Once Stolen

by D. N. Bryn

  The sight of it all raises bile into my throat. Acai.

  Acai couldn’t be dead. The elders, especially those as old as Acai, are ancient, untouchable. They’ve survived famines and wars and tragedies and migrations, the toppling of tribes and empires. A few dozen boat humans can’t be the thing that finally takes Acai down. But their corpse drifts along the surface of the water all the same. And I know it’s not just a few dozen boat humans. It’s a few dozen gathered green ignits as well.

  I rub Thais’s single one like it’s my life source.

  Xera leans against Fern, and their hands wobble so much that I barely make out their words through their stammer. “T-too, uh, many f-fishers.” Yet they smell not of fear, but of misery and anger.

  I follow their gaze to find Thais lying in the center of Lily’s ship, one shoulder propped against a metal case of spare cannonballs. What if she’s dead already? I can’t swallow the thought, but I can’t spit it out either. It rests like cotton against the back of my mouth, suffocating me.

  “Please,” I sign, to myself and the Murk and to no one at all, because it’s the only thing I can do.

  As my hands fall, the water parts to our right. Brine surges forth. For the first time, her old face looks truly ancient, red veins gleaming in her dark eyes. Her teeth bare in a smile. My heart clutches. She leaps over Acai’s corpse and plunges through the hulls of the nearest fisher boats. They flip, dumping screaming humans into the water. A few fishers manage to throw tiny ignits, thunder blue and paralyzing purple and poison green, but Brine slams her tail through their vessels, the wood cracking beneath each blow. Blisters flare between her scales, forming a distressing tapestry among the gashes torn by blue ignits, and she wipes blood from her nose, but still she chases after the fleeing boats.

  Be safe, Mom.

  Rubem swings our small vessel close enough to the steamship for Fern, Xera, and I to leap from our top deck to their lower one. A dozen fishers swarm the vessel, pistols and nets and machetes at the ready. I spot neither of the northerners’ fiery storms of hair among the dark heads, but Thais still lies beside the cannonball case, a chain around her waist. She reeks of sickness even from here. A fisher hovers over her, like they can’t decide whether she’s alive enough to use as a hostage anymore.

  Her chest doesn’t move.

  My own heart stops with hers. Movement blurs around me, Xera and Fern deftly taking out the nearest fishers. A gunshot bangs in the distance, followed by cannon fire, the vibrations warbling against my head ridges as though they come through water. My body moves, numbly vaulting me across the deck, hurtling through a boat human and slamming Thais’s uncertain guard out of the way.

  Her ignit sticks in my necklace, the wires tangling. I yank. My fingers slip. Another desperate pull, and the wires come undone, spilling the poison ignit out. I struggle to catch it with shaking hands while ripping out the necklace from beneath Thais’s shirt. The metal feels as warm and clammy as her skin. I slam the ignit into its protective coils and spark it with Rubem’s portable transitioner. The green glow alights, brilliant and blazing. Such a deadly thing turned into a cure by mechanics and genius. But there’s no cure for death.

  Thais doesn’t move. Oh, muck.

  Oh, muck.

  Oh, muck.

  No other words come. I wait, like waiting will help, because it has to. Because there’s nothing left for me if it doesn’t.

  Oh, muck.

  Pain screams through my tail, a fisher machete embedded there, slicing between my scales just below Rubem’s bandage job. I jerk forward, and some instinct drives me to wrap myself around Thais, to protect her even now. Even after I’ve lost her.

  My blood pools along the deck, flecked by the fisher’s as Xera’s knife comes through their neck. An ignit beats weakly against my chest, and a second gentle pulse joins it. Not a second ignit, but a heart. Hope assaults me, the sort of ragged teetering optimism that’s balanced on the edge of a knife prepared to cut straight through my chest the instant it falls.

  Thais coughs in my arms, and instead of falling, I fly. She takes in shallow lungfuls of air. Her long lashes flutter. By the time her eyes open, their red veins withdraw, and her ignit eyes gleam again. She smiles, a small half-alive smile. “You took your damn time, didn’t you?”

  “This hero business is hard,” I protest, grinning as though my heart isn’t skipping beats and my veins aren’t on fire and my stomach doesn’t have fifty butterflies all crashing and exploding in puffs of color.

  She laughs. “You going to let me up, fucking hero?”

  Uncoiling, I offer her one of my hands. “Can you stand?”

  Thais answers by doing so. One of her knees buckles, but she catches herself on my arm. As she steadies her full weight on both feet, the chaos of the ship hits us in the form of Fern’s tail. The boiuna dodges a machete before leaping at her attacker.

  I’m suddenly aware that she and Xera have been circling us this whole time, keeping the fishers off us as best they can. Blood streams from a gash in Xera’s arm, and a palm-sized space of Fern’s tail caves in as though the ribs there have been crushed. Still, they’ve killed or tossed off nearly every fisher in sight. From below deck, the cannon fires again, its shot splashing into the sea just behind Rubem’s speeding boat.

  As Xera finishes off the final fisher, a flame of orange hair appears in the entrance to the deck below. I grab Xera’s waist with my tail, yanking them behind the cannonball case with Thais and me. Lily fires into the air where Xera’s back had been a moment before.

  They flinch straight out of my grasp, knife raised, but their breathing settles, and they sign a quick, “Thank you.”

  Fern joins us, flattening herself to the deck. With a stolen pistol, she fires back at Lily. Rubem’s boat makes another pass toward us, but it sputters to a stop, ignit finally giving out. He slams his palms into the wheel, his shoulders drooping. A cannonball blasts through the cabin beneath him. The boat tips, and sea water pours in, black smoke billowing up in its wake. I swear a blur clears the space between Rubem’s boat and the ship, but I can’t be sure of anything through the sooty haze.

  Lily fires another bullet, and Fern returns it with one of her own. Thais’s chain rattles as she tries fruitlessly to free herself.

  To our right, a few surviving fishers drag Brine’s netted body onto one of the last intact fisher boats. Blood drips from her nose, and blisters boil between her scales. She struggles weakly, crushing one of the fishers’ feet. They pin her massive torso down, and two of them prepare machetes.

  Xera’s hand tightens around their knife.

  “Save her,” I sign. “Thais and I can handle this.”

  Xera nods and grabs Fern, who fires off one last shot before swinging them both toward the fisher boat.

  Thais holds out the rusty lock on her chain. I reach for the thunder ignit in my necklace, but my fingers brush only the ancient’s velvety exterior. Is there even a stone in there anymore? I rub the ancient’s smooth surface, glancing across the deck. One of the fishers’ tiny deactivated thunder ignits nestles in a crack in the wood.

  The stillness from Lily’s side of the boat taunts me, free of bullets and footsteps alike. I slide out and grab the little ignit. Nothing shoots me. Nothing even moves. I shove the ignit into Thais’s lock and activate it with the portable transitioner.

  The lock rattles and jerks open, but I leave the device pressed against the ignit a moment too long, and it vibrates against my scales. I yank my hand away before its bruise turns to anything worse, and it clatters across the deck.

  As I peek out to watch it, I spot both northerners. Wolf grips the lower deck’s entrance. Lily seems to be scolding him, but the more she waves him below, the harder he struggles to join her. The smell of death clings to him, as putrid and sour as it had Thais. Its brand shines in his sweaty inflamed skin and his blood-drenched bandages.

  Thais yanks off her chains. She rolls out from our cover, snatching up a pistol from a fallen
fisher.

  “Fucking hero,” I sign at her.

  She smiles, aims for the northerners, and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Her lips move in a silent curse. I launch myself at her. Curling my body around hers, we roll across the deck, a bullet zipping by us, and hit the railing.

  My necklace stones dangle from the tight wire cord as we come to a stop. Lily’s gaze locks on the ancient hanging in the center casing. I can smell her desire from here. She wants it with the same terrible lust that drove me toward Thais’s hoard. And she refuses to let it go.

  There’s only one way this ends.

  I lunge at her. As I burst forward, though, my straining muscles pull at the gash the machete left in me. Fresh blood spurts, and my tail whips the wrong way, careening me over a clump of dropped fishnets. I crumple to a stop in front of Lily, and my bones so blistered that I don’t know how to move my fingers, don’t know how to stop moving my shoulders. Everything but the ache of the net’s touch filters away as I writhe. Lily looms over me. Her fingers wrap around my necklace. Wolf pins me down, and Lily yanks, weeding the ancient and its ignit free of the casing. She leaps back, aiming her pistol for the space between my eyes.

  My head pounds anew and my lungs seize up. Between the gaps in my vision, Thais barrels into Lily. The ancient flies from her grip, rolling across the deck. Thais shoves the northerner’s arm to the side as her pistol fires. Hot blood slides across my shoulder in such a sudden ruthless rush that it propels me out of the netting. But I feel no pain. It isn’t my blood at all. The red stream surges from Wolf’s stomach, a slow waterfall he tries fruitlessly to catch. He falls to both knees.

  As he does, the ancient comes to rest against the heel of Rubem’s sea-soaked boots. Despite the heaving of his chest and the wobble in his legs, he brushes back his braids and picks the ancient up with one perfectly smooth motion. All around him, the world stills. A slight smile tugs at his lips.

  Beneath his grasp, a rainbow glow spreads across the ancient’s black form. It peels off my ignit, pieces of its dark glittering body stretching and contracting. It drags itself up Rubem’s fingers and across the back of his hand. The once blue ignit slips from his grip, clattering on the deck, now nothing more than a grey stone. He shakes his wrist. The ancient moves faster, vanishing beneath his shirt. He pulls at the fabric, tugging and twisting, first around his hips, then his waist, and up his chest. The creature slips across his collarbones and comes to rest in the crook of his neck. His hands tremble as he touches it. He digs his fingers into it, but it melts away from his touch, holding on to him like it’s a part of his skin.

  Shock takes me. I carried that thing on my necklace—it bore the accumulation of my shame and renewed my desire to help the Murk—and now it clings to Rubem as though it might slide into his pores and populate him like a new mangrove.

  Lily lurches toward him, toward the ancient, but I burst after her. I grab her arms. She slams her hands against my head ridges and stomps her heel into the gash in my tail. My senses mix in a wave of pain. So much pain. Too much pain.

  Thais appears at our sides again. This time, though, Lily expects her, launching an elbow at her face. Thais hits the railing of the deck, and the old wood cracks, two of the panels falling out of their slots.

  A wave of sickness hits my nose, curling my still blurred vision. Through the lingering pain, I make out the strained wrinkles and sunken shadows of Wolf’s face, scarlet sloshing out of his stomach. He launches at Thais, hands outstretched. She fights, but his dying fingers wrap around her necklace. He tears the ignit out.

  The world slows to a single heartbeat. Death takes Wolf in blisters and blood, dropping him like a rag doll. As he hits the deck, the poison ignit bounces once, then rolls. I try to follow its movement, but my gaze sticks to Thais.

  Without the ignit masking her poison, her hollow strength crumples, revealing every crevasse of the weakness still plaguing her body. A single line of blood slips out of her nose. It pools above her top lip. She falls through the broken railing, and the red tear drops into her open mouth.

  In a blur of bounces and rolls, the poison ignit shoots past me, just near enough that it infects me with the first hints of its sickness as it passes: a wave of fatigue and a twist of nausea. It notches itself between deck planks, waiting for the ship to tip and throw it out.

  The vibration of Thais’s body hitting the water echoes through my skull, vanquished only by the stillness that follows. No splashing. The tiny poison ignits scattered across the sandy sea floor cannot be emitting at the moment, too small to give off energy for the hours upon hours Thais’s large ignit can. But she’ll die anyway. Without the ignit in her necklace, she doesn’t have the strength to swim to the surface.

  I grab for the clingstone in my necklace, but it slips from my numb fingers, the small rock tumbling through a crack in the wood and disappearing into the lower deck. My gaze sticks to the gap where it vanished, yet I swear I feel every heartbeat around me: Rubem’s pounding with fear as Lily slams him into the deck for the gentle thrum of the ancient in his neck; the ignit’s pulse, a song of death and life; Thais’s weak rhythm, slowing, slowing; and me.

  I have to choose. Rubem or Thais. Thais or my life.

  The ship wobbles, throwing Thais’s ignit back into motion, rolling it away from me. I lunge. With a single finger and thumb, I grab it and launch over the broken railing, barely feeling Rubem’s limp body collapse to the deck a ways behind me.

  As I hit the water, the poison ignit leaches into me. My stomach curdles, and pain spears through my insides. My flesh burns between my scales. My muscles go numb. I can smell the weight of my own mortality.

  Fuck off a moment, death.

  With everything left in me, I propel myself to Thais’s body where it floats just beneath the surface. I wrap my fingers around the ignit to push it against the rim of her necklace. Blisters tear me apart, and pink tints my wavering vision as I shove the stone in.

  Live. Live. Her heartbeat awakens, and mine fades to a distant hum. Buh-bum. Buh-bum. Buh-bum.

  Something—someone—grabs me, yanking me onto a wooden deck. Through black stars, I can just make out the shape of Lily’s retreating ship charging into the open sea. Fingers lace through mine, and a cord brushes the side of my neck as my soul slips away.

  TWENTY

  The Rhythm of a Duet

  You and I,

  the king and queen of nothing,

  the homeless heroes,

  the full of heart,

  two idiots in love.

  And I’m loving it.

  LEAVES SHIFT ABOVE ME, a glimmering pattern of greens and golds, late afternoon light peeking through to caress my scales. The wood beneath me bobs to the gentle ebb and flow of rolling water. Up, then down. Buh-bum, buh-bum, buh-bum. Fingers tap a melody between the heartbeat, the rise and fall of a chest amidst the waves. A thin cord of metal rests against one side of my neck.

  Buh-bum. Buh-bum. Buh-bum.

  The deep musk of the Murk and the whip of the sea’s salt tug for my attention, but Thais’s rain-cleaned scent wins out, her sternum lifting and dropping beneath my cheek, her fingertips tracing the back of my neck. I press my head ridges to her heart and feel the beat of her life through my entire being. Her chest shakes, suddenly. I jerk upright, panic lancing out all other thought. The necklace chain goes taut, looped around both our necks, tying us together. The pendant hangs between us.

  But Thais smiles, and her ignit eyes shine.

  “You’re alive.” I must’ve signed the words, because she nods.

  Her laughter trembles through her hands. “My heartbeat didn’t clue you in?” She slips her fingers along my scales and draws the chain over my head, settling it properly against her own neck again.

  “I thought maybe we were both dead, and our souls were hovering together in the mists?”

  “Aw, I didn’t think you were that poetic of a person, Cacao.”

  I bare my teeth at her playfully, pressing my foreh
ead to her temple. “Fuck off.” My shoulders shake. The quaver travels down my spine and along my arms, rattling my whole being as though every ounce of fear and relief and joy has hit me all at once. “You’re alive.”

  “We’ve covered this already.” She prods me in the side. “You’re alive too.” Lines spring up in the corners of her lids. Puffy lids, a little red. “For a while there I thought . . .”

  The moisture filming her ignit eyes hurts my heart. I brush my thumb under her lashes. “You saved me. Like a fucking hero.”

  Her smile returns with a little vibration in her chest. “We saved each other this time.” Her tears gather anew, but the rain-cleaned smell of joy and affection never wavers. “You let me destroy all those ignits. You gave up everything.”

  “Everything? That’s a silly word. I never gave up you. Never again.” Not even a hint of regret can weed its way into the warmth of my chest. I chose Thais. I will always choose Thais, so long as she lets me. “We both have nothing now, but we’ve got each other to complain about it to, so it can’t be all bad.”

  She fiddles with her pendant, brushing the protective metal piece that covers the green stone. All the while, she watches my necklace—my ignitless necklace. “But you need an ignit.”

  I want to say no. I want to say that on top of being my everything, Thais is also all I need. But while I know now I don’t need an ignit hoard or even a jar of the pretty glowing stones, I do need to stop my bones from feeling as though they’re shattering out of place. “We’ll find one, I’m sure, you and me. I don’t have to worry about it on my own anymore.” I lean against her. Our foreheads brush. “I think I kind of love you, ignit eyes.”

  “You’d fucking better, cacao bean.”

  With my gaze on her hands and her teasing words bouncing joyfully through my head, the soft press of her lips to mine catches me off guard. I stiffen, then melt, sinking blissfully into her kiss. Suddenly it’s not her kiss anymore, but ours, perfectly shared, equally ferocious and tender, greedy and selfless. Her fingers trace up my arms and search my back, running along my spine and cupping my neck. I press against her until I feel the perfect beautiful beat of her heart above the pulse of her ignit.