by Anna Burke
“What is that?” I asked, inhaling deeply.
“Food,” said Seraphina. “Are you hungry?”
My mouth watered. I couldn’t place half of what I was smelling. Spices and oils and herbs drifted with the smell of flowers. My stomach had been churning with nausea for hours, but at this influx of aromas, I became aware I hadn’t eaten in almost a day and that, against the odds, I was hungry.
“We would never turn down your hospitality,” said Miranda.
Seraphina led us to an alcove hung with vining plants. A low table had already been laid, and, following the example of Miranda, Kraken, and Seraphina, I sat on the ground. I recognized the rice pots, but anything could lie beneath the other lids. Harper’s hand found mine beneath the table and squeezed.
Seraphina served us the rice. Then, she uncovered the first dish. The squid had been marinated in spices I couldn’t name by scent, and steam rose from the tender flesh as she forked a serving over to me. Next came a bowl of greens, sautéed in something savory, and after that, plump balls of a substance that might have been dough, but tasted sweet and unlike any rice flour I knew. I lost track of the other dishes. Miranda, Kraken, and Seraphina spoke of the ocean and mutual contacts while Harper and I filled our bellies. I still couldn’t name most of the seasonings. One or two seemed vaguely familiar, as if I might have eaten them in watered-down form. I recalled the small kitchen in Miranda’s quarters with a new suspicion.
“Did Kraken learn to cook from you?” I asked when I could cram no more down my gullet. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been allowed to eat more than my fill.
“I may have given him a few lessons.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it.
Seraphina settled back and uncorked a bottle of a pale green liquid. “May I serve your crew?”
“A small glass. I need them functional.”
“What is it?” Harper asked. Her eyes gleamed with the curiosity of someone well-versed in potent brews. I banished the memory of Jonah Juice before it could lay claim to my palate.
“A blend of my own. It takes the edge off the unbearable.”
The edge. I thought of Jeanine and blood-red seas, and drank. Miranda also had a glass, though hers, I noted, was considerably larger.
“Oh,” said Harper, appreciation oozing from the syllable.
It didn’t hit me like rum. Instead, a slow coolness crept through me, easing the grief and anxiety from my limbs. My head didn’t feel fuzzy. If anything, it felt clearer, as if my grief and exhaustion had blinded me to the brightness of the world.
“Enjoy yourselves,” Seraphina said, and nodded at Miranda. “Come find me later.”
“What is this place, really?” I asked when she was out of earshot.
“Everyone needs a place to feel free. Seraphina provides it, and we, in turn, provide her. Come on.” She stood and held out a hand. I took it, holding the other to my full stomach. A trailing vine brushed my cheek. I closed my eyes at the caress.
“What does she have in her nutrient bath? These greens would make the hydrobotanists on Polaris shit themselves,” said Harper.
“She might tell you if you ask. Kraken, can you and Harper see to the parts before I turn you loose?”
“Course.”
“What are we doing?” I asked her.
“Taking care of you.”
Harper’s newly shaved head drifted out of sight, dwarfed by Kraken. I allowed Miranda to lead me through the gardens. Unfamiliar plants grew all around. Most were rooted in carefully concealed hydroponics, but a few sprang from soil. I stroked a waxy seed pod dangling from one such plant. A sweet, spicy aroma clung to my fingers as I pulled away.
Miranda halted by an empty pool. Tall canes of bamboo sheltered it from view.
“Soaking pools?”
“You need it,” she said, then untucked her shirt and began to strip.
I followed suit. The last time I’d had a proper soak had been on Polaris station, back when I still wore an Archipelagean Fleet navigator’s uniform. The sudden lump in my throat surprised me. I didn’t miss my old life. But the pools reminded me of my childhood on Cassiopeia Station, where I’d spend hours floating on my back, feeling the ocean, convinced it was speaking just for me. The weightlessness had felt like an embrace. I’d gone to the pools for comfort during the worst of the bullying that had defined my time in Fleet Preparatory. Miranda’s scars glowed in the half-light like shooting stars. How had she known this was what I needed?
Water closed over her body as she slid beneath the surface. I remained dry a moment longer, possessed by the impulse to look skyward. Several stories above me arced a clear plex roof. Wild bioluminescence pulsed beyond, and beyond that, somewhere far from my sight, real stars. I felt the north star’s pull and oriented myself toward it unconsciously.
“Come in.”
I couldn’t decide if the pool was warm or cool, or if it was whatever Seraphina had given me to drink that made it impossible to tell. My toes, then my ankles, then my calves, breached the water’s surface until I was submerged up to my chin. Water took my weight. The release of pressure drew a shallow sob from my throat.
Hands drew me closer. Water swirled through my hair and beneath my breasts, cool and soothing, and Miranda’s body was warm against my back. She held me while we watched the bamboo stir in an artificial breeze. I wondered what the pools on Gemini were like, and if this reminded her of home, too.
A woman had died beneath my hands. I replayed Jeanine’s last moments again. The drink slid between me and the images like a wall of clear plex. I could still see them, but the impact was somehow lessened. My fingers didn’t itch with the remembered smoothness of exposed bone. I couldn’t smell the sharp tang of blood. I couldn’t hear my frantic breathing.
Miranda spoke in my ear. “Nobody tells you that part about command. How everything is your fault. Navigator, captain—we choose the wrong course, people die.”
“I feel . . .” I trailed off, unable to encapsulate the horror of the loss into something as banal as words.
“You feel like you’re caught in a storm, and no matter how deep you sub, the waves still crack the hull.”
That wasn’t how I felt. I felt like the storm itself, unable to stop screaming over empty water, but I understood this was Miranda’s way of putting her own feelings into words and so I did not correct her.
“She and Kraken were the first people to accept me.” I didn’t include Annie, as her acceptance had been largely opportunistic, and had ended with me clinging to the back of the ship. Miranda had walked her for that. Attempted murder was taken seriously on Man o’ War.
“Close your eyes.”
I did as I was commanded. Miranda’s hands left my waist and moved to my shoulders, working the knots in long, smooth strokes. With each, I briefly felt the stab of physical memory: swimming as fast as I could toward the hatch, trying to keep Jeanine from drowning. Salt flowed silently down my cheeks. Eventually, the memories slowed, then ceased, leaving me alone with Miranda’s hands. Her fingers found the knots in my neck, at the base of my scalp, my jaw, my ribs, my arms. She didn’t speak as she worked.
Seraphina’s drink, whatever it was, spread with Miranda’s touch, and with it came desire. At first, I fought the gathering warmth. Jeanine’s body was only hours cold, I was exhausted, and the stings from the jellyfish still burned. But as Miranda loosened a muscle deep in my lower back, I couldn’t repress the whine of need at the edge of my next exhale.
Her hands paused, and she pulled me flush against her.
“We shouldn’t,” I said.
She turned me in the water, her hands sure on my hips as she settled them over her own. Bioluminescence softened the sharp planes of her face, and the sly tilt of her mouth caught a blue glimmer. The taut muscles of her abdomen pressed into me. I felt her pulse, rhythmic and hypnotic. An artificial breeze shivered over my wet skin.
“We’re alive, Rose. There’s no shame in that.”
> “Just guilt,” I said, tracing her collarbone.
“Do you remember on the trawler, when you and I were in the head, and Jeanine kept pounding on the door?”
I laughed despite myself. Of course I remembered. “You told her to go piss in the ocean.”
“She was being a cock block.”
“She warned me to be careful with you, after you stormed off.”
“She was a loyal cock block,” said Miranda with a sad smile. “Even when I didn’t deserve it.”
“Poor Finn.” Finn, Jeanine’s lover, had only gotten three months with her before this, and he’d spent at least one of those months recovering from injuries sustained by a giant squid.
“Yeah.” She settled me more firmly against her. “But better him than me.”
“Miranda,” I said, horrified.
“I meant what I said. I will not lose you. Not like that.”
I looked into her face, noting the fierce set to her jaw and the desperate fear behind her eyes, and forgave her. “You won’t.”
“You were so frightened, when you first came aboard. Your eyes were huge, and when I pulled out my knife . . .”
“I thought you were going to kill me.”
“But you didn’t make a sound when I marked you.”
“Is that when you fell in love with me?” I said, half-joking.
“That’s when I knew you were going to be a problem, yes.” She skimmed her fingers over my ribs. “I knew you’d be hard to break.”
“Did you want to break me?”
She held my eyes, and I felt the air between us charge as it always did. “Initially, yes.”
A large part of me wondered what that would have felt like. Too large a part—my sense of self-preservation had never been strong where she was concerned. But for a woman who liked to find the cracks in others, she seemed staggeringly fragile as her lips curled in a coy smile. An almost claustrophobic sense of protectiveness surged through me. I wanted her to feel as safe as she made me feel. I wanted her to feel loved, protected, and shielded, for the moment, from the unbearable tenuousness of our existence.
“Do you know what I can break?” I asked, tilting her chin upward.
“What?”
“Every Archipelago record for holding my breath underwater.”
Her lips flushed as she took my meaning. “Prove it.”
Kissing her once, I took a deep breath and dove.
••••
I could have stayed in that pool happily for the rest of my life. Miranda held me loosely, her hair, unbound from its braid, floating over the surface. Ripples from the rising and falling of our chests stirred the black strands. A minute shift in her breath warned me, however, that this moment of peace was about to end.
“Time to go,” Miranda murmured in my ear. “As much as I don’t want to.”
We left the soothing buoyancy of the pool and pulled our clothes over damp skin. I kissed her shoulder blades as she slid into her shirt, savoring the way the firm line of muscle gave slightly beneath my lips. She paused her struggle with her shirt and leaned back into me. My arms wrapped around her bare waist.
The sound of approaching footsteps broke us apart. A young couple peered through the bamboo, saw us, and apologized.
“It’s fine. We’re leaving,” said Miranda.
We walked through the gardens and into the ring of corridors and living quarters on the outskirts. Miranda seemed to know her way through the low-ceilinged halls. Biolights burbled and graffiti decorated the patched plex. Some drawings were crude, but most had an ethereal beauty that spoke of real artistry. I paused by a mural of three octopuses with their tentacles entangled like hands. The mottled flesh looked so real. When I touched it, however, I just felt paint.
Many of the doors we passed stood open. Song drifted from some, and I wished we could linger to watch the performers. One room contained a small group of older people gathered around a rotund woman with a gray cat curled in her lap. Rugs lined the floor in patterns unfamiliar to my Archipelagean eyes. The woman’s low voice resonated around the room, and I caught snatches of a story told in a different tongue.
“What is this?” I asked Miranda.
“Singers, storytellers—Seraphina collects and cultivates culture.”
“What language is that?”
“Arabic.”
“Arabic.” I sounded out the word, tasting its corners. I knew that Arabic was one of the influences on the Archipelago common tongue, but I’d never heard it spoken purely. “Do you know what she’s saying?”
Miranda closed her eyes and listened. “It’s an origin story. I only know a few words.”
“An origin story?”
“Of how her people came to the ocean, and where they came from before that.”
“Why does it matter where we came from before?” I asked. My own history was a half-formed thing. My mother’s family came from all over the smaller stations, and my father was deep ocean through and through. His drifter origins were story enough for me. Why go actively looking for more pain?
Miranda raised an eyebrow. “History is valuable.”
“History’s dead weight.”
“You’d toss it, then?”
I mimed throwing something overboard.
“We carry history with us whether we acknowledge it or not,” said the woman with the cat. I hadn’t thought she could hear us. All the eyes in the room focused on me and Miranda. Blood rushed to my face.
“Sure,” I said, not wanting to argue.
“Where are you from?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t going to tell this stranger my history, no matter how kind her eyes.
“See how it weighs on you, even when you deny it?”
“I’m not—” I began.
“She’s not used to philosophical debates, Mae,” Miranda said, placing her arm around my shoulders.
The woman—Mae—nodded and gave me a smile as kind as her eyes before resuming her tale. We listened to the lyrical rise and fall of her words for a moment more. The cat’s purr blended with the low notes. My shoulders prickled beneath Miranda’s arm. The light pressure felt heavier than normal, as if Mae’s words had settled there as well.
“Come on,” said Miranda.
I was more than happy to obey.
Miranda eventually knocked on a nondescript door. At the occupant’s bequest, she opened it, and we entered a comfortable office. Seat cushions lay scattered across the floor in place of chairs. Seraphina sat on one with a chart spread across her knees.
“Where are you off to?” Miranda asked her as she sprawled across several cushions.
I made myself into a smaller shape and sat with my knees tucked to my chest. Odd lights danced in the corner of my vision.
“Southwest.”
Deep ocean. My mind calculated a series of courses before I remembered nobody had asked me to do so.
“Calm seas then.”
“And you?” Seraphina inquired.
“Depends on how repairs go.”
Seraphina folded up the chart and focused on Miranda. “I’m glad to see you. They say the Archipelago will fall, soon, one way or another.”
The languor left my limbs.
Miranda waved away Seraphina’s words. “Ching was defeated.”
“But she nearly won. Someone else will rise up, soon. Maybe you.”
“I’m done with that.”
Seraphina didn’t look like she believed Miranda, which made her an intelligent woman. “Either way, they’ve scaled back trade. I could use you.”
“Like you don’t have raiders of your own.” Miranda’s tone was gently teasing, but still respectful. Seraphina radiated power with a subtlety that took me unawares. Beneath that calm exterior, I sensed a mind as sharp as Miranda’s. Sharper, maybe. Which was dangerous. I fought to clear my head. Whatever chemical compound she’d given us seemed designed to lower our inhibitions. Miranda appeared untouched by it, but what if I wasn’t capable of accurately gau
ging her mental state?
“Never hurts to have one with Archipelago ties. Keep me in mind if you . . . stumble . . . upon supplies.”
“Always.”
Who was this woman? Seraphina and Miranda discussed trade while I sat there, still half entranced by the drink. Why did she think the Archipelago was about to fall? If anything, the Archipelago now seemed poised to reclaim lost territory under Comita’s influence. I tried to muster feeling about the potential collapse of my home, and blamed my apathy on intoxication. Of course I cared about the Archipelago. Of course it mattered to me if they fell. Collapse would lead to chaos. We would lose precious technology and algae strains and human life. The Archipelago was as much an ark as it was a nation; within, we carried the seeds of civilization, or so said our historians.
So I’d been taught, and yet, remembering Seraphina’s flourishing gardens, I wondered.
“How long have you been below the equator?” Miranda asked as I tuned back in.
“A few months. The ships that survived the Gulf made it here if they could. Good salvaging. Surprised it took you this long to join us.”
“We’ve been trawling the coasts,” said Miranda. “Not a lot of fleet activity that way.”
“May I speak plainly?”
“You always do.”
Seraphina paused. Her face radiated empathy as she took Miranda in. “Ching overreached. I know what she was to you, and I know how things ended. I’m sorry.”
Miranda didn’t stiffen. I studied her for signs of a reaction, but she just said, “thank you,” and seemed to mean it.
Another pause. Seraphina steepled her fingers and appraised Miranda over their tips. “This ship is, and has always been, a parley ground.”
Miranda did stiffen now. I fought against the lingering effects of the drink and felt the change in the air currents between them.
“Your business is your business. I trust there will be no unpleasantness?” Seraphina continued.