by Traci Chee
The sun had eclipsed nearly half the sky, blasting it of all color. Reed wiped his dry brow. The heat pressed down on him, wringing him out, though there was nothing left in him to sweat.
He’d spent the whole night pacing the holds, touching each of the casks and crates one after another. Up and down the hatchways. Around the dwindling stores. One, two, three, four . . . Counting them over and over, as if that would replenish the empty water kegs and meager slabs of salted meat.
But nothing had changed by morning. The crew received a scant meal of hardtack, a strip of dried meat, and a half-pint of water. Few of them even had the energy to complain. Their bodies were slowly consuming themselves, shriveling until they were gaunt and dry as raisins, skin stretched over sinew and bone.
Captain Reed leaned against the bowsprit, struggling to stand. He had been there for hours, tracing interconnected circles on the branches of the figurehead, but no matter what calculations he made, the result was the same: They had exactly enough provisions—if the rats didn’t get them and the sailing was smooth—for a return journey. If they turned around today, they might survive.
The sun was sinking into the sea, lighting it up like a lamp. They were close. But how close? The light was a subtle, shifting thing. They might pass beyond the edge of the world today, or tomorrow, or the next week.
Or never.
Maybe the ocean went on and on forever, and there was nothing for him to find out there. Nothing but endless empty water.
Beside him, Meeks squinted into the distance, searching for signs of change in the seas. Shadows yawned in the pits of his eyes. They had all begun to look alike—walking skeletons in gruesome masks like Captain Cat and the last sailor of the Seven Bells.
Reed rubbed his sore eyes. “Why’d you follow me out here, Meeks?”
The second mate grimaced. “You remember what Cat said, before she died?”
He remembered. Those six words came to him over and over again, circling back on him in the night. “‘Who’s going to remember your crew,’” he echoed.
“She was right, wasn’t she? All these things we’re doin’, all the adventures we been on, eventually, folks are gonna forget that we did ’em. Not you. You’re the captain. But the crew? Sooner or later, they’ll forget to mention our names. They’ll forget we were even here.”
“Then why—”
“Because you won’t.” Meeks grinned up at him, splitting his cracked lips. “I saw you go into that fire on the floating island. I seen you give up rations so the crew could have more. Some folks, knowin’ when they’re gonna kick it, might play it safe. But not you. Knowin’ you ain’t gonna die makes you fight harder to protect those who might.”
Reed put his hand on the second mate’s narrow shoulder and squeezed. Maybe he could finally do what Captain Cat had wanted: save the crew—all of them, not just their bodies but their minds too, so that when they left this place, it wouldn’t be branded in their minds the way Captain Cat’s experiences had been branded in hers. They could be free of this wretched unending brightness, and they’d never have to think of it again.
The words stirred deep in the trenches of his heart: We’re goin’ home. They rose, rolling up through him like smoke, into his throat, poised there behind the gate of his teeth. We’re goin’ home.
Words that meant defeat. And failure.
And survival.
“Cap . . .” Meeks put his fists to his eyes and bared his teeth.
Reed peered into the second mate’s puckered face and cursed. “Doc warned us about this.”
Distortions. Blind spots. Pain.
Meeks tried to blink, but he couldn’t open his eyes anymore. “I’m sorry, Cap. I wanted to help.”
“Let’s get you to the doc.” Captain Reed took the second mate by the hand and began leading him toward the main hatch.
What else would be taken from them, before the end? If there was an end? The bright spread of water stretched on and on around them, finally merging with the white radiance of the sun.
A muffled explosion, like powder, struck the bowsprit. Reed turned. Pieces of the sun were tearing off and floating toward them, trailing long ribbons of light. Wherever they struck, they hissed and burst like clouds of dust, sprinkling the hull with specks of light.
The Current was passing into the setting sun.
Shouts of alarm rose from the crew.
“It ain’t right!” someone cried. “We ain’t goin’ no farther!”
Meeks jerked his head in the direction of the voice. His hands fumbled for his guns. “Camey, that son of a—”
A puff of light dusted Reed’s neck and cheek. It felt like nothing—even lighter and less substantial than snowflakes. He brushed the collar of his shirt, but the light was already gone.
They’d made it. He would have crowed, if he weren’t so hoarse.
He nudged Meeks behind the foremast. “Stay here till I give word. I ain’t losin’ you.”
“But Cap—”
“Do it.” Without waiting for a response, he staggered across the deck, drawing the Lady of Mercy. He was so weak the floorboards seemed to roll beneath him.
“Anyone seen Aly?” Cooky called for the steward as he poked his head out of the galley. Reed stumbled past him and halted at the corner of the main hatchway.
Beyond the mainmast, Jaunty clung to the helm, where Greta held him by the neck with one thick hand. The other pressed the muzzle of a revolver to his head. Camey stood beside them, hawk-nosed and bright-eyed, guns drawn on the chief mate, who stood in the doorway to the great cabin.
“That’s far enough, Captain.” Camey jerked his head at the Lady of Mercy. “Toss that aside.”
For emphasis, Greta jabbed Jaunty with her revolver. The helmsman coughed and tried to spit sideways, but nothing came out.
Greta’s hair had begun to fall out, revealing flaky patches of skin on her scalp. Neither she nor Camey had voiced a complaint, not even in the form of a joke, in weeks. Reed should have known. But he’d been so focused on getting to the edge of the world that he hadn’t noticed. Or hadn’t cared.
Now she had Jaunty, though she was a little unsteady on her feet, a little unsure of her own limbs. Reed could draw faster than Camey, might even be able to kill him before he got a shot off. But not if it cost him his crew.
Reed let the Lady of Mercy drop. The silver revolver fell to the deck as Horse and Doc climbed out of the main hatch.
The larboard watch stumbled from the shelter of the forecastle, blinking at the brightness.
Jules started forward. “Camey, what—”
He shot at her feet. Splinters flew from the deck. The chief mate winced.
“Now,” Camey said, “undo your gun belt and get rid of that too.”
The barrel of Camey’s revolver stared Reed down. Remembering the boar from the floating island—shot clean between the eyes—he obeyed, unbuckling his holsters and letting them drop—Executioner and all—beside the Lady of Mercy.
“Turn the ship around,” Greta barked.
The helmsman grunted, his hands flexing on the wheel, but he didn’t turn.
Puffs of light struck the sails and drifted down to the deck. Hushed cries rose from the crew. The sun loomed larger and larger, closer and closer in front of the ship, as flurries of light broke over the masts and rigging.
“Camey, it ain’t dangerous—” Reed began.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what’s out there. You put us in one bad situation after another on this cursed voyage, and it ain’t right. We’ve had enough.”
“And if you’d pulled this stunt a minute sooner I might’ve agreed with you,” Reed said. “But not now. Can’t you feel it?” The edge of the world, waiting just beyond the circle of the sun. His fingers tapped against each other. A story worth telling.
Camey shook hi
s head. “I ain’t goin’ in there.”
Greta drew back the hammer of her revolver. “Be easier with your help, Jaunty, but we’ll do it without you if we got to,” she said.
“No!” Horse lunged forward.
Camey shot him. The bullet burst through his meaty shoulder and out the other side. He hit the deck. Doc rushed to him.
There was a rustling among the rest of the crew. One by one, they held up their hands—arms raised, palms outward—and edged away from Reed. None of them, not even Jules or Doc or old Goro, looked at him.
A grin spread across Camey’s hawk-nosed face. “Harison, get his guns.”
The fore of the ship passed into the sun, enveloped in clouds of light. Bright smoke covered the bowsprit. Reed cursed. Meeks was up at the bow.
The ship’s boy looked from Camey to Reed and back again. He shook his head.
“C’mon, Harison,” Greta said, “you’re one of us.” The light was so harsh her eyes were nearly closed shut. Reed watched her carefully. She didn’t know where Harison was, where to direct her voice. She was as blind as Meeks, though she was trying to hide it. “You’re from home,” she said.
“No,” Harison said, stumbling across the deck. “I am home.”
Her determination drained away as her sightless eyes roved aimlessly back and forth. She’d been so sure he’d help them. So sure. Reed almost felt sorry for her.
Light engulfed the flying jib, the forestaysail.
Camey’s yellowed eyes bulged from his face as he bellowed, “Turn!”
Jaunty bared his teeth. “Keep squawkin’. It won’t do you no good.”
The fore of the ship was covered in light now, wafting over the deck and spilling over the rails. They were almost a third of the way through.
“Help me!” Camey cried to the others. “We’re all gonna die if you don’t!”
Jules and Theo moved forward, hands extended, not entirely sure of themselves.
Reed could feel the light licking at his shoulders, the back of his head. It drifted around the periphery of his vision. “Not today,” he murmured.
The light overtook him. It swirled and whispered around him, bursting into clouds of dust where it touched his skin. It was so bright he felt like he’d be blasted clean at its touch.
The others were shouting. Someone whimpered.
A gunshot shattered the air.
Someone hit the floor, groaning.
Reed ducked, peering into the light, but all he saw was that brightness.
Someone stumbled over him. Someone else was crying. There were the sounds of a fight: grunting, shuffling, cursing, the banging of elbows and knees on wood, the smack of flesh on flesh.
A gun fell to the deck.
He felt for his discarded revolvers. His belt. Something.
“Cap?” Harison’s voice at his shoulder.
“Stay down,” Reed muttered.
The light cleared so abruptly that he felt like he’d been plunged into a well. He fumbled for his weapons, but his hands groped at nothing. Everything was black. And cold. After the blazing heat of the other side of the sun, this cold was bone-deep. It crunched.
He found his belt and buckled it on. As his vision returned, he saw black sky and the white disc of the sun, which gave off little light and no heat. His breath frosted in the air.
Greta lay on the ground, clutching her chest and gulping fast, painful breaths. Blood seeped into her shirt, around her hands. Above her, Jaunty clung to the helm, his shirt spattered with blood.
Harison was on his knees beside the empty pigpen. Reed grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him to his feet. “Meeks is behind the foremast.” The cold snapped up his words.
The ship’s boy nodded and scrambled away, nearly knocking into Cooky, who stumbled from the galley, calling for Aly.
The crew were on their hands and knees or clutching the rails, shivering in the sudden cold. Horse crouched protectively over Doc, who tried to stanch his wound.
The chief mate was wrestling with Camey, grunting, grappling, each trying to get a hold on the other. One of Camey’s guns had been flung clear across the deck, but he gripped the other with white-knuckled determination. The mate had his wrist and banged his hand over and over on the rail, trying to make him release it, but they both held on.
Camey tripped. He couldn’t see. His arms spiraled wide.
But the chief mate was never blind on the Current of Faith.
He wrested the gun from Camey’s grasp, turned it on him, and pulled the trigger.
Blood fountained onto the deck. Camey dropped.
The ship was silent as the stunned crew regained their sight. The sky was black as pitch, without even the pinpricks of stars in the darkness, and the faint illumination from the back side of the sun was dim and cold, more like mist than light.
In the sudden stillness, Aly climbed down from the foremast, her rifle swinging at her back. She stopped beside Greta’s corpse. Her breath smoked.
From behind the galley, Harison appeared, leading Meeks by the hand. “What happened?” the second mate asked, his voice falling loudly in the silence. “Help me out, Harison.” The ship’s boy leaned over to whisper in his ear.
Reed squinted at the crow’s nest and walked to Aly’s side. “I wondered where you’d got to.”
She shivered. “Couldn’t let them take the Current, Cap.”
The cold was sinking into their bones. It hurt to breathe. Reed put his arm around Aly’s shoulders and rubbed her arm. She was trembling. The others were clustered together at the rails, pointing into the black emptiness beyond the ship.
The water was as black as the sky. It wasn’t natural. As soon as any light touched the water, it sank beneath the surface and disappeared, gobbled up by the darkness. Even the sound of the waves lapping at the hull was wrong—like the clacking of teeth.
The backs of Reed’s eyes burned. His breath caught in his throat. That deep cold set something howling inside the core of him, wailing and screaming to get away.
The others must have sensed it too, because soon Aly began to cry.
Horse, too, was whimpering like a little kid.
Red lights appeared in the deep, but they sucked in more light than they gave, illuminating nothing. Thousands and thousands of them, multiplied over and over as far as the eye could see in the dim world behind the sun.
The chief mate swiveled, but he could not see the red lights. He could only feel the cold, the disturbing disquiet that carved into your gut and heart and lungs.
Then the sound advanced from the darkness.
It rolled over them like mist over mountaintops, filling the spaces between them, howling—or was it moaning. Whispering and chittering and mad laughter. Voices or the tolling of bells or glaciers cleaving in two or cliffs crumbling to dust. The last rattling gasp of the dying. It was the most terrible sound in a world of terrible sounds, the kind of sound that haunts you in the late hours of the night when the darkness shutters you in and the cold creeps into you through the cracks. When you are suddenly gripped by the unwavering certainty that you are already dead—and gone forever.
They had reached the red waters at the edge of the world—the place of the fleshless.
Chapter 37
Answers
Sefia put her hands on the emblem in the center of the door and glanced at Archer. The cold iron bit into her palms. Two curves for her parents, a curve for Nin. The straight line for herself. The circle for what she had to do.
Archer nodded. They had come here for answers. They had come here to finish it.
Ignoring the guards watching from the shadows, she took a breath, swallowed her doubts, and began to turn. Inside the door, great metal cogs wheeled and clanked as the symbol rotated until it was facing the right way, until it was correct.
The pins in the lock clicked, an
d the door swung heavily, silently, inward.
Sefia squinted. After the darkness of the corridors, the room beyond was blindingly bright. Candles filled the wall sconces and the cups of the hanging chandelier. Flames tipped the tops of slim white tapers, illuminating rough walls muffled by tapestries and old portraits in which the painted eyes of their subjects glinted like chips of glass.
Opposite them, near the center of the room, was a writing desk. The varnished surface was piled high with sheaves of paper, bottles of ink, and dip pens Sefia had never even dreamed of, and she was seized by the sudden desire to open all the silver-handled drawers and riffle through their contents, seeking smoother parchment, smaller books, and penknives that would fit in the curve of her palm.
But behind the desk, with her hands crossed neatly in front of her, was a woman with silver-black hair, eyes like slush, and skin the color and smoothness of a sun-bleached shell.
She was a little lighter in complexion, a little broader in the jaw and shoulders, but from a distance, Sefia might have mistaken her for her mother.
The woman rose expectantly, as if she’d been awaiting their arrival. “Welcome.” Her voice was as intricate and exact as metalwork. “I’m glad you made it.”
As Sefia and Archer entered, their footsteps making soft depressions in a thick carpet of red and gold, a man in a dirty aubergine overcoat closed the door behind them. He was tall and lean, with a stubbled jaw and a thick mustache that framed his mouth. A purplish-red scar coiled along the left side of his face, making the corner of his eye droop.
At the sight of him, Sefia’s hand strayed to the hilt of her knife. Beside her, Archer curled and uncurled his fingers, lightly touching his worn wooden scabbard.
The man tried to smile, but there was a mournful twist to his mouth, the glistening of his clear-water eyes. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.” As if to prove his point, he held up his hands and retreated until he reached the sideboard on the right wall, where he leaned back, his eyes never leaving Sefia’s. He didn’t even seem to notice Archer was there.
