Once Stolen

by D. N. Bryn

  After an era, she nudges me away, taking a deep breath into the crook of my neck. “That was me saying I love you, too, by the way.”

  “Are you sure?” I flick my tongue at her. “I think you’d better try it again.”

  She laughs, her face scrunching. “You perfect wonderful hurricane-brained—”

  “Shut up already.” I snatch her hands, lacing our fingers together, and kiss her again, letting the motion linger and expand, until it becomes our whole world. Until we become each other’s world.

  At some point I find her arms wrapped around me and her face settled lightly against mine, her eyes closed. I draw my fingers over her swirls of stubbled hair. The salty ocean breeze stirs her worn clothing, and the edge of the Murk’s canopy shifts above us as a monkey dashes through the leaves. Fern’s and Xera’s tangled scents lure my gaze along until I sense the vibration of them cuddled together in a tree to the left of our stolen fisher boat. On our other side sit three warriors who watch Thais and me with too little subtlety to be anything but our wardens.

  Before us stretches the little bay, remnants of the battle sullying the otherwise beautiful expanse. Driftwood bobs in the cracks between rocks and roots, the shapes of decimated vessels lying on the sandy floor, obscured by the shifting water. A pair of warriors stand with paddles on a long sturdy board, using an extremely long net to fish out green ignits, then deactivating them. Bodies still bob in the waves, but once enough of the deadly stones are eliminated, a group pulls them up, one by one, signing death proclamations over each before wrapping them in sheets for burial, fishers placed beside warriors. It takes the full team to lift Acai’s body from the water.

  I watch even though it hurts. This was my doing. And I would not have chosen otherwise, not if it meant more people would have died in the end, but I still can’t run from the consequences. I can accept that I made the right choice, and that the choice still hurts. Because, I think, both are true. Our good actions are not always without pain, just as the bad ones sometimes hurt us more than they hurt anyone else.

  I jerk upright. “Oh, muck. Rubem. Did anyone save Rubem?”

  Thais’s smile falls. Her fingers tap an anxious rhythm. “They were too far away, moving too fast. We have nothing that can catch a fully powered steamship.” She pulls her legs beneath her and leans against my shoulder. “He seemed to be alive still, and with only one person trying to crew the entire vessel, Lily couldn’t have taken him far. If she turned them toward a port though, she did it after they vanished over the horizon.”

  My stomach sinks for him. I promised Rubem I would save him this time, but I chose Thais again. I chose Thais over an island of ignits, and I chose Thais over Rubem, and I chose Thais over my own life. I regret none of those things, but Rubem’s and the ancient’s captures still hurt. I owe him more than this.

  The canopy rustles as a dozen Murklings filter through it. A set of human warriors climb down to the boat first, then an old couple, a hoatzi and a human, their patchy heads covered in strips of what must have been each other’s locks and feathers during their younger years, accented in beads that gleam red and gold when the sun hits them. Cayenne loops himself around the nearest trunk to help support the aging pair.

  The water stirs, and everyone, even the eldest of each species, tips their heads respectfully. An instantly recognizable woman with silvering pink fur climbing across her chest draws herself onto the edge of the boat, her dolphin’s tail draped over the side. Janaina: the dwindling botos’ only leader.

  One of each. Whether they’ve come to condemn me or honor me, they’ve decided that my actions warrant a representative from each of the Murk’s intelligent species. But I don’t see my mother among them. My scales crawl as I rise properly onto my tail, my fingers flittering instinctively over my necklace. The wide endless ocean looks like a fantastic escape. But I made my choices. I don’t regret them.

  The hoatzi councilor’s scaled bracelets clank together as they sign, “Little One of the Bittersweet Earth—”

  “Cacao,” I correct. “I am the Cacao Bean which Grows from the Bittersweet Earth.”

  They blink, their red eyes dilating.

  I look away until their hands move again. “Little Cacao Bean which Grows from the Bittersweet Earth, your actions today cannot reverse the previous deaths you have brought to the Murk.”

  “I know. And I didn’t help the Murk in an attempt to make up for anything.” My hands tremble, but I’ve committed myself to this path, for better or worse. “It was just the right thing to do, so I did it. I did some fucked up things before I was banished, and after I was banished, and also just yesterday. But the people you care about are the most important thing there is, even if they can be silt-breathers on occasion. It was time I started acting on that.”

  The human elder watches me with such intensity that I can’t escape their gaze no matter how far from their eyes I look. I nearly miss their question. “And the ancient? We know of your involvement in its demise.”

  I grimace. “It’s not dead—I would never kill one, not on purpose. Taking it just looked like an easy way out, I guess. I thought I could have everything that way, and no one would get hurt. But it was wrong. I was wrong.” And Lily possesses it, along with Rubem.

  The human wrinkles their nose and looks to their partner.

  The hoatzi shrugs. They whisper, the vocal vibrations shivering along my head ridges.

  As they finish, Cayenne adds his own accusation. “Were you the one who detonated the island?”

  “Yes,” I sign, before Thais can protest, because it was my decision. If anyone takes blame for it, it should be me.

  The human’s expression bunches farther.

  A sharp scent of disgust wafts off Cayenne. “Those ignits could have been used to better the Murk.”

  Anger blisters beneath my scales, righteous for once. Is this what Thais feels like all the time? “Fuck that. They’re just ignits. Like I said, the people are what’s important, and I did it to try and save them—Thais and you all, and, and even me. Because I’m important too.”

  Cayenne blinks, and slowly his lifted hands drop, his scent unreadably muddled.

  The human looks about to protest in his place, but Janaina grabs their arm. She nods to the hoatzi and Cayenne. “I believe that’s all I need to know. His own kind may make the final judgment.”

  I cringe as I glance at Cayenne. But he draws back, clearing the end of the boat for a new elder who slides in like the salt of the sea. Blisters still bubble between her scales, so irregular that the inside of my skull crawls. Blood pierces her eyes, and she lays her torso over the edge of the boat with a deep excess of breath, as though simply existing right now exhausts her. The vessel bobs heavily beneath her weight.

  Thais scrambles to offer the use of her necklace.

  Brine waves her away. “I’ll live, child. I suspect I’m too large for that to do me any good anyway.” Her hands move slow and sluggish, but her eyes fix on me with all her raging intensity. “My little earthen one, I may have misjudged you.”

  At her words, the child still curled inside me comes awake again, dying to be seen and understood and accepted. I don’t know if I can survive this, not with the way my heart aches to explode and my ribs tremble, pain and anger rising up, along with something else. Something I see a little clearer now that Thais’s love saturates me: self-hatred, borne out of a deeper disturbance, a feeling that if no one else could accept me with my needs, then there was no reason to accept myself. For that, I have to try to make Brine see. I need her not to let it happen again.

  “The Murk is a conglomerate whole, right?” I ask. “We all work together to help each other. Everyone sacrifices so that no one suffers.”

  Brine narrows her eyes. “Yes.”

  “Suffering, though, it isn’t… it’s not…” I start, but a tremble runs through my hands. I can’t meet Brine’s graze. I can’t look into her eyes and see that same flat nothingness that first banished me from my
home.

  Thais’s fingers press against mine, just long enough to settle their flailing before she signs, “But suffering for one person might not look the same, or be the same, as suffering for someone else. Every person in a community is unique, and what is right for one may not be right for another.”

  That Thais understands—that I am understood, even if it’s not by my mother—gives me a strength unlike any I’ve felt before. It cracks through the darkness. It lets me suffer where someone can see me. Where someone can hold me through it. I lift my head.

  “I needed the pulsing of an ignit to make all my irrational pain go away and help my mind settle back to normal, but you and the council and—and everyone—wouldn’t accept that, just because you didn’t know what it felt like.” My fingers waver toward the spot where my blue ignit should have been, but I force myself to keep talking. “You treated my need like a flaw until it finally became one. And that’s half my fault. I shouldn’t have let my fear of not having ignits drive me to steal and hurt for them. But I shouldn’t have had to fear that in the first place. I deserved better, as a child.” I believe that now, believe it because I was a child then, hurting and alone, and now I’m a hero, even if I’m not a perfect one. But I’ve been much worse in between. “I don’t know what I deserve now. I guess that’s what we’re here to find out.”

  Brine’s hands hang in the air a long time before she signs, her salty scent overwhelmed with everything and nothing all at once, impossible to make sense of and just as impossible to avoid. “I see.” Her large fingers seem almost small suddenly, their edges too soft for such an old being. “I see also that you’ve grown past that flaw of your own accord. I’m ashamed that I did not learn at your side. You are a part of the Murk, my child, and what you deserve is to be with us, and to feel safe here. We are willing to accept your return, and we—I—would like to learn more of this, to do better in the future. Our resource distribution may not be as sound as we once thought.”

  Warm blossoms in my chest chase my lingering worry away. I grin at Brine, my fingers tracing the edges of my ignit. Only for my mood to fall. “That’s great, Mom, but it wasn’t all my own accord. I had help.” I glance at Thais, then Fern, hanging from the branch above me, and finally Xera, perched in perfect stillness to my right. “I can’t come back unless they can come with me. Thais too—Thais especially. I love her, ignits or not.”

  She wraps her arm around my waist, leaning her head onto my shoulder.

  Brine reveals rows of gnarled pointed teeth. She reaches out and rubs the top of Thais’s head with one ancient finger. “I think the Murk could use another hero.” Her gaze drifts to Xera and Fern. “And those two were already pardoned. Though the witness of the Way the Dew Slides off the Fern will be better questioned in the future.”

  Fern smells far too pleased with herself. “Really, you should have picked up on that lie before I involved the skeleton monkeys.”

  I roll my eyes. “I take it all back, I don’t vouch for Fern, at all. Please throw her out of the Murk.”

  “You still owe me your bones,” she retorts, her eyes creepily wide and her smile obnoxiously big.

  I turn my back on her, but the scent of her laughter follows me, coated in her aroma of wet foliage.

  Janaina’s chest vibrates with a great sigh, and she shifts her dolphin tail. “These fishers are gone, but their absence will leave a vacuum easily filled with more hatred and death. Perhaps now is the time to send ambassadors to bridge the gap?” Her gaze moves to us, the rest of the councilors following suit.

  “What?” I sign the word a moment after thinking it, as though it sinks out of me in my shock. “You mean us? Be ambassadors?”

  “Oh, dear, no. I am asking only for your insight. You’ve lived far closer to these humans than any of us. Do you see a path to peace between our people? Though, if you are offering to take the first steps, do you believe you are the best suited for the job?”

  “No, no, not the best suited, at all. Literally anyone would be better.” My hands shake from how funny this is. “Literally anyone. And being an ambassador sounds boring—no offense.”

  Thais nods, her stomach clenching as though stifling giggles. “We respectfully decline such a prestigious title. But I think having ambassadors would be a good decision, and we’ll help wherever we’re needed.”

  “For the humble price of two ignits,” I add with a grin.

  Thais smacks me in the shoulder.

  She wobbles, the green glow of her necklace ignit fading out. Panic shoots through me, and I grab her arm, steadying her. But her lips turn up despite the worry tinging her scent. “I’m fine, for the moment. The necklace already cleared the lingering energy from my body while I shared it with you, so the poison can’t hurt me unless it gives me a spasm while its ignit is inactive.”

  The pieces fit uneasily together, sinking like rocks in my stomach. “They may not be overlapping right now, but at some point, they will. You’ll still get sick.”

  “Occasionally,” Thais admits. “But I’ll always get better. And during the bad points, you’ll just have to take care of me.” She nudges me in the side, gentler this time.

  “Always.” I press my lips to hers.

  Her heart beats against mine as she returns the kiss, her ignit pulsing softly. “Or,” she adds, “you could find me another large green ignit to replace it with when this one is recharging.”

  “If it’s as easy as getting this one was, it’ll be no problem.”

  In the midst of our teasing, the council grew bored. Their warriors guide them back into the depths of the Murk without as much as a farewell. They probably assume we’ll come stay at the nearest village for the evening. Maybe we will.

  Brine lingers behind with a few physicians. The canopy rustles, and a hoatzi appears through the leaves, out of breath. They give Brine a small package. She unwraps it carefully, her huge worn hands peeling back the crackly covering with calm deliberateness. A necklace of feathers, hair, scales, and beads lies within, an inactive blue ignit hanging from its center.

  She offers it to me. The cord runs between my fingers, soft and intricate, a piece of the Murk all on its own.

  “Because you lost yours,” Brine says.

  I slip it on, tightening it enough that it won’t fall off in the water. The glowing stone hangs a little below my old necklace of more ordinary rocks. Just this single ignit shines more beautifully than the halls of hoarded ones, as though it beats with love instead of pain and greed. I grin, tracing my fingers over it. “Thank you, Mom.”

  She smiles. “Take care of yourself, little cacao.” And with a deep inhale, she sinks back into the Murk. The surface goes still, and the physicians slowly make their way through the trees, tracking the massive brown shadow of Brine’s body as she meanders into the depths of the Murk.

  We watch in stillness, as though we cease to exist until she vanishes from sight, leaving us young and alone and tangible once more. Only the warmth in my chest and the gentle pulse of the ignits tell me it was all real. Fern flops across the deck at my side, giving an overly dramatic sigh.

  Xera creeps up to her and prods her in the back with their foot. “We, um, should go home.”

  “Your home crushed mine, pretty sure.”

  Xera’s lips twitch. “We will build new ones.” They hesitate, running their fingers through the feathers on their necklace. “Or, just one. For both of us.”

  Fern stares at Xera. Then she grabs them in a hug, dragging them down with her. Between her protective snuggling, she signs, “I’d like that.” She entwines her tail with mine, winding the tip around Thais’s ankle. “You two had better visit.”

  “But not, uh, too often,” Xera teases, slumping across Fern’s torso.

  “Why would I ever want to see you muck-faced silt-breathers again?”

  Xera blinks at me. “You said I could, could choose what I wanted for helping you later? Now, later?”

  “Now later works.”

&nbs
p; They nod. With the head of one of their arrows, they sever a lock of their hair. They grab my wrist, tying it beside the lock I’ve kept of Thais’s. “What I want is for you to keep this.”

  “Always.” I grin and catch Xera’s fingers, giving a little squeeze. But when I turn my smile on Thais, I find her distant gaze caught on the shadow of Rubem’s giant crocodilian as the beast lies across a mess of roots and logs and stares out to sea. I sigh, shaking my head. “You want to rescue him, too, don’t you? Fucking hero,” I grumble.

  Thais barely glances at my hands before looking out across the water, past the flat stretch where her mother’s island once sat and off into the horizon. Toward Rubem. “Of course.”

  “I love that about you.” I slip behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist and perching my chin on her shoulder.

  She leans against me. “It’ll be tough. We don’t know where those fishers will take him, or even if they’ve left him alive. But I think we have to try.”

  I grin with every last one of my teeth. “Well, then, Thais like the t at the beginning of taunt and the funny ice stuff, we’d better get started.”

  WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO CACAO AND THAIS NEXT?

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