Once Stolen

by D. N. Bryn

  The crocodilian’s limp body sinks, the weight of its bulky muscles dragging it down. My numb tail pulls me with it. I thrash, pawing at the boat as we go under. The hull slips away beneath my fingers. The crocodilian’s scales press against me, lumpy squares, too much like fishnets or rotting bark or—

  I rub my thumb over my ignit, feeling the dull pulse of it like a second heartbeat, a soothing rhythm that flows through me. Using my hands, I unwrap my tail from the crocodilian’s body. A cloud of blood seeps from the fresh gashes twisting through my scales. I bare my teeth at the few brave fish edging closer. They scram.

  Now for the boat.

  I pump my arms, wiggling the less numb portions of my tail. Little by little, I force myself closer to the boat. My hands barely reach the railing. My arms cramp as I flop onto the main deck near the front peak.

  I heave my tail up after me, like Thais has tried to do so many times. It takes far more effort than she made it look, along with some tugging, straining, and teeth gritting. By the time I finish, the cartel humans lie stunned or moaning from her work with the purple ignit shooter. All but one.

  He steps onto the deck, a hand held above his eyes and squinting despite the Murk’s natural gloom. The smoke stench and the reek of sticky bile linger on him, but now he smells of the sun, too, awake and determined, his fear gone or maybe just hidden. He surveys the scene. His jaw pulses.

  The moment he looks away from Fern’s collapsed form, she curls, quiet and subtle. She lunges at Rubem. Her mouth opens and her muscles bulge, but Rubem ducks out of the way, fluid as the fog, and her teeth clamp on air. His elbow crashes into Fern’s head, and he steps back in one smooth motion. His emerald-encrusted pistol seems almost to fly into his grasp. The silky contained vibration of it firing rattles my ridges.

  Oh, muck. We should have killed him. This was a mistake.

  Fern’s torso buckles, and with a thud, she hits the stairs leading to the top deck, blood welling along her side. It slips in scarlet rivers through the cracks in her green scales, pooling as more and more seeps out. It drips to the wooden deck. I can’t feel the constant plunk from the other end of the boat, and somehow, that makes everything worse, as though it’s only half happening, as though closing my eyes could reverse the whole thing.

  I writhe an arm’s length toward Fern, but my numb tail clunks along, smearing red in its wake. Thais slams the boat with the purple ignit cannon into the side of Rubem’s, and I tumble behind a collection of crates in the center of the deck. She leaps to Fern’s side.

  Rubem aims the pistol at them both, and they freeze. From the other small boat, a dazed human rolls over. The bug net from the cabin entrance curls up in a phantom breeze. Rubem’s chest heaves in and out. Fern bleeds.

  A bolt shafted in green and brown feathers whizzes out of the canopy above me, streaking toward Rubem’s arms. He yanks his hands down just in time. The bolt embeds harmlessly into the wood, and Rubem’s aim shifts to Xera. They go still, crouched on a drooping branch over the front of the boat.

  “Drop it.” He signs the words with one hand, his lips moving in time.

  Slowly, Xera lets the crossbow go. It clatters across the deck, the vibrations odd compared to the stillness that exists around its owner. Behind Rubem’s shoulder, Thais eases Fern a few steps up the stairs. A few steps toward safety. They stop moving when Rubem turns back toward them.

  Xera beats their branch. “Wait!”

  Rubem eyes them. “Yes, Murkling?”

  He hasn’t seen Xera with us yet, not since the early morning, and I don’t know if he can remember them with enough certainty to identify them as the human whose house caught fire.

  Xera’s fingers flicker to one of the feathers on their clothes, touching it gently. They swallow.

  I should help. I want to help. But I’m too close to Fern and Thais. If Rubem’s attention turns to me, he might see them move out of the corner of his eye. So I curl myself smaller instead, rubbing my ignit as though somehow that will make the words come for Xera.

  “You are, uh . . .” Xera’s hands tremble, wobbling through a series of motions clearly not meant to be words at all, and finally land on, “very red.”

  Rubem blinks, the wrinkles around his narrowed eyes multiplying. “Yes, as well as very busy with an excruciating headache and a mess you’d do best not to involve yourself with.”

  Xera glances at Fern and Thais who are now halfway up the stairs, but they immediately switch their gaze to the small boat drifting farther down the rivulet. “You—you shouldn’t be here. No river people in the Murk. Not right.”

  The base of Rubem’s throat vibrates, and he pushes his hand against his brow, pulling it away finally to sign. “You’re right. But we will be leaving soon, and this young person—” he waves toward Thais, who freezes. His attention must not have shifted enough to see the progress she’s made up the stairs. “She’s no Murkling, and neither is the boiuna hiding behind those crates.”

  I squeeze my ignit a little tighter and give Rubem a tiny smirk.

  His lips twitch in return, but he shudders the smile away, looking back to Xera. “I apologize over the one I shot, but it was in my own defense. The three of them attacked my crew and invaded my boat to kill me in my sleep.”

  A clumpy knot forms in my still partially senseless gut, as though a wallop of mud slinks through it. Rubem is wrong, of course. But only barely.

  Thais pulls Fern up the final step. The bearded cartel human struggles to rise from their slumped position across the seats on the top deck, but Thais grabs the purple ignit stick lying at their side—that same one that Rubem used on us in the treehouse—and pokes them with it. They go limp again.

  Xera’s fingers flutter over their feather, and they bunch their lips. “I think, you should know, that in the, um, the case of all of you, the surface is, is rougher.”

  “The surface?” Rubem asks.

  “Um, the surface, yes. It’s rough and hard, but inside are more things, things you did not see before: beautiful things and good intentions. Just more.”

  “Like a geode?” I sign to Xera.

  “Geode, uh, yes,” they agree, returning immediately to play with their feather.

  As they do, Thais helps Fern climb into the driving console. Fern stretches toward the canopy. Her face contorts, fresh blood draining from her side. She grabs a branch and pulls onto it, twisting her tail around the wood to reach down for Thais.

  But Thais clings to the purple ignit stick, looking back at me to sign a muddled, “When I throw, run.”

  Motherfucking—she doesn’t know my tail is still numb. And judging by Fern’s fast recovery as a larger boiuna, I know somewhere in the water must lurk a mostly functioning crocodilian waiting to swallow me whole.

  I try to give Thais the slightest shake of my head, but I can’t tell her no without lifting my hands into clear view of Rubem. Don’t do it, Thais. Let Xera help me once you and Fern are gone.

  Like a fucking hero, she ignores me, readying her aim.

  “People act like geodes,” Xera concludes.

  Confusion and suspicion flood Rubem’s scent name. Ironic, really, because for the first time in their short conver-sation, I think Xera isn’t actually trying to distract him at all, but rather explaining something they consider important. I agree: rocks are important. Rubem seems to think otherwise.

  He turns back toward the stairs, just as Thais lets the ignit stick fly. It twists end over end. The moment Rubem spots it echoes through his body in the fluid drawing of muscles and shifting of balance. But his notice comes an instant too late. The stick hits him, the holder smacking into his shoulder. It falls to the deck without the ignit ever making contact.

  His pistol comes up. It trains on Fern and Thais as they try to pull themselves properly into the canopy, Thais, still hanging from Fern’s arms, stares down the barrel of Rubem’s gun. Just staring.

  I move without thinking, a mad half lunge, half roll, all scramble. I shove into the back
of Rubem’s knees. My momentum carries us both forward, landing me directly on top of the ignit. It digs between my head ridges, and the mix of paralyzing energy and vibration against my skull shatters me inside, casting me into the dark.

  FOURTEEN

  Pieces of the Murk

  I don’t miss the Murk.

  I don’t miss the Murk.

  I miss the Murk.

  I WAKE TO THE throb of my own blood pounding in my head, a rush and slide like the waves along the coast. My scales tingle, half of them numb and the rest aching. Water caresses my tail and tickles at my waist, but thick glass presses against my side, and the Murk’s muggy air fills my lungs.

  Rubem’s fish tank?

  The understanding seeps in like fog, taking so much energy that none remains for my panic. My head ridges brush the tank’s mostly closed lid, sending a streak of painful shudders along my skull, and my tail curls awkwardly in the long container, filling most of the water space. Only a few fish remain, small harmless brown things that dart around in a group below my chin.

  As I try to orient myself, the whole boat seems to tremble. My heart lifts into my throat, giddy dragonflies tumbling through my stomach. It has to be Thais. What the fuck is she doing? Rubem’s scent wafts down from the open stairs to the deck, though, followed by the rap of one of his cartel humans’ boots, and I realize the quavering came not from an attack but from the activation of the huge ignit that powers the vessel.

  No one is here for me.

  That makes me ache all the more. I twist my torso and shove my shoulder against the tank lid. Despite my heaving and lurching, the resilient material pushes back. My muscles burn, and fresh blood seeps from the gash Rubem’s crocodile left in my tail, tinging the water pink. I collapse back into it.

  Am I going to die here or be carted around eternally like a part of Rubem’s collection because I risked everyone else’s lives for my greed? Because I refused to ditch a couple pretty stones? The words come from my own mind, but they look like my forebearer’s, like the council’s and the elders’, like apprehensive neighbors and traitorous friends: sharp and accusatory. I can’t lose like this. After everything I’ve been through. If I give in now, then why didn’t I give in when it meant I could still have a home?

  Home.

  It drifts past the window, the late afternoon cast in the deep gloom of the rising fog. The same mist spills through my mind, and muck, muck, I missed the Murk. I’d rather die than be kept as Rubem’s eternal prisoner, trapped in his riverboat, never to see this beautiful swamp again. If I do die, at least it’ll be here. At least I’m home.

  Another breeze twists sluggishly down the stairs, and I pick out Rubem’s scent once more, muddled by a metallic buzz in my nose and the grubby smell of his many pets. He makes no vibrations as he descends, only breaking the stillness with a heavy exhale when he sees me. His fresh shirt creates a shock of white beneath the ruby accents of his vest.

  “Finally awake?” He approaches the tank slowly, drawing out a key.

  I flinch from his new fishnet gloves. The sight of them continues to haunt me as he pops open the lock and lifts the lid. Muck, I need my ignit. I feel the brush of every rock on my necklace and the hidden tracking compass tangled beneath the largest of them, but the wiring that should be holding my ignit lies empty against my scales.

  Time to go.

  Keeping my eyes on the stairs, I launch toward them. My weak tail thrashes against the glass, and my hip catches on the lip of the lid. I fall halfway to the ground, smacking my elbow, half of my tail still coiled inside the tank.

  Rubem’s paralyzing stick appears in his hands. Just the sight of the purple glow at its end calls me to it, but its active state pulses through my worn skull, flaring pain along my head ridges. My bones all feel as though they’re being corroded away, and I can do nothing but recoil.

  I curl into the corner, between the tank lid and the back wall, trying to still my breath, and sign in jagged shaking motions, “Don’t you wave that thing at me, silt-breather.”

  Slowly, Rubem tucks his stick under his arm. His gaze moves along me, his brow tight. “If you don’t make another mad break for the stairs, I won’t point any weapons at you. Is that acceptable?”

  Just being here isn’t acceptable. But my head throbs like an open wound, and the route to the stairs seems longer than the entire span of the Murk. Rubem has his pistol tucked back into his belt too. Hurricane or not, I don’t think I could kill him with the way my tail feels now, and I don’t want to bet on him not shooting me if I fail. So I nod. I regret the motion when a wave of pain splinters my head. “What are you going to do with me?”

  Rubem lowers himself into a rocking chair beside a wire cage with a skunk bird in it. The creature picks at its wing claws, spinning its red eyes toward me, feathers fluffing. It reminds me of a hoatzi.

  Rubem pours himself a glass of wine dark enough to be the night sky, tendrils of a musty sweetness mixing with the bite of the alcohol’s smell. He takes a sip of it and sets the glass down, leaning back in his chair. It rocks ever so slightly, and he stops it with his foot. “I’m still reevaluating. Next question, please.”

  In my wildest rankings of weird conversations, this one tops all the charts. I sink back into the tank enough to rest my shoulders on the lip and face Rubem properly. “What happened to the others?”

  “They left,” Rubem replies. “My scouts did notice a large group of Murklings moving in on us—we’re sailing away from them now, toward the coast—but I haven’t seen the three you traveled with since they abandoned you. Which is unfortunate for us both. I was hoping you might lure Thais in. It’s half the reason I kept you.”

  He could be lying; I don’t know what signals to look for to tell. But Thais does have new Murklings to help her reach her hoard now. They could leave me here for good.

  The thought doesn’t match the Thais and Xera I know, but it sinks in anyway, twisting like a poison in my stomach. Xera could guide Thais through the Murk with fewer problems than I. Thais could reach her mother’s hoard without ever needing to give away a single ignit. She would be better off. Maybe she would leave me. The memory of her bile burns my nose, and I touch the twist of her lost hair encircling my wrist.

  Desperation makes people do crazy things.

  I prop my shoulders a little better against the back wall. “What’s the other half?”

  Rubem’s brow comes up. “Of what?”

  “The reason I’m here.”

  “If I’d dumped you into the water, you’d have drowned.”

  I’ve little time to dwell on that because my blue ignit appears between his fingers. He twists it absentmindedly. My hands ache to reach for it, as though my very soul pools inside them, yearning to be closer. I bare my teeth. “Give it back.”

  Rubem glances at the stone, then drops it into his shirt pocket. “No. You’ve stolen from me: ignits, a prisoner, a boat, one of my pet’s eyes, my only green ignit tracker, the lives of many of my crew and whatever teetering respect I had from them, and a much-needed morning of rest. I think I’m justified in relieving you of this one ignit.”

  The words dig into me like barbs because they’re true. They’re true and I hate it. I hate that, while I want that ignit more than he ever will, I took things from him that he seems to have needed and loved more than I ever could, and that somehow, in some bizarre way, that makes the ignit’s subtle blue glow through the ruby-embroidered lip of Rubem’s pocket justified.

  I glare. A few fish mosey a little closer to my still-seeping wounds, and I flick my fingers at them. They streak away.

  Rubem stands, his attention caught on me as he walks toward the tank. He moves with such soft fluid motions, so similar to Xera’s, that I feel nothing from him above the throbbing of my head ridges. But he doesn’t scare me. If anything, he reminds me oddly of the way the young hoatzis would creep closer to my sleeping forebearer, their curiosity pushing them forward until the old boiuna awoke and snapped at them, ja
ws always not quite clipping their tail feathers even when she could have easily gobbled them all down whole. Rubem’s not a Murkling child, though. He’s a dangerous cartel leader, and he can fuck off.

  I bare my teeth again. “That poison that’s polluting Thais now—why’d you make it? If those damn green ignits are so rare, why go to all the trouble of splitting one down so far that it could only be used once?”

  My question makes Rubem pause. He traces his fingers along the rim of the tank. I rub the stones on my necklace to keep from focusing too much on the fishnet gloves that turn his hands into something wrong and broken and painful.

  Finally, he lifts them and signs, “They’re dangerous ignits, those green ones. It’s better to have them used up than to risk them slipping into the wrong hands.” His eyes lock with mine, and even after I look away, I still feel them boring into me. “Imagine the destruction the fishers would cause if they could kill anything with just a stone.”

  Not just a stone. My brain skips to nets with the green ignits bound into the weights, slowly killing my body as the ropes pierce my soul, to bullets of green, sinking into Fern’s flesh and choking her from the inside out, to the stones dropped like poison into nests and pools and beds. The Murk survives because it stands as one, but none of us could fight something like that. My certainty trembles through me. I aggressively rub my necklace with one thumb, but my free hand feels empty, useless, like it might shake clean off.

  “I destroyed most of the ones the cartel had when I became its leader,” Rubem finishes, his words turning into disconnected fragments in my head as his hand moves toward my arm. His fishnetted fingers brush against my scales, agonizing.

  I tear away from him, instinct and pain driving me backward. My head thuds against the back wall. Dark fire pulses through me, and my scales slip apart. I can feel them crisping up, flaking off, falling away. I breathe in water.