by Anna Burke
“Do you want to try eating in the mess?”
I abandoned all pretense of being amused by fruit and looked up. The motion barely hurt; two weeks of confinement had been good for that much, if nothing else. Harper had kept good on the promise she’d made Miranda not to tax my brain, and mostly spent the hours we shared fiddling with spare parts of machinery or napping beside me. “Really?”
“It might be too soon.”
“No, I’ll come.” I rose carefully and collected my lemons, threatening my balance with dire punishments if it failed me now. My feet obeyed with only a slight delay. The drop in the left was getting better, and the world didn’t spin as wildly as it had for the first week.
I still couldn’t reach north, and we hadn’t spoken at all about the tenuous status of our relationship.
Miranda waited while I glanced at my reflection. The cut was fully scabbed now, and the bruising had retreated. Both my eyes opened fully. Focusing was still a hit or miss, and the nausea was constant, but I needed to get out of this room. No one would tell me anything about what was happening around me, except for whatever sanitized version they thought wouldn’t stress me. The fact it needed to be sanitized, however, itched more than my healing forehead. Without the cardinal points and the currents, I was worse than blind.
Miranda led me by the hand—though out of necessity, rather than tenderness—and we entered the mess hall together. Heads turned. My pulse leapt with anticipation that maybe for once they were happy to see me, until I realized the eyes leveled in our direction were sullen, not relieved.
It wasn’t that I’d expected cheers. The crew had learned to accept me as best they ever would. Resentment, though, was new. Or rather, it was familiar, but not from here. North Star had resented me. Man o’ War disliked me on principle, and perhaps because I’d helped raze Ching’s fleet, but they didn’t look at me like I’d stolen something from them. Miranda didn’t seem to notice. That didn’t make sense, either. Miranda was observant, especially when it came to her crew.
“Steady,” she said in my ear as I stumbled. I refocused my efforts on walking.
The captain’s table, at least, let out a whoop at my approach. Harper leapt up, cursed as her wounded leg buckled, and settled for waving from her seat. Kraken smiled and gave me a nod. Orca nodded too, but her eyes were on the rest of the mess hall, and I knew she’d seen what I had and was just as worried. The rest of the chiefs were more subdued in their greetings. I bared my teeth in a smile burdened beneath the work of conveying joy and simultaneously keeping the contents of my stomach where they belonged.
“You chose a good day to return,” Kraken said.
“Why’s that?”
“Our first batch of roasts was ready to harvest.”
“Roasts?” My mind struggled to recall any conversation from before my injury, but this time, regrettably, it dredged up a discussion about sea roaches. “No.”
“They’re not bad,” said Miranda.
“Even Orca ate them,” said Harper.
Orca snorted and raised an eyebrow. “I don’t turn down food. That doesn’t mean I wanted to see them in their natural state, thank you very much. If you don’t know what they look like they’re fucking delicious, though.”
“Fast protein, surprisingly social, and hardy,” said Nic, chief of hydroponics. “I’ve added them to tanks that need more bottom feeders. They clean things up nicely.”
“I’ll get you some.” Miranda left me to go get a tray. Everyone else had finished eating, probably in the time it had taken me to get to the cafeteria, which meant they’d be watching me try to keep down dinner. The prospect further spoiled my appetite.
“How do you feel?” Harper leaned across the table, wincing as the motion pinched her ribs.
“Like a half-baked squid.”
“But you’re walking.”
“And talking,” said Orca, “which, as always, is a pity.”
“Shut up.” Harper elbowed Orca and turned back to me. “She’s missed you.”
Orca shifted in her seat and let her curtain of braids hide her face.
“What’s new on deck?” I asked.
They shared a brief look. It passed from Orca to Kraken to Harper and back to me, and Harper offered up a passable attempt at her usual grin. “Nothing too exciting. We were able to trade with another ship for some of what we lost, and Miranda sent out raiders for the rest. A few have already returned.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
“Where are we?”
This time, the looks that passed between them were easily recognizable: concern, confusion, and surprise.
“You mean you don’t know?” Harper asked.
I realized my mistake with a rush of nausea. My stomach had always been sensitive to stress. The concussion, however, had magnified things to unbearable levels, and I clutched it with a groan and closed my eyes. Shallow breaths. North, south . . . fuck. What was the point of naming the points if I couldn’t reach them? I’d never had to ask for my location before. Knowing was as much a part of me as my cells, and now . . .
“A little above the second parallel at about -44 degrees,” said Orca. “Which you’d know, if you weren’t so busy dying all the time.”
Her comment elicited a laugh from Harper, and Orca flashed me a warning look from behind her hair. Act normal, it read, and cold trickled down my neck. Something was definitely wrong if Orca was helping me cover up a deficiency. It hurt too much to try to parse why she was helping me, though, and Miranda chose that moment to deposit a tray in front of me. The smell of food registered—though everything still smelled faintly like lemons except lemons themselves—and I surveyed my plate. A section of hard carapace lay beside an algae patty and fresh greens. The greens tasted sharp on my tongue, and I chewed them slowly while Kraken explained how to break into the shell of the roast.
Inside, the meat was tender and sweet and salty, and my appetite returned with enough force to make Kraken laugh as I prodded the shell for remnants.
“Glad you liked it, kid.”
“I don’t care what they look like. That is delicious.”
“You say that now,” Orca said darkly.
“Council meeting after dinner.” Miranda’s redirection caught all of our attention. “Rose, attend only if you’re functional.”
“I’m functional.” In truth, my head felt pulped. The noise and lights and smells of the mess hall ground my brain like fruit beneath a booted heel. Retreating to Miranda’s quarters was all I wanted to do, but Orca’s warning lingered. For some reason, I needed to act normal, and I had a growing suspicion I was overlooking something important. Something I should know to ask about, but couldn’t remember.
Miranda’s officers followed her out of the cafeteria. Kraken’s bulk walked behind me, which I took comfort from, but the same murmuring rose from the crew as we passed. I tried to scan the crowd. The effort made me dizzy. Faces blurred, and focusing on any of them brought on spikes of pain. Those faces I did manage to make out didn’t offer any clues.
My gaze snagged on a pair of dark eyes. Mocking lips twisted as the face turned away, and when I squinted to better make the person out, they were gone. The memory, however, left a kernel of fear.
The council meeting unfolded around me like ink in water. Words enveloped me but did not penetrate the fog in my brain, obscuring more than they revealed. Supplies. Trajectories. Coordinates. I sensed Orca watching me each time coordinates came up, and I tried to keep an interested expression on my face. Even without north in my veins, I should have been able to make sense of longitude and latitude. My fingers itched for a chart to orient myself, and my panic rose until it drowned out everything else.
What if it never came back? I traced the scars on my palm in lieu of the cardinal points. My sense of direction was what had gotten me onto Miranda’s ship, had guided me since childhood, had gained me admission to fleet prep, and defined every interaction I’d had with my peers since
then. Even my name—my fucking name—was a reminder. I was nobody without the ocean.
“. . . redirect our efforts.”
“—without methane, how can we—”
“. . . haven’t checked in with my sources, but it isn’t clear . . .”
I pressed the ridged flesh in the center of my palm until the scar began to twinge.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Orca’s voice cut through the fog. Crew stood around the table, talking amongst themselves, which meant the meeting was over. Harper and Nic were engaged in a heated debate that sounded like it had something to do with biofuel and algae. Kraken, Miranda, and the other ranking crew members argued about something else a few feet away. No one paid me and Orca any heed.
“I’m concussed.”
“You know what I mean.” Her gray eyes pinioned mine. “You’re not working right.”
“I’m not a tool.”
We’re all tools, Miranda had told me once.
“Listen. Are you capable of listening?”
“Screw you.”
“Things have gone sideways. You need to fix whatever is busted—” she gestured at my head, “before—”
“Orca.” Miranda motioned for her to join her with a curt wave of her hand.
“What’s gone sideways?” I asked.
Orca’s shrug was the only answer I received.
Chapter Seven
I stroked the fine hairs at the base of Miranda’s neck as she stretched across our bed. Seamus purred in the hollow between her thighs and stomach, and she scratched his chin. She smelled like stress and lemons. The looping scars across her back were redder than her light brown skin, and one crept up into her hairline beneath my fingers.
“Is everything okay?” I asked her. Neither of us had drifted off to sleep.
She rolled over. Seamus grumbled and stalked to the foot of the bed, where he lay down with an air of insulted dignity. I traced the scar that connected the hinge of her jaw to her eyebrow. “Everything’s fine.”
“You promised not to lie to me.” This was the closest either of us had come to addressing our fight.
“I’m not lying.” She kissed the palm of my hand. “I have things under control.”
“But there is something to control.”
“There’s always something to control.” The grumble in her voice matched Seamus’s, and I tapped the corner of her mouth. She nipped my finger. “You don’t need to worry about it until you’re healed.”
I settled deeper into the thin mattress and let my hand fall to the sheet between us. “What if I don’t heal? What if I’m stuck hiding in this room forever?”
Broken, I didn’t add. Useless.
“You’re improving.”
“Barely.”
“You can walk. We’re having a conversation.”
“Everything is hard and smells like lemons.”
“That, I don’t understand.”
“I hate lemons.”
“You used to love them. Remember that time in the garden?”
Even my broken mind could recall with vivid detail which time she meant. We’d lain in the sunshine by the plex overlooking the stern, and I’d told Miranda she was sweet. Only you would say that, she’d said. I’m a lemon, Rose.
She’d plucked one, and dared me to sip the juice from her cupped hands.
We hadn’t stopped there.
“I remember,” I said now, my body flushing. “Mere . . .”
“You can’t see your progress because you’re in it.”
“I feel like I can’t see anything.”
Miranda turned now to lie on her back. I studied her profile and waited for her to speak, the sense of foreboding returning.
“Amaryllis is the only reason the attack stopped where it did.”
“Were they her friends?” I asked.
“The pirates? No. She rallied the crew, though, and held them off the creches.”
“Why would they go after kids in the first place?”
“Kids are easier to press-gang into service. They adapt. It’s a pretty common practice. But . . .” She trailed off. Something was worrying her, and I wished I could put the pieces together faster.
“What?”
“I think you were right.”
“About what?” I said, stunned both by the thought of pirates taking children to replenish their ranks and also by this admission.
“It was a mistake to bring her aboard.”
I stared at her. She still had her eyes glued to the ceiling. Admitting fault wasn’t one of her strengths.
“Did she do something else?”
“No. But she saved my crew’s kids.”
“I don’t understand. I’m sorry. My head—”
“She saved them. I didn’t. And she’s been helping with repairs.”
The spinning in my head intensified. I reached out to Miranda to steady myself and closed my fingers around her braid. It anchored me, as tugging on it anchored her when she was frustrated, but did not ease the rising fear.
Orca’s comments were beginning to make sense.
“Most of my sailors crewed for her long before they elected me,” Miranda continued in a monotone confession.
“But you’re the captain.”
“It’s not like the Archipelago. We choose our captains. I serve them just like they serve me, and if I don’t—”
“They elect someone else,” I said.
“Yes.”
“They wouldn’t choose her over you. They left her to sail under you.”
“I know.”
But the timing was bad. I could see that, even if I didn’t like it. The attack. The lost supplies. Jeanine’s death before that, and the push to sail south into unknown waters.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Keep sailing, and get to the pole as fast as we can.”
“And if she leads a mutiny?”
“She won’t. I have it under control.” She meant it. The conviction in her voice held all the fierceness of the winter sea, but there was only so much even Miranda Stillwater could control. “You should keep staying here, though. I know we haven’t . . . talked . . . about anything. But you’re safest with me.”
As if I could argue even if I wanted to.
••••
Miranda brought the charts to her quarters the next day. I spread the charts on the carpet and lay on the rough weave trying to will them to make sense. Without my internal compass, I had to rely on instruments—but Miranda hadn’t brought me any. I did what I could with memory and my fingers. The process made my head ache terribly, and my eyes felt like I’d held them open in salt water for hours. From what I could gather, we were miles off our initial course, and I wasn’t sure why. After we’d restocked our supplies and waited for our agricultural stocks to grow back, shouldn’t we have returned to the course I’d plotted? Unless it had taken longer to accomplish those things than I realized. I rubbed my temples and tried to push past the fog. The harder I pushed, the thicker the fog.
Miranda found me curled up on the carpet hours later. Charts stuck to my cheek when I raised my head to blink up at her. The look on her face unsettled me. I caught shades of pity, frustration, and fear before she cleared her expression. The hands that raised me up were gentle.
“Time for dinner.”
Making the trek to the mess hall again was the last thing I wanted to do. Even getting knifed by Ching or one of her sympathizers held more appeal than sitting in that raucous room, but Miranda shook her head when I opened my mouth, and I shut it. There was a reason she was making me go, and it wasn’t torture. Perhaps she wasn’t as oblivious to her crew’s discontent as I’d feared.
“Make any progress on the charts?” she asked as I tried to tidy my hair.
“A little.” More like none, but I didn’t want to admit that. “Why are we so far off course?”
“Supplies.” A reasonable explanation, and the one I’d guessed. Her eyes met mine squarely. T
here was no reason for the suspicion, growing despite my mental fog, that she wasn’t telling me the whole truth.
A theme. I wasn’t telling her the whole truth, either.
“Before we got attacked,” I began, choosing my words carefully, “Ching told me to avoid deep ocean. Do you know why?”
“It’s pirate territory. Which we found out.”
“You don’t think she’s working with them?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t she have joined them then?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“The risk Amaryllis poses isn’t like that,” Miranda said, considering my concerns for a change. “She’s a captain. You can’t have two captains on the same ship without people comparing them. This isn’t about her. It’s about the crew. If they think I’ve dealt them a bad hand, they’ll start looking for another dealer. It might not even be Amaryllis they elect.”
I thought I understood her logic. By offering up a comparison, Ching exposed Miranda’s leadership flaws. Still, I didn’t think Ching was quite as blameless as Miranda seemed to want to believe. Stoking a mutiny seemed exactly like the sort of thing the Ching I knew did for fun.
As we walked, I practiced adjusting my focus from objects near and far until I nearly ran into a group of sailors. Miranda steered me out of danger, but the look she shot me afterward warned me against further physical therapy.
“Captain.” A woman hailed Miranda before we reached the mess hall. Hallé, maybe? Definitely something starting with an H. She had rings tattooed on all her fingers and around her biceps, and was heavily pregnant. Miranda answered her questions while I let my brain rest.
A familiar phrase jerked my attention back to the present. Over Miranda’s shoulder, I could make out a knot of sailors speaking in low, angry voices. Miranda either didn’t seem to notice or was too engrossed in her conversation with Hallé to care.
“. . . fucking fleet scum.”
It was the only phrase I could pick out. I wished I hadn’t heard it at all. Their eyes slid off me like oil spills, but they left a filmy residue clinging to my skin. Miranda broke off her conversation with Hallé with a sharp jerk of her head. I’d zoned out again, but the motion alerted me just in time to stumble backward as she shoved me aside. Something hissed by my right ear, then clattered to the ground. I stared at my feet. A knife lay there, still spinning on the scuffed floor.