Hunt for the Pyxis

by Zoë Ferraris

  “Hey,” he said to a young boy who looked familiar. “Have you seen Laika?”

  The boy shook his head and kept walking.

  Herbie sighed heavily as the last group of Arghs went by.

  He was just about to go back to the dining hall when a door opened at the end of a long corridor and a girl stepped out. He recognized Laika from her tangle of mousy hair.

  “Laika,” he said breathlessly, running toward her. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I just wanted to say goodbye before—” He was brought up short when she turned to face him. She was wearing a large woolen coat, and she had a small backpack slung over her shoulder. She looked scared.

  “I, uh…are you going somewhere?” he asked, afraid to hear the answer.

  “Yes,” she said a bit petulantly. “Santher told me that you and Emma are sneaking away tonight, and I’ve decided that I’m coming with you.”

  He was too shocked to speak. As she took off down the hallway, he scrambled after her. “Wait,” he said. “You mean, you’re…”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said, her voice quavering. As she hitched the backpack higher on her shoulder, he noticed her hands were shaking. “I’ve made up my mind. I know this is crazy. But I’ve packed my stuff. And I already said goodbye to the birds, and Flawn knows how to take care of them. He does.”

  “Flawn does not know how to take care of the birds,” Herbie said.

  “He can manage,” she said. “I’ve told him everything. By the way, you have Chester, right?”

  “Yeah, he’s here. I was going to give him back—” He took the screech bat out of his pocket and handed it to her, but she refused it and continued down the hallway. “Laika, wait.” He stopped her. “I know you want to come, and I would love it if you came, but…it’s going to be dangerous.”

  Laika gave a sniff. “Look, I know you told me never to tell Emma that I know who her mom is, but sheesh, everybody knows already. And if it’s true, and her mom really is Halifax Brightstoke, then I have to do this. The Queen killed my parents, and she almost killed all the Arghs!” She glared at Herbie. “Getting Halifax back is the only way that the pirates are going to come out of hiding, and that’s more important than taking care of birds.”

  “What if the pirates are dead?” he said.

  She gave him a cool look. “Don’t be silly.” Turning on her heel, she kept walking. Herbie watched her, half in amazement, half in dread before running to catch her.

  When Emma saw Laika climbing onto the Markab with a backpack slung over her shoulder, she instantly realized two things. One, that Laika knew everything. And two, that there was no getting rid of her now.

  When Herbie came closer, Emma gave him a glare, but Herbie shrugged and mouthed: She wanted to come.

  “Hi,” Laika said, trying to look brave.

  “Hi.” Emma glanced at Herbie again. “So I guess Herbie told you.”

  “No. I figured it out myself.” She was blushing. “I can help,” she said. “I know how to navigate in space, which you probably don’t. And I’m really good with animals. I know how to fish, and I brought a net, in case you didn’t have one.” She patted her backpack. “I figured you would need any help you could get. And…I know it’s important to find your mom.”

  “Okay,” Emma said. “But Lovesey told us not to go.”

  “I know,” Laika said. “But I have to do this. This is the only way the pirates will ever come out of hiding. Once they realize that your mom is back on the seas…”

  Emma still wasn’t sure what to think about the whole pirate army thing, but she liked the idea of finding someone who could help them. She glanced at Herbie. “Well,” she said, “we’ve got to leave now. The monkeys are going to help us get the Markab on the water.”

  Laika dashed off with a squee and went below to stow her bag, while Herbie stayed with Emma.

  “I’m sorry!” he whispered. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “It’s okay,” Emma said. She knew she ought to be worried, but she was quietly pleased that someone on the Argh was willing to come with them.

  A loud groan drew their attention as the monkeys began to open the great cargo doors. All around them the hold was dark, but as the doors opened, the light from a nearby star peeked in. It shone blue and bright, and it lit the room like moonlight.

  The monkeys had rigged the Markab to a complicated pulley system. Now one group of monkeys was pushing the ship forward along a pair of rollers toward the cargo doors. Another group stood by a dozen thick lines that were hanging from the wall. Letting out the lines would lower the boat into the water.

  When they reached the edge of the hold, Emma felt a stiff, warm westerly wind begin to tousle her hair. She stood next to Herbie and Laika, the three of them staring at the sea some ten feet below. The water was smooth and dark.

  THUMP! The boat swayed, and the monkeys squawked. Santher hauled himself over the railing, tossing his own backpack onto the deck. He smiled at them.

  “Santher!”

  “I thought you could use some extra help,” he said. “And I thought Laika might be coming. I figured if she had the nerve to come on this crazy expedition, then I did too.”

  “But you can’t go,” Laika said. “You’re the best shipwright on the Argh!”

  “I know,” he said happily. “But you’re going to need me more than the Argh will.”

  Emma didn’t protest. She was secretly delighted. Santher would know how to fix the ship if they encountered any problems, and besides that, she was glad to see him.

  The monkeys managed to get the pulley system working smoothly. They lifted the boat off the deck and slid it out the door. Hanging from a pair of wooden arms, the Markab was lowered slowly into the water below, where it landed with a gentle splish.

  They cut the lines from the Markab’s hull and waited as the monkeys pulled them back in. Once the boat was free, Herbie went to the mast and let out the mainsail. The wind filled it gently, and with silent motion, the Markab set off into the night.

  As much as Emma loved the new cabin, she was far more interested in the goings-on above deck. They had only been on the water for one morning, and already they’d seen two mermaids, a school of marletts, and a burping dog whale. After turning off the Strand to Cepheus, the Markab was now more than halfway down a much shorter Strand that would lead to the Lacerta system. They had also seen two ships, but those had kept their distance. Every sailor on the Strands knew better than to approach a dragon-of-war, no matter how small it was.

  A stiff, warm wind spanked the Markab’s backside, and she was making good time. According to Santher’s Navy Manual, it would take three more days to reach Lacerta’s main star, Alpha Lacertae. Two planets were there, and they would be able to dock on either one—and, hopefully, get information about Emma’s parents. Everyone was worried that the navy would have ships posted at the vostok zones on Alpha Lacertae, just like it had on the other systems. The Markabs had no choice but to wait and see.

  Herbie and Laika had spent most of the morning at the wheel, reading the Almagest and untangling the fishing net that Laika had brought in her backpack. Santher puttered about below, fixing odd things, while Emma sat at the bow, enjoying the warm air and the sight of the great Strand spread out before her. Herbie and Laika were prattling on, but when they got to the subject of Emma’s parents, her ears perked up.

  “…and their yacht was the Markab, of course,” Herbie was saying. “It’s funny, I always thought Emma’s dad was suspicious. It doesn’t surprise me that he was a pirate. I probably should have figured it out a long time ago. But I never thought Emma’s mom was the dangerous type.”

  “She was supposedly more dangerous than Mad Jack!” Laika said.

  “I know,” Herbie exclaimed. “Crazy, huh? It’s just, she always seemed so nice. She did yoga and she baked these really awesome granola cookies. I hate granola, but these were amazing. You have to spend time on them to get them that good. The craziest part, t
hough? She hated sailing.”

  “What?”

  “Seriously. She was totally afraid of the water. She never went sailing. She could barely manage to walk down the pier at the marina. Emma said she had all kinds of phobias—” They glanced at Emma in case she wanted to contribute, but she was pointedly ignoring them. “She was especially afraid of the water,” Herbie went on. “Although of course she showered…. ”

  Emma realized that all this talk about her mom was making her worry even more, so she decided to join Santher below.

  Climbing down the stairs, she found him standing in front of the faux porthole—a strange object that Dad had always kept hanging on the wall above the captain’s desk. The foot-wide circular mirror was set in a golden frame. Yet the mirror reflected nothing of the room around it. Emma used to like touching it as a kid; it was soft and squishy, like there was some kind of goo inside. It was one of the objects that hadn’t broken when the Markab had crashed onto the floor of the Argh’s cargo hold.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Santher looked surprised. “Oh, I was just wondering why you had an empty mesmer.”

  “That’s a mesmer?” She came closer.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess your parents didn’t tell you about this either.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s one of those communication devices, right? Laika told us about them.”

  “It sure looks like it,” Santher said. “I’ve been watching it for weeks now, ever since I first saw it. I kept meaning to ask you why there was no mesmer guard in it, but I figured he’d been scared away when the boat was damaged.”

  “What’s a mesmer guard?” she asked.

  “A guard occupies every mesmer. It’s usually an animal, sometimes a person. They live on the other side.” He touched the surface and the liquid in it rippled mysteriously. “You’ve really never seen anything in here?”

  “No.”

  Santher looked disappointed. “I was hoping we’d find a guard. It’s our only way to communicate with the outside world.”

  Laika popped her head through the window. “Could you guys help us? We’re ready to catch some fish.”

  They went above to find that the net was fully untangled. Emma took the wheel, Santher reefed the sails, and the Markab gently slowed. Together, Laika and Herbie tossed out the net. Everyone watched it sink.

  It only took a few minutes before the net line gave a tug. Laika leaned over and began hauling it in, while Herbie and Santher scrambled to assist. The net rose out of the water, flopping with long, skinny bright-blue fish and weighted by barnacles. They dumped the catch on the deck and began peeling the fish from the net.

  “Look,” Laika exclaimed, seizing a barnacle. “Vostok!”

  “That’s vostok?” Herbie asked. “It looks nothing like what we’ve been eating. On Earth we call those barnacles.”

  “Don’t eat it,” Santher said. “It’s dangerous raw.”

  “So, not sushi,” Herbie said.

  They watched as Laika struck the barnacle against the deck, cracking it easily in half. A blue blob of jelly spilled out like an egg from its shell.

  Herbie recoiled. “Okay, not eating it.”

  Laika was grinning. “Hand me that line,” she said. Puzzled, Herbie handed her the rope and watched as she tied one end to her leg, the other to the railing.

  Santher moved closer. “Laika, this is a bad idea…. ”

  She laughed and popped the vostok into her mouth. Judging from her face, it wasn’t as tasty as regular vostok—in fact, it smelled like brine—but immediately the jelly skin began spreading over her body. This one had a faintly iridescent sheen.

  “I don’t see how it’s diff—” Herbie’s comment was cut off when Laika began floating. She lifted up off the deck, still seated with her legs crossed. She was grinning happily as she floated up and up until the line went taut. Herbie got to his feet and grabbed the line, apparently afraid that it might come loose, in which case Laika would float up into the sky. Santher was shaking his head.

  “How is that happening?” Emma asked.

  “It’s just what happens when you eat raw vostok.”

  “So the stuff we ate was cooked?”

  “Sort of,” he said. “I’m not sure what they do to it.”

  Emma remembered eating vostok and feeling a strange lightness, as if she could float. It made a kind of sense that Laika was floating now, bobbing above them like a helium balloon. Herbie was staring up at her with a mixture of worry and amazement.

  “Come on, Herbie. Try it!” she called.

  “Not into the raw stuff,” he said.

  Laika spent another few minutes dangling above them before the effect wore off. The floating didn’t last long, but the shimmering jelly coat remained for the rest of the afternoon.

  That night, Laika and Herbie came topside, carrying plates and silverware and a giant bowl of stew. “We’re going to eat out here,” Laika announced. “I promised Herbie I’d show him the Lacerta conjunction. That’s when you can see the stars of Lacerta with Cepheus in the background. It looks like a giant river. Anyway, I saw it when we came down here on the Argh last year…. ”

  She carried on happily while Herbie laid down a blanket and everyone sat on the deck. The others must have been hungry, judging by the way they tackled the stew, and Emma, who hadn’t had much of an appetite for days, found that she was starving. She finished off one bowl and started on another.

  “So,” Herbie said excitedly to Emma, “I finally figured out why we can understand each other.”

  “Oh. How?”

  “Laika explained it. It’s because of the vostok. Apparently, it affects the parts of your brain that understand communication. I mean, I don’t think anyone understands it entirely, but it kind of downloads a universal translator into your head or something. That’s how I think of it, anyway. It works on everyone.”

  Emma slowed down her eating long enough to say, “Wow.”

  “But it only lasts for a couple of months,” Herbie said. “After that, you have to eat more vostok.”

  “Do we have more vostok?” Emma asked.

  “We have a whole box of it,” Herbie said, looking pleased by this. “The cooked stuff,” he added. Since they needed vostok to communicate with Laika and Santher, Emma figured it was a good thing they had such a big supply.

  The conversation carried on, and Emma ate another whole bowl of stew before Santher spoke up.

  “I’m curious how you got away from the navy,” he said. “You told me they chased you all the way from Monkey. I noticed the bullet holes in your mast when I was repairing the ship.”

  Herbie leaned backward to grab his backpack and take out the scuppers in the old bait jar. He showed them to Santher, who whistled through his teeth.

  “They look like bullets to me,” Herbie says. “Only I got hit by one and—”

  “You did?” Santher was amazed.

  “Yeah.” He shuddered, not wanting to explain. “Another one hit me, and I got changed back right away. But it’s nothing like a real bullet or it would have gone through me. I mean, what is it?”

  Santher shook his head. “Scuppers are bullets dipped in memory water. If they hit something inanimate, like a mast, then they just act like regular bullets. But the minute they hit a living thing, they transform it into something else.”

  “How?” Emma asked.

  “Memory water can do that if it’s really concentrated,” he said. “The navy does something to the water before they put it on the bullets.”

  “It’s horrible when someone gets hit by a scupper,” Laika said. “The worst is when they turn into a fish. They flop around on the ground and you have to put them in water or they’ll die. Usually the closest water is a Strand, but if they get in a Strand, then they swim away and they’re gone forever.”

  “So when you’re a fish,” Emma said, “you’re really a fish. You don’t remember your human self?”

  “That’s r
ight,” Santher said.

  Herbie shook his head. “I was only a dragon for a few seconds, but I had no idea what was going on…. ”

  Emma looked at the others. “He was an iguana.”

  Santher laughed. “We are on the lizard system. You should feel right at home.”

  “Very funny,” Herbie replied. “So I take it not everyone turns into an iguana?”

  “No,” Laika said. “You never know what you’ll turn into. One time, this boy on the Argh got turned into a hammer!”

  “It does seem completely random,” Santher added.

  “So…,” Emma said, looking down at the remains of their meal, “one of these fish we just ate could have been human?”

  Laika put a hand to her mouth.

  “Probably not,” Santher said, but he didn’t seem convinced.

  “I still don’t understand how a memory can be trapped in water,” Herbie said.

  “No one understands it,” Santher replied. “Touching it with your finger can mess up your mind. Imagine what would happen if your whole body fell in.”

  “What would happen?” Emma asked.

  “When you touch it,” Santher said, “the memories trapped inside the water become yours. They become like your own memories—you can’t really get rid of them again. But in the memory seas, you would get millions of memories all at once…. ” He trailed off, uncertain how to explain.

  “So your brain would explode,” Herbie said.

  “Kind of,” Laika said. “No one but your mom has ever survived being thrown in the memory seas.”

  Emma felt a horrified awe imagining her mom drowning in memory water. When she had touched the memory water on Delphinus, she had been drawn into a song that felt as real as if Herbie had been singing it beside her. And that was only one small memory. She couldn’t fathom what it would feel like to submerge her whole body, and to have to absorb millions of memories at once. This might explain why her mother was so afraid of the ocean and of sailing. For a sharp, sad moment, Emma regretted not knowing this before. In all the years she’d grown up, she’d only seen her mother as a coward.