by Anna Burke
“I don’t understand.” Miranda’s voice was a tonal catastrophe: it managed to be both flat and stricken at once, and her attempt to modulate it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
“You—” Seraphina’s brows contracted in confusion. “I assumed you knew.”
Miranda’s skin was a shade too dark to pale with blood loss, but her scars blanched as she stared at Seraphina.
“Ah. You didn’t.” The steepled fingers tapped themselves together in a rapid dance.
“What didn’t we know?” I asked, because Miranda didn’t seem capable of forming syllables through her clenched jaw.
“I’ve extended sanctuary to Ching until she can find a ship to take her home.”
The air in my lungs crystalized and broke into a thousand shards. Alveoli shrieked in the ensuing slaughter. I did not hear the words Miranda said to Seraphina. I did not hear anything until the door to our quarters shut behind us and Miranda collapsed onto a couch and closed her eyes, looking three decades older, and then the sound I heard was the quiet breaking of my heart.
Chapter Three
Seamus rubbed his head against my legs, his feline indifference to the glacial air in the room impressive. I felt frostbite forming on my nose. I couldn’t think. My thoughts crashed into each other over and over again, run aground by Seraphina’s words. Miranda kept her silence opposite me. Her head was bowed so low I could count the vertebrae in her neck.
This woman—my captain, my lover—had comforted me through countless nightmares, held me when I’d woken, screaming, from dreams where Ching Shih slaughtered everyone I’d ever loved before hunting me through the lower levels of the ship with her sword dripping blood. And all that time, as Miranda’d assured me I was safe, she’d known Ching Shih was alive. Worse, she’d orchestrated Ching’s survival. The most haunting of my nightmares was not the bloody ones, but a dream in which I stood on the prow of Man o’ War and watched a hooded figure be led away. It paused at the wharf and looked back over its shoulder, and then the hood was blown back, and the face beneath belonged to the woman who’d tried to destroy my world.
“She’s alive?” I said, because I needed to say something.
Miranda raised her head from her hands and turned empty eyes on me. “Three months.”
“What?”
“It took you three months to ask that question.”
Jeanine’s ghost laughed in the recesses of my skull, a reminder of the nightmare that had woken me only hours before. The effort of preventing a stream of projectile vomit from leaving my stomach gave me the illusion of calm.
“You told Comita she was dead,” I said around a mouthful of bilious saliva.
“No. I gave Admiral Comita Ching’s sword and implied she was dead. I owed Ching a life debt. She cashed it in.”
“You should have told me.” My voice sounded small and tremulous.
Hers was flat when she replied, “And you should have asked.”
Fury pushed down nausea. “Don’t put this on me, Mere. I trusted you. I believed you. I—”
“You don’t trust me, though.” Her voice remained expressionless. Mine, however, rose.
“I gave you my oath. In fucking blood. I gave up everything for you.”
Cold stole over her features. “No, you didn’t.”
“I—”
Her eyes narrowed. “You left a ship where you were shit on for your heritage to be second mate on mine, years before you would have achieved the same position in the Archipelago. You still have your family. You still have your best friend. You still have your sanity. The worst thing that has ever happened to you is that someone tried to drop you off my ship, and you were rescued within minutes. Don’t you dare talk to me about sacrifice.”
“Miranda—”
“I owe Ching Shih everything that I am. I couldn’t kill her. I thought you of all people would understand.”
I stood up from the chair I’d collapsed into and backed away from her toward the door. My entire body trembled. “I never asked you to kill her. All I’ve ever asked of you is trust. But you can’t give that to me, can you?”
Miranda’s glare deepened. She drew herself upright, and I saw sweat beading along her hairline. “You’re a fine one to talk about trust.”
There were several instances she could be referring to where I’d disobeyed her orders, but she didn’t get it. She hadn’t just lied to me as my captain. She’d lied to me in our bed.
“I am responsible for wiping out her entire fleet. She will kill me, Mere, and you didn’t think I might want to know if she was alive?”
“Believe me, I’m aware of what you did.”
I choked on the fist of her words. I didn’t recognize the woman in front of me. Her face was twisted in a rage that made no sense. I was the one who’d been lied to. I was the one who should be upset, not her.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Miranda’s jaw muscles jumped as she held back the words I could tell she wanted to launch at me. “Forget it.”
“No, Mere. Say it.”
She looked at me. I glared into her eyes, blue and clear and laced with the same hairline fractures that crisscrossed her body in the shape of her scars, but ran much deeper. I’d seen the damage following Jeanine’s death, and I saw it again now, as if blue light irradiated her. It arrested my breaking heart mid-shatter. I was a navigator. Detecting undercurrents was my job. What was I missing? Why would Miranda lie to me about Ching? She wasn’t looking at me like someone caught out in a lie. She looked like a woman haunted.
A sick feeling crept over me as I studied her, as cold and clammy as toxic fog. All the secret reasons why I’d never dared ask her about Ching stirred in my marrow.
It had never been only about Ching, though my fear of her was real enough. Ching represented a time in Miranda’s life I would never fully understand, but it had been a part of her. It was still a part of her. Miranda had sailed with Ching, which meant many of the people who’d perished in that battle were people she knew. People she cared about.
People I’d helped the Archipelago kill.
A buzzing sound filled my ears. The room seemed overly bright, flooded with blue, and I hovered on the brink of something vast and sharp. The buzzing intensified. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself not to tumble over the edge, but it was already too late. Blue light bled into the backs of my eyes and turned them as purple as the exposed muscles in Jeanine’s chest.
I’d been asking myself the wrong questions this entire time.
“You didn’t want her fleet destroyed, did you?” I said.
Miranda jerked her eyes away from mine and stared back down at her hands, twisting the ring on her thumb—a Gemini captain’s ring. Another reminder of the things she’d lost. Once, I’d floated at the stern of her ship, cut loose by a woman I’d thought was my friend. The silence of the stars that night had been a cataclysm; they were nothing compared to what I saw in the depths of Miranda’s averted irises now. In my arrogance, I’d thought I’d saved her. Instead, when I’d led the Archipelago down on Ching’s flank, I’d cut Miranda loose.
It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been the one to give the orders, or that, given the option, I would have offered clemency. Without the hidden channel I’d discovered through drowned Florida, the Archipelago wouldn’t have been able to slaughter Ching’s fleet and sink her ships. The fight would have been fair—or at least fairer—and Ching would have had bargaining power. Equilibrium might have been achieved. But, like a much younger Miranda, I’d underestimated the Archipelago’s capacity for violence. Unlike that Miranda, I should have known better, for I was in love with the evidence of their cruelty.
The buzzing intensified. I hated Ching for the war she’d brought down on my people, but I remembered the revelation I had after Jeanine’s death: how Miranda had fixated on nearly losing me, instead of the reality of losing two members of her crew. I remembered, and as I did, the blade fell. I’d been fixating on Ching
to avoid something even uglier. By finding the channel, I’d given the Archipelago the means to commit genocide.
The vomit I’d been holding back burned my nose as I bolted for the head. Seamus hissed as I tripped over him. I clutched the plex sides of the toilet and heaved and heaved and heaved. My stomach was always one step ahead of me. My mother had called my tendency as a child to feel ill before a stressful event “your nervous stomach.” This was so much more than that. It was like my body knew it was toxic, knew I brought death with me wherever I went, and now wished to rid itself of itself.
A hand settled on my back. All the muscles in my abdomen quivered with the effort of expulsion. I threw up until the only thing that emerged was rancid air, and then I leaned my forehead on the plex and sobbed.
Miranda wiped my face clean with a wet rag when I stopped convulsing. I accepted the glass of water she handed me and rinsed out my mouth, then drank, replenishing the liquid I’d lost with a diligence outside my own volition. I drank for Miranda. I sat up for Miranda. I slowly, painfully, accepted I would not die in the small bathroom in our quarters, and looked up into the face of the woman who’d lied for the same reason I’d never asked about Ching. If we acknowledged the damage that lay between us, it would open a gulf as vast and full of our dead as the Gulf of Mexico.
The cool plex of the shower stall supported my back. Miranda arranged herself cross-legged in the narrow space between the toilet and the door with her hands dropped loosely in her lap. Neither of us spoke for a long time.
“We had a plan,” Miranda said at last. “Together, we’d take down the Archipelago and bring equality and stability to the Atlantic. It took four years before I realized she had another agenda. All Archipelageans were the same in her eyes. She didn’t want equality. She wanted sovereignty. A nation of her own. No matter the cost. When Comita approached me, I thought I was so fucking brilliant. I thought I could play them against each other and force the treaty I’d first tried to get on Gemini. I thought, like a bloody fool, that I could make up for what I’d done to my station.”
Her words did not echo in the small space, but I felt them reverberate down my body anyway.
“I didn’t tell you about this before the Gulf because I did not know if I could trust you. After, I didn’t tell you because I did not want you to feel as I’ve felt every day since they walked me. I thought I could protect you. And Ching . . .” An expression I’d never before seen crossed her face too quickly for me to read. “I could not be certain you wouldn’t go to Comita, if you knew.”
I saw the fires burning over the surface of the Gulf and, just below, the bodies.
Would I have gone to Comita? If Miranda had sat me down and said, “Rose, I cannot lose this woman even if she is a monster, because I have lost too many people already to this war,” would I have spat in the face of her trust? I didn’t think so, but I understood why she could not take the risk.
Understanding brought no comfort. Miranda and I stared miserably at each other, lost in our own private hells, and she did not reach for me.
“I think I should go,” I said.
She flinched, but did not argue. I stood unsteadily and walked the short distance to the quarters assigned to the second mate. I rarely used them. I hadn’t kept so much as a spare shirt in a drawer. The room still felt as if it belonged to the previous occupant, who’d died in an attempted mutiny—also my fault. I curled into my hammock and felt the ship hum around me. Hard to believe we were still docked beside the Trench, or that the rest of the crew, including Harper, were off enjoying themselves in Seraphina’s hold.
I’d helped the Archipelago destroy an entire fleet of people. Yes, I’d been driven to it, chased into the channel by Ching’s scouts, and yes, what I’d seen of Ching’s treatment of our mining stations had horrified me. Ching had no right to punish Archipelago innocents for the decisions of the elite. That didn’t mean her sailors had deserved their fates. A fate I’d brought down on them. I should have known what would happen. Maybe a part of me had. All this time, I’d struggled to reconcile my love for Miranda with my history and the values instilled in me by my upbringing, unaware she’d been struggling with something far greater.
My dreams that night were once again drenched with blood. Faces floated in dark water, bloated and bruised, and even the water in the hydrofarms ran red. Dev called for me to find him while squid wearing Ching’s face hunted me through the tangled ruins of my ship, Jeanine’s head in their beaks. Harper panted in pain, a sword through her gut, asking me to tell her mother she forgave her while Orca crawled toward me, Comita standing over her with a knife. Behind them, Annie laughed, a rope in her hands. “I’ll save you,” she said, but her face was half skull and rotting flesh, and an eel peered out from the empty socket. And Miranda—Miranda lay still and silent at my feet, her scars as livid as they must have looked the day she got them, and she didn’t move when I shook her. “You should have saved us,” said Jeanine. “You should have saved us all.”
I woke, screaming, to the feel of Miranda’s arms around me and her voice in my ear.
“Easy, love.”
She held me tightly as I sobbed, until the sobs turned into dry heaves and then back to sobs and finally to sleep, and when the nightmares came again, she sang to me until the fresh grief passed. Her voice was rough and sweet. It passed through me and into my bones, where it hummed with the rhythm of the ship.
“Did I ever tell you the story of how I found Seamus?”
I shook my head against her collarbone.
“This was back when I first started under Ching, after I’d recovered enough to remember who I was. I mostly helped Ching plan raids, which meant I spent a lot of time talking with drifters. This ship came in to trade—it was even smaller than our trawler—and I was in the docking bay with Kraken gathering intel. He was chatting with the captain, who looked like she was twelve, when this ball of fluff erupts from their hatch. Obviously I caught it.”
“Obviously.”
“And it bit me. Hard. But before I could drown it, it climbed up my arm and hid beneath my hair, hissing and biting and clawing me every time I tried to get it off. So I let it stay. He didn’t come down for four hours, and I ended up with the rest of the litter before the end of the day.”
She toyed with my curls as she spoke, smoothing them between her fingers and letting her nails lightly scratch my scalp, the way both the cat in question and I liked.
“I never found out why he wanted to get off that ship so badly. Sometimes I’m glad. It doesn’t always matter what we’re running from, as long as we get away.”
“What about the things we can’t get away from?”
Her lips pressed against the top of my head. “That’s when we hold on to each other—and our knives.”
When I woke up again, I was alone once more in my room.
••••
Harper sauntered toward me during breakfast with her eyes half-lidded and a satisfied smirk on her lips. Her haircut looked as fierce as she’d claimed it would in the morning light. Orca trailed her, looking equally smug. I fixed as blank an expression on my face as I could manage, aware I looked like shit but desperate to keep Harper from asking what was wrong. Last night’s revelations were a poison coating every inch of my insides. Miranda did not join us at the table. I did not know where she was, or if her appearance beside me last night had been a dream.
“You missed out by leaving early,” Harper said as she slid into the seat beside me.
I side-eyed her, noting the rumpled state of her clothing, and forced a light tone. “Have fun?”
“More fun than you’d believe.” She stretched. “Neptune, but I’m sore. Everywhere.” Her wink left her meaning unmistakable.
“You’re going to put me off my breakfast. What did you get up to?” I asked Kraken, turning away from Harper’s lazy grin.
“You’ll have to wait and see, but I promise, it’s delicious.”
Harper perked up. “Food?”
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“Seraphina’s been cultivating a new species. She discovered them last year. Easier to raise than eels, fast protein, and while they’re not much to look at, they’re delicious.”
“When you say not much to look at—” Orca began.
“She calls them sea roaches, but I’m working on a more palatable title,” said Kraken.
“Sea roaches? Like cockroaches?” Orca pushed her tray away. “Hell no.”
“Juicy, tender—you won’t even notice.”
“I’ll notice.”
“You’ll eat it,” said Harper, “like a good girl.”
“Seraphina has a library of old recipes,” said Kraken, perhaps sensing an audience in Harper.
“How old?” I asked, feigning interest.
“Pre-flood. Spices you’ve never heard of. Plants and animals that don’t exist anymore. She’s been trying to recreate some of them for years. Food is culture.”
“And yet, you want us to eat bugs,” said Orca.
“I’ve eaten real roaches before.” Kraken’s voice lost its lightheartedness, and he seemed to grow in his chair.
Orca was undeterred. “Right, but you were starving.”
“We’re always one blight away from starvation.”
An awkward silence followed this pronouncement. Harper broke it.
“This took a turn. Orca, shut up. You’ll eat your roach and you’ll like it. Can we call them Roach Roasts? Or, what about Roachellini in red sauce? Little nuggets wrapped in rice flour could be . . . Rumplings. Roach dumplings.”
“Rumplings.” Kraken savored the word and rubbed his bald scalp. “I like it. Or roasts.”
“Vomit,” said Orca, but she said it quietly and without heat.
I pulled her aside as the meal finished.
“I’m busy,” she said automatically.
“Fuck that.”
Whatever she heard in my voice was enough to break her concentration. The languid expression left her face as she focused on me. “You need to hit something?”
I nodded.
She led the way, not to the rings, but to a mostly empty storage room. Crates and barrels lined one wall, but the floor was larger than a ring and had been recently swept. The resident cat hissed and bolted out the door before Orca shut it. Neither of us had wraps for our hands—not that wraps had ever stopped Orca from beating the shit out of me in the past. My breath echoed in my ears.