by Tara Sim
“Cayo?” Soria wormed an arm out from under the sheets and grabbed his hand. “Why are we leaving Moray? What about Father?”
He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. He had to tell her the truth—all of it.
It came out of him like a frayed thread. Cayo told her about the counterfeit, about Kamon’s dealings with the Slum King, about how their father had been willing to let her waste away. It hurt, as if he tore that thread from his own skin, ripping apart his seams and undoing all that made him Cayo.
When he opened his eyes, Soria was crying quietly, her face half-turned into the pillow. He squeezed her hand.
“We need to get away from him,” he said. “And this man, Roach, says that there’s a way to help you. That’s why we have to leave.” He pressed her fingers to his lips. “I’m sorry, Soria. I wish I could fix this.”
But she shook her head and sniffed. “There’s no fixing some things, Cayo. I just…” She sobbed brokenly, her breath rasping. “I thought he loved me.”
He leaned over her. “I love you. And I’m going to do whatever it takes to save you.”
Soria scrubbed a wrist against her eyes and looked at the jade ring on her finger. “I wasn’t honest with you before. When I told you where I got this.”
Cayo frowned, not sure what it had to do with anything, but nodded for her to continue.
Soria brushed a thumb against the ring, her lips trembling. “It was a long time ago, but I remember it clearly. It’s because Father was so angry, and it scared me. I was supposed to be in a lesson with Miss Lawan, but instead I was going to the gardens because I’d left a toy out there. That’s when I heard Father yelling at someone. I peeked around the corner and saw he was with another man, who was dirty and clearly drunk.”
His sister closed her eyes, as if to better focus on the memory. “Father was saying that the other man had screwed up, that he had ruined his plan. That he was supposed to deliver a girl to the manor, not sell her to a debtor ship.”
“Deliver a girl?” Cayo’s frown deepened. “Was this a debt collector?”
“He must have been. He was nervous, but he laughed to hide it. He said something about needing to repay a debt to a captain. Father was…” Soria shuddered. “I’d never seen him so furious before. He hit the man and he went down.”
It didn’t surprise Cayo to hear about his father being violent, but the image still made his stomach ache.
“The debt collector told him to wait, that he had payment for his troubles, and showed him a ring. ‘The girl’s mother gave it to me as payment,’ he said. ‘For smuggling her out of the city. It’ll make up for the cost of you hiring me.’ But Father wouldn’t accept it and flung the ring into the garden. He said that it was worthless compared to the price of the girl. That if the man didn’t want to die that day, he would leave and never come near him again.”
Soria opened her eyes and fixed them on the jade ring. “I chased after the ring and picked it up, kept it in my jewelry box until I was old enough to wear it. I don’t know why—maybe because it was pretty, or because I wanted to remember that day. As hard as I tried to convince myself that Father was a good person, that he was someone I didn’t have to fear…”
More tears slid down her face. She angrily tore at the green band, scraping her knuckle as she popped it off her finger and threw it weakly across the room. It bounced against the wall and landed in a clatter.
“I’m glad we’re leaving,” she whispered.
He stayed with her until she stopped crying, until she let her exhaustion make way for uneasy sleep. Cayo stood and swayed, not quite used to the movement of a ship despite his childhood longing to live on one. But more than that, he was still dizzy and sore from last night, from his reckless descent into debauchery.
If he had simply gone home, would he have been able to avoid this? Had his vices finally ruined his family for good?
Cayo pocketed the ring before he climbed the stairs to the deck with a pounding head. The others were there: Roach, a man and two women he vaguely recognized from the countess’s estate, and the countess herself.
The girl who had pretended to be a countess.
She felt his gaze and turned to meet it. She opened her mouth as if to say something to him, then looked away.
Cayo bristled. Fine, then.
He walked up to Roach. “You said you came here to investigate the source of ash fever. What do you know about it?”
Roach sighed and dug something from his pocket. The buttons of his blue uniform jacket winked in the meager starlight as he pulled out a folded handkerchief.
“I’ve been here for a couple of weeks, trying to connect the pieces,” he said.
“Wait, you’ve been here for weeks and didn’t try to find me?” the girl said.
“I did try to find you! In fact, I heard there was a sale for a Vault belonging to the name Chandra and I stopped by to see if there was a connection to you.” He shrugged. “But when I got there, it was being raided by some men. I grabbed some random papers they’d hauled out, just in case, but I haven’t had time to look them over yet.”
She swallowed. “You…You must have just missed me.”
“I’ve been looking for you all day. Didn’t realize you’d show up here.” He held out his hand, and the girl briefly took it with a weak smile. “Anyway,” he went on, addressing Cayo, “the final piece fell into place once the prince died. I did some digging, tracked various transactions, and found that the deaths all had something specific in common.”
Roach peeled back the layers of the folded handkerchief, revealing a flat black disc.
“Counterfeit currency,” Roach said. “They’re not just painted gold—they’ve been alchemically altered. And the substance coating them has properties that cause ash fever.”
Cayo reeled, and not-Yamaa gasped. Roach solemnly wrapped up the disc and returned it to his pocket.
That meant his father wasn’t just the cause of the counterfeit, but responsible for an illness that had already taken lives. Would very likely take his sister’s life. Kamon Mercado wasn’t merely a criminal—he was a murderer who had brought death upon his own daughter.
But that still didn’t explain one thing. Cayo felt for the disc in his pocket and held it out to the girl he had kissed in the rain, the girl who had convinced him to turn in his father.
“Were you in on it?” he asked, his voice low.
She frowned as she stared at the disc. “What—”
“Romara. You gave her a coin, didn’t you?”
She looked like she would be sick. Silently, she nodded.
“What were you doing with counterfeit money, other than pretending to be nobility? Are you working with my father?”
“No, it’s nothing like that.”
“Then tell me the truth!”
He hadn’t meant to shout it, his voice ringing across the deck and over the water. Roach looked at the docks worriedly while one of the women swore.
The girl took a deep breath and met his gaze. “The man who kidnapped you and your sister. His name is Boon. He enlisted me—and these three,” she said, gesturing to the others, “to help him carry out his plot for revenge against your father, who made him Landless.”
The Kharian man crossed his arms with a stormy expression. “Wish I’d caught the bastard. He’d be much worse off than Landless.”
“Boon sent me here with his money, but I didn’t know it was counterfeit. I didn’t know that it…” Her eyes drifted to the companionway, where Cayo had taken Soria.
Then she frowned and turned back to Roach. “You said there are cases of ash fever showing up in the Rain Empire. How is that possible, if the counterfeit is localized to Moray?”
“It’s not as localized as you think. Part of my research led me to this man, Mercado, and I found that he’s been sending money there for the past few years. Apparently, he has debts he needs to pay off, although I couldn’t find the exact source of those debts.”
Cayo s
hook his head. “What do you mean, he was sending money? It’s illegal for any merchant in Moray to have dealings with the empires. We’re supposed to stay neutral.”
Roach laughed, and it grated against Cayo’s ears. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but nearly all of Mercado’s estate belongs to the Rain Empire, and about a quarter of Moray as well. Coin has been flooding out of the city, and hardly anything is coming in. The city is broke.”
“But that means…”
The young man nodded. “If Mercado is taken down and the counterfeit revealed, Moray will become economically dependent on the Rain Empire. It’ll force an end to neutrality, and likely bring the Sun Empire to your shores. It’ll mean war.”
Cayo drifted back, as if to avoid the words. The consequences of his father’s actions. His heart was a dull weight in his chest, dragging him down, down, until he thought he would merely fall through the floorboards.
He moved to the railing, gripping it in his hands. The others went on talking behind him, but the girl came up to his side, cautious.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For all of this.”
He didn’t bother to look at her. “Who are you, really? Why were you working with that man?”
She sighed and leaned her elbows on the railing. “I suppose I should start by saying that my name isn’t Yamaa. It’s Amaya Chandra.”
Cayo repeated the name silently, his lips shaping the unfamiliar sound.
She told him her story: how she had grown up in Moray until her father was killed and her mother sold her to a debtor’s ship. Her years diving for pearls and doing whatever it took to survive. She stared at her wrist as she spoke, and for the first time he noticed a small tattoo of a knife.
Fitting, he thought, though he wasn’t quite sure why.
She explained how she met Boon, and how they had prepared to ruin his father’s name. How she had been instructed to use Cayo, but that she had realized he wasn’t part of his father’s plans, how she had tried not to drag him into it. If she hoped it would soften him, she was wrong; it only cinched his bitterness tighter.
All this time, he had been an unwitting pawn. He had decided not to use her for her money, when all along she had been using him for her plans.
“Did you kill that man?” he asked when she was done. “The former captain of the Brackish?”
She paused long enough that he had his answer. Still, she replied, “Not directly, but I might as well have. He was a bad man, Cayo. He tortured children.”
He understood that—he did—but the reminder of that lifeless arm swinging off of the stretcher turned him cold. She was stained with blood.
“We’re going to find Boon and pay him back for what he’s done,” Yamaa—no, Amaya—said. “And we’ll do whatever it takes to help your sister. It’s the least I can do, after…everything.”
Cayo didn’t speak for some time. During her story, he had taken the jade ring from his pocket and fiddled with it, its weight insubstantial yet unbearable. When she looked over at what he was playing with, she stiffened.
“Where did you get that?”
He turned at the sudden change in her voice. Her dark eyes were wide, as if she had encountered a specter.
“It’s not mine, it’s Soria’s.” Cayo held out the ring in the palm of his hand. “Although I doubt she’ll want it any longer.”
Amaya reached out, then shrank back. Shaking her head, she took the ring from his palm, the graze of her fingertips white-hot against his skin. She cradled the ring in both her hands, one of them wrapped in a bandage, staring down at it as if it were a bird with a broken wing. She drew in breath to speak but released it as a shuddering sigh as tears fell from her eyes.
“It was my mother’s,” she whispered, brushing a thumb reverently against the band. “The day she sold me, she came home in tears, and her ring was missing. The ring my father gave her when they married.”
Revelation opened a pit in his stomach as he thought back to the story Soria had just told him. “I…I think there’s something you have to hear.”
He related Soria’s story to her, watching as her face hardened, then went slack with shock. She clamped her hands over the ring and held it to her chest, staring at the deck with overly bright eyes.
“This man, this debt collector, was told to bring you to my father for some reason,” Cayo said. “But the debt collector sold you off to that captain instead, Zharo, because he had a debt with him. The debt collector tried to give my father that ring, saying that the mother…your mother…had given it to him in exchange for smuggling you out of the city.”
“My mother didn’t sell me,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and let her tears fall. “I knew it. I knew he was lying.”
“Do you know why my father wanted you? Why he would pay a debt collector to bring you to him?”
Amaya heaved a breath and wiped her face. “My father. He’d collected blackmail on Kamon Mercado and was planning on using it. But then he died, and I was the only one who had access to his Vault, being a blood heir. Mercado must have wanted to use me to gain access to all that blackmail, to destroy it.” She shook her head and peered down at the ring again. “He got exactly what he wanted.”
Cayo swallowed, hardly knowing what to say. Every secret that was revealed only seemed to turn his father more and more into a monster, into a man he couldn’t even recognize.
“Well, you can keep it,” he said, pushing away from the railing to return to Soria. “My father might be a thief, but I’m not.”
“Cayo.”
He turned to her. The way she stood there, her fist held to her chest, her hair loose and waving in the sea breeze, made his throat tighten. He had first seen this girl in the inlet, sad and stubborn and strong. To see her again now, when he knew the truth, made him mourn for all the time they could have had together, if only they had both been honest.
His mother’s songs had been right: Nothing could stay, and everything was temporary. You could never trust what you had, only what you were capable of.
“Can you forgive me?” she asked softly. “It doesn’t have to be now, but someday?”
He thought about it. But nothing made sense anymore, including whatever feelings he had, or thought he had, toward her.
“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully.
Then he descended the stairs, disappearing into the dark.
She searched, but her magician had vanished. Neralia wept, for again she was alone, trapped in the cradle of the ocean’s dark and all the stars gone cold.
—“NERALIA OF THE CLOUDS,” AN ORAL STORY ORIGINATING FROM THE LEDE ISLANDS
Amaya stood at the railing of the quarterdeck, watching the lights of Moray grow distant. She had already lost sight of the Brackish, still docked with its pennants waving in the wind and its purple sails furled.
The last time she had watched Moray disappear on the horizon, she had been ten years old, and her name had been Silverfish. She had wept then, but she didn’t weep now.
Because this time she was leaving nothing behind.
Cicada would take care of the Water Bugs, make sure they got home to their families. And by the time the Port’s Authority caught wind of the strange events of this night, they would already be far out at sea.
Amaya looked down at the ring in her hand. Proof that she hadn’t been betrayed, that her mother had done all she could to try to save her from Mercado. She remembered how well it fit her mother’s slim finger, how the jade perfectly complemented the light brown of her skin. She tried to slip it over her fourth finger, but it was too small; she had inherited her father’s broad hands.
Sighing, she drifted toward the front of the ship, turning her back on Moray and facing the expanse of ocean that stretched before them. Liesl, Deadshot, and Avi were below in the galley, but she didn’t feel like joining them yet. Instead, she leaned on the railing and inhaled the briny air, letting it play with her hair as she remembered what it was like to be on the water, its rolli
ng movements and fathomless depths.
Her need for revenge had brought them all to this place of uncertainty and fear. She had ignored all the warnings and tended only to her desires, unknowingly spreading the counterfeit and ash fever with it.
She was no better than Mercado. No better than Boon.
“You’ve changed.”
Roach had joined her at the railing. He looked more like himself out of his uniform—more like the boy who had survived those seven years alongside her, making her laugh and sneaking her food. He gave her his familiar two-finger salute, and she gave one back. I’m all right.
I think.
She rested her head against his shoulder. “The countess was only an illusion,” she murmured. “As soon as I put on a pretty dress, all anyone could see was a rich girl.”
He hummed in disagreement. “It’s more than just clothing. It’s in the way you hold yourself, the way you speak. Like you’re more…you.”
She lifted her head with a frown. “How can I be more me when I was pretending to be someone else?”
“I’ve no clue, but somehow it happened. And I’m glad it did.”
“That makes one of us.” But at least now she could drop all her masks, perhaps finally figure out who she truly was.
And maybe, hopefully, that girl would be someone worthy of Cayo’s forgiveness.
Still, they had a long way to go until they reached that moment. Once they arrived in the Rain Empire, they would have to try to find a cure for Soria before the disease progressed more than it already had. She would try to find a lead on Boon’s whereabouts and expose his lies. And then…
Well, she didn’t know. She supposed the only definitive plan was the one she had stuck to for the last seven years: survive.
“It feels good,” she said softly, almost to herself, “to be back on the water.”
Roach huffed a fond laugh and tightened his arm around her shoulders. “It feels good to be on the water with you by my side. I’ve missed you, Sil.”
She winced and looked away, focusing again on the sea before them. “Don’t call me that. I’m not Silverfish anymore.”