Flotsam

by R J Theodore

  It was nice that Hankirk couldn’t speak around Meran’s iron grip to interrupt her.

  “That ring controlled her neatly, just like the aliens designed. But you gave her the boost of willpower she needed to overthrow Onaya Bone. You made her stronger and tipped the scale. Now she’s got the power of Lindent’s ring, Onaya Bone’s powers, and the powers the Yu’Nyun stole from Silus Cutter when they murdered him. You think you can control her with one little trinket? I wish you luck.”

  Hankirk, eyebrows up and knit together, looked down Meran’s arm at the simula’s hungry expression.

  Talis could maybe stop Meran from killing him. Talk her out of it, or ask nicely.

  But she could also finally be done with him.

  Meran looked over her raised arm at Talis, then tossed Hankirk at her feet.

  He coughed and rolled himself up into a fetal position, cradling his useless arm.

  “He is your adversary, Talis,” said Meran. “I have my own.”

  Meran turned her fierce gaze upon the three surviving gods of Peridot.

  Chapter 40

  Meran crossed her arms over her chest. She looked downright cocky. Go ahead, try me, her posture challenged.

  Arthel Rak spoke. In his voice, Talis heard the blowing roar of a fire, and she felt heat tighten the skin of her face.

  “Two of us are lost because of you.”

  Meran laughed. “The dawn of these consequences began with your own actions, seventy-five generations past.”

  “We atoned for what we did. There was a natural order that emerged. What was lost is beyond restoration, but we gave this planet new life. New purpose.”

  “You stole from me all that I was. Nearly destroyed me. Destroyed this world. You mistook the ability to wrench my power away for the right to wield it.”

  Lindent Vein, eyebrows up over blind eyes, moved a hand as if to stop her words. Argued, “We mended the world. Rebuilt it.”

  Helsim Breaker agreed. “Look at all we have achieved. There is no world elsewhere among the stars that has flourished as Peridot has under such conditions. We have created something entirely unique in the universe.”

  “Fractured,” spat Meran.

  Even Talis had to bristle with wounded pride at the derisive tone. It was her home, after all, whatever shape it was in.

  Meran continued, one lip curled in a snarl, “Had you joined your powers instead of hoarding them for yourselves, you could have reversed this precious Cataclysm of yours in moments. Mended everything. Restored it, as though it were untouched. If you had worked together these aliens would have not made such fools of The Divine Alchemists of Peridot.”

  “Yes!”

  Talis turned her head toward the sound. Hankirk was on his knees. His face was alight with reverence. Meran was confirming everything he believed.

  It unsettled Talis. She felt dizzy.

  Helsim Breaker and Arthel Rak looked at each other. Lindent Vein protested, “We work well together.”

  He sounded like a child bargaining with a cross mother.

  “You have never worked together.” Meran’s voice grew in volume as she spoke. “You have never seen the interconnectivity of the elements. Never used my gifts to ensure balance. You created your little playpens within Nexus and left your creations to squabble among themselves. To steal from and murder each other. To raise barriers that kept them as much apart as you five kept yourselves isolated.”

  Quickly, Arthel Rak said, “It was Onaya Bone. This is her fault.”

  Meran turned her gaze upon him sharply. He visibly flinched.

  “I am aware of her treachery. Her greed betrayed you at the moment of transference. She would have seized all of my powers for herself and destroyed the rest of you, had Silus Cutter not contained her. For her betrayal and her failure, I have spared her. Her greed, at least, did not hide behind a mask of benevolence. Her greed, at least, allowed some small piece of me to survive.”

  She moved toward them. Put one foot on the railing and stepped up, as though about to jump.

  “You three will not be so lucky.”

  They outnumbered her. But she had taken back Silus Cutter’s power from the Yu’Nyun. Had stripped Onaya Bone of her powers with a kiss. Was already imbued with the energy that had been stored in the ring for all these years.

  And they knew it.

  Arthel Rak and Lindent Vein braced themselves. The ocean behind them trembled. Its surface rippled as the Master of Water flexed his connection with his element.

  Meran took a step, as though the air before her were solid. Wind gently ruffled her again.

  Helsim Breaker was nearest to Meran as she approached. He moved back, tentatively. She increased her speed as she moved toward him, lowered her head and shoulders, balled her hands into fists.

  He flinched. Broke the line. Floated backward, almost stumbled in midair as he turned his back on his fellow gods in panic.

  She didn’t pursue him, but turned her attention to the others.

  Lindent Vein’s longer arms came up defensively. Arthel Rak’s eyes were wide, his eyebrows raised, lips parted in panic. They moved backward from the small woman. Slowly, still facing her.

  Meran moved faster. Pumped her legs and sprinted across open skies to close the distance between them.

  They turned in earnest retreat.

  Helsim Breaker reached the perimeter of Nexus ahead of them and disappeared inside. The spheres moved again, and before they sealed into a tight shell, Talis saw the interior reshape itself with glowing walls that formed twisting corridors, overlapping and fusing together. A labyrinth.

  How desperate Peridot’s gods had become.

  Lindent Vein and Arthel Rak, together, reached the arched gate to Nexus. They paused only for a breath to see that Meran was still following them, then continued inside in a scramble.

  Never slowing, she raced in behind them.

  The archway slid shut, the surface of Nexus sealing tight with a slam that reverberated through the air. Talis felt it rattle her chest. Her sternum ached as though she’d been physically pushed.

  The markings on the surface of Nexus flared, reformed into a new pattern. The churning of the ocean settled, sliding back into its usual depths to spread over Nexus and close it off. Its surface calmed again, gently rippling green and white beams of light.

  The pain in Talis’s chest subsided, then slipped away. Proximity to Nexus no longer held a vise grip on her heart. She inhaled a deep gasping breath, as though she’d just risen out of that ocean water and could finally fill her lungs again.

  Hankirk lay curled up in a trembling fetal position, cradling his arm. Dug, Tisker, and Scrimshaw looked to her.

  The air was thick with disbelief. It was done. Whatever Meran planned to do with Helsim Breaker, Lindent Vein, and Arthel Rak, the crew’s part in it was over.

  A heart-wrenching crack rippled through the air and the deck tilted as Wind Sabre’s two aft lift lines failed under the stress. The thick cords of twisted rope and wire snapped like cheap thread, whipping free of their anchors and dangling, useless, from the lift balloon above.

  Chapter 41

  The deck lurched, jarring Talis, forcing her to take a step to keep from falling.

  “We have to go,” she said, loudly, trying to hide her panic behind the command. “Where’s the nearest port? Farm, anything, I don’t care as long as the crust isn’t lifeless.”

  Until a few moments ago, the effects of Nexus on the body were enough to keep anyone from settling the smaller bits of crust that hung in the skies close to the gods’ domain. It was practically taboo. Moreover, it was terribly uncomfortable.

  Tisker looked at Talis from his place at the wheel. He braced his grip with his forearms. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the chill and the wind. He shook his head. This wasn’t any sky he knew.
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  In Cutter territory, the next ring of cities would be the high-society islands with expansive estates, ostentatious gardens, and pristine cities with sparkling towers and stable economies. Not the sort of place they made a point of visiting, but that hardly mattered. If they were in Cutter skies, she’d gladly run Wind Sabre aground on someone’s manicured lawn and deal with the consequences. But that was around the other side of Nexus.

  Hankirk’s face was a paler reflection of Tisker’s. The blood loss from his arm was taking its toll. He trembled as he tried to stand. Not much more damage he was likely capable of bringing upon her. The damage to the ship mattered far more.

  “Stanch that,” she said, not kindly, to Hankirk. He was bleeding on her deck again.

  To Dug, she said, “Get these two to the med bay. They can treat themselves, or each other, or die there, but at least they’ll be out of the way. Then go help Sophie with the fires.”

  Let Hankirk fade off, and she’d finally be able to put him over the railing like she ought to have done days before. If his arm hadn’t come up to block the knife, she’d have done so less than an hour ago. But no, she was sending him for ­medical treatment.

  She allowed a moment to marvel as she watched Dug and Hankirk gather up Scrimshaw, supporting the one-legged alien on either side. The three of them just minutes past fighting each other for survival. She eyed Hankirk. The grave injuries he’d caused. His arm. Scrimshaw’s leg. Dug’s faith. The blame for those traced directly back to his misguided actions. There was no time, with the ship an inch from sinking, for any more foolishness. She trusted him to be smart enough to know that.

  The thought of trusting him at all made her jaw clench, which at least kept her teeth from chattering with panic.

  She turned her back on them and jogged to her cabin. She let the door swing wide open on its hinges behind her as she pulled up the vellum charts showing the nearest territories. She overlapped the translucent sheets and lined up the territory edges. Cutter, Bone, Rakkar skies. The Vein had only a small pocket of islands carved out within the Bone and Rakkar borders, and that was farther out than Wind Sabre could likely limp.

  She ran her finger in a spiral out from Nexus, looking for any named island. If it had a name, there was generally someone there to care what it was called. She’d prefer a port. Something with a dry dock for repairs. Gods only knew what the hull looked like. First was the matter of finding someplace near enough.

  They’d come to Nexus on a straight course from Fall Island, answering Onaya Bone’s call, and were still in Bone skies.

  The deck shifted under her feet again. Items rattled in a cupboard behind her as the ship tilted to starboard.

  Fall Island was an option. The temple had been built as near to their goddess’s home as the body could stand. All the other Bone islands were scattered in the outer reaches of Peridot’s atmosphere or gathered up along the borders to keep pushing at them. But Fall Island was more than a day away, and there wasn’t much in the way of a dry dock. Not to mention, Talis had kinda left a scorched alien ship and no shortage of bodies there.

  There was Subrosa, but she wasn’t confident of crossing back over the Cutter border, either. Unlikely that anyone with a direct line of sight on Nexus had missed what just happened. Cutter Imperials would want to question the whole crew before allowing them across, and they’d let her ship fall out of the sky while they pressed for information. There’d be no alien escort to get them past patrol ships this time—better off for that, of course—but Wind Sabre wasn’t up for another regatta through the storm-cloud gauntlet.

  Rakkar settlements dotted the charts, a quarter way around Nexus from their position. But, at this radius, an arc was a shorter distance than the straight line back to Talonpoint. Plus, with the distral tailwinds, they’d get a bit more distance out of the effort.

  Her finger paused on a small island. Absurdly close to Nexus. It had to be a mistake. Or an ancient site with nothing but ruins.

  “Heddard Bay,” she read its name aloud, her voice strange in the quiet of the cabin. It wasn’t the old Rakkar language, from the days of their inverted underground pyramids.

  A bay meant moorings and docks. The Rakkar were agoraphobic, but that didn’t mean they didn’t want for trade goods. And if they didn’t have a formal shipyard, she at least knew that even a Rakkar child would be skilled enough to repair her ship.

  She measured the curve, plotted the course. With their proximity to Nexus, it worked out to half the travel time of a course back the way they came.

  The lines outside her cabin groaned, straining. She circled the island in red and tossed the pencil back into the case as she turned from the table. She heard it miss and bounce onto the floor. That was a mess she could live with. She was already halfway out of the cabin.

  “Tisker, circle Nexus and keep it to our starboard.” She leaned against the side of the wheelhouse.

  He was steering the ship with his wrists, bracing them against the spokes of the wheel to spare his burned palms. His despondent expression cleared for a moment. He looked up at her voice, and his posture straightened. “Found something?”

  “Think so,” she said. “Ease us off to a radius about twice where we’re at, and angle down three degrees, then you can tie off the wheel and take a break. We’ll trip over a Rakkar island in about half a day.”

  “Rakkar,” he said. He brought up his arm to itch his cheek on the sleeve of his shirt. “Never met one’a them. Are they as strange as you hear?”

  Strange was an abstract that no longer had a place in the world after what they’d just been through. “They’ll be the prettiest faces you ever see if we can get there in one piece.”

  “Aye, Cap.” It was emphatic.

  “Don’t risk the lines we have left for the sake of speed. I’ll send Sophie up to bandage those hands soon as I find her.”

  Tisker nodded his thanks. “Something to drink would be good, Cap.”

  She nodded. Her own throat wanted for moisture.

  “And we’ll drink something stronger when we get there,” she promised. “Rakkar put the fire to their spirits, too, and I owe us all a round or four.”

  He grinned, lopsided and something like his usual self. It warmed her.

  She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Just get us there, yeah?”

  “Aye, Cap.”

  The crew quarters were a complete loss. By the time Talis followed the smell of lingering smoke to its source, Sophie and Dug had gotten the worst of it out. Dug was stomping on the remaining embers while Sophie swept the charred husks of their personal belongings into a metal bucket.

  Gods-cursed stinking winds. As if her crew hadn’t paid enough of a price already.

  The crew quarters were designed for more people than she had, but they weren’t spacious by any means. Nothing kept aboard was a frivolous item. It was family portraits. Mementos. Things that all that gods-rotted money in the hold couldn’t replace.

  Her gaze went to Dug’s throat. His locket wasn’t there.

  Emotions seized at her lungs, as though her rib were broken again. Anger and guilt backed up and overwhelmed her. She hit the frame of the door with the side of her hand.

  Sophie looked up at the sound and tugged the bandana down to her collar. The smile it revealed was melancholy but wholly Sophie. “Looks like those alien weapons crossed with the lamp wires. Sparked a fire that started with the blankets on Tisker’s bunk. Got it out, but…”

  But they’d lost everything.

  “Inda’s picture?”

  Dug shook his head.

  Talis inhaled a shaky breath through her nose and her sinuses stung with the cloying smoke. “Dug, I’m sorry.”

  Dug nodded but said nothing.

  She shook her head. It wasn’t fair. Her crew had lost so much. As she brushed a bit of soot from her eye, the burned skin of he
r forearm tightened and stung. She wished she’d let Meran heal that rotted mark. This was where it led when people put blind faith in symbols, gods, and waste like that. Guilt whispered that it should have been her quarters fed to the flames.

  But no, the charts. What fortune remained had given them that. They’d walk—or at least limp—away from this. And that was no small thing. Take their shares, and fix the ship. Or retire from this nonsense. Go live proper, honest lives. Make some new memories to replace the portraits and the lockets and the pieces of their lives they’d lost.

  “We’re, uh,” she started, then had to clear her throat. “We’re headed to Heddard Bay, on the Rakkar side of Nexus.”

  “Rakkar.” Sophie exhaled the word in a breathy whisper. The corner of her mouth twitched up a tick.

  Talis nodded. “Not far, at this radius, and we can ride the distral winds. How they managed to settle so near without the headaches crippling them, I’ve no idea, but my charts are up to date, and I can’t ignore what it trims off the time we’ll be relying on just three lift lines.”

  Sophie blanched, the smile still on her face but empty as a dried husk. She’d gone to fight the fire earlier and hadn’t seen the lines snap.

  “I’d hoped it was just the wind on the chewed up hull creating the drag I’m feeling,” she said. Didn’t have to say she knew better. Sophie knew the ship better than anyone.

  “You two finish up here,” Talis said. She’d tend to Tisker’s hands herself. The crew cabin was their space, even covered with ash. “Then we can do short shift rotations to reinforce what we can. Get yourselves fed or rest in my cabin. Hear?”

  They nodded and put themselves back to work. Wind Sabre needed them, and they’d never failed her before.

  Half the galley was missing.

  The gimbaled oven was gone, and the spice rack that had been mounted above it, but they still had the cooktop and ice chest. The port-side hull breach opened onto empty skies. Taking with it, Talis realized, the folio with Sophie’s ship design. She’d stowed it in the cabinet there before they left Subrosa. If she’d given it back to Sophie, it would have been in her pocket, likely as not. Talis closed her eyes. She might not want Sophie to leave, but the thought of all that work just… lost.…