Seafire

by Natalie C. Parker

  “Talk to me about options. Can we redirect power from the sun pips and bow? If we keep the cabins dark, can we—”

  Amina’s hand closed over Caledonia’s forearm. Here, away from the crew, Amina let the depths of her frustration show. She had kept this sail alive for three hard years, had repaired it time and time again to keep the Mors Navis moving. And now it was scattered at her feet like spent rifle shells.

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Captain. I could do as you say, divert what those cells draw, but it would provide less propulsion than the wind.” Her eyes turned skyward as they so often did, searching for signs or hope. Finding neither, she released a slow sigh before adding, “It is not a solution, and I’m afraid I have none to offer.”

  The sun was harsh on Caledonia’s face, reflecting from the surface of the sea and toughening her skin. It was powerful. It was power. And it was just out of reach.

  “We’ll find a way.” She’d been much closer to defeat than this moment, but even as she spoke, she knew their situation was precarious.

  Caledonia turned her gaze to her crew. Every single girl on deck knew something was wrong. The Mors Navis always struck hard and hid fast. That was how they survived—by never sticking around to see what followed the first wave. The ship should have been moving at top speed, not cruising gently. Still, there was work to be done, and the girls were tending to it.

  The wounded were belowdecks with Lovely Hime. The deck crew, under the guidance of Tin Mary and her four sisters, was making quick work of collecting bullet shells to be reused and debris to be discarded, reloading weapons, and scrubbing out bloodstains. A few girls hung over the railing, using rubber wedges to detach what remained of the magoons. They’d be reappropriated, crafted into whatever weapon Amina thought of next. Soon, all signs of their battle would be smoothed into their routine.

  The boy was gone. Taken by Redtooth to the hole where he’d remain until Caledonia was ready to deal with him again. At the moment, she was happy to let him sit in the dark anguishing over whether his death would arrive in a few minutes or hours.

  The day was won. They’d taken all the bounty they could reach, sunk a baleflower crop, and survived an attack. The floor beneath the mainmast block was clear. All her girls had survived, and not a single shrouded body marred this day. It was a blessing and not one Caledonia took lightly.

  “It was not our blood the killing wind wanted,” Amina said, following her gaze.

  “May it always be so,” Caledonia replied, though Amina knew full well that Caledonia didn’t believe in spirits.

  Caledonia left Amina to collect the scales and returned to the bridge, where Lace greeted her with a determined smile and a report. Other than Pisces’s shoulder, the injuries were minimal, the raid on the barge had supplemented their food and ammunition stores but not by much, and they’d set a course for the Bone Mouth.

  “We’ll reach it in three days at current speed.” The last was offered with a raised eyebrow and an inquisitive tone. “Of course, if we push to top speed we’ll be there faster.”

  “Maintain course and speed,” Caledonia answered, leaving the bridge to stand at the bow.

  So much had changed in the span of a single day. Caledonia needed time to cast her thoughts over the ocean, let them fall into a new sense of order. In light of the broken sun sail, everything else was secondary—Pisces’s injury, the Bullet, their temporarily boosted food stores. Nothing else would matter if they didn’t find a way to generate power. That was her job. Keeping this ship and its crew in food, ammo, and power.

  Caledonia knew the names of all fifty-two girls aboard her ship. Some were runaways—fled from the towns that traded children for safety—some, like the Mary sisters, were rescued from the fortresses of Aric’s small tyrants, and others were like Caledonia and Pisces, the remnants of rogue families. They’d all been scarred by Aric’s growing empire and wanted to destroy it piece by piece. No matter where they’d come from, every girl on this ship was here to fight.

  They’d hidden in the rocky shoals of the Bone Mouth, they’d grown strong, they’d grown brave, and they’d downed seven bale barges all told. And now Caledonia would have to tell them that it was over. They were nothing more than a wind ship. And wind ships weren’t fighting ships.

  The sun was low in the sky when Caledonia finally called for Amina.

  “Captain?” she asked, joining Caledonia where she still stood on the command deck. The Mors Navis boasted a low profile with only two short levels rising from the main deck. The command deck stretched forward from the bridge, just far enough for the two girls to speak without being heard by the bridge crew.

  “What if I get you a new sail?”

  Amina narrowed her eyes. “How?”

  “The usual way. If we steal you a sun sail, can you make it work?”

  “Of course,” Amina said, clearly offended at the question.

  “Good,” she said, turning to the bridge. “All stop!”

  The engines quieted, and the plume of seawater that rose behind the Mors Navis fell flat. The ship slid atop the water, letting the lapping waves coax it to a stop. For the first time, that gentle tugging felt ominous. It wouldn’t be long before gathering even the smallest of speeds would be difficult.

  “Captain?” Lace appeared before them, her blonde curls vibrant with sunset.

  Caledonia turned her steps toward the main deck. Her body was beginning to ache from bruises she hadn’t realized she’d gained during the fight. It was a good feeling, one she relished as she gave Lace the order to gather the crew.

  Word raced through the ship, drawing Lovely Hime and her dozen wounded girls from below, the bridge crew from above, and even Far, the oldest women on the ship at forty-two turns, from her preferred solitude in the galley. Caledonia stood by the mainmast block as they pooled around her like sharks. Pisces found her way to Caledonia’s side, brushing a hand down the back of Caledonia’s arm to let her know she was near. No one made a sound.

  The sun was bleeding along the horizon now, setting fire to the ocean and turning the sky a brilliant, fish-scale blue. Soon the deck would be ringed in the dim blue glow of electric sun pips, just enough to remind the girls where the railing ended and the ocean began, but not enough to call the attention of a Bullet ship.

  “We have a boy on board,” she said when all were present. An uncomfortable whisper surrounded her, as she knew it would. “He won’t stay. But he saved Pisces’s life and in return we’ll drop him in the shallows of the Bone Mouth.” She allowed just a breath of a second to pass before she pressed on. “That is not our problem. Our problem is that our sun sail is dead.”

  Here she paused again, allowing the unease to settle in. No good would come from hiding this truth. Her girls needed to feel the reality of the situation before she offered her plan.

  A rush of voices passed around the circle.

  “Dead?” asked Pippa, unwilling to hear it. “We’re good as sunk.”

  Tin called out in her deep voice, “Can’t Amina fix it?”

  “If I could fix it, that’s what I’d be doing.” Amina’s answer was sharpened by irritation.

  Caledonia felt every bit of their anger and fear, but she kept her expression calm. She lifted her hand, and the voices quieted.

  “We will soon be a ship under wind and wind only. You all know what that means. We stay this way and we die or disband, and that’s not something I’m willing to do.”

  She turned slowly, surveying the faces of her girls. Each was steely and bright. There was no hint of surrender here.

  “We have options,” she began. “Without power our best bet might just be to hide.”

  Redtooth made a sound that landed somewhere between a grunt and a laugh.

  At one point in time, many of her girls might have preferred to hide. But that was before they’d found their rhythm as a crew a
nd learned just how good at this they could be. Hiding now would be an insult to the small amount of pride they’d gained. Caledonia was counting on that pride as she pressed on.

  “Hiding made us strong. It gave us time to make this ship strong. But there’s something we do even better than hide,” Caledonia said.

  “Spend bullets,” Tin replied darkly. “Sink ships.”

  Tin stood several inches taller than Caledonia, her spiked brown hair streaked with grime and sweat, her pale blue eyes full of the setting sun. She and her sisters had been the last to join the crew, eight months ago. They’d been a boon to the ship, smart and hardworking. But Tin made no bones about wanting to punch the Net and escape Aric’s domain for good, and Caledonia knew there were more than a few girls on board who were tempted by the idea.

  “Exactly,” Caledonia confirmed. “We fight! And if we’re going to keep fighting, we need a new sun sail.”

  “Are we going to port?” Redtooth asked, excited by the prospect of taking her raiding crew to shore. In all the Bullet Seas there wasn’t a single port that could be called friendly, but there was at least one that didn’t fall under Aric’s rule.

  “Not to port.” Caledonia pointed toward the horizon they’d just left, now inky with nighttime shadows. “We’re going to power down and stay here until a Bullet ship spots us.”

  “And how are we going to run without power and no wind?” Tin gestured to the sky where the air barely stirred.

  “We’re not going to run,” Caledonia said, standing firm in the face of Tin’s concern. Every piece of this had played to her favor, right down to Tin’s final outburst. Her girls were ready to fight, and they’d do whatever it took to make that happen. She knew she had them even before she said it. “We’re going to load every weapon we’ve got. And we’re going to let them bring their sail to us.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Clear nights always reminded Caledonia of when this ship was her mother’s, when they sailed under the moon and hid during the day.

  Rhona Styx kept the Ghost out to sea for so much of Caledonia’s life that her little brother had been born there. When she was old enough, Caledonia’s father taught her how to climb the riggings, to tie knots, and to judge distances, all under the dim light of the shimmering stars and moon. From her mother she learned how to steer the ship between the narrow straits of the Bone Mouth, how to rely on old charts and the eyes of their crew.

  And sometimes, when it was calm and quiet for miles and miles around, she and her little brother would climb atop the bridge and he would sing. Donnally started with songs passed down from their parents and the others on board, a strange mishmash of tempos and long-forgotten languages, but soon he was creating his own music. He sang about Caledonia’s red hair and about their mother’s missing tooth and about riding on the backs of great whales.

  There were too many songs to remember now. But when the night was calm like this one, she’d catch the refrain of one floating through her memory and suddenly his voice was there, a crooning, tremulous soprano singing about a crab who reached too high and was caught up by the stars.

  Such memories were always accompanied by the threat of tears. She felt them squeezing the back of her throat like a bitter lime. She bit them back. There was room on her ship for tears, but not from her. She’d practiced smoothing over that familiar bite of sadness with anger. It only took a single word: Lir. She conjured his face in her mind, those cold blue eyes, and let anger burn her sadness away, imagining how good it would feel to slide her dagger between his ribs.

  One day, it would be more than a pleasant imagining.

  Caledonia sat on the bridge, one knee pulled tight to her chest, eyes on the flat plane of ocean ahead, her mind tossing between Donnally’s song and her own dark longing. In the old world, the little room would have been secured on all sides, wrapped in thick walls of protective metal. The crew didn’t need to see with their eyes because they navigated the seas and even battles with soundtech. That kind of tech was all but extinct now, and the bridge of the Mors Navis was wrapped in panes of self-healing glass. Caledonia closed her eyes and willed her mind to be as clear as that glass.

  “Cala,” Pisces called quietly in the dark.

  Each of the bridge stations were empty, her crew gone to their cabins to rest until the fight came to them. On deck, a skeleton crew of four girls watched for signs of Bullet ships.

  “You shouldn’t be up here.” Caledonia turned to her friend. Pisces’s white bandage glowed in the moonlight. “I need you rested. As well as can be.”

  Hime had stitched the cut on her head and smoothed it with a regenerating poultice. The wound on her shoulder wasn’t as bad as they’d feared. Her leather body armor had taken the brunt of that vicious hook, but no wound was a good wound out here. As Hime had often reminded them, it wouldn’t be so bad if they could get their hands on some Bullet skintech, patches and nanogels that could mend even the worst wounds. But they were incredibly hard to come by. Pisces’s shoulder had been stitched with thread and bandaged, and she was under firm orders from Hime to keep it still until movement was absolutely necessary. She’d be back in the water as soon as another ship appeared. Wounded or not.

  “I know, but I wanted to thank you. For letting him stay.”

  Caledonia hadn’t thought about the boy in hours. He was still in the hold, rotting with his own thoughts. “Don’t thank me until he’s off my ship.”

  “I’m thanking you now.” Pisces had been around Caledonia long enough to be undeterred by her hard exterior. “I put you in a tight spot with the crew, and I think you did a good thing.”

  In truth, Caledonia didn’t want to be thanked at all. She didn’t think she’d done a good thing. Keeping a Bullet on board was the most foolish thing she could think of, but if Caledonia had one weakness, it was Pisces. The girl lived in the softest part of Caledonia’s heart, and she would do nearly anything for her. If not for Pisces, the boy would be treading water or back in the hands of his clip. Now he’d probably just end up dead.

  Maybe they’d all end up dead.

  “They had me, had my tow. They’d have filled my blood with Silt and let me dream my way to death. But he stood up for me. Spirits know why, but he turned his gun on his own clip and saved my life.” Frowning, Pisces smoothed a hand gingerly over her bandaged shoulder. “He can’t go back. You know how they feel about traitors, what they do to them. He deserves our help.”

  This was a place Caledonia wasn’t willing to go. Pisces’s ability to temper revenge with compassion felt like a dangerous vulnerability. Over the years, Caledonia’s resistance to such compassion had become a line between them.

  “No,” she said, decisive. “He doesn’t. He might have done a good thing for us, but there’s a mountain of bad things behind him. Don’t forget that.”

  “Cala,” Pisces said, her voice sweeping down Caledonia’s back like a mother’s gentle hand. Calming and reprimanding all at once. “Just because there are bad things behind someone doesn’t mean they only have bad things inside them.”

  Except when that person was a soldier of Aric Athair. She let the line between herself and her friend grow a little thicker, imagined it curling around her own heart like a wall. Pisces needed her heart. Between the two of them, she was the one who knew when the crew needed room to breathe or scream or fight. It was good that one of them was aware of such things.

  Eight bells chimed sweetly in the distance. A four-hour shift had passed, and it was time for a fresh watch to take over. The girls on deck moved quietly, passing each other like shadows.

  One figure appeared in the doorway and stood just behind Pisces. Blonde curls gathered moonlight. “Captain.” Lace’s voice was quiet and soothing and as familiar as a warm blanket. “Nothing to report. Next shift’s up.”

  Caledonia nodded, feeling cheered by Lace’s presence as always. No matter how terrible things were,
Lace could always find a reason for hope. Her mother had lived under Aric’s rule and died smuggling Lace out of the Holster. When Lace told the tale, she ended it with a smile, saying, “There are good people in there, too. And they’re fighting in all the ways they know how.” True or not, believing it gave her a taste of Lace’s optimism.

  “Thank you, Lace. Get some sleep. You, too, Pi.”

  Lace left just as quickly as she’d come, but Pisces hesitated.

  “Pi.”

  “I’ll keep watch with you.” Pisces would stay with Caledonia even if she were bleeding from her ears.

  “If I can’t have you whole, I need you rested. Go to bed, or I’ll get Red to take you away.” She tried to make her voice light, but it was evident in Pisces’s expression that she hadn’t been entirely successful.

  “What if he really is what he says?” Pisces pressed.

  “He’s not,” Caledonia answered quickly.

  “But what if it’s true and he does want out? He could help us. He was a Bullet, he could know so much about how they—”

  “He is a Bullet,” Caledonia snapped. “And I’m not having this argument. He goes. As soon as we’re near the shallows.”

  Pisces paced toward the door and back again, frustration evident in her brusque gait. “He’s not the enemy, Cala. He’s a tool of the enemy, and we shouldn’t take his turning lightly. Promise me you won’t.”

  This, at least, she could do. “I promise you, I won’t take anything he does lightly.”

  If Pisces sensed the danger in Caledonia’s words, she didn’t let on. “Goodnight, Cala,” she said, dropping a kiss on her friend’s cheek.