Seafire

by Natalie C. Parker

  Blue-white light arced from charge to charge, spidering out to kiss the copious amounts of metal on each Bullet. Their bodies snapped in the air like sails in the wind, their eyes rolling skyward, mouths freezing with jaws clenched.

  “Now!” Caledonia cried. The crusher was closing in, its nose lined up to ram the Mors Navis dead center.

  Five girls dove over the side of the ship, their feet caught by strong hands as they dangled and stretched to sever the cables of magoons holding the Mors Navis in place. One by one the cables snapped. Caledonia raced to the helm and drove the jets as high as they might go.

  The Mors Navis jerked ahead, but she hadn’t been fast enough. The crusher hit them with a glancing blow, ripping a patch of metal siding from the stern.

  The ship heaved to one side, sending girls and guns sliding across the deck. Caledonia could do nothing but grip the helm and wait. From that position, she could see Redtooth and the bow boats racing home. Behind them, an explosion split the barge in two, filling the sky with vibrant orange petals that drifted slowly to the ocean.

  Her girls roared in triumph. It was a vicious sound, and it filled Caledonia with so much delight she thought she could right this ship herself. Aric had lost a hearty crop today. And it was Caledonia and her crew who had taken it from him.

  Not far from the sinking barge, she spotted something else bobbing in the water, a dark figure directly in the path of the approaching assault ship.

  Pisces, she realized with horror. And the Bullet crew had her in their sights. Just as the Mors Navis began to right itself, a pick hook swung down from the enemy ship and buried itself in Pisces’s shoulder.

  As Caledonia watched, Pisces was dragged from the water straight into the hands of the enemy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Caledonia did not realize she was screaming until her girls answered her cry with a collective one of their own. Leaping up, she aimed her ship for Redtooth while the crusher, now several hundred feet beyond them, struggled to shift its momentum and return. The mag ship was dead in the water, and the assault ship, having slowed to collect Pisces, didn’t have the momentum to catch up. The Mors Navis was faster than both remaining ships; they would get away easily now.

  Except for Pisces. It took every drop of Caledonia’s control to keep her course and not go after her friend, even though panic gnawed at the back of her throat.

  The returning bow boats slid into the choppy waters near the base of the ship. It took three tries, but the crew successfully hooked and hoisted both boats back to their hanging berths. Her girls moved efficiently, unloading the bounty the raiding parties had collected before sinking the barge. Their joy in victory turned quiet.

  That was it. Their goal completed. The bale barge destroyed, her bounty claimed. Clear of combat, they were ready to run. They had to run. It was the mission she promised her girls: Hit hard and hide fast, no unnecessary risks. But Caledonia’s hands shook as she turned her eyes away from the assault ship.

  “Caledonia.” Lace stood beside her. Saying her name as though it were a command. How many times had she said it already?

  “Yes, Lace.”

  “Your orders.” She stepped in close. “Do we go for her? Say the word, Captain, and we’ll go for her.”

  For one second, she considered a head-on fight with two Bullet ships. Her crew was brave and bold. If she asked them to, they’d churn like a storm to bring Pisces back. And she wanted to. She wanted so badly to raise her voice and ask them to prolong the fight. But the risk was too great. How could she justify the lives they might lose for the one she might save? Maybe if all she had to risk was her own life, she could. She would risk herself a thousand times over for Pisces, but asking her crew for the same was irresponsible.

  “We make for the Bone Mouth,” she said, voice hard.

  “Captain,” Lace began in protest.

  “Now, Lace.”

  The engines churned. Caledonia’s ears filled with a howling wind. Some part of her whispered that it wasn’t real, and another part of her wailed that it was more real than the wheel beneath her palms.

  She gritted her teeth and cast a final glance at the Bullet ships. The bale barge was only a smear of orange petals on the water, the mag ship bobbed without power, and the crusher had turned heel and was headed for the assault ship now two miles away. Two terrible miles that stretched between herself and the friend who had become her family. Her chest tightened, and something in her heart began to unravel.

  Pisces was gone.

  She’d never lost a girl in battle. Not one. And for Pisces to be the first? It was the one thing Caledonia didn’t think she could bear.

  Then, a cry from one of the Knots. “The tow!”

  Caledonia’s grip tightened on the wheel. Only when she heard it again—“Pisces’s tow!”—did she pull the ship out of speed.

  “Eyes on the Bullets!” Caledonia called up to the Knots, all too aware that the assault ship might view this pause as an opportunity to renew its attack.

  The deck was alive with movement as Caledonia climbed down the companionway ladder. The railing was three girls deep, all of them peering over at the water below.

  Pisces. The name repeated again and again, but Caledonia didn’t believe it—couldn’t believe it—until the sight of her friend, glistening and bleeding, appeared briefly above the heads of her crew as she was pulled over the ship’s railing.

  Caledonia raced across the deck, pushing through the crowd with shaking hands, preparing for the worst. And suddenly, there she was. Blood coated one side of her face, dripping from a gash on her forehead. Her shirt was black against her wounded shoulder, and there was a deep puncture in the leather of her vest where the hook had found purchase. Alive. She was alive.

  Caledonia closed the distance between them and pulled her friend into her arms, surrounded by a cheering crew.

  Before Caledonia had a chance to say anything, another face appeared at the railing, hauled up with the tow. A boy. A Bullet.

  All sound ceased.

  The crew instinctively formed a circle with Caledonia at its center. She turned, releasing her friend and facing the boy.

  He was perhaps a few years older than her, with wide brown eyes and a strong nose. Slashing the deep brown skin of his bicep were the horizontal scars of his bandolier. He had three. Each was thick, ropey, and saturated with the same dense orange as a baleflower. Caledonia had seen only one other bandolier scar this close before. They were a symbol of loyalty to Aric. Each represented some deadly degree of service to the tyrant, and for this Bullet to have three suggested his hands were thoroughly blood-soaked. He wasn’t just dangerous, he was deadly.

  “Throw him over,” she commanded.

  Pisces raised a hand. “Wait.”

  Caledonia could see the hope trembling in the corners of Pisces’s mouth.

  “He saved my life,” Pisces said. “Please.”

  Pisces knew the rules as well as any girl on board, but she didn’t know how the Ghost was discovered so many years ago. They’d lost their families because Caledonia had let her guard down with Lir. This Bullet would be no different, and she would not let her friend make the same mistake.

  In the distance, the Bullet ships were shifting on the water, perhaps deciding to pursue the stalled prize in front of them.

  “Good.” Caledonia unsheathed her pistol and pulled the hammer back, pointing the barrel at one of the boy’s wide brown eyes. “Now throw him over and save his.”

  “He risked everything to help me,” Pisces protested. “He killed his own to get me off the assault ship, Cala. They won’t take him back.”

  Caledonia trusted what her friend said, but she also trusted her gut. She of all people knew how deceptive a Bullet could be. Sacrificing one of their own to get a saboteur on board the Mors Navis would be an easy decision for their Silt-drenched minds. They w
ould do anything to please Aric Athair.

  Caledonia shouted, “First rule!”

  And all around her came the chorus, “No Bullets!”

  It had been the first rule from the beginning. When Caledonia’s gut had healed and she and Pisces had repaired the damage to their ship, they’d agreed to form a crew. Lir’s betrayal was Caledonia’s constant secret companion, and when she demanded an all-girl crew, Pisces had no reason to object.

  Now Pisces stepped in front of the boy, placing her own head at the end of Caledonia’s barrel. “He saved my life,” she repeated, each word careful and precise.

  Blood streamed steadily from the gash in her forehead. Maybe the boy had saved her life, but it was Caledonia who would make sure she stayed alive.

  Redtooth appeared over Pisces’s shoulder, her grin streaked now with sweat and ash. With one easy move, she had the boy’s arms locked behind his back and his knees bent to the deck. He made no sound, no struggle.

  “You have a few precious moments to save his, Pi.” Caledonia lowered her gun and with her other hand gave Lace the signal to accelerate. “We get too far and he’ll drown for sure.”

  “We send him back and he’s dead anyway.” Pisces kept her voice low. “He wants out. We abandon him and we’re no better than them.”

  There was a dagger tucked into Caledonia’s belt. It was small, with a wooden handle curved to fit completely inside her grip, and a short black blade meant to sit between the first and second fingers. The last time it tasted blood, it had been her own at the hands of a Bullet who said he, too, wanted out. There was no room on her ship for another who said the same.

  The deck rumbled beneath their feet as the masts shuttered down into their holsters, no longer required by Amina’s Knots. Half of the crew was in motion, clearing the deck for speed, their eyes on the boy, Pisces, and Caledonia. The air between them smelled of brine and copper. Pisces kept one hand pressed over her wound, blood traveling down her arm in shallow rivers. She needed to be belowdecks with the rest of the injured where Little Lovely Hime could see to her wounds, not up here fighting for the worthless life of a Bullet.

  The rules of their ship were simple: no Bullets, act together or not at all, and the captain’s word is law. If there was flexibility on any of the three, it was the last—Caledonia’s girls weren’t afraid to make their opinions known. As long as they did it while they scrubbed the deck or peeled a potato or tended their wounds, she didn’t mind. She liked that her girls had guts. But this was the kind of challenge that could slip beneath the skin of the whole ship if she didn’t lock it down.

  Caledonia stepped closer to Pisces, torn between wanting to knock her out and make her see reason. “We don’t trust Bullets.”

  “We trust Hime,” Pisces shot back, too quiet for any but Caledonia to hear. “How is this any different?”

  “You know how.”

  “No, I don’t.” Pisces flinched, adjusting the hand over her wound. “We take the girls when they want out. Why not him? Why not the one who spared my life?”

  Wind whipped between them. Its sharp sea spray did nothing to cool the tension. It was true Hime had been one of Aric’s and it was true that they’d taken her in. Even that had been a gamble.

  “This is not a negotiation.” Caledonia could feel the eyes of her crew clinging to this conversation. She raised her gun, again pointing it at the boy. “No Bullets. Not now. Not ever.”

  The boy didn’t move. He barely seemed to notice the gun leveled at his head, but his lips parted and he watched Caledonia with a fearless kind of surprise.

  Then he spoke. A single word that found no purchase in Caledonia’s sympathy. “Mercy.”

  Caledonia’s grin was as hard as her heart. “Not on this ship,” she said. He was not the pale-eyed boy from so long ago, not the one she dreamed of killing, but Caledonia thought shooting him might feel nearly as satisfying. “You’ve done a good thing, so I’ll spare my shot and your life. If you jump now, maybe your crew will do a good thing, too.”

  In the set of Pisces’s mouth, Caledonia saw the determination she so admired in her friend. Nothing would convince Pisces to throw him over, just as nothing would convince Caledonia to keep him on board.

  “I can help.” The boy’s gentle voice was jarring in the silence. Caledonia laughed and opened her mouth to share exactly what she thought of that, but he pressed on. “Please, I know how they think. I can—”

  Redtooth abbreviated his plea with a blow to the back of the head. “It’s rude to interrupt,” she growled.

  Laughter shuffled through the crew as the boy fell forward. Redtooth wasn’t one to pull her punches.

  “Twelve miles out, Captain! Clear seas! No tails!” The call from Lace meant they’d put the remains of the Bullet fleet twelve miles in their wake with no signs of pursuit. Good news for them. Bad news for the boy.

  “Throw him over,” Caledonia said again.

  Redtooth hauled him to his feet. This time he fought against her grip. “Wait! Please! I can help! You want to sink their barges? I know how to find them!”

  Anything that came out of his mouth was nothing but noise, and every girl on that deck knew it. They would never trust a Bullet to tell her where to find Aric or his drugs. This time it was Pisces who stepped forward, and with a pained wince, she slammed her fist against the side of his head. It landed with a dull smack, and the boy’s entire body drooped in response.

  Out cold, he sagged in Redtooth’s grasp, his head lolling to one side, knees splayed out at awkward angles. Pisces also drooped. Her broad shoulders hung like stones on her tall frame, hands loose at her sides. She looked ready to crash, but she wasn’t finished.

  “No Bullets,” Pisces said loudly enough for all to hear. “We drop him in the shallows first chance we get.”

  This was a slippery slope, Caledonia knew. It didn’t break the rule, but it came close. Her crew was loyal, and that loyalty was stitched together with rules and hard years of evasion and battle. To threaten a rule was to threaten the weave of their fabric.

  Caledonia moved close enough to speak in her friend’s ear. “You’re alive, and I could not be more relieved, more grateful, but keeping him on board for any length of time is a risk.”

  The look Pisces returned was both gentle and strong. “We can resist them as long as we don’t become them.”

  “Dammit.” Caledonia couldn’t argue with those words. She’d said them herself dozens of times over the years, but they weren’t hers any more than they were Pisces’s. “Rhona would be proud of you.”

  “And you, too.” Pisces gripped Caledonia’s hand, sticky with blood.

  “Gag him. Bind him. Put him in the hole,” Caledonia snapped. “First chance we get, we dump him in the shallows.”

  The crew rippled with whispers, hisses, grumbles. Caledonia stood tall and brought her gaze to bear on all who were near. “Now,” she ordered, calm but firm.

  Redtooth dropped the boy to his knees so the others could gag and bind him. Before they were done, he was conscious again, blinking meekly in the late afternoon light. If he was surprised to find himself still alive, he didn’t show it. He remained compliant even when Redtooth stooped to make sure the ropes were tied so tightly that they cut into his skin.

  “Captain,” Amina called, approaching from the quarterdeck. She’d come to them from the Hands of the River, the folk who lived on the Braids and spoke with a breathy, musical accent. Sweat shone against her reddish-brown skin, and she moved like an ocean current, with rolling grace in every motion. Though she was shorter than Caledonia, she was just as imposing, with the sides of her head shaved smooth and a crest of thick braids coiled and twisted on her crown. The crew moved seamlessly out of her way, creating a path.

  Caledonia braced, noting the way Amina’s eyes strayed from her to the boy and back again.

  Amina closed the space
between them like a small storm. “We have a problem,” she said.

  Caledonia felt her pulse quicken. “Can it wait?”

  “No,” she said. “Our sun sail was hit. Again. It’s not drawing power, so all we have is our reserves.”

  After the fight they’d just had, their reserves would be low. And they’d have burned through plenty making their escape. They’d need more to make it back to the waters of the Bone Mouth. And they needed to do it quick if they hoped to eat.

  “What do we have left?” she asked, afraid she already knew the answer.

  The ship bucked beneath their feet, slowing.

  Amina held her captain’s gaze, unflinching. “In another day, we’ll be dead in the water.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The sun sail hung from its mast in disjointed sections, dripping like rain where the weaving had come undone. Black scales littered the deck, some cracked or broken, others glittering in the late afternoon sun, turning the quarterdeck into a field of jewels. It was almost beautiful.

  “Can you repair it?” Caledonia asked, eyes drifting over its ragged edges.

  Amina collected a handful of fallen scales, turning them over like coins. She’d been with Caledonia and Pisces for a full three years. The girls had just finished patching the ship and were in pursuit of parts to repair this very sun sail when they rescued Amina from a small band of Bullets. They’d been too late to rescue her companions, and Amina had joined them with fury in her heart. Nearly half of the ship’s systems were running due to her creative attentions. More than anyone, she knew the difference between broken for good and broken for now. If there was a way to fix it, Amina would find it.

  One by one, she let the scales drop from her hand. They hit the deck with hollow clatters. “No,” she said. “It’s done.”

  The word sounded deceptively simple when their reality was anything but. Done meant they were reduced to the power of whatever winds Amina’s spirits chose to send their way. Done meant they’d never have a chance of outrunning another Bullet ship. They would still have power. The deck was littered with sun pips—small dishes set into the flooring that fed power and light belowdecks—and the entire bow was coated in sun paint which fed directly into the bridge systems. But without the sun sail to charge the engines, they wouldn’t be able to outrun anything on these waters.