The Panagea Tales Box Set

by McKenzie Austin

  Bermuda stared at the liquor bottles on the table, posturing. “Maybe.” She frowned, feeling a bubbling pool of embarrassment in her gut. She did not wish to remain the same fragile person she was when she operated in the shadows of the guilt she felt after Ty’s death. But old habits died hard. “I’ll come back. I just ... need some air.”

  As Bermuda ascended the stairs toward the main deck, she heard the others chastising Penn for his word choice. She felt too fatigued to care. With the sound of the airship’s propellers helping to drown out their voices, Bermuda crossed over the deck, leaning her elbows on the railing.

  The end of her excursion brought a cool breeze with it. Oxygen-rich. The air even tasted healthy. It soothed her aching bones. Knowing it was a byproduct of the gods, however ... Bermuda dug her fingers into the unforgiving metal she supported herself on. It was a mixed bag.

  The others were trying to help. That much she knew. Bermuda swept her organic hand through her hair as she stared out at the treetops of Northwestern. They covered everything. When once the land was dominated by manmade structures, nature decimated it all in a fraction of the time it had taken for the buildings to be made.

  She wished the landscape of her mental interior could undergo as efficient of a change ... but no matter how hard she tried to bury Kazuaki Hidataka, her anger over his death resurrected him in her mind. Her heart. His immortality drained from him before Mimir stole him away. But he remained immortal in her.

  Avenging him would quiet the ghost, she decided. Or her own, incessant need. She wasn’t sure which it was that pushed her to continue, but Bermuda knew she couldn’t stop. Not until she found Mimir. Not until she slaughtered Nordjan of Northern, for freeing the pest from his well.

  The skin on the back of her neck prickled under the feeling of watchful eyes. Bermuda spun, expecting to see if one of the crew had come to fetch her. Her heart froze when she laid eyes on the woman before her.

  “Havidite,” Bermuda hissed, reaching for the katar strapped to her back. She didn’t have the energy to pull it from its sheath, but she made no move to drop her arm. “What the feck are you doing here?”

  The goddess’s head tilted to the side. Golden light from one of the ship’s exterior lanterns reflected over her structured jaw. “It seems I drew the short straw. I have the unenviable task of convincing you to leave.” Though visions of resentment lived in her face at having to say it, Havidite added, “I hope we can reach an agreement of sorts.”

  Bermuda drew her shoulders back. She planted her feet into the floorboards, trying to appear stronger than she felt. “You know why I’m here. Use your abilities to help me find Mimir, and I’ll leave.”

  Gray wings tucked behind the goddess’s back as she adopted a smug look. “We’ve said it countless times during your reign of terror. Open your ears. We can’t find him. He is exiled. We have no desire to access him on the channel, and he hasn’t utilized it to contact us, either.” Havidite’s chin rose as she cast a downward glare. “Why would he? I know some of the others fear he might discover the location of their precious humans, but they are blinded by the care men imagined them with. Mimir knows the gods hate him for his betrayal. He doesn’t want to be found.”

  Bermuda scoffed, her arm muscles quivering. “That’s bad news for you, isn’t it?”

  A heat flushed through Havidite’s body as she stood her ground. “Do you intend to slay us until you get what you want? To what end, Steel Serpent?”

  “Funny,” Bermuda smirked. “I think I asked you the same question last year.”

  With a huff, Havidite’s tone deepened. “We did what we did to save Panagea. You destroyed her. Depleted her of resources with overpopulation. You made us to care about her. Do not stand there in disbelief because we did what we were fashioned to do.”

  “Good thing you’ve got wings,” Bermuda spat, her hand still fixed over the katar’s handle. “It’ll make the fall less painful when you tumble off that pedestal you put yourself on.” Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You know damn well the gods slaughtered all those men because they were pissed about being replaced by machines.”

  The goddess sneered. “Driving home the truth that no one should ever betray the gods was merely a benefit. Nobody turns their back on us and lives to tell the tale.”

  “Yeah?” Bermuda’s brows rose. “Mimir seems to have gotten away with it.”

  Havidite’s lips curled back as her fingernails bit into her palms. Summoning a carefully controlled tone, she redirected the conversation. “Mimir took something from you. Surely, you cannot punish the deities as a whole for the crimes of one god.”

  “Can’t I?” Bermuda laughed, the sound depraved and manic. “The gods annihilated millions of lives for the sins of a few. A few that were dead hundreds of years ago, mind you.” Though her arms remained too weak to threaten the goddess with her enchanted blade, the sadistic smile that spread over her lips appeared to be enough of a silent threat on its own. “I’m not going anywhere. Not until I get what I want.”

  Nostrils flared on the goddess’s face. She surveyed Bermuda from a distance, her expression unimpressed. The mortal could not hide her battle scars. The corrosive aftermath of her rage. “The only thing you’ll find here is your death. Maybe not now. But soon.”

  “That may be so,” Bermuda breathed, her words hoarse as they left her throat, “but I’ll take as many of you with me as I can before that happens.”

  Sensing no ability to appease the wild thoughts of the Steel Serpent, Havidite crossed her arms. “Death is upon you. I can smell it. I will simply tell the others to remain in hiding. We’ll wait it out.”

  “Hide,” Bermuda challenged. “I’ll find you.”

  With a sigh, the goddess stretched her wings. With the elegance and grace of any ageless, revered creature, she swept herself away. Several feathers settled onto the floor. That was all that remained of her presence.

  Bermuda dropped her arm. The blood was slow to return to her fingertips. Havidite’s appearance rebirthed the demon in her. The nerve of the goddess, to step foot on her airship. Boiling over with rage, Bermuda headed for the dining room once more, bursting through the doors.

  “Quartermaster!” Brack stretched out his arms, welcoming her return. He reached for a glass and held it up. “Came back for that swig, aye?”

  “Havidite appeared to me on deck.” Bermuda silenced his gesture with her cutthroat announcement. She lifted a finger, pointing to Brack. “Meet me in my room. Bring the stims. We’re going headhunting before they can go into hiding.”

  It was a lot to absorb, in a small amount of time. Brack cocked his head to the side, shrugging his shoulders. “Come on, love—Havidite or no Havidite, I mean, she can’t even feckin’ hurt us. Let’s take a day or two and—”

  “Belay that!” Bermuda swept her arm out, cutting him off. “My room. Now.”

  Brack watched as Bermuda made her exit. His shoulders dropped as he dragged his hands through his hair, stopping at the back of his head to squeeze his frustration into his scalp. “I think we’re losing her, mates.”

  Rennington stood, shaking his head. “Feckin’ Havidite.” He glanced at his comrade, uneasy. “Quartermaster’s barely recovered, Brack. She can’t go back out there.”

  Staring at the wall ahead, Brack rubbed his hands over his face. “Yeah, yeah ... I didn’t want it to come to this, but ...” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Ready the ship, mates. I’ll go have a talk with her.”

  Motivation and anger carried Bermuda’s feet to her room with haste. Shaking, frantic hands stuffed weapons into an open bag. Hand-made grenades. Medical supplies. Purified water. Humans. Gods. She didn’t care who felt the brunt of her fury. When the bag was full, she closed it and threw it over her shoulder.

  The weight of it pulled her down. Bermuda reached a hand out, steadying herself on a wall. She felt her heart protesting her movements. Each beat brought a pulsing stab with it. The woman choked it down when she saw Brack enter h
er chambers.

  “Rabbit,” she panted, extending a palm. Bermuda stifled the puncture of regret for losing her temper on him in the dining hall, though it clawed at her. “The stimulants. Please.”

  Brack’s silhouette lingered in the open door. He pressed his hands against the frame, leaning in. “Come on, love. Don’t do this. You’re fallin’ to pieces on us.”

  “Rabbit,” she breathed, the bones in her chest visible over her seemingly weightless body, “do not test me. I need to do this.”

  “Why?” The man shook his head, trying to appear jovial, but failing. “He’s gone. I miss him too. I do. But killing them, the gods ... even if you find Mimir ...” Brack shrugged. “It ain’t gonna bring him back.”

  Bermuda’s eyes shone in the small pinhole of light leaking through the open door. Glassed over, she squeezed her palm into a fist. “He is gone, Brack. I know it. And someone needs to suffer for it.”

  The man hung his head, his jaw set. He returned his focus to her, wearing a gentle tone. “The only one here suffering, love ... is you. And by extension, us.”

  Her fingers twitched. A compulsion drove her arm up, where she grabbed a fistful of her hair. Her mouth felt dry. Her throat, sore. Beads of sweat formed around the skin of her forehead as she held out her hand, determined. “I’m going in, Brack. There’s nothing you can say to stop me. Hand me the stim.”

  He stared at her open, waiting palm. A bleak symbol of an irreversible rage. With slumping shoulders, he reached into his pocket and placed a syringe in her hand.

  Without delay, Bermuda bit the cap off and jammed it into her flesh. She needed it. The energy that came with it. The ability to convince her muscles to continue. They had minds of their own these days, disregarding more and more commands from her brain.

  She waited for the comforting rush to flood her. It normally took seconds.

  It did not come. Not this time.

  Brack flashed the woman a sad smile as he watched her head bob loosely on her neck. “Sorry, love. Had to be done.”

  Vision faded in and out. Bermuda staggered back, the pack of supplies sliding off her shoulder and onto the floor. She reached out for the wall once more in an attempt to steady her wobbling legs. “What ... the feck d-did you ...” The words slurred into one another as they slipped off her weakening tongue.

  Reaching out, Brack caught her before she fell. He felt the tension in her muscles, from her attempt to push him away. Her efforts failed. Bermuda had nothing left in her to achieve such a feat. With the sedative coursing through her veins, and her fragile body too weak to fight its effects, she slipped into an unconscious state in the Rabbit’s arms.

  “No hard feelings,” he muttered to the lifeless woman as he lifted her body up and over his shoulder. He carried her over to Kazuaki’s hammock, gently placing her down into the netting that cradled her on all sides.

  Her body rocked back and forth from the movement as Brack pulled up a chair and sat beside her. It would be a long trek to the snowy mountains of Northern. He wanted to be sure Bermuda did not asphyxiate on any vomit during the ride if her body gave out faster than he thought.

  Brack ‘The Rabbit’ Joney felt no eagerness at returning to his homeland. Thinking about it caused him to absently pick at the skin around his cuticles. Almost twenty years separated himself from that place. But only two scenarios could bring the quartermaster back from the edge she’d pushed herself to. They could drag her, kicking and screaming, to Umbriel, hoping that the Earth Mother still resided in Southeastern with Nicholai.

  Or ...

  They could bring her to the mountains. His old stomping grounds. It was closer. They might even get her there before she came to. It would mean less resistance. Less time for her pride to demolish the lifeline they offered her.

  Yes. It made the most sense. They’d deliver her straight into the capable hands of the monks of Montezu.

  Brack rested his head on the unforgiving material of the chair’s hard back. His eyes counted the imperfections in the ceiling above him. The raspy sounds of Bermuda’s breathing killed the silence. It gutted him.

  Accepting death was never an easy feat. Rennington knew it. Granite knew it. Penn knew it. The whole crew acquainted themselves with it time and time again. Bermuda remained the only one who, despite her experience, still struggled to come to terms with its permanency.

  But she needed to. The sooner she accepted it, the better off she’d be. Brack closed his eyes and sighed once more into the evening. It was a hard fact for him to accept, as well. Like everyone else, he needed to make peace with it, because it wasn’t changing.

  Whether he or anyone else liked it or not, Captain Kazuaki Hidataka, the once immortal legend of Panagea, was likely dead and gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The ocean must have missed him. He enjoyed the sea as well, present conditions aside. Saltwater ran through his veins since the day he was born. But the taste of land had been fresh and savory. New. Exciting.

  Above everything else, it had been short. Fate returned him once again to a boat.

  As Kazuaki laid with his back against the cockboat’s floorboards, his legs dangling over the edge of the vessel, bent at the knees. He stared at the pale sky above. The clouds were welcomed things. For the last year that he had spent drifting at sea in the small boat Mimir stole from off the coast of Southern, the captain yearned for clouds. They helped to block the relentless rays of the sun.

  Only when he and Jernal worked together to fashion the tarp above them from the box of supplies, did either mortal have any relief from the heat. Kazuaki was intimately familiar with the contents of the supply boats stored away for Time Fathers in the event they needed to make an emergency ocean departure. It seemed like only yesterday that he had plucked Nicholai from the edge of his ship, and dragged the knowledge of the hidden cockboats out of him. Like only yesterday, that they stole all the supplies from Darjal Wessex.

  Time moved differently as a mortal. It seemed far more fleeting. Kazuaki forgot what it was like. When Mimir took ownership of his soul and hurled Jernal and him out of their places in Seacaster after the battle with the gods, it took his brain a moment to catch up with his circumstances. Everything had happened so fast.

  In one moment, he was eviscerating deities. In the second after, he belonged to one.

  And in the final moments, the ones he found himself in now, he floated on a stolen cockboat that had run out of food and water two weeks ago, in the middle of the ocean, sandwiched between the god who fooled him, and a man he once considered an enemy.

  Kazuaki wondered if Bartholomew noticed the boat was missing. He wondered about the state of Panagea. If Nicholai, Umbriel, and the crew survived.

  Most of all, he wondered about Bermuda.

  Wondering was about all one could do with the endless hours spent in a boat that had no exit. He tried to escape many times. Those attempts had occupied his efforts for several weeks before he realized it was futile. Water choked his lungs if he spent too much time beneath the waves. It wasn’t like the time when death could not touch him. Kazuaki reacquainted himself quickly with how fragile human life was. Swimming to freedom was impossible.

  Even if it were an achievable feat, Mimir would never let him get far. In the beginning, Kazuaki vividly recalled each failed attempt to escape. He’d hurl his battered, tired body back into the cockboat, panting from lack of oxygen—he’d look up at Mimir through strands of black hair that were matted to his face from the water. The salt would sting his eye, but what burned the most was the smug look of satisfaction on the lesser god’s face after each unsuccessful endeavor.

  Mimir would have been content to let Kazuaki drown in the ocean. It would have been easier to contain him that way. To keep him. Mimir wanted both men dead, that they would stay with him for all of eternity. But the lesser god did not mind drifting on an endless ocean. He knew if he bided his time long enough, death would come for them both. He enjoyed the company, in the meanti
me.

  “Three-hundred and twenty-two days,” Jernal muttered, scratching another line into the cockboat’s soft interior with a knife from the supply kit. “Forty-three days until our anniversary, Captain.”

  Kazuaki frowned as the sun pierced its way through a cloud, throwing an unpleasant sheet of warmth over his exposed shins. He considered sitting up to roll the cloth of his pants back down for protection, but the effort required too much of him. The captain rolled his head to the side, his eye falling on the steel katar beside him. He grabbed the handle and tilted it, to see his reflection in the polished metal. A grim, malnourished man stared back at him, barely unrecognizable from the person he used to be. “I hope you’re not expecting a gift,” he murmured to the commander.

  Jernal closed the blade of the knife back into the handle and placed it in his pocket. He stared at his collection of marks. One for each day they drifted at sea: the only place Mimir could contain them both and keep himself far from the angry hands of vengeful gods. With a grunt, the commander flopped back against the vessel’s side. “I gave up hope for such things long ago.”

  His voice had grown weaker over the last several days. Kazuaki detected a dryness in Jernal’s throat that matched his own. The captain thought for sure their end had come weeks ago when they ran out of food and water. Included in the supply kit was a simple water purification device, but it did not work on seawater. The men needed to wait for rain.

  In a rare moment of desperation, Kazuaki disgusted himself by praying to other lesser gods for assistance. He thought, perhaps, if he could summon one to his location, they might strike Mimir down for his misdeeds, returning freedom to the captain and commander. But gods did not come for Kazuaki Hidataka. Not when he had murdered a slew of them in Seacaster last year.

  Whether they thought his prayer was a trap for him to kill them as soon as they appeared, or they simply did not care to assist him in his plight, he did not know for sure. The only thing Kazuaki knew was they weren’t coming.