”

He eyes me but doesn’t say anything and returns to his work. “How did the meeting with Lysett go?”

“Fine.”

“Okay, Howsley.” He sets down the knife. “If we’re going to operate on a level above ‘acquaintance’ here than I’m going to need more from you than ‘fine’.”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah, okay. It was…kind of weird. Lysett thinks QMTP may be triggered by stress. So she…triggered stress.”

“How?”

“Something called a calidifier? I don’t know. It was like a gun that makes your skin unbearably hot.”

At the word ‘gun’ he’s on his feet again. “She hurt you?”

“No, no! It was…mild discomfort.” His eyes are bright, brimming with concern. The look pulls something tight in my chest. “It was fine.”

He shakes his head. “There’s that word again.”

“It really was. Nothing happened. Like…literally nothing. I think Axioma was kind of disappointed. They want me to go back in two days to try again.”

He frowns.

“Lysett said it won’t be the same next time. She says there’s other ways to induce stress. They were really careful about everything. She said she didn’t want to overload me and that we can stop any time.”

He rubs his face, agitation radiating off him from feet away. “I didn’t think…I didn’t know it would be like that."

"It was fi—"

He eyes me sharply.

"It was…no big deal."

"I feel like I pressured you to stay.”

“You…did. But I wanted to stay. I want to understand what’s going on inside my own head.”

He shoves a hand through his hair and I can’t help but notice how well it suits him long. His hand leaves it tousled, thick black curls falling in his eyes.

"Okay, well just don't let them make you do anything you don't want to do."

"Since when has anyone been able to make me do something I didn't want to do?"

I expect him to smile, say something snarky back, but he just says, "Mm," and picks up his knife again. He turns it over in his hands, studying it as though he's suddenly very interested in it.

"Hey," he says without looking up, "so…this new sail…”

I blink. “What new sail?”

He tilts his chin up to draw my attention to Panga’s boom, where clean white folds of canvas are neatly flaked and secured with sail ties.

“That new sail. You know anything about that?”

Axioma must have taken my demands seriously. “Uh—no. I don’t know where that came from.”

He folds his arms. “And uncle Blenny messaged me. Said a bunch of coin showed up in his account today. I guess you don’t know anything about that either?”

I shrug. “Maybe he forgot he had it. He’s kind of a lush isn’t he?”

"A bunch of coin also showed up in my account.”

“Huh. Weird.”

He eyes me. “I don’t want you doing this because you think you owe me anything. I would have figured out how to replace the sail. Blenny will be fine on his own. It’s not your job to take care of him.”

I drop my eyes and fiddle with my nails. “Yeah, well…he was pretty dependent on you, wasn’t he? And now you’re not there. Because of me.”

Silence settles between us. Sargo turns the knife over and over in his hands, and I sense that he's struggling to say something. When he finally manages, “Thanks,” his voice is rough.

I don’t look at him. “You’re welcome.”

We let the silence sit a moment longer. The eerie green light from the underground lake makes water patterns on the clean, white canvas of Panga’s new sail. I become aware of the wind. It’s gusting around the harbor, clattering loose lines and setting little flags flapping.

“It really is windy in here," I murmur. "It’s kind of crazy.”

“Yeah. It usually starts to pick up around this time. Hey…” His tone brightens. “Do you wanna go for a sail?”

My heart accelerates a little.

“Unless—” he quickly counters himself, “unless you’re too beat.”

I send my gaze out over the bright green water. I am exhausted. I can feel the tiredness like lead in my bones. But the thought of being out there, in the fresh, wild air, with Sargo, on Panga sounds much more appealing than sitting alone in my room, not sleeping, stewing in thoughts of grog like a slab of marinating meat.

I nod. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

He grins and stoops to gather the line he was fixing from the dock. “Okay. Give me five minutes! Oh!” He stops suddenly. “What about Malarkey?”

“She’ll be fine. I took her for a walk before I came here.”

His eyes glint. “So there’ll be no one to get in between us this time?”

My stomach swoops but I manage to keep my wits enough to say, “Nope. This will be grownup time.”

____________________

Panga flies over the bright green water of the lake. The wind rips across the deck, curving the sail into a crisp parenthetical. The air is surprisingly chilly; the spray that kicks over the bow and onto my cheeks lands sharp and cold. The water is choppy, but level; there is no swell on this underground lake: it’s a flat, wide open playground that we skim over like a stone.

At the helm, Sargo holds us steady with a wide stance, his shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal the rigid cords of muscle in his forearms, bare feet planted like roots into the deck. Our eyes meet, and he grins.

“Coming about!” he yells, but I’m already there, snatching up the starboard jib sheet and freeing it to let the sail move.

As Sargo lets the wheel spin freely through his palms, turning the boat one hundred and eighty degrees, I catch the sheet on the opposite side and use it to pull the sail into its new position, then wrap it around a winch and crank the winch in a circular motion to tighten it, the effort burning my arms and drawing sweat from the center of my chest. I should be exhausted, but I’m elated. I glance up at the sail to check the telltales; they stream proudly in the wind, brilliant little slashes of scarlet against the white canvas.

“Perfect!”

Sargo’s voice comes to me over the wind and I turn over my shoulder to look at him. The breeze whips his hair into his eyes and he shakes it back, turning my insides to water and making me truly afraid for a moment that I might fall over the side.

"Hey!" He steps to one side, holding the wheel in one hand and extending the other toward me. "Do you wanna be captain for a bit?"

We tack and jibe around the bay for almost two hours, Panga carving up the lake like butter. By the time we ease her back into her slip, my skin is flushed with the briskness of the air, my hair wild. I hop onto the dock with a line in my hand and kneel to tie it off. When I stand, pushing hair from my face, Sargo is leaning both forearms on the rail, watching me from the deck.

“Not bad, Howsley.”

I flick my hair over my shoulder and lean on the other side of the railing, fixing him with a cocky look of my own.

“I think you mean ‘damn, Howsley, that was amazing.’”

He leans over the rail so suddenly my heart skips, bringing his face close enough to mine that our lips almost touch, and grins.

“Damn Howsley,” he says quietly, and I feel his breath on my cheek, “that was amazing.”

Heat erupts across my throat and chest. I duck away, hiding my own smile, and grab the stern dock line. Sargo folds the mainsail and I hop back up to the deck to help him finish tidying up.

We work silently, but I notice he wears the same secret smile I do, and he can’t seem to step around me without putting a hand on me. My arm. The small of my back. My hip. Every touch seems to land more intimately, linger a little longer. By the time we run out of things to put away, and settle in the cockpit, my face is flushed again, the ghosts of his hands all over me.

“Thanks for coming out.” He smiles. “That was fun. You’re actually a really good sailor.”

I return the smile, but inside, the thought of going back to real life—to my room and my restless thoughts—settles like an anchor around my neck. A sigh escapes my throat.

“I don’t want to go back.”

He catches my eye. “Me neither. Kind of just want to stay here and hide out from everyone.”

“So…”

He shrugs. “Tea?”

The galley nook below is warm and comfortably familiar, just big enough for both of us to stand opposite each other. I lean against the counter while Sargo fills the kettle and puts it on the stove.

“So,” he says, “you obviously didn’t learn how to sail like that from me.”

The comment catches me off guard. I open my mouth, hesitate, close it again. He eyes me over his shoulder as he lights the stove.

“So where'd you learn it?”

There’s so much to tell him, I don’t know where to begin. “I learned it from Fetch, I guess.”

He frowns.

“When I was crewing on the Kingfisher.”

He leans against the other counter, directly opposite me, one foot between my feet, and folds his arms.

“When you went overboard in Alluvium…after Zenith picked you up,” I continue, “they couldn’t find me because I blipp—I mean, I…” Both words sound equally ridiculous. “I teleported.”

His eyebrows shoot up.

“I guess Axioma would call it 'triggering QMTP.' I woke up on an island in the middle of the Salt. Alone. There was nothing there. I—nearly starved. I was there a week. I learned how to make a fire. The Kingfisher saw the smoke and picked me up and I bartered passage back to Alluvium. They put me on the crew.”

He shakes his head. His eyes are taking me in again as if they’ve never seen me before. “Amazing.”

“It definitely wasn’t amazing,” I deflect. “Fetch was a nightmare.”

“I bet. She seemed pretty tough.”

“Yeah. It was kind of hellish.”

“Did she teach you to navigate?”

A fist of anxiety grips my heart. No. That was Savage. Nodding quickly, I lie, the words coming out too fast.

“Yeah. Well, she taught me to navigate the coast. When I got to Île Tor, a woman there showed me how to use the stars to cross open water.”

His brow furrows. “But you would have had to cross open water to get to Île Tor from Alluvium. How did you get all the way out there without knowing how to use the stars?”

I sigh. “Yeah. It…didn’t go great. We almost died.”

“We?”

“I met a girl from Pocosín. We sailed together. She was cool—you would like her.”

The memory of the four days Locuaz and I spent without water, of the thirst, sears the back of my throat. My smile fades.

"I could have killed her.”

He nods slowly. “Now you know how it feels. To be the captain.”

I squint at him. “Were you scared? When we sailed from Brume?”

“All the time.”

I feel those words like a knife in my heart. He was scared. Really scared. And I was no help. I could barely sail. He was carrying all that weight alone. Responsible for my soul and Malarkey’s.

"I thought about it all the time," he says. His eyes are so bright I feel as though they're looking right into me. "I just wanted…to keep you safe.”

I drop my gaze. As I do, he stops my chin with two fingers, tilting my face back up to his.

“Why do you always do that?” he says.

“Do what?”

“Look away from me.”

The breath catches in my throat. “Sometimes…it’s hard to look at you.”

“Why?”

“Because you make me feel things.”

His fingers still tipping my chin, he presses his thumb to the corner of my mouth; draws it from there along the edge of my jaw.

“What kind of things?”

My heart is beating so high in my chest that I can barely speak around it. “I don’t think I can tell you that.”

He smiles, his eyes following his thumb as it grazes my earlobe.

“Okay. Well…can I tell you what I feel?” he says.

I manage to nod. I’m drowning in the scent of him; the Salt, the trees of Brume, his clothes and his sweat.

“I feel like kissing you, Howsley.”

A rush of air comes into my lungs that makes my head spin. And in that rush, I find my voice and say, “Okay. So why don’t you then?”

His eyebrows lift. But he doesn't move. I see the pulse fluttering in the side of his neck. I feel his hand trembling. Nerves.

I’ve called his bluff.

Sargo Paz is thoughtful and considerate, and he’s intelligent and honest, but he is also scared. When it comes down to it, for all his flirting and touching my shoulder and carefully laid plans of seduction in caves, Sargo Paz has never been one to take big, crazy leaps into the unknown. I’m the one that does that. I’m the reckless idiot who leaps without looking. He’s the smart one. He’s the careful one. He’s the one that said ‘maybe.’

For a heartbeat, that ‘maybe’ hangs between us like an unnavigable chasm. For a heartbeat, he’s lost, standing on the edge of that chasm. And in that heartbeat, I take hold of the front of his shirt and pull him across it.

“Howsley, what the f—”

My lips swallow his half-hearted protest.

Apart from Savage, the only person I’ve ever kissed—well, okay, the only person I remember kissing—is Pitch Starkey, when we were thirteen. It was awful. Too wet, and too long, and somehow we both had too many teeth. I remember standing there wondering how on Earth we could have both possibly sprouted so many teeth all of a sudden, and how long we had to keep standing there with our gross, toothy mouths jammed together, and overall just really wishing I had no mouth at all so that I would never have to kiss anyone else ever again.

This kiss is nothing like that.

As our lips touch, electricity arcs through me like a plucked string. His mouth responds to mine; a brush that becomes a press that becomes a push—becomes searching, wanting. He moves into me, and I grab clumsily at his waist and pull him closer. We come up against the counter behind me, his hand on the back of my neck. He holds me more firmly than I expected him to, as though now that he’s across the chasm of ‘maybe,’ something barely contained simmers just below the surface of him. Something strange and thrilling; new, and yet somehow totally familiar—like all of this. Like him.

He pulls away to catch his breath, and a tiny noise escapes my throat—a soft moan of disappointment and want that I don’t mean to make. He hears it. His eyes glint and his mouth is smiling as he presses it against mine again.

“Howsley? Paz?”

A shout from somewhere outside catapults my heart into my throat. His lips break from mine.

“They found us,” he groans, and buries his face in my neck.

I try to find my voice, but it’s choked by my heart. I can feel Sargo’s heart pounding through his shirt, our chests beating like drums against each other, frenetic, out of sync, keeping no time. His weight presses me against the counter, one palm braced on the countertop next to me, his other hand resting on my hip, his lips against the crook of my neck. Neither of us tries to move.

“Howsley! Paz!”

Again the shout, louder now. Sargo draws a deep breath, his body expanding against me, and sighs. Then he stands and moves away, pushing his hair from his face, one hand lingering on my stomach before he steps to the companionway and climbs the few short steps to poke his head out.

“Yes?” His voice has an uncharacteristic sharpness and I grin.

“Is Howsley with you?” says the voice outside.

“She is.”

“Can you send her to the office? Axioma would like a word.”

“Now?”

“It’s not urgent. But as soon as possible.”

“Okay.”

Footsteps retreat down the dock and Sargo swings back down into the cabin. His eyes find mine as he steps into the galley and takes hold of my wrist, pulling me against him. He wraps his arms around me tightly and I place my cheek against his chest. The sound of his heart slowly quiets against my ear, and I feel his lips press a kiss onto the top of my head.

“Damn, Howsley,” he murmurs. “That was amazing.”

chapter

twenty-eight

>>> YESSSSSSSS MIJAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!

A series of pings ricochets around my skull as Locuaz’s messages crowd noisily into my head, a wall of capital letters and exclamation points.

>>> TELL ME EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!

>>> WAS IT AMAZING?????

I grin to myself as I gesture in the air to send a message back.

>>> YES IT WAS AMAZING. AFTERWARDS HE LITERALLY SAID "DAMN HOWSLEY THAT WAS AMAZING"

>>> WHAAAT HE SAID THAT? THAT'S KIND OF HOT

>>> OH ALSO HE HAS THOSE LINES ON HIS HIPS THAT MAKE A V

>>> YOU SAW HIM SHIRTLESS???

>>> I SAW HIM PUTTING ON A SHIRT

>>> SNEAKY

>>> I DIDN'T MEAN TO. HE WAS COMING OUT OF THE SHOWER

>>> NOT YOU SNEAKY. HIM SNEAKY. THAT WAS A MOVE FOR SURE CHICA

>>> A MOVE?

>>> YOU THINK THAT WAS AN ACCIDENT? LIKE HE DIDN'T HAVE TIME TO PUT IT ON ALL THE WAY BEFORE HE CAME OUT? ¡PURA MIERDA!

>>> MAYBE

A minute or so goes by, then she sends

>>> SO IT'S NICE?

>>> WHAT?

>>> LA VISTA. THE VIEW. OF YOUR BOY

>>> OH HAHA. IT'S VERY MUCH NOT THE WORST THING I'VE EVER SEEN

>>> DAMN MIJA. I KIND OF WANNA MEET THIS GUY

>>> BACK OFF, YOU'RE GAY

>>> PERO ME GUSTA UNA VISTA HERMOSA ;)

Malarkey and I are walking through the labyrinth toward a spot we discovered yesterday during our walk—a hidden stone courtyard in the north quadrant, overgrown with moss. It’s early morning, but I’m already up, showered, dressed, breakfasted, and practically skipping. I slept well for the first time in days.

When I think about it, Locuaz is probably right about that whole ‘casually stepping out of the shower putting on my shirt’ thing. Sargo's definitely not the kind of person who's just going to blindside you with full-on shirtlessness. He's too…polite for that. Too careful. That would be too much of a leap. But I think I'm starting to figure out his thing: test the line without actually crossing it. Sneaky.

We reach the courtyard and I plop down on a low stone bench while Malarkey takes herself off to do her business. I message Locuaz again.

>>> SO YOU MADE IT TO POCOSÍN?

>>> SÍP!

>>> HOW IS IT?

>>> REALLY GOOD :) I’M STAYING WITH MY MOM AND SISTER. THEY ARE WELL.

>>> YOU GOT THERE FAST. AND AGAINST THE WIND.

>>> YES YOTE IS A MUCH BETTER CAPTAIN THAN YOU ;)

I smile and shake my head, then send

>>> HOW LONG ARE YOU STAYING?

>>> I DON’T KNOW YET she replies. I MIGHT STAY HERE WHEN YOTE GOES BACK TO TOR. IT’S NICE TO SEE MY FAMILY AGAIN.

Malarkey wanders back and sits next to me, leaning her weight against my legs and looking back over her shoulder at me. I reach down to absent-mindedly fuss with her ears. Another message comes through.

>>> SO YOUR BOY…HE’S OKAY?

>>> ? WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

>>> HE’S OKAY? YOU’RE OKAY? WAS HE IN DANGER?

I hesitate, my fingers hovering. I haven’t told Locuaz anything about Zenith, my chip, the Lottery…

How much do I want her to know? How much will she care to hear? I decide to fill her in without going too deeply into the part about me being the savior of humanity. It’s a wall of text and it takes her a long time to reply.

>>> SO…YOU’RE WORKING FOR THEM? she says. ZENITH?

>>> NOT EXACTLY. THEY’RE JUST LOOKING AT MY CHIP.

She doesn’t reply for a long time again. I send

>>> YOU THERE?

Finally, she replies

>>> YEAH. JUST THINKING.

>>> ? ABOUT WHAT?

Her next thoughts come slowly, one at a time, with long pauses between them.

>>> I DON’T KNOW MIJA.

>>> I JUST BEEN HANGING WITH YOTE A LOT

>>> SHE REALLY DOESN’T LIKE THEM

>>> ZENITH

>>> SHE TOLD ME A LOT OF BAD STUFF

Another extra long pause.

>>> BUT MAYBE SHE’S WRONG I DON’T KNOW

>>> JUST

>>> BE CAREFUL

I start to compose a reply, stop, delete, start again, and finally send

>>> I WILL.

Malarkey yawns, stands, stretches, and shakes herself.

I sigh. “Yeah, okay. Time to go.”

I return Malarkey to my room and head for Grike’s main square and the Zenith lab. As I pass the tunnel that leads to the harbor my stomach swoops. I check the time. 0914. I’m already late. I shush the voice telling me to blow everything off and go find Sargo, and keep going.

I bound past Helva in the waiting room, grinning, my chin high. Lysett greets me with a quizzical look. “You seem better today.”

I try to tuck away the smile and nod. “I had a good day yesterday.”

“Oh?” She trades me a small smile of her own while she fits the biochip interface cap over my head. “I’m glad to hear it.”

I hardly notice as she steps back to scan my vitals. She gestures to input something into her chip, then pulls up her stool and sits in front of me.

“Okay, Bird. Today I thought we’d try something a little different.”

I give her a cheerful shrug. “Whatever you say.”

She eyes me briefly over the top of her spex, then continues. “It’s not my intention for these sessions to become unbearable or to torture you. So I think we’ll return to the calidifier at a later date.”

I nod.

“What I’d like to try today instead, is some memory access.”

“O—kay.” I frown slightly. “Meaning what?”

“I think if we can pull up the memories that you have associated with the phenomenon—memories of what happened just before, or even during the jump, we may be able to get the part of your brain that triggers QMTP to fire.”

My stomach clenches. “So you want me to tell you what I was doing before it happened?” That I was drunk?

“Not necessarily.” My breath releases a little. “You don’t have to share it out loud with me if you’re not comfortable. But I want you to focus on the memories. It’s been shown that visualizing ourselves performing an action causes the same areas of our brain to fire as physically doing the action. So I want you to imagine yourself in the moments before you jumped. Every detail, as much as you can recall. Put yourself back in that moment. Can you do that for me?”

I swallow down a vague feeling of nausea and nod, my euphoria ebbing slightly. “I think so.”

Lysett smiles. “Great. Now, while you do that, I’m going to activate something in the biochip interface that I think might help.”

“Activate something?”

“Yes. This unit,” she adjusts the mesh cap over my head, “doesn’t only read impulses from your chip. It can also send signals. My hope is that I can stimulate some activity in your chip using electrical impulses and that this may give it the push it needs to access the QMTP module.”

I stare at her. “You’re going to…electrocute me?”

She laughs. “Not at all. It’s perfectly harmless. At the most, you may feel a slight tingling in your scalp. Similar to what you felt yesterday. Other subjects have described it as being quite pleasant.”

Other subjects. My mind spins back to my conversation with Shale. You mean the ones that died?

Calm down, says the voice in my head. You don’t have any proof that anyone died.

Lysett stands and crosses to the black box on the wall, taps on it a few times and then taps the side of her head and inputs something into her chip. She turns to me, her eyes crinkling into slits.

“Ready?”

I take a breath. Just cooperate. The sooner they get what they need, the sooner you get out of here.

I nod. “Ready.”

She flips something on the side of the box and almost immediately I feel a warm, tingling sensation creep from the nape of my neck. It spreads across the back of my head, wrapping behind my ears, up over the crown of my head until my whole scalp buzzes. Lysett was right: it’s more intense than what I felt yesterday, but it’s not unpleasant.

“Okay,” says Lysett, “now I want you to think about the first time you experienced QMTP. What were you doing in the moments before it happened? Where were you? What could you see? Hear? Smell? Put yourself in the memory.”

I close my eyes and pull the image of the Azimuth girl’s bathroom into my head. The smell of bleach and disinfectant. The cool tile beneath my knees as I knelt in front of Electra’s backpack, the rough canvas between my fingers, digging through pockets. My racing heart, panicked breathing. Electra’s voice ringing through the stall door.

“Hello? Who’s out there?”

“That’s good, Bird.” Lysett’s voice floats through the memory to me. “Keep digging.”

The burn of grog in my chest. The lightness of it in my limbs. The rush of fiery boldness that compelled me to act on this very stupid impulse.

Reckless.

Savage’s face swims before me. “I don’t think you’re stupid Alluvium, just a bit…reckless.”

His hand on mine. His beard against my cheek. I catch a breath. No. Not that. Pushing the image away, I pull the bathroom back to me—the sound of Electra’s voice, the weight of the smooth, cool stone between my fingers.

The weight of Savage’s dart between my fingers, his eyes, sharp and calculating, watching me smoke it. The smell of ash and pineapple. His chest. Tattoos.

Come on, Bird, focus.

“Good, Bird, keep going.” Lysett’s voice drifts to me again. “What thoughts were going through your head before it happened? What were you thinking?”

What was I thinking?

I force myself back to the memory of the Azimuth bathroom. What was I thinking? I was thinking, “What the hell are you doing, Bird?” I was thinking, “This is crazy.” I saw my reflection in the mirror and she didn’t look like me.

The image of my face in the mirror on the wall in the Kingfisher’s head slides in front of my eyes. What the hell are you thinking, Bird? I had asked myself that night. This is crazy. He’s missing teeth.

I become aware that I’m on my feet. Lysett’s eyes come into focus, her brow raised in alarm.

“Bird? Are you okay?”

What was I thinking?

My whole scalp is on fire. Lysett grips my arm, gently steers me back a step, and pushes me to a seat on the examination table.

“Just breathe. You’re alright.”

Am I? I glance wildly around the room, reorienting myself. “Did I…what happened? Did it work?”

She shakes her head grimly. “I’m afraid not. I think you just got a bit over-excited there. Let’s take a breather.”

She steps back over to the machine and inputs something into her chip. I drop my head and put my hands on my knees.

No matter what I do, I can’t seem to keep the specter of Savage out of my head. He’s like the dark shadow of a shark swimming back and forth below the surface of my consciousness. It isn’t that I feel bad about what happened, exactly. It’s that I feel bad that I don’t know what happened. What does that say about me? What was I thinki—

“Alright, Bird. Are you ready to try again?” Lysett’s voice is bright across the room.

I look up weakly. “Again?”

She pulls up her stool in front of me, a hand on my knee, her eyes bright. “I think we were close to something there. If it’s okay with you, I think we should try again right away. While it’s all still fresh.”

I stare back into her eyes, dizzy. “I—okay.”

She smiles and squeezes my knee. “Good girl. Why don’t we try a different memory this time? Maybe one that isn’t quite so emotionally charged? Can you think of another moment that triggered QMTP for you?”

The night Sargo and I fought on the Kingfisher. I got drunk with Goliath and Red.

No. Don’t think of the Kingfisher. Something else. Somewhere else.

The night in the Flats. When Five drugged me with Pyrewater and stole the stone.

I nod, drawing a breath. “Yes. I have one.”

“Great.” Lysett crosses back to the interface, taps a few buttons, and again I feel the warm, tingling sensation wrapping around my head. “Whenever you’re ready, Bird.”

I close my eyes, pulling myself back to the club in the Flats. The dim red light, the low-ceilinged, smoke-filled room. The dull thud of music coming through the wall. The sickly smell of spray paint and barbecue sauce.

Haar. It was the smell of haar, I realize.

Five’s blackened fingertips, holding out the pipe to me.

Savage’s blackened fingertips, brushing mine as he handed me the dart. Savage’s knife going into a man’s jaw. Into Fife’s jaw.

A tingling sensation prickles the tips of my fingers. Fife’s face begins to shift and flicker. Dots of light needle the backs of my eyes and the faint taste of metal sours my tongue. I feel a pull, deep behind my navel, as though the world has dropped out from under me.

Then Fife chokes, sputters black blood, and disappears. The scent of ash and pineapple overwhelms me.

What were you thinking?

I’m on my feet again. This time, the mesh cap is clutched in my hand, torn from my head. My scalp stings, the room sways and spins around me. Lysett grasps at my arm as I wrench myself away from her.

“Don’t touch me!” I stumble to the door.

“Bird! Bird, please wait!”

Her voice swims through my head, mingling with the other voices there, the jumbled torrent of memories and lies. Of reckless, impulsive decisions. Of grog-fueled mistakes.

I’m through the door and into the hallway, hiding my face as I stalk through the waiting room, past Helva, through the next door, onto the dizzying steps outside. I halt abruptly and collapse against the steep face of the cliff behind me, gasping short, half-sobbed breaths.

What were you thinking, Bird? What are you ever thinking?

The door opens next to me. But before Lysett can step through it I run, barreling down the steep stone stairs toward the square, far below me.

“Bird! Please come back!”

Her voice fades, lost in the noise of the city rising up to meet me, and the memories clamoring at my heels.

____________________

The door to my sleeping quarters hisses closed as I stalk past Malarkey and fling myself onto the bed. Thoughts won’t stop coming, as though the damn that was keeping it all at bay for the last few weeks has cracked and the reality of everything I’ve done is crashing through.

How many people’s lives have I wrecked or nearly wrecked? Not even including my own? I stole. I forced Sargo to leave Brume. I put him in the crosshairs of the Anonymity. I left Blenny bereft. I don’t even know what might have happened to my moms. I probably slept with a murderer.

Jesus, I could have killed Locuaz.

I curl into a ball, covering my head with my arms as if I can somehow keep it all away, block the thoughts from getting in. I feel bad for all of it. But underneath it all, I feel bad for myself. I feel bad for myself, and selfish for feeling bad for myself.

Three knocks on the door send Malarkey into a barking frenzy. I jolt upright, swiping at my face with my palms, hair sticking to my cheeks. “Hello?”

“It’s me.”

A knot of tears wells in my throat. I want to hide. Run away and bury myself somewhere deep, deep underground. But I can’t. I have to tell him the truth. I have to tell someone the truth or it’s going to eat me alive.

Drawing a deep breath and putting a hand on Malarkey to quiet her, I cross to the door and put my palm on the scanner. The door hisses open and there he is; tousle-haired, bright-eyed, wearing his old blue button down with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open, and a big, warm smile that makes my chest thump.

“Hey!” His eyes dart around my face and his smile falters. “What’s wrong?”

I think about lying. I force a casual expression. “I just came from a session with Lysett.”

His eyes darken. “What happened?”

“Nothing, I just—had a rough time.”

He steps through the door and pulls me to him in one motion, laying his lips against my forehead. Then he folds his arms around me, burying me in the scent of clean linen and soap and the achingly familiar smell of him. Of home.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

No. I really, really don’t.

I mumble into his shirt. “…yeah. Okay.”

He unfolds his arms and steps back, looking for my eyes, but I turn away and sit on the bed. Malarkey, slowly waving her tail, comes to me and puts her head in my lap. I gaze down into her big blue eyes, squeezing her ears between my hands. Sargo doesn’t follow me. He stands in front of the door and folds his arms, waiting.

“I know how to make QMTP happen,” I say, keeping my eyes on Malarkey’s. Sargo says nothing. “I know how to make it happen and I haven’t told Lysett. I lied. I lied about what I was doing when it happened because I didn’t want to tell her.”

I sense him shifting his weight.

I take a breath. I can’t not say it now, and I can’t say it if I don’t say it fast.

“I think the thing that triggers QMTP is grog. Every time it’s happened—well, every time except one—I was drinking. And…that’s been more times than you probably think. Because I’ve been drinking a lot. You were right. It’s a problem. I have a problem."

He's quiet for so long that I have to tear my eyes away from Malarkey’s and find him. His face is drawn.

“I don’t really know what to say about any of that,” he says finally.

Something inside me deflates. What did I think—that he would have some kind of answer for me? I drop my gaze and study my nails.

He crosses and sits next to me, leaning his forearms on his knees. “That’s not what I meant to say. I just…that’s a lot.”

I nod.

“I didn’t know about any of that.”

I nod again.

“What happened? With Lysett?”

"She wanted me to access memories of what happened before I blipp— before I triggered QMTP. ‘Jumped’ I guess is what she calls it. But all I can think about is grog. And when I think about grog, all I can think about is the stupid, shitty things it’s made me do. It’s like a tidal wave of…shit coming at me. And—some of the stuff I did…”

I come to the thing I can’t tell him. Again my voice fails me. So I decide to say it fast again, because if I don’t, I’ll never say it.

“The last time I got drunk, I woke up the next morning in Savage’s bed.”

He goes very still, and the air in the room becomes hard and unbreathable. I sit very still too, possibly because some small subconscious part of my body believes that as long as I keep still, whatever is about to happen will not happen.

Finally, he says, “What?”

“I was—”

“What did he do?” He pulls me around to face him, his eyes black and furious. “What did he do to you?”

“No—” I squirm my shoulder away from his hand. “He didn’t—it wasn’t like that. I…it was…” I take a breath. “I did it on purpose. It was my choice too.”

His brow furrows. “I don’t…understand.”

The air starts to creep back into my lungs. Now that I’ve said it, now that I’ve owned it, I feel an odd rush of relief. It was my choice. It was a poor choice. A drunken, terrible choice. But it was mine.

He shakes his head slightly. “Why?”

“He was keeping me prisoner on the Kingfisher and I thought maybe I could…I don't know. Get him to let me go? I mean…I was drunk. It wasn't a fully-cocked plan.”

I pause, watching him carefully. His eyes are confused and wary. I could leave it there, and I probably should. I should probably let Sargo think that the only reason I did that stupid thing was because I was trapped and didn’t know what else to do. But that wasn’t the only reason. That isn't the whole truth. And I'm tired of lying to him.

"But also…” I make myself look him in the eye as I say this, “I think part of me just…wanted to do it.”

His face collapses. He stares at me for a long moment, and then pulls away. I watch him do it—watch him stand up and turn away from me—and I feel a flicker of defiance. Why should I feel bad? It wasn’t actually any of his business. It’s not as though Sargo and I were together. It’s not as though I owed him anything.

He turns to me again, his face still crumpled. “But why, Bird?”

The defiance flickers, grows stronger. “I just told you why.”

His eyes harden. “Because you were drunk.”

I fly up from my seat to meet him at eye level. “No! Because I wanted to. Are you not listening to me?”

“He’s a monster.”

“He’s not.”

“We watched him murder people.”

“So?”

“So?” He pushes his hand through his hair, his eyes disbelieving. “So this is what you were doing while I was sitting here? Waiting for you?”

My jaw drops. “I didn’t ask you to do that! That was your choice. Why is it any of your business what I was doing? It’s not like we were together!”

“I know, Bird!” His voice rises over mine. “It just…” he catches himself, deflates a little, turns up his hands, “hurts.”

Silence descends like a guillotine, separating us. Malarkey stands up, turns an anxious circle in the corner and sits down again, thumping her tail nervously.

“I think I need to go,” says Sargo.

I open my mouth but find nothing there.

For a long time, we stare at each other, then he swallows and nods, and turns away. He walks to the door and raises his hand to the palm scanner. As the door hisses open, he pauses. He angles his head back, but doesn’t look at me as he says, “Did you like it?”

I scowl at the side of his head and let my voice be hard. “I don’t remember. I was drunk.”

He scoffs and walks out.

chapter

twenty-nine

“THAT’S IT, BIRD, GOOD!”

Lysett’s voice drifts to me through a fog of memory. In the memory, I’m sitting in the galley of the Kingfisher with Red and Goliath, polishing off Goliath’s grog and struggling to remember the sign for ‘rain’.

“You’re doing great.”

I grit my teeth. If Lysett would stop encouraging me every ten seconds, maybe I could focus. I try to ignore her and focus on Red’s hands in the memory, palms open, fingers gently cascading down either side of his face.

“Rain,” he mouths.

Oh right. I remember. In the memory, I raise my hands and mirror his motion, gently mimicking raindrops falling with my fingertips. I’m pretty drunk. He only showed me the sign five minutes ago but I’ve already forgotten.

“How were you feeling?” Lysett’s voice interrupts. “What thoughts were going through your head?”

I grimace. The image of Red disappears. If you would shut up, I snap at Lysett inside my head, maybe I could remember.

I take a noisy breath through my nose and try to concentrate.

How was I feeling? Angry. I was angry. Sargo and I had had a fight. It was our first day being escorted to Alluvium by the Kingfisher. It feels like so long ago now. We had dinner with the crew and then he started hassling me about how many drinks I’d had. We argued and he left. Just left me there with a bunch of Reckoners we didn’t know and a captain we’d seen stab someone in the jaw.

I can feel the anger rekindling like a light in my chest.

He just walked away. Just like he did in Naze. Just like he did last night.

“Good, Bird! I’m starting to see some activity here in the—”

“Jesus, would you shut up!” I wrench the biochip interface cap off my head and open my eyes.

Lysett recoils, her mouth forming a little “oh!” of surprise. I fling the cap down and stand, raking my hands through my hair, trying to scratch the tingling out of my scalp.

“I’m...sorry, Bird. I didn’t realize it was such a distraction.” Lysett stands back, two placating palms held up to face me. “Why don’t we take a break?” Her voice is gentle. Too gentle. It grates at me.

“No.” I snatch up my pack from the chair I set it down on when I came in this morning. “We’re done for today.”

Before she can protest, I sling the pack over one shoulder and stalk out of the room. The door hisses closed behind me and I pause in the dim corridor. The anger begins to recede. In its place, an overwhelming chasm of sadness opens up.

Why did I choose that memory for the session today? Because fighting with Sargo last night wasn’t enough? Watching him walk out, hurt and confused, wasn’t enough? Going to bed angry wasn’t enough? I needed to wake up and remember a whole different fight, feel like a complete asshole all over again?

I squeeze my head between my hands and close my eyes.

You need to apologize.

No way. I’m not apologizing to him when I haven’t done anything wrong.

You need to talk to him, then.

Why?

You know why. Because you hurt him.

A bubble of memory rises through my subconscious. Hide and seek. The day I caught Shale and Fife kissing in the shed. The way it made me feel. Betrayed. Stupid. Left out. It wasn’t as though I was in love with either of them. It wasn’t as though either of them owed me anything. It wasn’t about that. It just…hurt.

I open my eyes and let out an exasperated sigh that’s more like a growl. Fine. I'll talk to him.

I tap my brow to check the time.

>>> 1200

Later than I thought. I was with Lysett all morning. I haven’t seen or heard from Sargo since last night. I tap my brow again to close the clock, then tap my temple to pull up Messenger. My fingers hover in the air for a long time before I send

>>> HEY. WHERE ARE YOU?

I pull my pack onto both shoulders while I wait for his reply. A minute goes by and no reply comes. I release a huff of irritation. Hitching up my pack, I prowl into the waiting area. If he won’t reply to my message, I’ll have to talk to Helva. And I hate talking to Helva.

I square up in front of her desk. She doesn’t look up from her slate as she tersely says, “Yes?”

“Do you know where Sargo is? I haven’t seen him this morning.”

She flicks her surly eyes up to mine. Something gleeful and malevolent dances across her face. “He didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“He left.”

“Left?”

“Uh huh.”

“What do you mean ‘left’?” My voice is hollow.

“He sailed out of here early this morning on that little yellow boat.”

My chest collapses. Her cold, jealous eyes observe the rabble of emotions struggling across my face with something akin to triumph.

“I would have thought he would have told you.”

“Where did he go?”

She shrugs. “He didn’t say.”

“When will he be back?”

Irritation flickers in her eyes. “You’re his friend, aren’t you? Why don’t you tell me?”

I glare at her for a long moment, fighting the urge to climb over the desk and grab her stupid skinny neck in my hands.

“Thanks.”

Outside, panic grips me. Left? Left where? That can’t be right. He wouldn’t just leave me here. I barrel down the steps to city center two at a time, fly through the square, run blindly through the maze of tunnels to the harbor. The planks of the main dock shake beneath my pounding steps as I round the corner onto Panga’s pier and see—

Nothing. Panga is gone.

A ball of pain knots in my chest. I gasp around it, short of breath, light-headed. The ball tightens, grows, turns into tears that burn in my throat. I shed the pack from my shoulders and drop it on the dock, then sink to my knees after it.

He’s gone.

Tears sting my eyes. I heave a choked sob and let them blind me, the eerie green lake swimming behind them like a ruined painting. I didn’t think he’d leave.

My head is ringing. It’s worse than the static I used to hear when my chip was broken. A distant keening that goes through me like a dagger, like a manifestation of the keening in my heart. I squeeze my head between my hands but I can’t shut it out.

I look up. I can’t shut it out because it’s not inside my head. It’s real. It’s a sound in the world. A high-pitched howl that wanes and then rises again, metallic, grating, like a file against my mind.

It’s an alarm.

Blinking, confused, swiping tears and hair from my face with the backs of my hands, I stagger up. People are running down the dock. They bump and shove past me, distressed, not seeing me. I catch a man by the arm.

“What’s going on?”

“A raid!” He wrenches himself away and keeps running.

A raid?

Three pings fire off in my head in rapid succession and I tap my temple to open the first message. It’s from Axioma.

>>> YOU NEED TO GET TO YOUR ROOM. PLEASE GO NOW.

I swipe open the second message.

>>> I’M SENDING SOMEONE TO FIND YOU BUT PLEASE DON’T WAIT. LOCK YOURSELF IN.

A jolt against my shoulder from behind sends me stumbling forward. The man barely acknowledges me as he barges past. I don’t bother to open the third message. In a daze, I grab my pack from the dock and start to run.

I let the crowd carry me back through the tunnels. People jostle and push each other, but after the initial panic on the dock, they seem to have regained some composure. They move like a crowd who has done this before. Everyone seems to be making for the living zone in the north quadrant.

When I see my door, I fight my way sideways through the bodies, slam my hand against the scanner, and tumble through. Malarkey bounds across the room as the door hisses shut behind me, muffling the noise of the crowd outside. I spin around and examine the palm scanner on this side of the door.

Lock myself in? How?

There’s a tiny ‘X’ in the bottom right corner of the scanner screen. I touch it. I hear a beep and the palm scanner turns red. A heavy metallic thunk comes from inside the door. Exhaling a shaky breath, I turn and put my back against it.

The alarm still blares somewhere outside. Malarkey paces and whines. I sink to a seat with my back against the door and call her to me.

Suddenly, the muffled sound of the crowd behind the door changes. Someone screams. The pounding of feet intensifies. I hear shouting, and someone slams against the other side of the door behind me, rocketing my heart into my mouth and sending Malarkey into a frenzy of barking. The door shakes and the person rebounds, moving on, or swept away by the crowd. Then I hear the cause of the panic.

Gunshots.

I’ve never heard a gunshot before, but somehow I know exactly what it is. Three sharp cracks. More screams follow. More gunfire. Clutching Malarkey, I get to my feet in a low crouch and pull us away from the door. I run around to the other side of the bed and press myself flat to the floor, grabbing Malarkey by the scruff of the neck to keep her next to me. Above us is the window and I feel a sudden wash of gratitude that it’s only a hologram and not real point of ingress.

Two more shots fire outside and I flinch and cover my head with my free hand. The screaming and sound of pounding feet has stopped; I sense that the majority of the crowd must have passed. Escaped? Made it to their living quarters? Everything happened so fast. The sudden quiet on the other side of the door unnerves me. I realize I’m holding my breath and let it out in a rush. I pull my arm away and lift my head off the floor an inch, straining to hear.

Three loud knocks shake my door. Malarkey detonates with the suddenness and strength of a bomb.

“Malarkey, shh!” I grab her head between my hands, trying in vain to quiet her. Another three knocks on the door, a brief pause, then three sharp cracks. To my horror, the door emits a low clunk, and slides open. Malarkey tears herself from my grip and launches herself over the bed.

A man screams; deep voiced, rasping and metallic. Peering under the bed I can see Malarkey on the other side, pinning someone to the ground, her jaws around his arm. I use the edge of the bed to pull myself to my feet.

A second figure steps into the open doorway. A long, high-collared jacket. Heavy, knee-high boots. A grotesque, pink smudge where a face should be. A ponytail. A cane.

I stop dead, my heart freezing.

“Shale?”

chapter

thirty

IN THE HAND that isn’t holding a cane, Shale is holding a gun. As he steps across the threshold, he points it at Malarkey.

“No!”

I roll across the bed toward her as the shot goes off. By the time I knock her aside, it’s already happened. She yelps as we stagger sideways, tripping over each other, her claws catching my pants. I stumble to my knees and pull her toward me, feeling all over her fur. I find nothing. No wound, no blood.

Another shot startles her enough to wrench herself free and she bounds away, unharmed. I whip my head around. Shale stands over the other man, the gun pointed at his head. Thick, black blood creeps outward in a halo on the floor as the man’s pink mask flickers and disappears, revealing his face. His eyes stare vacantly, empty. A bullet is lodged between them.

Shale tucks the gun into his waistband, hobbles to me in three quick steps and extends a hand. I gape at the dead man on the floor. Shale wasn't aiming at Malarkey. That man was his colleague, and he shot him.

“Why—”

“He heard my name.” Shale’s voice is deep and metallic, fringed by the crisp, silvery edge of distortion. "Don't call me that again. My name is Rooster."

“I don’t—”

“Get up. We need to move fast.”

In a daze, I take his hand. Across the room, Malarkey cowers in the corner. Shale pulls me roughly to my feet.

“Follow me. A boat is waiting in the harbor.”

“...a boat…?”

Shale has turned and is hobbling toward the door, pulling the gun from his waistband again. I stumble after him, reeling, stepping over the dead man.

“What boat? What is happening?”

“We’re taking you back to Alluvium.” He flattens himself against the wall by the door and holds out a hand to push me flat to the wall next to him. I let myself be pushed, the world spinning. Shale taps behind his left ear.

“Ladybird, this is Rooster.” He listens to a radio response I can’t hear. “Copy that. I have the asset. We’re coming to you.”

He steps one foot around the doorframe, scanning the hallway, the gun raised next to his face, then beckons me forward with a quick flick of his head.

“Let’s go.”

“Wait…Shale—” I sway, pressing a palm to my forehead. “Rooster…”

“We don’t have time for questions, Bird.” He turns his face to me, the nauseating pale blur of his mask shifting like oil on water, the gun still raised in one hand. “If you don’t come with me now, you may not ever leave.”

Another gunshot echoes down the corridor to the left. He snaps his head around, points the gun and fires two quick shots, the cracks jolting through me like lightning.

“Is that what you want?” His head whips back to me. “To remain a prisoner?”

No. The answer comes quickly. There's no reason for me to stay. Sargo is gone. I never cared about helping Zenith. I don't know if I believe in what they're doing. I don’t even know if I believe that Axioma has my best interests at heart. I’m almost certain Lysett doesn’t.

The problem is, I don’t know if Shale does either.

But he is, at least, your brother.

Another crack in the distance. Shouts. I swallow a breath. I glance at Malarkey.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

On the floor almost immediately outside is another body, the face a bloodied hole, a smear of red blood and gray brain across the stone floor, one arm bent in the wrong place. It must be the numb fear in me that keeps me from throwing up. We run to the end of the hallway, Shale surprisingly fast on one and a half legs, his triple-step tap-dah-DUM keeping time with my racing heart.

We turn left at the end, down another hallway. Empty this time. Not even a body. Cracks in the distance, the alarm still shrilling somewhere overhead. The sharp, acrid smell of smoke grenades and gunpowder, unfamiliar and yet instantly recognizable. More tunnels, familiar by now; I know the way to the harbor. Shale must be following a map in his chip.

We pause at the end of the tunnel that comes out at the lake. Shale flattens me to the wall with his forearm and touches behind his ear.

“Is the harbor secure?”

A response I don’t hear, then a nod. He beckons me after him.

We’re halfway down the main pier when three Zenith guards catch up. I hear them before I see them, a thunder of footsteps pounding up behind us, and as I turn, one of them slams into me, taking me to the ground. My head bounces off the wooden planks of the dock and I see stars. The weight of a man is on top of me.

“I have Howsley!” he yells.

He rolls nimbly sideways, grabbing me by the arm and hoisting me to my feet. I stagger and almost sink to one knee but his grip is painfully tight around my bicep, keeping me upright.

“Stand up!”

The brown and white flash of Malarkey comes as if from nowhere. The force of her taking him down is enough to knock me down again too and I land on my back with his weight across my legs. He kicks and twists, flinging his arms, screaming as Malarkey pins him with one paw and sinks her teeth into his neck.

I scrabble backwards, crablike, on my hands until my legs are free from under him, then stumble to my feet. The harbor tilts and sways in my vision. To my right, Shale fights hand to hand with a second guard, swinging his cane high and bringing it down with a stomach-turning crack on top of the man’s head. His gun lays on the ground several feet away.

I see the third guard in the corner of my eye just as he lunges for me. Turning too late, I collide with him head on, his elbow catching me on the side of the face, sending me tumbling onto my back again. He scrambles after me, but I’m marginally more prepared for this attack, and I pull my knees up to my chest and kick straight out with both feet. They connect with the center of his sternum and I feel the satisfying crack of his rib through the bottom of my shoe. He staggers backward, bringing a palm flat to his chest, his face registering a moment of shock.

In that moment, I roll onto my stomach and scramble for Shale’s gun. It’s close—I snatch it up and roll onto my back again, pointing it at the man’s head with shaking hands.

It stops him short. He shows me his empty palms, out of breath, his face conciliatory. When I don’t fire, however, his eyes sharpen.

“You know how to use that?”

My answer is moot. Malarkey bounds over me from behind, her front paws landing together in the center of my chest, replaced by her back paws, which launch her toward my attacker. The wind is shoved out of me and sharp, stinging pain sears my chest as her claws find purchase in my skin. I roll onto my side as she plows into him, his frantic screams for help becoming garbled, choking nonsense as she closes her jaws around his face and tears it off. The white fur of her chest is already stained dark brown with blood.

Jesus, Malarkey. I stagger to my feet. Take it easy.

“Let’s go!” Shale barks. He holds out his hand and I remember the gun. I hand it over with trembling fingers and Shale takes off again without a word.

The boat waiting for us is a rib—much like Panga’s skiff, only bigger, heavier, faster. An inflatable pontoon with a rigid bottom, it looks like it was meant to land military personnel in heavy surf. A massive outboard motor hangs off the back, idling. I recognize Ladybird standing in the stern even though her pale face is smudged and obscured by the anonymizing mask. Her slight figure and jet black bob cut hair are a dead giveaway for the woman I hid from at Shale’s warehouse in Alluvium.

“Help me loose the lines!” Shale shouts as we draw even with the rib.

I skate to a halt and drop to a knee to untie the stern dock line while Shale handles the bow. As I do, the planks beneath me shake with thunderous footsteps.

“We need to go!” Ladybird’s voice cuts the air like steel. I glance over my shoulder. More guards are coming, running flat out down the dock. I get the line off the cleat and sling it into the rib. Malarkey scrambles in after it.

Shale shoves the bow away from the dock. “Get on!”

I steel myself with a breath, then jump, the image of Locuaz soaring off the dock in Alluvium flashing through my head as I tumble over the side of the rib and land on hands and knees. I scramble up and turn around, throwing my hand out to Shale. As his fingers close around mine, the guards reach him. One grabs him around the chest, almost wrenching his hand from mine.

“No!”

Suddenly, the thought of losing Shale is terrifying. Who else do I have left? I grab his wrist with my other hand. Two more hands reach from behind me and clamp around his forearm—Ladybird’s steely voice is close to my ear.

“Pull!”

Shale swings wildly over his shoulder with his cane as we heave, catching the man on the jaw and sending him reeling. The sudden release lurches Shale over the side of the boat, and he lands on top of me, his elbow in my ribs, chestnut hair coming loose from his ponytail, falling around my face. Ladybird leaps back to the stern, snatches up the tiller and revs the motor, and we careen away from the dock in a bank of spray.

Three skiffs are in pursuit as we blaze across the acid green lake, but their speed is no match for the rib. By the time we pop out of the narrow underground canyon into the Salt, they have fallen so far behind that I can no longer see them. The bay we dump out into is massive, with sheer, sandy cliffs rising all around us, and three enormous racing yachts anchored in the middle. The water seethes, the sky crackles with purple lightning, and the air is so full of particulate that I choke.

“Storm coming!” Ladybird yells over the combined roar of the motor and wind. “You sure you wanna do this, Rooster?”

“We don’t have a choice!” Shale yells back. “The decoy boats will draw the lightning.”

Decoy boats. So all three of those ships are Anonymity ships. Is only one meant to make it out? How many other Anonymity members are still inside the Zenith facility? How many will make it out alive?

Ladybird swings the rib up alongside the middle of the three boats. It’s at least the size of the Kingfisher, with a slick black hull that, although pockmarked with years of fiberglass repairs, looks dangerously fast. The kind of boat that probably used to race in international regattas, before those started to lead to civil unrest and outright war.

Malarkey leaps out of the rib as soon as we’re close enough and I pull myself up behind her. The deck is bare bones—I see nothing that won’t be used explicitly for sailing. Nowhere to sit. Nowhere to hide. Two helms at the stern, totally exposed to the elements. Three faceless crew members hustle from below as we board, dressed in red and black waterproof gear. They move wordlessly, quickly, hoisting the rib, pulling up the anchor and setting the sails while Ladybird takes one helm and Shale the other.

We’re underway before I’ve even gotten my bearings, and not knowing where else to go, I throw myself down on my stomach on the bow, pulling Malarkey down next to me. I wind one arm into a rope and wrap the other around her chest, burying my fingers in her fur.

The faint crack of gunshots reaches me. The three skiffs have emerged from the dark of the canyon and the decoy ships are drawing fire. We pitch crazily over a massive wave and I silently pray—actually pray—to whatever gods can still be bothered to listen, that we somehow make it through this alive.

“Hold on!” screams Ladybird. “This is gonna get wet!”

The boat is lightning fast. We are literally flying as we come out of the bay, the hull lifted out of the water on hydrofoils, the knots on the speed indicator ticking up and ticking up even when I’m sure we can’t go any faster. Rain drives against the sails with a sound like thunder. Spray and spindrift sting my face.

A torrent of water comes over the bow and hits me like a wall of stone, knocking the wind out of me, deafening me. I cling to the rope as the water sucks me toward the open stern. I feel my grip on Malarkey slipping.

“If someone goes over the side in bad weather,” says Sargo’s voice in my head, “forget it. They’re gone.”

I redouble my grip around her neck, but the realization is breaking over me that I’m not strong enough to hold her. The combined force of her weight and the surging water are tearing her away from me. There is nothing I can do to stop it.

“How long would it take them to find me out there?”

“They would never find you.”

We pitch over another wave and the force of it wrenches her from my arm. She tumbles head over tail toward the stern, a ragdoll of white fur with four legs.

“Malarkey!”

Her legs scrabble, claws useless against the slick, soaking deck. For one surreal heartbeat her eyes meet mine, white with terror, and then she disappears over the side.

“NO!”

I try to struggle to my feet, but the rope has tangled and cinched so tightly around my forearm that I can’t get loose. Helpless, I watch as her head disappears beneath the waves. When she resurfaces, she’s a speck far behind the stern. The boat is moving so fast I’m already losing sight of her.

“Shale!”

The scream shreds the inside of my throat and is immediately whipped away by the wind. He can’t hear me. I train my eyes on the spot Malarkey went under while I twist my arm in vain to free myself. Her head comes up again, tiny and helpless in the infinite blackness of the Salt. She goes under again. Desperate tears burn my eyes.

My arm jerks free. I jump to my feet, sliding sideways, and scramble to the stern.

“Shale! Stop! We have to go back!”

“We’re not going back.”

“What?!”

“She’s gone, Bird.”

Gone. The word clutches at my throat. I scan the water again, frantic sobs beginning to choke me. I can no longer see her.

Gone.

I lurch for the rail.

“Bird! What the hell are you doing?!”

Shale’s shout is harsh but distant. There is no thought in my head as I climb onto the rail, barely holding onto the rigging with numb fingers. Rain and wind lash the side of my face as I scan the seething water. Shale won’t go back for Malarkey. But if I can get to her, maybe he'll come back for me.

I close my eyes, and jump.

The sound is what I register as I hit the water. The bang of submersion, the raucous gurgling as I sink like a stone beneath the waves. The harsh gasp of resurfacing, my own breath a shock in my ears. Another bang as a wave crashes over my head. Then another, and another. There is no getting my bearings, no looking around. Every time I breathe, it seems, water fills my mouth. The surface of the Salt is spray—stinging rain and driving wind. I can’t see through it; can’t hear anything over the sound of water filling my ears.

Then I spot her. Somehow, like a miracle, in this madness, I see her. A white speck. A moment. It disappears. Resurfaces. Disappears again. I heave myself toward it. Waves come between us: mountains of steely gray water. I lose her. I keep swimming. Waves lift and carry me. They drag me under and I fight my way back to the surface.

I spot her again; closer now. I tumble head over heels and choke and cough and somehow, we come together. Somehow, I get my arms around her. I’ve swallowed so much water it’s a miracle my lungs aren’t already filled with it. Her claws tear at my thighs and shoulders as she panics and I try to hold on to her. My legs are weak. We go under the water and I struggle to come up. The next time we go under, I struggle harder, stay down longer.

We go under again, and I feel a tingling in my limbs.

I’m drowning, I think. We are both drowning. We are drowning each other.

Sparks flash in my eyes; needles of light. In my ears, the pressing silence of the underwater world gives way to the sizzle of static. My arms around Malarley prickle. Blood fizzes inside my veins. My mouth floods with the taste of metal and I hear a familiar voice, muffled, crackling, as though coming through a radio with poor reception.

"Find me, Bird."

I’m not drowning, I realize. I’m blipping.

I clutch my arms tighter around Malarkey.

Home, I think. I want to go home.

chapter

thirty-one

SHE WAS FALLING.

She is falling.

I am falling.

The world is white and everything is pain and I’m falling. The world is sharp and silver and edged like a razor blade. A trillion needles sizzle under my skin, in the backs of my eyes and deep inside my ears, like rain pelting a rooftop. The needles are in my blood; in my mouth. Metallic; acid against my teeth.

I am falling. I have always been falling. I will always be falling.

No. I’m not falling; I’m expanding. I’m shrinking. Like a cloud. A mirage. I am everywhere and nowhere. I am everything and I am nothing.

“Bird!”

Do I hear a voice, or am I speaking?

“Bird!”

I am a name. I am Bird.

“Bird, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

I have a voice. I am a word. The word crackles, reverberates; splits and multiplies. Comes up against the edges of my consciousness. Everything is the word and nothing is the word.

“Yes, I hear you.”

Yes I hear you. I hear you. Yes hear you I yes hear you yes yes I hear I you you yes I I hear I yes I hear yes you I hear yes you.

“You found me.”

“Who are you?”

Who are you you who are who you are are who you are you who are who you.

“Bird! You found me!”

The voice shrinks and grows, echoes, shifts, disappears. I am directions. Up. Down. Behind. The voice comes from all of them.

“Where are you?” I yell, and my voice is like mist.

“I’m here!” The other voice comes from everywhere. It comes from nowhere.

“Who are you?!”

“Fife!”

Fife.

Red earth. Angry sun. A desert. Children. Hard people. A trade. A need for water.

“Is this a dream?” I ask.

I hear gunshots. The crack of them, deep and disorienting, shaking me from the inside like cannon fire.

Cannon fire.

Yes, cannon fire. Not gunshots. Too big for gunshots. Cannon fire. Barks like cannon fire.

Yes, barks. Not cannon fire. Too deep for cannon fire.

Malarkey. Malarkey is barking. The sound comes from everywhere. It comes from nowhere. Somewhere, Malarkey is barking.

“Malarkey!”

My veins begin to prickle. Needles of light appear behind my eyes. The sound of Malarkey shifts and fades, phases. Fife’s voice blends with it, separating, moving.

“Bird, where are you going? Don’t leave!”

“Where’s Malarkey?”

“She’s here. She’s with me. We’re here. Come back, Bird!”

“Malarkey!”

“Don’t leave!” Fife’s voice is fading.

“MALARKEY!”

I am everywhere. I am nowhere. I am here.

I am gone.

chapter

thirty-two

I AM FALLING.

Trees. Leaves like swords. Needles. Fog. A forest. I am falling through trees. The ground is coming.

I am awake.

____________________

“Malarkey!”

The word explodes from my mouth, ejected by the brutal blow of consciousness, of hitting the ground, of waking up. Everything is pain and light, and then everything is still. Quiet, muffled birdsong and the bittersweet smell of petrichor.

I’m in the forest. Below me, needles. Not needles of light. Needles of fogwood trees. Soft. Fragrant. Damp. Above me, the dark spires of the canopy. Behind that, obscured as though by a city skyline, the sky, silver-bright with fog.

I am home.

The thought comes unbidden and without reason or grounds, but I know, somehow, that it’s right. I don’t know how I know. The smell, maybe. Damp earth, trees, and a base note of the distant Salt. The bright, silver sky and the gossamer mist winding through the forest. The chill in the air. All of these are familiar. All of these things, I know. I am in Brume. I am home.

Malarkey.

I roll onto my hands and knees. There she is. Lying on her side in the dirt. I scramble to her, reaching out a hand, but before I touch her, I know. Before I see the blood seeping from her ears and nose. Before I see the black, burned-out holes where her eyes should be. Before I feel the cold, rigid muscles beneath her fur, I know.

“Malarkey…”

A sob cracks open my ribs and the hand of death reaches inside me, and carves upon my heart the words: Malarkey is dead. Indelible. Infinite. The pain of the words turns me over in the dirt, forces my face against the damp forest floor, and wrenches a wail from deep in my gut. It twists me in half. It excoriates me.

I can’t breathe. I can’t see. I can’t stop crying.

____________________

It takes me a long time to get up.

The fog-silver sky begins to darken, and streaks of pink and gold find their way between the trees. The damp comes down, and with it, cold. I wrap my arms around myself and curl my knees into my chest and shut my eyes and keep crying because what else is there to do?

Eventually, when the light is so dim and gray that it leeches all the color from the world, I stand up. I brush the dirt and needles from my clothes and hair. I spit blood from my mouth. I wipe salt from the corners of my eyes. I shiver and ache. I dig a shallow hole with nails that bleed and sting. I bury Malarkey. I make a mound of dirt over the grave and pile stones on top of it. The grave looks small and lonely and sad, and it only makes me want to cry harder.

By the time I finish, the sky is black and the early evening stars are making way for their later-rising brothers. I walk away. I don’t stumble. I don't lurch. I don’t run or stagger. I walk quietly out of the forest. I’m tired. I’m exhausted. Walking is all I can manage.

At the edge of the forest, the ground slopes toward a familiar bay. The lights of Brume nestle amongst the blackness of the trees like tiny golden pinpricks.

I walk until I’m among the lights. Until I find my street. Until I’ve made my way up the infinite steps to my house, opened the door, and walked into the kitchen.

I’m not ready to see my moms yet, I realize, when I see them sitting at the table.

____________________

Morning brings fresh light, and with it, fresh pain. I cry in bed for a long time before I get up because Malarkey is still dead and I don’t know what else to do.

My room is unfamiliar. It feels like a place from another world. It doesn’t smell like me anymore. On the chair by the door I find clothes, and I remember that my moms had to go to work. Neither of them can afford to take the day off, even for the return of the second child they thought they had lost forever.

That’s good. Last night was too much crying. Too much talking. Mama K was too thin. Mama J was too fat. People deal with stress however they will, I suppose. They wanted to take me to the medics. They wanted to call the peace force. They wanted to feed me. When, after two hours of sobbing and questions, I told them that all I needed was a bed and to never speak to anyone ever again, they finally let me go.

I get dressed. I examine the marks that Malarkey left on my chest when she spring-boarded over me to save my life for the last time. Three claw marks, deep across my heart. They have already scarred. They are as smooth and shiny as glass and as black as burned-out stars. Was it the blip that did that?

The house is dim and cool. As I make my way to the kitchen, a litany of pings rattles through my skull. Messages from the moms. I tap my temple to open them.

>>> HI SWEETHEART. I’M SO SORRY IF THIS HAS WOKEN YOU. WE LEFT BREAKFAST IN THE KITCHEN.

>>> WE LOVE YOU.

>>> PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON’T GO ANYWHERE TODAY! PLEASE REST. WE LOVE YOU.

>>> WE’RE SORRY WE COULDN’T BE THERE. WE WILL BE HOME EARLY TO MAKE DINNER. IF YOU’RE UP TO IT.

>>> PLEASE REST. WE LOVE YOU.

They come in such quick succession that I give up trying to discern which message is from who. I swipe through them all and am about to close Messenger when I notice a notification badge for an unread message from yesterday. It’s the third message that Axioma sent as the raid was starting. I swipe it open to clear the notification dot, and my heart stops. It isn’t from Axioma.

>>> HEY BIRD. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY ANY OF THIS SO I GUESS I JUST HAVE TO SAY IT. I NEED SOME TIME TO THINK. SOME SPACE. I DON’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO. I KNOW IT ISN’T FAIR FOR ME TO BE HURT. YOU’RE RIGHT. WE WEREN’T TOGETHER. IT WASN’T ANY OF MY BUSINESS. BUT IT STILL HURTS. IT STILL MAKES ME ANGRY. ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE YOU TOLD ME…I JUST DON’T KNOW HOW TO FEEL. I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO PUT ALL OF THAT. I’M GOING TO POCOSÍN. I'M SORRY.

I stare at the wall of text until it becomes so blurred by tears that I can no longer see it. Then I bring a block of ice down hard around my heart and go into the kitchen for breakfast.

____________________

My moms told me not to go anywhere today, which feels like an invitation to defy them. Even exhausted and empty, I can’t just sit around here all day. Not with these thoughts. Not with this pain for Malarkey like a machete in my heart.

I go back into my room to find my shoes. This will be the first time I’ve worn my own shoes in months. I ran out of here barefoot the day Sargo and I fled Brume. I borrowed his shoes.

I find my shoes under my bed, a bizarre, unfamiliar artifact from a life that’s no longer mine. I pull them on. I walk out of the house.

I walk quietly, with purpose. There’s only one place I can go today. It isn’t a thought I’ve had consciously, but I’m on my way there. It wasn’t a question or a decision I made. It’s an inevitability. A choice that was made for me by unseen forces. There is only one thing I can do today. There is only one thing I know how to do today.

I arrive at Sargo’s house and find the back door open. Stepping into the kitchen, assaulted by the familiar sour smell, I’m again struck by how this place isn’t somewhere I belong anymore. It’s too different. It has become different by staying the same.

I walk through the kitchen and pad across the living room to the grog cabinet. The key is on the windowsill. I don’t bother with a mug. I just tuck the bottle under my arm. There’s a second bottle. I take that too.

A voice stops me on my way back through the kitchen.

“Not even going to pretend anymore?”

It’s Blenny. I turn without surprise. “Pretend what?”

“You used to fill them up with water when you’d been siphoning off the top.”

“You told me not to do that.”

His red, watery eyes do something that resembles twinkling. “Did I? That was astute of me.”

He’s leaning against the kitchen doorframe in a ratty bathrobe and slippers with holes in the toes. His gray hair is frizzy and limp, his unshaven jaw slack and flabby. I smell the reek of grog on him from halfway across the room.

“Have you seen my boy?” he says. “Have you seen Sargo?”

A fist clenches around my heart. I nod.

“And he’s well?”

I nod again. Blenny slips away from the wall and scuffs across the room, pulls out a chair at the kitchen table. He gestures at me to sit.

I eye him wearily. The few words I’ve already spoken have taken a penance. My bones are iron. I don’t want to talk. I want to drink and sleep. Wordlessly, I pull up a chair and sit opposite him. He reaches for the half-drunk bottle and twists off the cap.

He sips from it, wipes his mouth, and hands it across to me.

“Sometimes I feel responsible for being the one to turn you on to this stuff.” His eyes cloud with something akin to regret. “But something about your face tells me you would have found your way to it eventually.”

I sip from the bottle and say nothing.

“You always seemed so angry,” Blenny says, taking the bottle back and contemplating it before taking another sip. “Like you wanted to tear the world in half. I never could figure out why.”

“Maybe there’s nothing to figure out,” I say. “Maybe some people just are that way.”

He frowns. “You’re too young to be saying things like that.”

“And you’re too old to still be drinking this much.”

He smiles sadly. “Unfortunately, you never get too old for that.”

“So, what, you just hit rock bottom and decided to stay?" I snatch the bottle back, angry again. Angry at him for giving up on himself, angry at myself for giving in. For coming here. Angry that I didn’t even think to stop myself.

He shakes his head. “People talk about rock bottom like it only happens once. Like you either get out of it and leave forever, or it sucks you in and buries you. That's not how it works. No one stays at rock bottom. And very few people leave forever. You just keep coming back.” He sips slowly and looks at me for a long time. “Tell me: are you at rock bottom now?”

I scowl. “What makes you think that?”

“I don’t think you’d be here if you weren’t.” His eyes are gentle and I see Sargo in them. I turn away sharply.

Blenny puts the cap back on the bottle and sets it in the middle of the table. “Do you want to hear the most encouraging thing anyone ever told me, Bird?”

I give him no indication that I’ve heard him.

“The most encouraging thing anyone ever told me is that as bad as things are, they can always get worse.”

“Great.”

“It is great,” he says. “Right now, I bet you feel like things can’t get any worse. Don’t you?” He tries to catch my eye and I pointedly don’t let him. “But they can always—and I mean always—get worse. And that's good. Because it means this isn't the end. This may feel like the end. It may feel like you have nowhere to go. But you do. You always have to go somewhere. Now, I won’t feed you bullshit and tell you that the place you will go is up. You could almost certainly go down. In fact, you probably will. You will go down, and then you will go up, and then you will go down again. That’s life. But up or down, you will go somewhere.”

He lays his palms on the table and uses them to push himself to his feet, joints cracking, a small grunt escaping from somewhere deep and painful.

I still don’t look at him. “So what’s your point?”

“My point is—rock bottom is not a destination. It’s a pit stop. This isn't the end. You will have plenty more opportunities in your life. Plenty more chances to screw those opportunities up. Plenty more chances to hit rock bottom again. Plenty more chances to bounce back.”

I stand and reach for the bottles. Blenny blocks my hand with a surprisingly quick forearm. He arches his bushy gray eyebrows without humor.

“You can have one.”

____________________

I spent the afternoon mulling over Blenny’s words and wandering around Brume, trying to find a place I still fit into. Everything felt small and cramped. I have outgrown the city.

For a while, the hole in my chest was filled with grog, and I was at peace. But then, the grog leached away and it began to fill with feelings again. The feeling of Malarkey being dead. The feeling of Sargo abandoning me. The feeling of teleporting through…hell, or whatever that was—of being slivered by light into a trillion pieces, of reassembling across some other astral plane, of landing here, three thousand miles away. I don’t know exactly what that was. I only know that it felt like hell.

I floated into dinner on a warm, groggy haze. It didn’t feel good, but it felt better than feeling bad. It felt like viewing the world through a pane of glass. Everything at arms’ length, everything slightly muffled.

My moms noticed immediately, of course. I thought I’d done a fair job of cleaning up and getting rid of the smell, but I suppose you don’t go around being a mom for over twenty years without getting pretty good at spotting when your kid is hiding something.

I expected an all-out shouting match. Flat-out murder. What happened was worse. They just cried. Cried a lot and told me they were sorry. Asked questions. Got angry, yes, but mostly cried. Wanted to know where I had been. I thought about telling them everything, but it seemed like an insurmountable task, and anyway, there’s only so much a mom can take.

So I told them bits and pieces. The only time they got really angry was when I told them about jumping off Shale’s boat to rescue Malarkey.

“What were you thinking?” Mama K demanded. “You could have been killed!” Mama J put a hand on her arm. She took a breath. “For a dog? How could you be so…stupid?”

At the end of it, I don’t know if they believed anything I told them, or even understood it. Mostly, they just seemed concerned with how I was doing.

____________________

I stand in front of a nondescript door in the side of a nondescript house on a street across town from my house in the middle of the afternoon. The sun is shining and the air is cold and clear. Etched on a small metal plaque next to the door are the words Rav Parley, Therapist.

It’s been three days since I blipped into the forest near Brume and reappeared to my moms like a ghost with a half-shaved head in the middle of the night. Two days since I showed up to dinner the following night, drunk. This is the upshot of two days of arguments and crying and being told how loved I am.

A gust of wind carries the fresh, cool scent of the Salt to me. I stand with my hand raised, not knocking on the door. Consenting to therapy feels like consenting to QMTP testing. The thought of having someone poke around inside my head does not appeal, whether I’m wearing a little mesh cap and being electrocuted, or just sitting in some nice lady’s living room in Brume.

I messaged Locuaz yesterday to tell her where I am. I haven’t tried to message Sargo. He’s probably offline halfway across the Salt on his way to Pocosín anyway. Locuaz seemed to think therapy would be a good idea.

>>> THERAPY IS JUST TALKING, she wrote. YOU NEED TO DO MORE TALKING

So okay. I’ll go to therapy. Not because my moms told me to. Because Locuaz did.

Somewhere down in the harbor, a gull cries, shaking me back into my body. I steel myself and knock.

Inside, the sound of soft shoes on a wood floor tells me someone’s approaching. I pull on my bandana just as the door opens. The scent of incense wafts over me. In front of me stands a tall woman with close-cropped salt and pepper hair, fair skin, and a handsome, deeply lined face, flecked with moles. She wears a pair of spex with thick, red rims, and a corn yellow scarf is pulled across her nose and mouth and draped elegantly around her shoulders.

She smiles behind the scarf—I can tell by the kind wrinkles in the corners of her eyes.

“Hello Bird,” she says. “Please, come in. It sounds like we have a lot of work to do.”

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Rock bottom is just a pitstop.

More down on her luck than she’s ever been, Bird finds herself turning to grog to deal with her problems.

As she sinks further and further into a black hole of despair, she strays dangerously close to the edge of reason.

Then a close call forces Bird to re-evaluate her choices, and she starts down a road of redemption that allows her to gain control of her mind and turn her greatest weakness into a superpower.

With her newfound abilities, Bird is tempted down a dark path. But when new information comes to light about Zenith, she realizes she must stand up and fight for the very soul of humanity.

Will she use her superpower for good or evil?

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playlist

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the songs that were in my head while I was writing this series.

acknowledgments

As an indie author working primarily on my own, I don’t have a big team to thank. However, there are a few people who have been incredibly supportive throughout this process, and without whom, this book would not be what it is.

In no particular order, those people are

Sam Stokes for ARC reads, reviews, and general unbridled enthusiasm

Tara Brodbeck for beta reads and writing feedback

Trevor Hope for steering the boat while I’m writing and making sure we don’t sink

Aloy McGee for being the world’s most legendary dog (who so far, has not fallen into the ocean, thank God or whoever.)

about the author

🪶⚓ PART-TIME AUTHOR. FULL-TIME PIRATE.

HI! I'M LIZ. I'm a freelance writer, indie author, and full-time live-aboard sailor. I’m currently sailing around the world with my boyfriend and my dog, turning my real-life adventures into YA Sci-Fi and Fantasy books.

I love incorporating the incredible experiences, beautiful places, and fascinating people I encounter on my travels into my work. Many parts of the world are underrepresented in fiction, particularly speculative fiction, and I feel grateful to be able to explore them, both physically and in writing. In addition to exploring the world, I like to explore themes surrounding mental health, addiction, technology and climate change.

When I'm not penning YA novels about the impending apocalypse, I work as a fully remote freelance content writer specializing in articles about code, music theory, and off-grid living. On the rare occasion I'm not writing, you can find me swimming, hiking, telling my dog I love her for the bazillionth time today, or watching Taskmaster.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Trigger Warning

Sand

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

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About the Author