Seafire

by Natalie C. Parker

  The bags were cut, and the air filled with a powdery white cloud. It puffed and swirled in the tugging wind, traveling toward each of the four ships. If the Bullets knew what was coming, they had no time to react. The powder engulfed their ships like a deadly fog, filling their noses, mouths, eyes, and lungs with a burning they were powerless to combat.

  As the roar of their engines fell away, the canyon filled with the screams of boys and men. Their ships faltered and slowed, and soon the screams stopped altogether; the quicklime had burned its way through layers of delicate skin, making it painful for those Bullets to draw a simple breath, much less issue a cry.

  Hime wilted, her eyes filling with glossy tears she fought to contain.

  I am like them, Hime said.

  Caledonia considered her response. Hime had never felt like a Bullet to her. She’d felt like a girl who’d been forced to adapt to a violent way of life or die. She’d felt like a survivor. Now she wondered at all the ways surviving could change a person, all the ways it might have changed her brother. And then she stopped wondering.

  “A little,” she said carefully. “But that’s one of the reasons we have to keep fighting. So maybe one day, no one will have to be even a little bit like them.”

  “Come on.” Amina moved to take Hime’s hand. She pulled the girl close, wrapping one arm around her shoulders. “You don’t need to see this.”

  But Hime pulled away, keeping her eyes on the ships in their wake. No, I do.

  Caledonia watched for any of the ships to recover and renew their chase, but they passed into the next narrow channel with no signs of immediate pursuit.

  Her girls cried out in victory, their voices pounding along the canal walls. They were tired and hungry, but their eyes shone in the full light of the sun. Even knowing they’d left Cloudbreak without the supplies they needed, the crew was committed to this journey. It filled Caledonia with a twist of guilt and pride.

  It was only as Caledonia made her way again toward the bridge that she realized something shocking: The bounty was real. The boy had told the truth.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Dusk slipped down the canyon walls long before the sun had set. Caledonia’s arms trembled with cold and effort. Every movement of the ship needed to be precise. Fast. When Amina finally climbed into the cabin to announce there’d been no sign of pursuit since releasing the quicklime, Caledonia pulled the ship out of gear. They might not have much of a lead, but they’d gain more by reducing their wake, traveling in silence, and letting these twisting, enigmatic canals cover their path.

  “Go silent and dark. Thrusters for drift only,” she said, giving the helm over to the bridge crew. “Tin, take a rest, too.”

  Everyone needed a rest, but more than that, they needed a safe course through these canals. Caledonia and Amina spent hours tucked away in the map room, their lights as low as they could keep them, their backs bent over Hesperus’s flawed map. Usually, this was a task that would involve the whole command crew, but with Lace gone and Pisces injured, they needed Redtooth on deck and Hime with the wounded while the two of them studied.

  An ideal course took them through the northern passages, depositing them west of the Rock Isles. From there it was a straight shot toward the Northwater conscription routes. But it was the northern canals they couldn’t trust. More than once, Caledonia found herself tracing that course, wondering if they could risk the uncertainty.

  Eventually, they found a path that would take them safely out of the canals. It would drop them due south, west of the southernmost thrust of the Rock Isles. Barely closer to their desired course than when they’d docked at Lower Cloudbreak. But it was an area that wasn’t frequented by Aric’s fleet, and that, at least, was a small victory.

  By the time the two girls returned to the main deck, night was thick and several of the crew had taken up watch posts. The sky was a narrow slip of glittered black far above them. The sun pips remained dark, and the only sounds were the occasional whisper of pebbles tumbling into the water.

  It was the first still moment they’d had since fleeing Hesperus’s observatory.

  “I lost everything.” Caledonia kept her voice quiet. “Everything we had to trade, I lost.”

  Amina stood silently at her side, offering neither comfort nor censure. She watched the captain with her steady, dark eyes. Witnessing but not judging. For some indefinable reason, it was a relief to be heard and not challenged or calmed. It was a relief to let her failure feel like a failure.

  “I shouldn’t have taken all the scales with us. That was reckless.” Rhona never would have done something so irresponsible. She’d have taken half and held half back. Just in case.

  “I agree.” Amina’s honesty was jolting. “But I didn’t at the time. It was a good risk, just a bad outcome. I would have made the same decision.”

  “Are you sparing my feelings, Amina?”

  Amusement narrowed Amina’s eyes just as it widened her smile. “When have I ever spared you anything?”

  Amina was the only one among them who had purposefully left her home and people to fight. The Hands of the River fought only as much as was necessary to keep Aric’s influence out of the Braids, but at fifteen turns, Amina, with her small family, had joined a band determined to do more than keep Aric at bay. She’d lost her family in much the same way Caledonia had, at the hands of a merciless Bullet clip. She was like a hewn piece of granite, formed in fire and tougher for it. She would be the last to spare Caledonia any hard truth.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing on this ship we can use to neutralize Electra’s hull?”

  “I’m sure.” Amina stood quietly for a moment, head tilted into the breeze as though listening to another conversation. “Captain, we made mistakes. But our reasons were good. Your reasons were good.”

  It felt like an accusation. It didn’t matter that her reasons had been good, the result was the same. She’d lost the only viable option they had of building the weapon they needed to save their brothers, and in the process failed to acquire the food they’d need for a long haul at sea. She opened her mouth to say as much when a dreadful howl erupted from the bowels of the ship. It echoed around them, blossoming in the narrow canyon like a bomb.

  The Bullet.

  Without another word between them, Caledonia and Amina raced belowdecks. The sound had called several curious crew members into the hallways, but the instant they heard the captain coming, they made room for her to pass.

  The two made quick progress through the galley and down to cargo hold on level three. Here, the cries were so much louder, splintered with shrieks of real pain. Even though he was a Bullet, it was still difficult to bear witness to such agony.

  She made for the door, but was arrested by a voice calling out.

  “Captain!” Pisces hurried into the cargo bay, face stricken with worry. “Captain, I’ll take care of him.”

  “I need him quiet.” Caledonia paused with her hand resting on the hatch.

  “I’ll take care of him,” she repeated. Pisces looked more rested. Some of the color had returned to her cheeks, but racing here had taken more energy than she had to give. At another cry from the hold, Pisces’s lips pressed with concern.

  “I need him to get quiet and stay quiet.” Caledonia made sure there could be no confusion about what needed to happen.

  Pisces straightened her shoulders, forcing her breathing to remain even. “I said I’ll take care of it. He’s my responsibility.”

  “No, he’s mine,” Caledonia corrected her.

  Inside the hold, the boy raged against himself. He banged against the floor, and his cries plunged into dreadful moans. Pisces’s fist wouldn’t be any kinder than Caledonia’s, but it didn’t matter who knocked him out, just that someone did.

  “Make it fast,” Caledonia said.

  Pisces needed no more invitation than those words.
She spun the hatch and was through the door in an instant, pulling it shut behind her. The boy’s cries dimmed immediately, and after another moment, the hold was silent.

  Sending Amina to rest, Caledonia returned topside where she sat high on the bow, a worn blanket wrapped around her shoulders against the cold, listening for any sign of pursuit. Every so often, the bow thrusters churned softly beneath her, keeping them in the center of the canals. A gentle wind curled around the ship, and now that she had time to look, Caledonia saw the channels were lined with small trees, clinging to the crags and narrow shelves of rock.

  Along the deck, her girls moved quietly through the night. The bell stayed silent. When it was time for a new watch to take over, the girls met briefly in the dark to confirm the transition.

  Redtooth watched over the deck crew from her nest atop the mainmast block, her gun cradled across her knees, a thin blanket for warmth. She was as tough as her past had made her. She never said much about it, but they knew she’d been rescued from the ship of a hard man by Captain Annee, who sailed under a single law: harm no women. Annee took the girl among her crew, and after her death, Redtooth had come to them looking for a new crew to serve and love. When it came to her girls, she made sure they all had what they needed even if that meant she went without. That included the captain. If Caledonia spent a sleepless night topside, Redtooth did, too.

  The boy in the hold didn’t make another sound. It was difficult to think about him now without thinking of Donnally and Ares. The bounty was real, he hadn’t lied about that, so what were the chances he was lying about their brothers? For the first time, hope spun through Caledonia’s heart unchecked, surprising her with the hot press of tears. Hard on its heels was the dread of knowing she’d just lost their best chance of saving them. But she still had this Bullet. If there was another way, she would make him reveal it.

  And then there was Lir. For that brief second, she’d had him in her sights. If she closed her eyes, she could see it again: the nose of his ship burning with baleflowers, the dark tower of it climbing four levels into the sky. She would never forget its profile, and now that she’d seen it, she wanted nothing more than to make it burn. But Hesperus had called him a Fiveson. He would always sail with a small fleet around him like armor, insulated and protected from every threat.

  But he lived. Lir was alive. And that meant one thing: She could kill him.

  Caledonia’s fingers strayed to the dagger in her belt. The metal of the blade was always warm, as though flush with the memory of her blood. One day, she would give it another memory to keep it warm.

  Just before dawn, Pisces settled in next to Caledonia, two steaming cups of weakened teaco in her hands. The drink was a mix of whatever they had—coffee beans, chicory root, tea leaves—all brewed together and rarely the same from day to day. Today, it was worse than usual. Though Tin had managed to supplement their stores in Lower Cloudbreak, Far was already working to stretch their pantry. Without her knowing how long she’d need to do so, their fare would once again get thin and salty.

  “He’s sleeping,” Pisces said.

  It took Caledonia a moment to realize she was talking about the boy. It didn’t matter to Caledonia if he slept, only that he wasn’t shouting, but she nodded as if the information pleased her.

  “I think he may be coming through the worst of it, though his pain is far from over.”

  This did please Caledonia. “Good,” she said.

  A soft, disappointed sigh eased from Pisces. “I know you hate them. But if you want to believe our brothers will be okay, that they can come back to who they were before Aric, then the same has to be true for this one.”

  It was all Caledonia could do not to argue. She remembered their brothers. Donnally was too kind, too generous to submit entirely to Aric’s cruelty. Ares, she wasn’t so sure of. As a boy, he’d been just as self-possessed as Pisces, but he nursed an anger that surfaced occasionally. When there wasn’t enough—meat, bread, time—he would explode out of his child’s body. At the time, it was directed at Aric’s fleet, but he was just a boy, and Caledonia feared that his anger might have found an encouraging home among the Bullets.

  Without the solid-states Amina needed to build her electro-mag, they might never find out. Their mission had gone from rescue to survival. But she couldn’t bring herself to crush whatever hope Pisces still had of saving their brothers. She was having a hard enough time maintaining her own.

  Sunlight landed, light as a bird, on the tips of the tall channel walls. In moments, they would have enough light to drive the ship faster. Caledonia sipped at her teaco, and her stomach growled in response.

  “Hime says Doc Tricius gave you skintech as well as antibios.” It was a piece of luck to find antibios, and a little bit of a miracle to find any kind of skintech outside of the Bullet fleet. She’d have to thank Clag if they ever found themselves in Cloudbreak again. “She thinks you’ll be back in the water in no time. How does your shoulder feel?”

  Another sigh. “A little better today.”

  “Good. Keep resting. Do whatever Lovely Hime tells you to, and nothing Red tells you.”

  That earned a laugh from Pisces. The girls climbed to their feet as the sun glided down the walls toward the ship. It was time to move, and her crew was already making preparations. The dead watch girls shuffled belowdecks for a few hours of sleep while others emerged bright-eyed and ready for the day ahead. Weariness settled along Caledonia’s limbs. As soon as Tin appeared, she’d follow the dead watch crew and sleep.

  “Captain!”

  Every head turned to the woman now emerging from belowdecks. Far’s voice was infrequently heard, and never at such a volume. It was always strange to see her outside the galley. She was a tall, broad-hipped woman with black hair that curled densely around her face and shoulders and skin as pale as quicklime.

  “Stowaway!”

  In front of her, held in the woman’s iron grip, was the form of a small girl, struggling to keep on her feet. She twisted to face Caledonia. Her left cheek was decorated in a single raised spiral, and her hair was filled with colorful ties: Nettle.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “I found her scavenging in the pantry.” Far gave the girl a shove but didn’t release her. “Like a rat.”

  Nettle didn’t struggle, but she had the decency to appear guilty as she met Caledonia’s eyes. She clutched a bag to her chest that was half as tall as she was, and though she was armed, she hadn’t gone for her weapons.

  Every bone in Caledonia’s body ached for rest, her groaning stomach reminding her she’d had nothing except weak teaco, and she hadn’t slept since their arrival in Cloudbreak. A stowaway was the last thing she wanted to deal with.

  “I thought you were smarter than this, Nettle.” Redtooth pulled the girl from Far and pushed her to her knees facing the captain.

  “I know you said to wait, Captain Styx, but you said yourself you don’t come to port often. I couldn’t not take this chance.” Nettle’s words came in a hopeful rush. She looked from Caledonia to Redtooth to Pisces to the whole gathering crew. “You’re all girls! You’re all girls. Please keep me. Please, please keep me.”

  Caledonia considered the girl. She’d dropped them right in the court of the Sly King without warning. Had she known about his plan to claim the bounty? “You’ve already disobeyed me once. Why would I keep someone I can’t trust to follow orders?”

  “I disobeyed you to serve you,” Nettle said. “And I’ve come bearing gifts.”

  She laid her bag on the ground and started tugging at the ties. With a laugh, Redtooth pulled the bag out of her reach. “You talk, I’ll open.”

  “Batteries. Two of the solid-state lithiums you were after, and a box of string conductors. Not as powerful, but lightweight, and they hold their charge forever as I understand it. Very valuable.” As she spoke, Redtooth pulled each item from Nettle’s meager belong
ings. “Hesperus always takes more than he gives. But I know all his hiding places.”

  “You stole them? From the Sly King of Cloudbreak?” Pisces nearly shouted.

  “I did.” This time, Nettle didn’t look guilty. She looked proud.

  “So you brought us batteries and a new enemy, is that what you’re saying?” There was a trembling anger in Pisces’s voice. Caledonia understood her point. They had more than enough adversaries as it was, but they’d left Hesperus with a small treasure and hadn’t damaged his port on their way out. She was willing to consider this part of their bargain, even if the means of trade was indirect.

  “Someone get Amina up here,” Caledonia called. To Nettle she said, “If these are as good as you say, I won’t put you over for stealing aboard my ship without consent. But if they’re not, you should count yourself lucky that we’re still inside the channels.”

  Amina arrived a moment later, blinking sleep from her eyes. After a quick inspection of Nettle’s gifts, she confirmed they were exactly what the girl had promised.

  “Solid-states, fully charged,” Amina said with a knowing look for the captain. “They’ll do.”

  The crew was very aware that adding hands to help with the work also meant adding a mouth to feed. And there wasn’t a girl among them who hadn’t noticed the thinning of the soup. Keeping Nettle on board might breed resentment, but Caledonia wasn’t in the business of abandoning girls. Especially not smart girls. Though it irritated her endlessly to be held hostage by Nettle’s selfish desires, having solid-states meant Amina could build her weapon. This was exactly what they needed to resume their pursuit of the Electra and their brothers.