Sibbi tilted her head to the side. Her wide brown eyes were intelligent and inquisitive. There was something in them that Yat barely recognised, because it had been so long: compassion, perhaps. She’d not expected it from the woman at all. It made her mad, but she didn’t know why.
“So,” she said, “we know what that means. Rough night?”
All her fear had transmuted into rage, and it was boiling up inside her. It felt good, in a way that fear didn’t: it was a rush, to spit fire instead of burning.
“You know the answer to that, bitch,” somebody said, “your friend sent a man to shoot me. Your little pocket policeman had me shot in the fucking head because you two couldn’t be bothered being discreet. Save me the whole act: shut up or kill me. I get the feeling it won’t stick.”
She realised, with horror, that the words were coming from her; angry, reckless words that spilled out of her like pus from an open wound. To her surprise, Sibbi laughed again. The sound wasn’t charming any more: it was infuriating. Jad ah lah child, calm calm, stop your fussing.
“Well,” she said, “it seems like you’ve figured it all out. I definitely got where I am today by being that very sloppy. I’ll save you the speech, since you’ve so cleverly figured it all out.”
She took something out of her pocket and turned it over a few times, and Yat realised it was her father’s engraved hip flask.
“Steel,” she said. “Very illegal. Pity: it’s useful stuff. It’s everywhere, of course. They only arrest you for it if they don’t like you.” She held it up to the light. “Fea the Cat, stealing from the gods? They hang thieves, you know.” She sniffed it. “Stinks of kiro too. You keep your roaches in the same pocket? I thought cops were smarter than that.”
She twirled it around between her thumb and forefinger, just once.
“What’s your point?” said Yat. “You trying to threaten me?”
“My point,” said Sibbi, “is that this little piece of metal is illegal on illegal on illegal. And yet, you keep it. You carry a thief in your pocket: in front of your heart, next to your old dog-ends. It sounds like you’ve got more compassion for a storybook thief than a real one.”
“He had a reason,” said Yat.
“Oh a reason,” said Sibbi. “Well that’s different. No criminal ever had a reason. They did a bad thing, and they went off to suffer for it. They broke the law, and the law is never malicious, or clumsy, or just plain wrong. You don’t break the law, do you constable? You’re a good cop, after all: that’s what everybody says. Nice engraving, by the way—must’ve cost a mint.”
She sounded—angry? No, less than that. Resigned. There was something about the woman that was tough as old boots, but she seemed, just for a moment, small and tired. She rolled the cheroot around between her thumb and forefinger, and stared at it. After some time, she looked up at Yat.
“I’m going to let you out of that chair,” she said, “as a show of good faith. I want you to know that my men had nothing to do with what happened to you—I’ve got enough problems right now without adding more. You got yourself caught up in something, and I don’t have all the answers about what.”
“Not for lack of trying,” said Ajat.
“Aye,” said Sibbi, “we’re getting there. Or we were, until last night. Now we’re sifting through the rubble and trying to figure out where up is and where down is. The last thing we need is some tzapa cop blundering into it, which is why you’re currently tied up until we can figure out where we stand with you. So, before I let you up out of that chair, I need you to tell me we’re on the same side.”
They weren’t on the same side. They weren’t even on the same continent, as far as Yat was concerned. The woman had attacked her, tied her up, demeaned her, taken her gods-damned flask. Still, being tied up was worse than not being tied up. If this mad woman was willing to help her out, she wasn’t going to stop her. She swallowed her pride, and nodded.
“We’re on the same side,” she said. She hoped she sounded like she believed it. It was apparently good enough, because the vines holding her down wilted, and fell away.
“Now,” said Ajat, “let’s talk ab—”
Yat was already out the door, pounding along a hallway somewhere in the belly of the ship. The whole hall rocked back and forth, and she stumbled, barely managed to stay on her feet, kept running, shoved passed a sailor who seemed just as confused as she was, shoved open a door that led out into the bar (empty, empty, why? No time) out through the main doors onto the deck and—
The ocean stretched out in all directions. It was evening. Somewhere in the distance, miles and miles away, she saw the shape of the Hainak lighthouse, with the city laid out behind it. The occasional firework went off: less than Yat expected at this time of year, but you couldn’t stop some people from having a good time. She stared over the side, and the ocean stared back.
“It’s a boat,” said Sibbi. “They do that.”
Yat hadn’t heard her approach. The woman wasn’t even out of breath. A few men working on-decks stopped to peer at them, but Tiryaźan glared at them and they returned to their work.
“B-but,” said Yat, “the Port Authority, the garrison at the lighthouse. Your ship is grounded and every cop in the city knows it. You shouldn’t be able to so much as change the sails without getting boarded.”
Sibbi shrugged. Ajat strolled up behind her; she cleaned under her nails with a curved knife.
“I’d be a poor smuggler if I couldn’t slip a blockade,” said Sibbi, “and a worse one if I told the how-of-it to a cop. We’ll take you home, but I’ve got some things I need to do first, and I’d like to have a talk with you about your uh, situation.”
“So I’m a prisoner then,” said Yat. “I’m not in chains, but I’m a prisoner.”
Sibbi laughed: that warm, maddening chuckle. “What’s new?” she said. Something pushed against Yat’s arm, and she realised that Sibbi was handing her back the flask. She took it, and rubbed her thumb on the engraving. It calmed her, a little. She could feel the golden threads all over the strange ship tugged at her. The sea was cold: not empty, but it had a very different energy that set her teeth on edge.
“Come inside,” said Sibbi, “We have a lot to talk about. How do you take your tea?”
It was a lot to take in, but Yat was done running. She was done being treated like a child. She was done being taken for a ride. Something was going on here, and this woman knew something. Data was data.
“Black, two sugars,” she said. Sibbi turned, and walked back inside. Yat leaned against the side of the ship, and stared out at Hainak: so close, so impossibly far away. The air was warm, and pleasant. She stayed there for a few minutes, listening to the cries of gulls.
Ajat came out and put a hand on her shoulder: much more gentle than Yat had expected.
“Tea’s getting cold,” she said. She smelled good: oak, and citrus. Yat wanted to go with her; she turned and followed—at last—on her own terms.
The bar was different in the soft evening light. It was empty except for Sibbi, Ajat, and a beat-up porcelain tea set. It wasn’t a large room. The plants on the walls seemed to turn towards them: the whole ship was alive, and connected.
The tea was very good. It was smokey, and fragrant—jasmine, liquorice, some gentler notes she didn’t recognise. The cups were surprisingly well-made: they looked like some sort of proprietary shellac, with gold filigree. After taking a swig, Yat opened her flask and set it on the table. Then, without breaking eye contact, she picked up the teacup and carefully poured its entire contents into the flask. It took about thirty whole seconds, and during that time nobody spoke. The only sound was the creaking of the ship, and the gentle murmur of tea flowing into the flask. If the breach of tea-protocol upset the pirates, they didn’t let it show. She put the cup down then, as she moved to close the flask, it almost slipped from her grasp and fell onto the
table. She caught it just in time.
“Tremors,” said Sibbi. “They’ll get worse. When did you last smoke?”
“I don’t—”
“Girl, I’ve seen what you keep in your pockets. Don’t lie to me. Everybody on my ship needs a clear head, whether they’re working for me or not; I’m not having you fall overboard because you thought the moon was singing to you. Besides, you don’t need it: you’re of the weave, now. You want to reach out, all you need to do is reach out. You need a thought, you ask. You need a smoke? Tough.”
Yat grumbled a wordless response, which seemed enough for Sibbi.
“Now,” she said, “there’s something else we need to talk about: blanks. Do you know what a blank is?”
“A blank,” said Sibbi, charging ahead without waiting for an answer, “is a criminal or a homeless man or an academic who asks the wrong questions, so they strap him down on a gurney and feed him a special drink, and then his mind drips out his ears. At first it was a special punishment, only for the worst. These days? Well, factories need workers, labs need people to work with dangerous chemicals, armies need soldiers who aren’t smart enough to run but are juuuust smart enough to take orders. They’ll take anyone who won’t be missed, and there’s a lot of people in Hainak who won’t be missed or, at the very least, won’t be missed by the sort of person with the power to do anything about it. You knew this, of course: I’m telling you because you managed to convince yourself that you didn’t. Part of being alive is learning inconvenient things, then un-learning them if they hurt too much.”
It was impossible. If it were true, somebody would’ve told her about it. She would know. The government or the police or some brave hero wouldn’t let it happen; the Gods would call down lightning or locusts; the staff would burn the factories to the ground. Blanks were criminals who did inexcusable crimes, who were remade for service to the state: rapists and killers and—
There were a lot of blanks—she knew that. Thousands of them, tens of thousands. Hainak had its troubles, but it was hard to believe even Hainak had that many evil men. Blanks died a lot: they blundered into the wrong alley while carrying something nice; somebody forgot to tell them to stop working and they starved; they just plain stopped working sometimes, and had to be decommissioned. There were always blanks, though: the white blood cells of the city, hauling things to-and-fro. How many murderers could there be? She’d assumed Kiada had been taken because she’d stolen something very valuable: gotten overconfident, gone into some rich man’s house and taken something neither of them could afford. They didn’t just blank people for nothing. They didn’t do it because they needed a set of arms to push a broom.
She groaned. They didn’t just carry things: there were blank soldiers, blank miners, blank prostitutes. Wealthy alchemical botanists liked to use them as test subjects or walking advertisements: stuff you couldn’t legally do to a human, but blanks weren’t human. She and Sen had once worked as security for an art exhibit, where the artist used blanks as canvases: living tattoos, extra limbs, spines and heads twisted all the way around, dead-eyed blanks fused entirely to the wall with a flesh-and-cellulose mesh. The audience had walked amongst them, drinking date-plum wine and tittering to each other. Nobody batted an eyelid: it was understood that they must’ve been evil men, and it was almost more honour than they deserved to make them into something beautiful. Hells, she heard they used them in the medical college to teach anatomy: specially-engineered ones with open chest cavities and very short lifespans. The blanks’ feelings hadn’t even been a concern: they’d once been bad men, then they’d stopped being men entirely.
Everybody knew that blanks deserved to be blank, but nobody had ever stopped to ask how they knew it. It was just one of those truths you didn’t question.
When Yat spoke next, she was very quiet. “Why are you telling me this?” she said. She wanted to sleep again. She was still half-empty from the fight in the park, and this was too much to take in.
“Because,” said Sibbi, “I want you to see what the city thinks of people like me—people like us.”
“Us?” spat Yat, “what do you mean us?”
As the words left her mouth, she saw it: the way Sibbi and Ajat stood with each other, the way they touched so casually, the way they—
“But—you, you and Wajet—” she said. She knew it wasn’t an argument: knew her own heart wasn’t as clear-cut as that.
Sibbi snorted. “That old goat,” she said, “wouldn’t have any interest in me. The man’s a force of nature: he came here from Ahwara and they told him he needed to change his ways, so he brought his husband to church and nobody even tried to stop him. He’s crazy, you know? I’d rather have him on my side than a thousand good cops. That’s why he’s never got beyond sergeant, but I don’t think he cares. He’s our eye in the force: looks after certain uh, vulnerable officers. Gods know, the police won’t. He brings them to me, in time. I told him to find you, but, well, something changed. He and I needed to speak privately: you’ll forgive the little ruse. The crew didn’t know what to do about it so I let Ajat entertain you while Wajet and I hashed things out.”
Something changed. Between the Station and the ship, he’d been warming her up, but it hadn’t taken. She’d been too quiet, or pushed back too much, and they’d held off on bringing her aboard until they could figure out what to do. Another thought dawned on her. “Does he— is he—do we all have magic powers?”
It was Ajat’s turn to laugh. Yat was getting sick of the condescension. “No girl,” she said, “we don’t.” She paused. “Well,” she said, “it’s complicated. You’ve got to die poorly to get yourself wrapped in gold, and this city is not kind to us; this world is not kind to us. One shouldn’t lead to the other, but it too often does. It doesn’t happen to the powerful nearly so often, which is why folk don’t talk about it—if it doesn’t happen to the powerful, it doesn’t exist to them, and they get to choose what the world is about. They die soft, and old. The gods need soldiers, and they are not fit for duty. Folk like us? We die often, in the quiet places, and nobody talks about it because we don’t matter to them. We barely even count as people. We only matter when we’re keeping their factories running: when we’re filling their pockets. If we stop working for them, we cease to exist.”
It was true. It wasn’t often direct like it used to be, but that didn’t make things square. Kiada—scruffy little fire-hair Kiada who knew the filthiest jokes, and sung arias on the rooftops—had gone out one night and never came back. She’d seen Kia that one time again: glassy eyes, pushing a broom. Never mentioned it to the other kids, grieved quietly as though Kia were dead. What if—
So many what-ifs. So many things she’d overlooked as Just The Way Things Are. She realised that her own threads were febrile, jittery, pale—could the women see it? But of course they could. She’d seen Varazzo’s distress, seen that vile little seed beneath it. Just how much could they see? How well could somebody read the threads?
She gripped her flask, and drank the dregs of cold tea. She did not speak, and the two women across from her refused to fill the silence. They sat and listened to the outside-sounds: the creaking of wood, the stamping of boots, the cries of gulls. Years could’ve passed before she spoke again.
“I need some time,” she said, “to—think.”
“Take it,” said Sibbi. “You’re welcome anywhere on the ship. Ask my people any questions: nothing is off limits.”
“Can I go home?”
Sibyl pursed her lips, then shook her head.
“Home is off limits,” she said. “I’m afraid we have places to be.”
She’d been so caught up in the conversation, she hadn’t been paying attention to the threads. There were so many in here: the whole ship hummed with power, and it was hard to make out where one thing ended and another began. She hadn’t noticed the large man lurking in the hallway. Sibbi must’ve seen her looking, someho
w: seen it in her eyes, or maybe in the twisting weave of her threads.
“Wajet,” she said, “come in.”
The door opened and—
The threads in Yat’s body seemed to move on their own, reacting to a threat: they grabbed at the plants, and the ants, and the wooden walls and the hemp fibres in the rigging. She’d been told the man was innocent, but something inside her wasn’t ready to believe it. She could feel her skin going red, feel her heart beating faster, feel herself turning force towards him to smash into him and break something vital away and—
Sibbi grabbed her, and their threads came together. Sibbi’s power was immense, beyond understanding; it was like emptying a cup of water into the ocean. Yat barely even existed. Her mind screamed at her, but she wasn’t controlling the flow of power any more. Sibbi took the threads, and twisted them into a rough braid and turned it towards a planter in the corner.
The mushroom in it exploded outwards at the same time the plants around it withered. It was two feet high, then four, then seven: pushed up against the roof. And then, it withered. The threads left it, flowing back where they came from. Sibbi was controlling the flow, and the dead plants stuttered back to life.
It was done. If not for the gigantic dead mushroom in the corner of the room, nobody would’ve been any the wiser. Sibbi breathed out loudly, then swore in Dawgae. Wajet stood in the doorway, looking a little baffled. It wasn’t an expression he seemed accustomed to wearing.
“Constable Yat,” he said, “I hear we’ve got some catching up to do.”
Yat tried to sleep. They’d cleared out a small storeroom in the hold for her, and put a mattress down. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was a bed. It was her own room, which seemed like a luxury onboard the ship: most of them slept together in a communal bunk area. The sailors were very careful around her: they didn’t speak much, or touch her. They didn’t seem to want to make eye contact.
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