by Anna Burke
“We’ll go now,” said Lia.
I hesitated. Leaving Harper here in this strange place where she couldn’t even communicate her most basic needs seemed impossibly cruel, but so did letting her die from infection.
Forgive me, I silently begged her, and let Lia lead us on.
The room that would be ours for as long as it took the Moray to decide whether to kill us, help us, or release us was small. Noting its size, however, was like noting the color of a giant squid’s mantle as it bore down on you—irrelevant. A plex column of water plunged from the ceiling and into the floor. Sunlight streamed through it, dancing among the jellyfish and squid. The room’s walls and floor had the same glowing growth as the rest of the ship, which no longer surprised me, but the bunks—I assumed they were bunks—suspended themselves from the walls like seed pods, almost as if they had been grown, too. Around the central water column, planted in the floor itself, waved ferns. They seemed to curl and dance in the flickering light, and the effect was beautiful and hypnotic. An alcove contained the bathroom. I didn’t explore; there was time for that later. My eyes instead fixated on a low curved table containing plates of strange foods. If this was their brig, it was the nicest brig I’d ever heard of.
“Your crew will wait for you here,” Lia said to me.
“Wait, what?”
“They will be comfortable and cared for. The speaker wishes your injury healed; this has been arranged.”
I swept my eyes over my crew: Miranda, Orca, Kraken, Nasrin, and Finn. How could I trust they would not be harmed?
“Go,” said Miranda. Her eyes were on Lia, cold and assessing, but her voice was reassuring. I wished we’d had more time to work things out, and that I could be certain I would see her again.
I wished for a lot of things.
Lia jerked her head toward the door, impatience showing on her dimpled face. I allowed her to lead me back out.
“They will be safe?” I asked.
Lia shrugged off my worries. “Yes. Now, there is so much to discuss. But first . . .”
I assumed she’d lead me back to the infirmary, but instead she descended through a moss-covered hatch and into a room that was mostly tank. A woman swam within, cradling a child on her naked hip. Kelp grew from the tank floor. The woman’s gills fluttered as she breathed, and as her child slept, his small pink gills fluttered too.
“This is impossible,” I said.
“What is?”
I touched my neck in the places where the woman’s gills sat.
“Oh. Not as impossible as you’d think.” She tapped the clear wall gently with the pads of her fingers. The woman looked up from her child, shedding the dreamy expression that had occupied her face a moment before, and swam toward the plex pane. Webbing connected her elongated fingers and toes. I glanced down at Lia’s feet: normal. No thin membranes of skin, though the faint pulse of bioluminescence lit the beds of her nails a faint pink.
As I studied her, she made a series of whistles and clicks that must have carried through the plex, because the woman nodded and gestured to the ladder on the side of the tank. Fucking ladders. I had a premonition I was not going to like this.
“You’ll need to get into the water.” Lia reached for a small mask that hung on a disturbingly organic-shaped hook nearby and illustrated how to attach it to my face. “This will allow you to breathe.”
I accepted it with sweaty hands. “What is she going to do to me?”
“She is a . . . oh, I don’t know how to translate it.” She looked like the puzzle intrigued her. “Most of us can echolocate, but—”
“Echolocate?”
“Sonar. That’s how the speaker found you. He taps into the ship, and—never mind. It’s complicated. She has an unusually well-developed temporal cortex. She can stimulate growth to help regenerate the damaged areas of your brain.”
That made even less sense. I wondered if I had a choice or if I’d be forced into the tank, should I refuse. My head ached in response to the overload of new information. Why in all the seas had the crew made me captain?
“But I have to get into the water?” I asked, stalling.
“Yes.”
“I—” The longing for north sat on my tongue, stopping my words. I’d been willing to risk a coma back on the Man o’ War to feel north, thanks to the drugs Harper had brought me. How was this any different?
I stripped down to my undergarments, folding them on the soft, mossy ground, and ascended the ladder. When I reached the top, I fixed the mask over my nose and mouth and slipped into the cool water.
My first breath sent bubbles into the tank. Kelp waved, and small fish darted away as I let myself sink. The gilled woman observed me through a cloud of coarse hair. A tiny octopus encircled her ear like jewelry, and her skin changed color with her surroundings, just as the octopus’s did. Impossible; and yet, here I was. She extended her hand and held up her webbed fingers in a gesture that reminded me of Lia opening the doors on the ship. Hesitating, I held my smaller hand up to hers. Her skin shifted to match my skin tone. It was oddly comforting. Then she opened her mouth, and I fell into the abyss.
I woke on the mossy ground outside the tank. Lia sat beside me, clicking to the woman, who sang back. Periodically, they signed. How many forms of communication did these people need? My body felt heavy and damp and chilled, and I instinctively reached for the currents to gauge our location. They coursed through me, stronger than I’d ever experienced, so strong I feared I’d be pulled in and swept away while north pulsed like a beacon in my body. I turned my head to face the cardinal point just to alleviate the pressure.
“You’re awake,” said Lia, a genuine smile on her lips.
I vomited into the moss.
To my surprise, as I gagged, spit, and gagged again, the moss rippled—and then proceeded to absorb the emptied contents of my stomach at an alarming rate. I wriggled backward, lest I, too, be consumed.
The motion triggered new alarms. Every sense felt raw and heightened. Touch burned. Sound assaulted. Smell, too—no longer lemons, but the pungent scent of growing things, Lia’s sweat, and brine. When Lia spoke, her words ricocheted around the room and left patterns across my vision.
“How do you feel?”
“What . . . did . . . you do to me?” Speaking produced more of those bright flashes, as if a pattern lay beneath the world of sight—a fourth dimension of sound.
“She healed you.”
“No. I’m . . . this . . . different,” I managed.
“You had scarring. Old scarring. She removed it.”
I vomited again as her words seared across my vision. Lia frowned and moved to put a hand on my shoulder. I flinched away. My skin felt as if it would slough off if brushed. The sensation of my hands on the moss was too much. I felt everything.
“Close your eyes,” said Lia.
I was more than happy to obey. I wanted to curl into a ball in this potentially carnivorous moss and die.
Lia clicked. The sound skittered across my brain like water droplets on a hot pan, and my mind glitched. There was no other word for it.
“Make that sound,” she said.
It was that or continue vomiting. I touched my tongue to the roof of my mouth and mimicked her—
—And saw the room.
My eyes flew open. Lia grinned.
“How?” I asked.
“You’re one of us.”
“I’ve never been able to do this before.” I spoke carefully, already growing more accustomed to the way my words reverberated and left traces behind as sound waves bounced off walls and objects.
“Like I said. There was scarring.”
“From what?”
“That’s what I’d like to know, too. She says it was intentional. And old—you would have been a child.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Where were you born?”
I told her. The vibrations of my voice painted the story as I traced myself back to my earliest beginnin
gs. My mother, holding me on her hip. Sleeping curled on our mat looking out the window at the sunlit sea. My father, an average man, with his kind brown eyes and weather-worn skin, lifting me in the air in the years before he vanished. A drifter, bound to the currents, unable to obtain Archipelago citizenship—or so my mother had told me.
“Recessive maybe,” said Lia. “But I wonder. May I?”
I held myself still as she touched my head. Her hands were gentle as she probed my skull, and her touch itched in new ways.
“Hmm,” Lia hummed. “I’m not as good as she is, but if your father was one of ours, he could have . . . yes. That would explain it.”
“Explain what?” I asked as she pulled away.
“He could have had you damaged intentionally, to hide you. To make you like your crew.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“No idea.”
“But he wasn’t like me.”
“Genes are not always expressed, but they can be passed on. If he left us, or if his parents did, he would have taken his genes with him.”
“Why would he leave?”
“We do not keep our own against their will. Without any expressed traits, he would have been . . . less.”
I leaned into north. My father had known what I was. Known, and denied me the choice of my inheritance. Perhaps he’d told himself he was protecting me by cutting me off from the ocean. He hadn’t totally succeeded—my navigational skills were proof of that—but he’d done enough. Did my mother know? More pressingly, would I ever get the chance to ask her?
“I know you have many questions, but you should rest now. Quietly. I will return you to your crew.” Lia helped me up and handed me my clothes, which I put back on, and then she offered me a flask of water to rinse out my mouth. When I’d finished, she held out her hand. “It will be best if you let me guide you.”
Her hand was warm and her grip was firm and solid. The necessity of the gesture became clear the moment I began walking. North pulsed in my skull and the currents tugged at my blood; meanwhile, sound painted pictures behind my eyes. It was overwhelming, and my head ached, but not in the way that it had. This wasn’t the ache of a bruised mind. It was the ache of a child exposed to open air for the first time. I was raw to everything: pleasure, pain, the feeling of air moving across my skin. I clung to Lia until we arrived back at the room where my chosen family waited.
“Rose.” Miranda was on me in an instant, snatching my hand out of Lia’s and folding me into her arms. I trembled at the touch. Miranda’s blood was a current; it sang to mine, and her arms were walls that kept me safe.
“She’ll need quiet,” Lia said as my crew peppered her with questions. “Let her sleep, and when she wakes, she’ll explain. It is late anyway.”
I didn’t hear the rest of what she said. Miranda picked me up and carried me to a bunk, laying me down on its soft, spongy surface. I reached for her, and she crawled in beside me—then, with a few words to the crew, pressed something that closed the pod around us. In the darkness, I breathed easily at last.
“Are you hurt?”
I shook my head against her chest.
“Then what—”
“I can feel everything,” I said, wondering how I could put this into words. “They . . . I can navigate. And more. I can’t explain. But—”
Miranda stroked my forehead, and I trembled again. Her touch electrified my skin. Her fingers only stroked my forehead, but I felt them everywhere.
“I’m sorry—” she began.
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“You need to rest.”
“Stay with me?” My hands were curled against her chest, trapped between us, but I touched her jaw with a fingertip and let the vibrations of my voice paint her into being in the darkness.
“I wasn’t planning on giving you much choice.”
Chapter Fifteen
“About time,” said Orca when I emerged from my pod. Orca’s voice grated strangely in my ears, but my head no longer ached. In place of pain was an alien mind. My mind. My real mind. I braced myself for more sensory overload. Sound and sight had been separate things for all the years of my life. How long would it take to grow accustomed to the layer of sonar skittering over my vision?
“We need to check on Harper,” said Orca, who had been sitting with her knees to her chest on the floor. Upon seeing me, she stood.
Harper. A jolt of dread twisted my intestines. She had to be okay. I raced over the memories of the previous day, cursing how blurred the concussion had made even recent events. I wanted to believe she was safe. The rest of us hadn’t been harmed, and I was proof the sea wolves had medicine beyond our capabilities, but I needed to see her for myself.
And then we needed to come up with a plan. Now that I could think clearly, the tenuous nature of our survival hit me anew. We knew nothing about this ship or these people. Anything might set them off. Culturally, we were years and oceans apart, and if all that stood between my crew and harm was Altan’s interest in my genetic material and the promise of a hostage . . . I shivered. My track record for keeping people alive was less than perfect.
“Eat first,” Kraken urged me.
I didn’t want to eat. I wanted to find Harper.
“You need every advantage we can give you,” Kraken continued, unrelenting. “Low blood sugar will cloud your judgment. Eat.”
He was right. I tried not to hate him for it. After a few forced bites of fruit and seaweed cakes, I approached the door.
“Good luck with that. It doesn’t open,” said Orca.
Ignoring her, I splayed my fingers against the plex the way I’d seen Lia do. Nothing. I shouldn’t have expected it to work for me just because I was distantly related to these people. Still, I hesitated. The plex gave slightly beneath my fingertips, unlike the plex I was familiar with. There was an almost rubbery quality to it, like the flesh of a cephalopod.
“I tried everything,” said Orca.
“Just let—” As I spoke, sound waves bounced off the door, and I saw it anew. Just off dead center sat a spiraling pattern of intermittent densities. I repositioned my palm in the grooves and gave a slight twist, following the interstitial spaces. The door eased open with a soft shushing sound. I blinked. There must have been a pressure plate beneath the plex. Or something. I refused to dwell on what that something might be. Doors weren’t alive. Doors didn’t have synapses. Doors were refreshingly simple that way.
Silence fell behind me. I stared at the corridor, wondering what would happen to us if we wandered this ship without an escort. Probably nothing good, judging by what had just happened with the door. We had no way of knowing how this ship operated or what risks it posed to those unfamiliar with those parameters. I remembered the fleshy appendages that had maneuvered our ship in the bay and pictured them wrapping around my body.
Harper.
“Do we go, or wait for Lia?” I asked Miranda.
She hadn’t risen from our pod. One arm was flung over her eyes, and she lay with her face tilted toward us, listening.
“Your call.”
“I know. And I’m asking for your advice. All of your advice.” I included the rest of the crew in my words.
“It might help if you tell us what happened to you yesterday,” said Nasrin. “You were gone for hours. You must have learned something.”
I backed away from the open door before answering. “This ship is impossible. The way it moves, the people . . .”
“The thrice-damned cephalopods.” Finn gave a pointed look at the octopus hovering in the water column behind him.
“I think the octopus are pets.”
“Don’t you mean food?” asked Kraken.
“There was a woman in a tank with a baby—”
“I’m sorry, what?” Nasrin rolled her thick neck from side to side, working out a kink. Tendons swelled.
“She had gills. She’s the one who fixed my head. They put me in the tank, and she did something with sound maybe. I
don’t really remember. But her baby had gills, too, and the woman had an octopus. It was curled around her ear, like an earring almost. Maybe they don’t eat them, so let’s not make any threatening gestures at eight-limbed creatures.”
“Literally nothing you just said makes sense,” said Orca. “Let’s go find Harper.”
“And this moss?” I pointed to our surroundings, trying to get used to the way my voice echoed in my head. “It consumes biomatter.”
“Maybe it’s how they purify the air,” said Kraken. “Might be some fungi worked into it as well. Would explain the biomatter.”
Something clicked, and I closed my eyes, letting my senses parse through currents and cardinal points until I could concentrate on the way the ship moved through them. The walls muffled sound, absorbing rather than reflecting. I had the feeling the echoing halls of the ships I was used to would drive me mad, now that sound created shapes behind my eyes. “I think . . . I think the whole ship is alive. Even some of the plex.”
Orca crossed her arms. “That’s insane.”
“I know. But I can feel it. The way the ship moves—I’m not saying it’s sentient, but the component parts are all organic.”
“What about the fact that they have fucking gills?” asked Nasrin.
“I have no idea.”
“And this is supposed to help Harper somehow?” said Orca.
“Watch your tone,” said Miranda.
Orca subsided. Once again, I wished Miranda would reclaim her captaincy. The crew listened to her. We trusted her. At least when she made mistakes, they were for predictable reasons. I had no clue how I was going to screw up, save that I was one hundred percent going to do so soon.
“We need to come up with some sort of strategy,” I said.
“Gain Lia’s trust,” Kraken suggested.
“But don’t trust her,” said Nasrin. She and Kraken had positioned themselves nearest the door, and there was something endearing about the way they scowled protectively at the rest of us—at least until I remembered how useless muscle was against this ship.
