“Okay you got it,” said Ajat, “tell me how many we’re looking at.”
Yat searched the memory. They’d gone through the ship so fast and it was hard to tell. Focus. The word made its way into her head unbidden. She took a deep breath. Focus, go deeper. They’d been on a corvette when the alarm sounded: confusion, chaos, and every soul very much awake. The sailors felt different from the ship: their threads more tightly-packed. Their agitation made their threads light up like smokers after a year at sea.
“About forty crew per ship,” she said, “and twenty marines. The crew aren’t soldiers, but they’re armed and they know how to fight. They might run if they were on land, but they know there’s nowhere to go. The big guns aren’t on the vanguard ships but they’ve still got more than enough cannons to knock us out of the water. Even one of those large-bore grubs gets through the hull, we’re done for.” The echo of the grub’s mad eat eat EAT still rang in her head.
“So, about 350 men,” said Rikaza, “and they’re ahead of us. They’re distracted, but their instruments will still pick us up if we come anywhere near them. We try to fight and we’re done for, and waiting isn’t an option. We need to jump.”
“No,” said Ajat. “Out of the question. Sibbi is too weak right now, there’s no way I can get us close enough without phasing the Kopek into the docks, and every other Crane Weaver in a thousand leagues is mad as a shithouse rat. You wanna be the one who jumps? You wanna make an ox fly?”
A thought flared up between them, on the edge of being spoken, some infectious thought moving between them, coming from both at once: if you can’t jump then what the fuck are you good for?
Rikaza looked shocked with themselves, and hung their head.
“I’m sorry m’am,” they said. “I didn’t. I—”
“You know,” said Sibbi. “You three are thinking hard enough to wake the dead.” They all turned in surprise. Even Ajat—facing the deck—hadn’t seen her come up, and her shock ran through their connected threads.
“I am going back to bed,” said Sibbi. “It has been five days: I am not so infirm that I can’t do another after almost a week. We will jump in the morning, when I am rested, if you three haven’t eaten each other before then. ”
“But sajti, you’ll hurt yourself,” said Ajat.
“We’ll drain the planters,” she said, waving it off. “We’ll have to restock if we want to do it again any time soon and I’m sure the crew will miss the greenery, but it’ll get us where we need to be. I love you, but you need to trust that I know what I’m doing.”
Ajat looked mollified. “I love you too,” she muttered. “Now please sajti, go to bed.”
Sibbi didn’t need telling twice. She turned on the balls of her feet, and her nightgown swirled around her as she stormed off into the bar.
Come here, little shipwreck: I’ve a story to tell.
I remember the first time you drowned. I remember the second, the third, the thousandth. I cannot leave your side: I chose you, I am bound to you, I was bound, I will be bound. The sun will turn in on itself before I could leave, the stars will lose sight of each other, darkness will blanket the sky and there will be silence in the world of men before I could leave. This much is true.
I remember the fall, as though you were a needle being woven through the fabric of the bottomless night, pulling the world behind you. I remember the man who found you, and what you did to him. Tangled in a net, you lashed out and you hurt and you hurt without end. It is burned into this city, now, etched into its nerves, made manifest with each rattling breath.
I remember the end of the world. I remember staring out across the fields and jungles and oceans and hearing only wind. I remember all these things so you don’t have to: I was like you once, until I became like me. You will forget I said this, but you will remember it when you need to. The lost girl becomes the eater of days, and the world trembles.
There is a tree at the roof of the world, and its roots drink deep of poisoned water. There is a splinter in its heart, there is a madness that hollows and makes anew. It sings in its sleep, and the world shakes with its music and tears itself down and builds anew. There is a lion with no teeth, there is a spider with no legs, there is an ox with no tail. One of these things is not the same as the others, but I cannot tell you which.
There is, as always, love.
You will forget this until the moment it matters, then you will never forget it again.
Rikaza had left to go to bed, and Ajat stayed at the wheel. Yat stood with her, letting the rhythmic slap of the hull bring her heartbeat back down.
“Rikaza’s alright,” said Ajat, after a while. “They were one of the first we picked up. Hard life, that one, harder than almost anybody aboard. That sort of life either makes you very kind or very cruel, and we’re lucky they fell on the side they did.”
“You two both, well, you know,” said Yat. “I’m sure you get on.”
Ajat rolled her eyes. She laughed, just a little. “Riz introduced me to their fleshsmith a while back,” she said. “‘got a bunch of dermal implants put in: cuttlefish stuff to make me change colour. Didn’t work but it seemed like a fun idea at the time. They weren’t the changes Riz thought I’d get. They were fine with it—just surprised I guess. I’m happy with those parts of my body as-is. Well, shaving’s a pain, but I feel like it’s part of the thing. I’ve got living hair, but the greenhorns always want to talk about the other stuff.”
She shrugged, then looked to the place where Rikaza had been standing. “Riz’ll come around. Rather have them at my back than a thousand Hainak marines. That’s coming from a place of authority on both: I actually served, when I was a different me. It was my first time on a ship. The ocean was the only part that really stuck.”
“You were in the war?” said Yat. Ajat didn’t look older than 30: she couldn’t have been more than fifteen when war broke out.
“Yep,” she said. “Took a chain-shot to the waist, got thrown overboard. Ship went down, but I didn’t. Sibbi picked me straight up out of the water. That’s where all this started, you know. We fell in love, and things changed but we stayed in love. You know what Kopek means?”
Yat had heard rumours: hound, fang, hunt. She didn’t want to say that, so she shook her head.
“Means pack,” said Ajat. “Like a pack of dogs. We’re all lost pups here, together on the edge of things. We stick together, and that’s how we survive.”
“Is that it then?” said Yat, “survival?”
For a moment their eyes met, and Ajat seemed lost. She shook her head.
“That’s how we live,” she said. “It’s different, I hope.”
“Me too,” said Yat. She closed her eyes and let the sea air throw her hair around. It felt like flying. She opened her eyes again, then patted Ajat on the arm: she’d never been good at comfort, but it seemed to work. They stood there for another moment.
“Go to bed,” said Ajat. She’d seemed on the edge of saying constable but stopped herself.
“Yeah,” said Yat. “Bed sounds good.”
She stuck around for a few more moments, then turned and left. She could hear Ajat humming at the wheel: an old song she barely recognised, maybe something from the war. The song went on behind her, as she descended out of the night, and into the warm belly of the ship.
The jump looked different from up on deck. There was more preparation this time around—the crew spent all morning bringing up planters and placing them in a circle around the wheel. Yat hadn’t noticed it before, but there was some sort of circle burned into the wood there, with nodes for each planter. It had taken about an hour to set up—Sibbi kept ordering sailors: no, put the toadstool closest to me, no the cactus goes in beside the rune that looks like a little house.
The plants in each node were rooted, magically, to the ship—contact points in a giant magical battery. Th
e sheer flow of energy made her teeth hum. Sibbi stood in the center, hands on the wheel. Ajat stood nearby; she didn’t look overjoyed, but she wasn’t saying anything.
Yat didn’t notice the mist until it was coming up over the gunnels. It flowed over the sides and spread across the deck. It was up to her ankles, then up to her waist, then she couldn’t see a damn thing. The ship kept moving forward, and moving forward, and moving forward and—
It carved out of the mist and the city lay spread out before them. Somewhere out in the old southern docks ward: mostly abandoned these days, since the shipyards had slowed production. A few drifters on the dock watched them approach, and didn’t say anything. Xidaj stood at the front of the ship, looking through his gunsight and shouting back at the crew, who sprang up and prepared for a hard turn. The gangplank went down fast, skittering across the boards as the ship slowed.
The instant the plank touched the docks, Yat could feel the whole city humming—wood on wood, one little battery connecting to a massive machine. It was power, in a way she hadn’t really understood, something she’d been feeling all her life but didn’t know what to do with: it was people and it was animals and houses and streets, thousands on thousands on thousands. It used to make her anxious, knowing just how big the city was; now, it made her feel strong. She used to believe—while in the grips of that great grey emptiness that spanned the days between panic attacks—that she was uniquely and powerfully alone. Touching the city like this, it struck her how many souls felt the same: how many threads in the great tapestry thought they weren’t a part of anything that mattered. They were frayed, and knotted, and still very much alive.
The gangplank was down for barely more than a few seconds. Wajet sashayed down onto the docks, gave a little mock-bow as the ship pulled away and the crew pulled up the plank with practiced ease. She ran along the ship’s railing, as if to follow him; she ran up the stairs of the aftcastle and peered over at the disappearing dot behind them. She’d expected a stop: a time to slip out. She’d barely even had time to wave, and now they were tearing back across the water, and a mist rose over the sides and—
They were leaving. Something was happening in her home, and they were going to fuck off into the ocean and leave Wajet, big loud sledgehammer-souled Wajet, to figure out what. She’d known it before they got here, but it only hit her in full force watching the docks fall away: this was big, and they had a chance to stop it, and they were about to entrust it to the least-trustworthy man on the whole Oxtail. When she’d reached out into the city, she’d felt something moving: something wrong. A disruption in the fabric, fraying and loose threads, a rot beneath the gentle contours. She couldn’t let the man do it alone: didn’t trust the man to do it alone. Didn’t trust his allegiance, didn’t trust his courage, didn’t trust—even if his heart were true and his faith firm—his capacity to do anything but shout and bluster and make a bigger mess than he’d started with. Her people were going to get hurt, because Sibbi was sending the wrong man. Of all people, she was sending a man with no magic, with no wits, with nothing but very noticeable volume issues. Yat knew these streets, and these people. They should’ve sent the whole crew but, failing that, they could’ve at least sent the good cop instead of the bumbling one. She knew his mission: she knew where to go. She would help him, whether he wanted the help or not. She could protect Hainak, and the Kopek—those beautiful people, these beautiful people—from itself. She didn’t care for all their damned riddles: something was very wrong, and Hainak needed a damned hero.
She could still feel the city: an afterimage burned into her soul. If Sibbi could use the ship to jump a ship, surely she could use the city to jump herself. She’d been there inside the woman’s magic when she cast a golden needle out across the ocean, and pulled herself tight behind it. She had no idea how, but the water was already lost beneath them and the city was vanishing and she pushed past Xidaj and reached out—
Her memory cast back to dad’s protein broth. She knew it made people big and strong and she wanted so badly to be strong, so she poured a little into her cupped hand and it had burned more than anything she’d ever felt. She’d find out later that it was a heavily diluted before anybody was allowed to drink it: that the solution wasn’t even safe to touch unless it was mixed to 1/1000 parts with water. The scar still itched on humid nights. Which is to say, a body can only take so much good.
Yat died—blew open like a single bulb taking a century’s worth of power at once. She was falling, falling, torn open and spread impossibly thin while massive hands grabbed at her and stitched and frantically stitched, hearing whispers and screams and and—
—emerging from the water, bursting up into the world, gasping at every precious breath of oxygen. In the distance, to the south, she saw a ship shrouded in mist. She could feel the anger and confusion on-deck even from here. And then: empty sea. The mist collapsed, spread thin, then melted away into the muggy air. She bobbed in the water and—for the first time in several days—noticed its acrid reek of salt and fish and dead things. She was half-in the doorway to another world and that world pulled at her. She grabbed ahold of one of the dock timbers, and hauled herself painfully up. She knew this place, of course: same place she’d died. There were no cops here this time, nor any blanks.
The window of a nearby shop had been blown out, and glass lay all over the ground. Somebody had put warning signs around it, but nobody had bothered to sweep up the glass. Either it was recent, or uniforms were still busy with other parts of the city: sweeping up potential evidence made the detectives furious and made their jobs harder, but she didn’t see any detectives around either. Her clothes were already starting to dry—the same warmth that rebuilt her was still somewhere inside her, curled up like a fist and radiating a terrifying heat. She reached out into the nearby buildings and found: rats roaches cats grasses weeds birds—birds—an old cellulose wall covering a broken piece of wood a bird—bird—and not one single man or woman or anything even close. Not even a squatter, and gods knew the city was packed with squatters.
She wanted to pretend she didn’t know about them. She’d spent years pretending things weren’t septic, because she needed to pretend to stop herself from breaking. It was easier to say it was a one-off, a temporary twitch away from normalcy. This wasn’t new: it was the old rearing its head, casting off its mask. She buried the little things, but it was a blizzard of little things crushing her and crushing Kiada and crushing Hainak and crushing everybody. A crescendo of voices flowing together, fists beating on locked doors while the city shouted this is how it’s always been. This is how it’s always been, this is how it’s always been. Sure times are changing, but this is how it’s always been. We used to kill folks, now we take their humanity away first—it’s humane. The world eats them and they don’t feel a thing. It was just new tricks for old evil, and she’d made herself blind to it because confronting it hurt too much. Her throat burned, and the nausea rose from her spine, into her head, raising the short hairs on her crown. She tried to push it down like she’d pushed the realisation down a thousand times, but it wouldn’t let her. The lump sat in her throat, choking her, forcing her to acknowledge it. She had known. She hadn’t put the little pieces together, but it wouldn’t have been hard. Evil like rain: a million droplets, together a flood. She just put it off for another day and another day and another day. She’d become a cop to fix it, and she’d only made it worse: packed the miseries tighter. She’d known and told herself this is how it’s always been. She stood in the street for a minute, and let the broken city lights play across her face. She didn’t know how long she stood there: it could’ve been a minute, it could’ve been an age. She wanted to stay forever, but a quiet thought cut through the noise: now that you’ve seen it, you need to stop it.
But how? You could fight a monster, but you couldn’t fight a storm: you just closed the windows and prayed for it to stop. One person couldn’t stand against that. She was lost and
didn’t have a plan, but something Ajat had said was nagging at her: every other Crane Weaver in a thousand leagues is mad as a shithouse rat. You wanna be the one who jumps? You wanna make an ox fly? Crane Weaver. It made sense: Rikaza was strong, Cannath was fierce, and Sibbi and Ajat could, well, fly. In a sense. She had no idea what monkeys were good for. Stealing fruit? But Ajat had covered that one too: Monkey is quick, and monkey is clever, and monkey is the only one still fighting, and sometimes that’s enough.
She wandered away from the docks, and found an empty building to sit down in—she didn’t want to risk being seen if the Kopek came back. She needed to catch her breath, and clear her head. They had been kind to her, but the ship wasn’t home: she wasn’t born there. A quiet voice inside her head piped up: neither were they. She pushed it down. They were good people, and good people close to her got hurt. She didn’t know whether it was her fault, but it happened and there was nothing she could do about it. Besides, she could protect them better from here: do the necessary work, make sure whatever was burning through the city didn’t burn their strange floating home down.
The empty building had a single open window, and she climbed up a decorative wall-covering and slipped inside. She had to tear away an overgrown membrane, but it was malnourished and came away easily in her hand. She dropped down onto a rusted iron walkway, above a factory floor. The conveyor belts gathered dust, and she didn’t recognise any of the other machines. The red brick walls made it hard to sense threads: she tried to put her hand against them and cast down, but got nothing. Something tap-tapped across the skylight above, and she saw a pair of pigeons roosting on an intersection between the beams. They’d replaced all the glass with membrane, but everything else was dumbtech. The old iron roller door was heavy with rust—probably never a very successful business, if they couldn’t replace a door like that. She wouldn’t be bothered by anybody in here.
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