Kingdom of Salt and Sirens

by J. A. Armitage

  "So, your friend… what’s the favor you’re going to call in?" I asked as we made our way through the thinning vegetation. We must have been approaching the edge of a town.

  The captain looked over his shoulder in answer. "We’re going to need some supplies. Probably another boat."

  "Another boat?" I startled at this. Was he worried about ours being attacked too?

  He gave me a curious look, his clear blue eyes narrowing under his dark, furrowed brow. "Yeah. The Citadel will be able to find this one after a few days. This place is in a dead zone, but that’s just for the average scanners. When they don’t pick us up on those, they’ll bring out the others to increase the reach."

  I exhaled in relief, though in a few days, none of that would matter. Either he would be dead, or I would.

  "What’s your friend’s name?" I asked, trying to change the subject and escape the looming dread it brought me.

  "Doctor Zee," he said. "We’re almost there."

  The bite wound on my arm was starting to itch and redden again, which I didn’t understand because it had been almost gone after the treatment on the boat. Maybe I should have waited for the saline treatment from the healer like Reed insisted, I thought, but there was only going forward now. If there was an issue, this Doctor Zee would likely notice and treat it.

  But again…none of it would matter in two days.

  10

  When the brush and overgrown vegetation finally cleared, we came upon a small shelter made from the materials all around. It was all tree trunks and mud, with a roof made of thatching. The captain knocked on the weathered screen door.

  "You mus’ be from elsewhere if you’re knocking," an older man’s voice said in an accent like the sailors who always come from the southern depths. "Come on, then."

  The door creaked when the captain pushed it open, and around the corner sat an older man with very tanned skin, his white hair and brows a stark contrast to his dark eyes. He was thin and wore an embroidered blue shirt with ornate designs running vertically down each side.

  "Doctor Zee…" the captain said, making the old man’s face light in a wide, almost toothless smile.

  “Que milagro, look at this son of Eve come back to me," he said, which nearly stopped my heart. Son of Eve? That was what Mama Luz called the captain. "And who…?" The man trailed off when he met my eyes, his wide smile falling just a little. "Who is this pretty señorita?"

  "Doctor, this is Cora."

  "Cora is it?" Doctor Zee’s lips flinched and his dark eyes widened as he looked into me more than at me. "What a beautiful name…"

  He extended his hand to me for some reason, the skin on his arms thin and fragile, like a spiderweb weighed down with dew in the morning. He made my own skin prickle.

  "Ah, she’s from…overseas," the captain said, as if in apology.

  Doctor Zee nodded and smiled widely again. "Undine…"

  My heart started pounding so loudly, I was sure both men would hear it too. "What did you say?"

  "I said, indeed," he answered, giving me a closed lip smile. "May I?" He glanced down at my arm and held out his hand.

  "That should have been healed by now," the captain said, puzzled when he saw the bite wound. "The restraints on my ship malfunctioned and burned her."

  "This is no burn, muchacho." The doctor cradled my forearm and led me over to a small area that looked like a makeshift infirmary. Several differently-colored and shaped bottles with corks in them lined the shelves, which hung over several folded pieces of cloth and a few strange instruments. He picked up one of these, a lens bound in a thin wooden frame, and held it over the bite wound on my arm.

  "Who bit you, Cora?" the doctor asked.

  "Ah…bit me? No…nothing bit me," I lied as it occurred to me there was no way for me to explain how I’d been bitten to the captain.

  Doctor Zee fixed his dark eyes on mine, one white brow arching. "Not what, child. Who?"

  "And when?" the captain asked, taking a step toward us. "She’s been in my care since the seat restraints malfunctioned. If she already had a bite wound, it would have been healed by the derma packs my ship surgeon used on her."

  "Not this sort of bite, muchacho." Doctor Zee looked more closely at my arm.

  The captain met my eyes. "He said, who…Cora, a person bit you?"

  "I… I don’t know," I stammered. Why couldn’t I think of something to say? "Maybe, a small shark?"

  "You were in the water?" The captain’s dark brows crashed over his narrowed eyes. "When? Before the Sweepers picked you up near the docks?"

  "Ah…I—I’m not sure," I stammered again, realizing I’d only made everything ten times harder. I needed to stop talking.

  The doctor looked at the captain for a long time before he nodded and gave me another closed-lip smile.

  "Let’s see what can be done for this, aye?" he said with a small nod. He took down one of the brown jars from the shelf and dripped some of its muddy contents onto a tuft of white…sponge? He squeezed it over the bite wound, and it started burning worse than when I’d been bitten in the first place. I sucked in a quick breath and pressed my lips together, afraid that if I didn’t, I would scream.

  "What is that?" the captain asked.

  "Iron, mostly. Some copper, zinc…" Dr. Zee looked at me like I should’ve had a reaction to this, but the only reaction I was having was pain.

  "It burns," I said through my teeth, but then the pain became maddening and I ran to the faucet near the back of the room to wash off the concoction.

  The burning on the surface subsided, but the searing pain seemed to sink into the muscles in my arm…into the bones, finally spreading down to my fingers and up into my shoulder.

  "Are you all right?" the captain asked, moving to my side.

  "It hurts…inside my arm now. It’s getting worse."

  "Just doing its job," Dr. Zee said, crossing to us and pouring a warm liquid over the wound, which completely neutralized the pain. The bite mark was no longer red or swollen. In fact, it was almost unnoticeable, save for the semicircle of broken skin. Dr. Zee rubbed something that looked like clay over this, then started washing his hands.

  "Let that dry until it cracks. It’ll fall off when it’s done doin’ what it does," he said without looking up at me. He shook his hands dry and showed us back to the front room, stopping to grab a bag. "Now, follow me to the market and tell me why you come all this way to see old Doctor Zee."

  The market was alive with people talking, trading and trying not to run into each other. Doctor Zee didn’t approach any of the wide baskets of multi-colored fruits and vegetables that were almost too intriguing to resist. I’d never seen them up close like this with the fruit on the island in The Shallows being so far up the beach.

  "Those are called mangoes," Doctor Zee said just off my shoulder, startling me. "Dos, por favor," he said to the woman behind the spread of yellow fruits that were kissed red in places by the sun.

  "Mangoes…" I repeated when he handed one of them to me. I held it up to my nose and breathed in the sweet, rich scent.

  Doctor Zee smiled. "Don’t have these where you’re from, eh?" he asked, not apparently interested in the answer as he turned and kept walking. The captain pulled out a small blade from his pocket and took the fruit from my hand.

  He sliced the fruit down the center and handed half to me. He raised his half to his mouth and scraped his teeth along the inside peel. I did the same, but was surprised by the deluge of liquid that escaped. The captain laughed as he swallowed the last of his mango and brushed away the fruit water from my cheek with his hand.

  A smile settled on his face. “Juicy…” he almost laughed. “When they’re soft on the outside like this, that’s how you know they’re ripe."

  I flinched at the word, remembering the crew aboard his ship who tried to attack Opal and me. The captain’s smile fell away in the same moment a small, black creature snatched the rest of the mango from my hand and scurried up a nearby tree t
o eat it. "What is that?" I asked breathlessly, my heart hammering in my chest.

  The captain laughed again. "That is a hungry little monkey," he said, tossing the rest of his mango to it. "No monkeys where you’re from either, then…" he stated instead of asked, studying me when I looked back to him. I hurried to catch up to Doctor Zee before he could ask me anything else.

  "My mother took me to this market when I was a child. Same with her mother, and her mother’s mother, since the market first came to be," he said, his gaze traveling over all the goods, all the people.

  "How long ago was that?"

  "Maybe a month or so after the beginning of time." Doctor Zee turned to look at me intently. His hard expression softened after another few seconds, and his smile turned into a hearty laugh. The captain made his way to my other side, and the doctor composed himself as we made our way out of the market and back onto the earthen path that brought us here. "So, what brings you to Snake Island, then?"

  "We need your help, Doctor Zee. A place to rest tonight, a boat and some supplies for tomorrow."

  "A boat? Did you risk a swim here, mi hijo?"

  The captain smiled. "The boat we brought here can be traced after a few days. I’ll need to smash the batteries in it, if you can help us with a replacement."

  "Somebody in pursuit of you then?"

  "It’s a long story, but mainly, we left before something could be done to Cora."

  "I see." Doctor Zee nodded to the path in front of us. Small blue and red flowers interwoven on vines that seemed to lace the entire dense, green path. "You’re always welcome en mi casa, of course. And I have a fishing boat that’s twice as old as you, but you’re welcome to see if you can bring her back to life. She’s in the marina."

  "Thank you." The captain exhaled like the weight of the entire sea had just been lifted from him.

  We turned the corner and came upon the doctor’s home again, where he dropped the bag of goods inside and took us around the back.

  "Hello, bonita," the doctor said to a box, this one sea green and more rounded than the black one that had taken me to the captain’s ship. "This car may be older than the boat." He laughed.

  "Car…" I repeated to myself, then caught the captain watching me.

  "Get in," the doctor said. The captain opened the side of the car and motioned for me to go in first. He sat next to me, and the doctor pulled a small, shiny stick from his shirt and pushed it into a slot. The car roared and started to shake.

  "Her bark is worse than her bite," the doctor said.

  The captain shook his head, amazed. "This must be at least a hundred years old."

  The doctor nodded. "Bonita likes the old tropics life."

  We moved along the earthen path slowly, but more quickly than if we were walking. It wound over a rise that overlooked the sea, which seemed so quiet and peaceful from this distance. I wondered how Reed was, if Opal had made it safely back to my mother and the Guard. And I wondered how I would ever manage to kill the man who had saved me not once, but twice.

  11

  "Likely needs airing out below," the doctor said. "She’s been in that slip awhile."

  "Are there tools aboard?" the captain asked.

  The doctor shrugged. “Maybe in the engine room. Climb aboard and let me know what you need. I can bring it back from the house."

  The captain nodded and climbed aboard the boat, leaving me with Doctor Zee standing outside of the car.

  "Were you a fisherman?" I asked as the captain disappeared below deck.

  "Of sorts," he said, nodding, but he didn’t look at me. "How did you come to meet the good captain?"

  I started over two or three times in my mind trying to figure out how to answer him. I couldn’t tell him the truth, and I couldn’t even tell him the half-truth about the leaving the Weigh Station before they could find out why I was different.

  I finally just repeated what the captain had said earlier. "It’s…a long story."

  "You got yourself into some trouble?" he asked, glancing at the marks on my neck. "Some…deep trouble?"

  I suddenly felt insecure and moved my hand over the marks, but they felt different. There were only two raised lines instead of the three. I touched the other side of my throat and felt the same thing—only two instead of three.

  "No visible issues!" the captain shouted from the deck, startling me. "I’m going to start her up."

  The doctor nodded to the captain, who disappeared again below deck, and my heart started pounding in my chest. Two lines…two days…there were only two days left now.

  "That’s a good man up there," Doctor Zee said, again without looking at me.

  I glanced at him. "I know."

  "Not all of them are."

  The doctor’s voice became steadier, fuller when he said this, and for an instant it felt like the ground moved under my feet—a tremor so short I wondered if it happened at all.

  "Did you feel that?" I asked.

  The boat growled to life, spitting and coughing at first, but then the engine started to regulate. We heard the captain’s muted celebratory cheers from below deck.

  The doctor laughed. "Good man…" He glanced at me, his dark eyes flitting again to my throat before he started clapping his hands and walking toward the boat to meet the captain, who had just come out to the railing.

  I was frozen where I stood. Why did everything he just said feel like…a warning?

  "It works!" the captain shouted to me, pulling me back from my thoughts.

  "We’ll celebrate tonight," Doctor Zee called up to him. "The sun will be going down soon. But there should be some fly rods below. Take her around the island and catch us a feast, muchacho. I’ll come back in a bit with supplies."

  The doctor looked at me longer than was comfortable before he went back to his box—er, his…car—and disappeared back down the path. I followed the captain’s gestures and climbed onto the ship to meet him.

  "You ever been fishing, Cora?" he asked as he disappeared again below deck. He emerged a few seconds later with two long poles. He walked me to the far side of the boat and leaned over the railing.

  "No, I haven’t…not with a rod, anyway." The captain looked at me, surprised.

  "Nets?"

  I nodded, realizing it would be the closest thing he could understand to skimming for krill or even small fish.

  "What’s that?" I asked, nodding to the bait tied to the end of the line. It looked alive, but it wasn’t.

  "It’s a fly lure. I’ll show you how it works, but we need to get on the outside of the shoreline first," he said, setting down the rods and moving into the small covered room that led below deck. I scanned the horizon feeling like we were being watched, but the water was calm.

  Maybe too calm.

  The boat moved slowly out of dock, and the shoreline soon fell away. In what seemed like no time at all we came around to the side of the island where we first landed. The boat we’d left under the overgrown vegetation seemed untouched.

  "Captain?" I called to him. The engine of the boat downshifted and we stopped moving.

  "Call me Nicholas," he said with a smile, startling me with how quickly and quietly he appeared at my side.

  "I was going to ask if we should—" I started, but stopped when he pulled his shirt over his head. His shoulders and back were broad and muscular, but also dotted with various scars. A few small and round, and others long and thin. He turned to me and I gasped before I could stop myself. His chest was shadowed in dark hair that followed a line down the center of his sectioned abdomen. Most of the male Undine were lean like he was, but their torsos were plated with smooth, armored scales.

  "What’s wrong?" he asked, his heavy eyebrows arching.

  "Ah…nothing. I just didn’t expect to see…you." I stammered like a halfling.

  "Oh." The captain’s—Nicholas’s—smile returned, and his clear blue eyes disappeared under the sweep of his thick, black lashes when he looked at the deck. A wash of color kissed his
cheeks as his smile turned to a mischievous grin. "Well, I didn’t pack for the trip, so I’m afraid I’ll have to startle you one more time," he added, dropping his pants and jumping over the railing in nothing more than a dark blue covering that seemed like half pants, only much tighter than the white uniform pants he had been wearing.

  He dove into the water and swam below the skim most of the way to the boat we brought here. When he finally surfaced next to the nose of the boat, he opened a panel near the front and began tugging at something. I watched his long arms reach, the muscles flexing and contracting until finally, he pulled out a rectangular black box and carried it to the rock he’d used to break open the coconut when we first arrived. There, he smashed it and took a small, silver piece from the wreckage only to smash that, too, against the rock with a nearby coconut shell.

  He tossed the coconut shell aside and with a dusting of his hands, waded into the water and swam back. He moved like he’d been born an Undine, his long, smooth strokes propelling him back to this boat as quickly as I could imagine any of my kind. I turned away from him as he pulled himself onto the deck because I didn’t want him to see me watching him, but it was almost impossible to look anywhere but at him.

  He met my eyes and fought the grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. I forced myself to look away, to look back at the overgrown forest in front of us… anywhere but at the play of muscles alongside his hips as he approached.

  I cleared my throat. "That must have been the device the people back from the Weigh Station would be able to track?" I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

  "Not them, the ones from The Citadel, but yes," he said, the smile evident in his voice… He knew I was trying not to watch him, even now, and the certainty of this made me fight the smile threatening to break free across my own lips.

  My lips… I thought, and all levity faded away. My lips would kill this man. I needed to remember this. I needed to stop letting myself get distracted.