by Anna Burke
As I rounded yet another corner in the increasing black, a squid made a dive for my hand. My fist closed instinctively. The beak scraped across the back of my knuckles, and I curled my body in on itself as I fumbled for my knife. It wasn’t a large squid. Its body looked bluish, though it was hard to tell, and lights pulsed down its mantle as it retreated a few feet to survey me.
Fucker, I thought at it, hoping it was alone and not part of a pack. Luck like that, however, didn’t come my way often, and so I inched backward until the wall met my spine.
The second squid appeared as I adjusted the air tank on my back. It hovered behind the first, appraising me with wide round eyes. I bared my teeth around my mask. This would not be how I died.
Lights pulsed down their sides. The shifting colors suggested language, nuance, an intelligence determined to find its way into the soft meat of my body. I edged along the wall with my knife hand ready.
The third squid hit me from below. I felt tentacles close around my leg as the beak tested the resiliency of my pants, rearranging my hamstring muscle in the process. My knife sank into its head, and the skin parted with a rubbery ease I did not have time to contemplate as the other members of its pack made their moves. One went for my knife arm.
The other went for my face.
I felt the give of my mask as its powerful body ripped the tubing from my mouth. Spluttering, I bit into the tentacle and screamed in a stream of bubbles as its beak raked down my cheek, sending my blood into the water along with a cloud of ink. The squid on my leg released me—hopefully to die—and I scrabbled at the squid around my head and neck with my other hand. Slippery flesh slid against my fingers. My lungs ached. I needed air, and the squid on my knife arm was twisting my bicep against my humerus with vicious intent. The tentacle in my mouth writhed as it tried to get away. I bit down harder. If I let go, I would try to breathe, and water would flood my lungs as it had flooded my ship.
The squid doing its best to remove my bicep released me without warning. In relief I dropped my knife, then cursed—freeing the other squid from my teeth—and lunged after it. I kicked toward the bottom of the hall with my lungs crackling and sparks dotting the edges of my vision before I realized my head, too, was free, and jammed the breathing apparatus back between my teeth. That first breath of air blinded me. Oxygen raced through my veins as I forgot about my attackers. When I recalled my predicament several breaths later, closing my hands around the hilt of my knife, I found myself in a fog of ink.
Neptune, no.
I swam back to the ceiling with slow kicks, my leg and arm aching and my face leaking red around my vision, and passed over the cloud and down the hall with a tight rein on my panic. Only one thing would have distracted the squid from wounded prey, and I had no desire to meet any more predators.
Sure enough, when I looked over my shoulder, my enemies were engaged in a battle for their own lives as an even larger squid shredded the one I’d wounded. Humboldt hybrids—vicious and ruthless in their pursuit of their own kind. This, I reminded myself, was why divers went out in groups with spears instead of six-inch knives. Praying my blood didn’t draw any more unwanted attention, I pushed on through the swarm.
The door to the room where the crew were trapped opened at my touch. Bioluminescent algae swirled in the water, which meant the light tubes must have shattered, and I paused in the doorway to feel for life. Blue light arced from each steadying sweep of my hands and feet and clung to the fine hairs on my arms.
Something moved in the corner. I jerked my knife out before me, bracing myself for another attack, and then kicked toward it as I recognized the shape of a human leg in the luminous clouds.
My eyes struggled to parse what the shifting light revealed. The shapes did not add up. Eventually, however, I realized there were two people huddled beneath an overturned storage crate. The crate would retain the air inside so long as they held it in place, though not enough to last them for long. It had to be mostly carbon dioxide by this point.
Rescue protocol stated you always brought along a spare tank. Otherwise, a drowning crewman might kill you both in their panic. I didn’t have an extra tank. All I could do was take a deep breath, hold out my hand to get their attention, and duck into their shelter.
Jeanine’s grinning skull tattoos shimmered in the reflected light as her eyes found mine. I passed her the rebreather. She fastened it over her face and took several long breaths before passing it back to me. I gestured at her companion to indicate he should take it first, and then my heart constricted. I knew him: a boy no more than sixteen, training up to be an engineer. Jeanine supported him, but no breath stirred his chest. Numbness spread from my stomach to my limbs. A child. He was a child.
She pushed the rebreather into my mouth. I gulped air.
“He got stung. Allergic reaction.” Jeanine’s tone was matter of fact, but I’d seen her in the dining hall with the boy—Dev was his name—joking and tousling his hair. I’d come too late. Had she held him, here beneath this crate, while he asphyxiated as venom overrode his system?
“What happened to your face, Rose?”
“Squid.”
Jeanine nodded. She didn’t ask what had happened to the ship. All that could wait. As for Dev, I sized up his frame. He was taller than me, and heavier. Dragging him back through the debris field for his family would be difficult, but I couldn’t leave him here to be eaten.
“If we carry him—”
“Don’t be a bleeding idiot.” Jeanine sucked air to replace what she’d expelled from her lungs in her outburst. Without another word, she dove. Shock still had my limbs in its sluggish grip. She’d returned by the time I managed to convince them to move, towing the lid of the crate behind her. “We’ll seal him into the crate.”
Efficient. Cold. How many people had she seen die over the years, that she could react like this?
“Jeanine—”
The look she sent my way silenced me. Bioluminescence painted the scene as Jeanine tipped the crate. Bubbles erupted, briefly crowning Dev’s head of black curls before vanishing into the gloom. The crate sank to the floor. Jeanine folded his body into the empty box with a tenderness that raked across my ribs more fiercely than any squid, then fastened the lid. I offered her air. It was all I could do.
A scan of the room for threats revealed the crew had been doing repair work on a maintenance panel. A length of pipe connected by a single screw floated nearby. Jeanine worked the screw free with the tip of my knife. Packages had settled back to the floor, save for a few with air bubbles trapped inside. I pried the lid off a smaller crate. Sodden bags of rice flickered in the light. The lid was small enough for one of us to carry without slowing us down, and would act as a shield between our bodies and the waiting swarms. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the crate where Dev lay tucked in on himself as if asleep.
Armed with her pipe and with my knife back in my waistband, makeshift shield in hand, we traded the rebreather back and forth. The door to the hall yawned darkly. I motioned for her to stay close as we kicked off and began our swim.
Nothing remained of the squids that had tried to make a meal of me. Even the ink had dissipated, and while I saw shapes flitting in the distance, nothing attacked. I held the lid between my body and the trailing jellyfish. Jeanine swam directly above me. The magnetic field fizzled against my blood as I oriented myself to the darkness of the hall. It wasn’t a far swim under normal circumstances, though admittedly there were no normal circumstances in which an entire bay flooded enough for a swim, but the hazards of floating scrap and supplies and boneless predators changed the terrain. Water displaced by Jeanine’s hands rippled over the back of my neck. Glowing jellyfish drifted, menacing and aimless, and their bells hit the lid with soft thumps.
The strike came from behind. Jeanine twisted and her pole scraped against my leg as she struggled. I fought to turn as a line of stinging cells brushed my bare feet. Pain seared. I had the rebreather, and I inhaled sharply. The tank sw
ung on my back and threw me off balance. By the time I righted myself, dropping the shield in the process, a squid the size of Kraken had Jeanine wrapped in its tentacles.
Orca, floundering in the water beneath the behemoth. Finn, lying senseless on the floor while Kraken launched himself at the squid. Diving beneath that massive body. Closing my hand over Orca’s wrist.
The memory assaulted me. Ink spiraled in black swirls as Jeanine tried to drive the pole into the squid’s mantle, but it had its tentacles wrapped around her torso. I could barely see her in the darkness. My knife came to my hand as I slashed at the muscular appendages, but without a clear view of Jeanine, I worried I might stab her, too.
She needed air. I grabbed hold of a limb and pulled myself closer, driving my knife into the rubbery flesh. A sucker fastened to my left forearm. The pressure burned against my skin. My knife dug into the tentacle as I sawed back and forth. Another tentacle slapped me across the face and sent me tumbling through the water. Jellyfish brushed me with pulsing strands, leaving trails of electric agony.
The floor met my feet. I pushed off again, desperate to get to Jeanine. She couldn’t have much oxygen left. This time, I collided with the body of the squid. It writhed as I drove the blade into the mantle as deep as it would go. The heart lay toward the mantle’s posterior, and its brain sat between its eyes. That, however, was too near Jeanine. My arm twitched as jellyfish venom fired through my muscles. I clenched my teeth on the rebreather and drove my blade deeper still.
The monster shuddered as blood poured out of the wound. With a tangle of arms, it released Jeanine and jetted away, leaving me to catch her.
Not all the blood in the water belonged to the squid. I pressed the rebreather into Jeanine’s slack mouth. She did not respond. I shook her. Performing CPR beneath the water was impossible, but I prayed to Neptune anyway. Her head, with its inked sharks, lolled against my shoulder.
I scanned her body for signs of damage and choked on a cry. Her chest was a ruin of muscle and exposed bone. The squid’s beak had sliced her from sternum to belly button, and while the worst of the damage had been inflicted on her ribs, the iron in the water from her spilled blood soured my mouth. I had to get her back to the airlock.
Abandoning hope of immediate resuscitation cost me several seconds. At last, spurred on by another sting, I took back the rebreather and lifted Jeanine. Her weight bore me to the floor, and, damning the jellyfish, I swam the long hallway back to safety, each kick another second of oxygen deprivation for my burden.
Light from the airlock broke through the murk as we rounded the last corner. I pounded on the hatch while Jeanine’s unconscious body slumped beside me, partially suspended in the water. It opened. The sound of compressed air fell on my ears like a lullaby.
The airlock took five minutes to drain. I knew this, and knew it could not be hastened, and yet those five minutes meant the difference between life and death. I brought Jeanine to the expanding surface and did what I could. Compressions on her ragged chest stained my hands red with her blood, and her lips were cold as I blew air into her lungs. I repeated the motions until hands pulled me up and I found myself on the wet floor, surrounded by dying jellyfish and the motionless body of my friend.
The medic took over. He shouted something, and footsteps echoed. Harper hauled me out of the airlock and away from the jellyfish, where I collapsed while she removed the tank from my back. My limbs twitched with venom. A familiar voice shouted in the distance as Harper looked me over, noting the damage to my face and the welts on my exposed skin, and then Miranda knelt before me.
“Jeanine,” I said. My throat burned. Somewhere along the way I had swallowed salt water.
Miranda pulled me into her lap and held me close with a strength both tender and vicious.
“Never do that again,” she whispered into my hair. “Never fucking do that again.”
“I had to save her—”
“I would let this whole ship drown before I lost you.”
Not the whole ship, I thought as she clutched me tightly to her. Just Jeanine. Her body remained still and lifeless on the floor beside me, and my hands were sticky with her blood.
••••
My stings were treated in the infirmary by a vast, muscular, tattooed woman with gentle hands. Jeanine’s body lay on a table nearby. Finn, her partner and the ship’s communications specialist, sat beside her. He did not weep. He clutched her fingers in his, and his lips moved as he spoke inaudibly into the private bubble of his grief. I lay silent, feeling the venom leech out of my skin beneath the compresses, and wished myself dead.
“You did everything you could,” Harper said hours later, around a mouthful of rum. I’d wanted to crawl back to my quarters and burrow deep into the mattress and my despair, but Miranda was needed on deck, and she’d refused to let me mourn alone. Instead, we sat at a bar table, drinking to Jeanine’s memory.
Harper slumped with her head on Orca’s shoulder. Kraken sat on Orca’s other side, tossing his lucky dice into the air between sips of the bitter drink the bartender, Nasrin, kept replenishing for him.
I sat beside my captain and wondered if Dev’s parents, or Jeanine’s, were on ship. I’d never thought to ask. Each time I blinked, I saw her chest, splayed open to reveal cartilage and bone, and I longed to scrub the feel of raw tissue from my hands. I’d come so close to saving her.
“You got the valve replaced,” Miranda said. I tried to tune into the conversation.
“Replaced is a stretch. More like patched. It won’t hold up under pressure, so we can’t sub very deep. Pray for calm weather.”
“It won’t need to hold for long. I sent out an SOS. A friend of ours is in range.”
I hauled myself out of my grief-induced stupor. There was only one universal rule on the ocean: never ignore an SOS. It didn’t matter the captain or who they served. Nobody left another ship to drown. Ships that broke this rule knew they would be blacklisted, and, if they ever needed help, might be turned down. Even Archipelago ships obeyed the unwritten mandate, unless, of course, they were in the middle of a war.
The news of help on the way came as a distant relief. I couldn’t feel much around the inconceivable ache of our loss, but I was aware enough to realize this also meant we wouldn’t need to head for Paradise island. More relief eddied at the edges of my consciousness, reaching me only in faint ripples.
“Who’s the friend?” asked Harper.
“Seraphina.”
At Miranda’s words, Orca jerked her head up. “Seraphina? The Seraphina?”
“Who’s Seraphina?” Harper turned her interrogation onto Orca.
“You wouldn’t have heard of her, but out here, she’s like . . .” Orca trailed off, clearly unsure what kind of comparison to draw to best illustrate her point.
“She’s a fucking gem,” said Kraken.
“Wait, is that the woman you were telling me about?” I asked Miranda. “The cultural historian?”
“Cultural historian?” Orca looked from me to Miranda, and then burst into strained laughter. “More like pleasure boat captain.”
“Seraphina’s business is information and pleasure, and yes, Orca, she is also a cultural historian.” Miranda sounded almost prim in her correction. I would have found it endearing if I didn’t still smell like Jeanine’s blood.
Miranda’s collection of books had fascinated me when I first came aboard her ship. I’d recently inquired about their origins, and Miranda had launched into a rhapsodic account of a captain named Seraphina who had made it her business to collect and document cultures past, present, and evolving. She hadn’t mentioned “pleasure.”
“Like a sex boat?” Harper put my question into words.
Orca’s grin widened until it crossed the line from “amused” to “malevolent.” “Haven’t you heard about what happens when two pirate crews get together?”
Everything I’d ever heard about pirate debauchery flooded my synapses. Orgies fueled by the drugs grown from
fungi in their bilges and bizarre strains of weed and algae; sporting events involving the mutilation of the losers, and sometimes the winners—in short, every vice known to humankind throughout all its ages, crammed into leaky holds full of unwashed criminals.
“She also will have spare parts.” Miranda rested her hand on the small of my back. Her touch was lighter than her voice, which sounded as heavy as the ship. “And after . . . this . . . the crew could use a break. Boost morale.”
“How soon can she get here?” I asked, thinking of sudden squalls.
“Six hours. Let the crew know, will you?” Miranda waited for Orca to nod before turning to me. “You should rest before she arrives.”
“I’ll escort her back to her quarters,” said Harper, extricating herself from Orca’s grip.
Miranda squeezed my hip in a silent apology that she could not escort me herself.
Harper led me, not back to my quarters, but to the room she shared with Orca. It had changed since I’d last slept there. The whale skull still hung on the wall, but instead of a sling hammock, she had a hammock bed made from hemp stretched across a metal platform. No doubt Harper had designed or commissioned it herself. The small chest that held Orca’s things had been replaced by shelves built from scrap—more of Harper’s handiwork—and a carpet covered the floor, woven from scrap cloth and fringed with brightly colored tassels. She even had a mirror.
“What are we doing?” I wanted to lie down in the bed I shared with Miranda and weep.
“Miranda doesn’t always know what’s best for you. We all need a rest, seas save us, but there’s something I need you to do, first. For us. For Jeanine.”
Harper pulled a few objects off the shelves, and I registered a cake of soap, a bowl of water, and a straight razor. I glanced between it and her head and backed away.
“Don’t be such a jelly.”
