by Anna Burke
“They would have had to breed selectively,” Kraken said, his rumbling voice darkly speculative.
“Eugenics always ends badly.” Despite her words, Miranda sounded thoughtful, rather than alarmed. “That explains a few things.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like you.”
I reached for another fruit. Lia’s dimples stuck in my mind like sonar ripples. The familiarity I felt in her presence haunted my thoughts when I needed them clear, and old memories gnawed: a nondescript man I loved with all my childish heart, his arms around my mother; large, warm hands keeping mine safe; good-bye after good-bye until one day he didn’t return. Lost at sea. Gone. I’d been too young to understand, and young enough to adapt to life without him; and as I’d grown, I’d asked after him less and less. He was the reason I was mocked. He was the reason my mother was lonely. We both avoided the subject and the pain it raised. In Lia, I saw the life I might have had, and it seethed beneath my skin like bioluminescence.
“I need to get back to the trawler. Our stocks will die, and that hell beast needs feeding,” said Kraken.
“Seamus.” I’d forgotten about Miranda’s cat. “I’ll say something. Maybe we can stay there instead of here.”
“Check this out.”
We turned to Nasrin. She had her hand pressed to the plex column. Inside, a small blue octopus matched her fingers with five of its eight limbs. When she moved, so did it.
“Do you really think they don’t eat them?” she asked.
“We haven’t been served any,” said Kraken.
“I don’t think they do.” A new idea occurred to me. “Maybe they’re not pets after all. I think they might study them. That’s why some of them have skin like an octopus, though I don’t know why that would be beneficial.”
“Maybe it’s just decorative,” said Miranda. “We’re assuming everything they do is utilitarian. That could be a mistake.”
Her hands trembled as she reached for her flask. She gave it a shake, then returned it to her belt. It must have been empty. A spasm of an unnamable emotion crossed her face. I studied the twist of her mouth and swallowed my dread.
Lia didn’t return for me again that day. By my estimation of evening Miranda’s shaking had worsened, and she lay on the bunk with sweat pouring off her skin. I sat beside her and stroked her clammy forehead.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Kraken.
“I’m fine,” Miranda said.
“Is it an infection?” All I could think about was Harper, lying unconscious while fish ate the dead flesh from her hand.
“It’s not an infection.” Kraken crouched before Miranda and took one of her hands in his. Her scars and his tattoos complemented each other, and I remembered him telling me she’d been the one to ink him. He had been the first sailor she’d marked, though ink was a kindness she hadn’t shown the rest of us.
My brutal, beautiful, broken love.
“It’s nothing.” She struggled into a sitting position. Strands of lank hair clung to her face. “It will pass.”
“Kraken—” I said.
“She’s right. It will pass.” He held Miranda’s eyes, and the look they shared shut me out entirely.
“Go find Lia,” said Miranda. “See about our ship.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“I told you. I’ll be fine.”
“Miranda—”
“Fucking go.”
Stunned, I jerked away from her. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall of the pod, her hand still bound with Kraken’s.
“Fine.”
“Don’t give me attitude, Rose. Just do your job.”
As if I was the one with the attitude. I stood and headed for the door, pausing only long enough to beckon Orca to come with me.
“Breaking rules already?” she said as she stood with a clink of shells.
“You’re my first mate. They can deal with that or they can kick us off their ship.”
Orca grinned at the anger in my tone. “Whatever you say, Captain.”
Once in the hall with the door sealed behind us, I realized my first problem: I had no idea how to find Lia, and I did not speak the Symbiont language. Instead of admitting this, I snapped at Orca, whose grin widened each time my temper flared. “Let’s see Harper. And don’t touch anything.”
Orca walked in step with me down the mossy hall. The light from the moss showed me her face in profile—jaw set, eyes wary, ready to take on the ship itself. I was suddenly glad she was my first mate. By all rights she should be furious with me. I’d ascended to captaincy after only a few months on her ship, whereas she’d served for years, and I’d come between her and that same captain. Yet she’d taken it in stride. I hadn’t been in any condition to predict her reaction at the time, but in retrospect I was surprised. She’d just lost her ship, too, but unlike certain others who would not be named, she wasn’t trying to drink herself into a coma.
We didn’t pass anyone on the short walk to the infirmary, nor were we eaten by the walls. I pressed my palm against the plex door. It slid open. I tried not to think about the conversation I’d had with Altan regarding sentience. A door was a door. Plex was plex. Algae were algae.
Orca pushed past me and ran to Harper’s side. She remained unconscious, but her face had regained some of its usual firmness. I hadn’t realized how much flesh the fever had leeched from her bones. Orca stroked her wet hair and I turned away to give her privacy.
The child in the tank with the octopus caught my attention. She curled around it like it was a cat; its tentacles entwined around her fingers and wrist. Moving closer, I crouched to study them. Tight, short curls crowned her head. Her eyes were closed, and her lashes brushed round, childishly plump cheeks. She couldn’t have been more than four. The octopus changed colors with her breathing, shifting from blue to purple to green. The shifts soothed the ache in my chest left by Miranda’s harsh words; they were innocence suspended.
The child’s eyes opened slowly, and she blinked. Gold pierced the water. Her gills flared, and though the organs unsettled me, there was something about the motion that felt like a human gesture. The octopus woke, too, and tightened its grip on her hand. Her other hand formed a series of languid signs. Not knowing their sign language, I didn’t know how to respond beyond a small wave. She smiled, revealing small white teeth, and waved back. I wondered why she was here. Nothing appeared visibly wrong with her, but then again, what did I know about what was normal for a gilled child? I put my hand against the plex. She mirrored the gesture, and the octopus extended a tentacle. A tiny sucker fixed itself to my thumbprint. It was such a contrast to the last sucker I’d had directed my way.
“Making friends?” Orca asked from Harper’s side.
I nodded.
A voice spoke in Symbiont. I didn’t understand, but the reprimand was clear. I looked up from the child to see Vi enter the infirmary. She strode across the floor and yanked me upright by my left arm, speaking rapidly. I shook my head in an attempt to communicate my confusion. Her brows contracted in frustration. Finally, she pointed at me, then Orca, and then the door.
“I think we’re being kicked out,” I told Orca.
Orca kissed Harper’s forehead. Vi growled something. Orca ignored her and, with a lingering touch to the tank, joined me at the infirmary door. The last thing I saw of Vi was her frown as the plex slid shut.
“She looks so much better,” said Orca.
“I know. Except for the flesh fish.”
“Excuse me?”
I filled her in on Symbiont medicine as we followed the curve of the ship past closed plex doors. Several sailors frowned as they passed us, their expressions identical to Vi’s, and I guessed it was only a matter of time before word got back to Lia. Good. I needed to talk to her.
“Check this out.” Orca paused by an open door. Within, coils of fleshy tubes emitted faint pulses of bioluminescence. She moved to investigate, but I pulled her back.
“When did you vomit?”
“When they fixed my head.”
“Fucking gross.”
“What are you doing?” Lia approached at a dead run, her face wide with horror as she saw the room beyond us. Bioluminescence pulsed along her skin in staccato bursts.
“Looking for you,” I said.
“You should not be out here. Especially not her.”
“This is my first mate, Orca.” The anger I felt at Miranda spilled over into my voice. “We were looking for you.”
She caught her breath and straightened. “What did you need?”
“We would like to return to our ship.”
“You are not authorized to leave.” More pulses of light glimmered beneath her skin. I wondered if they bore any correlation to her emotional state. Was that why their clothing was so damn revealing?
“We have no intention of leaving, but the ship requires maintenance, and my crew would feel more comfortable in their own quarters.”
Lia’s eyes flickered over Orca before returning to me. “Would they stay put?”
“Hey, now—” Orca bristled at the implication she required containment.
“We will.”
“Then I will talk to Altan. Is there anything else I can do for you?” Her tone suggested the only valid answer was Please take us back to our quarters and lock us in.
“It’s been nice to stretch my legs,” said Orca.
“You are lucky to still have them.” Lia glanced once more at the room Orca had nearly entered. Was I imagining one of the tubes had inched closer? I tugged Orca away.
“Remind you of something?” Orca said.
“Yeah.” The massive squid we’d battled several months ago had possessed tentacles of a similar size. The comparison felt like a premonition. This ship seemed poised to swallow us all.
Lia herded us back to our room. When I turned to seal the door behind us, she caught my arm. “I am serious. There is danger here. More than you know.”
I gave her a fake smile and stepped away, doing my best to look sobered by her words instead of infuriated. I was so fucking sick of cryptic warnings. Comita, Miranda, Ching, and now these Symbionts—could no one just spell things out clearly? Maybe this was why the world had collapsed: nobody knew how to communicate. The Symbionts should add that into their genetic coding.
Orca clasped my shoulder and drew my attention to the rest of the crew. “We need to get to the ship,” she said to me in a strained voice. “Miranda’s in withdrawal.”
Before me, Miranda crouched on her hands, dry heaving into the moss. Kraken supported her with a steady hand on her back and murmured something I couldn’t hear while Finn and Nasrin played a game of dice at the table, using fruit as chips.
Cardinal points skittered around my compass. I knew Miranda drank too much. Her flask was always handy, but she was never drunk—until recently. Once or twice I’d even wished she would tip herself over that edge, if only to see her lose control. She wasn’t in control now. She’d stripped down to her undershirt, and the muscles in her shoulders bunched as she shook.
“Neptune,” she groaned, and my anger dissipated at the pain in the line of her bowed neck.
“I know,” said Kraken. Kraken, who’d been Miranda’s confidante for years. He, of course, would have known about Miranda’s drinking. She’d promised me no more secrets. But this . . . The sounds of dice rolled around my head, disturbing my thoughts. How could the crew just sit there, pretending this wasn’t happening? Nasrin felt my glare and looked up. The grim set of her mouth told me more than words. She wasn’t ignoring Miranda. If she was sitting there, it was for a reason.
I thought back to all the times I’d seen Miranda sipping from her flask. She’d been drinking more of late. That much, at least, I’d noticed. The pit of anger in my stomach stirred anew. We couldn’t afford her to collapse. I needed her to be strong and stable, as she’d been since I met her.
Had she been strong, though?
Ching had told me Miranda was broken. I’d seen the cracks in her façade, but cracks could be smoothed over. Resealed. I’d thought her stable despite the fault lines. Now, standing in the doorway as I watched her heave, I felt a lens shift. The sound of her moans rippled across my newly sensitive mind and revealed patterns I’d been blind to previously. Patterns I wished I couldn’t see.
Miranda, carving her mark in my palm. Miranda, striking me with her whip. Miranda, walking Annie, walking Andre, slicing that man’s throat right in front of me, while betrayal after betrayal left its own mark on her body.
Miranda, lying.
I’d mistaken her cruelty for strength, and her tyranny for command.
She’d told me, right before our capture, that she knew what it was to love someone like her: someone brutal and damaged and scarred. Of course I’d known the scars on her body were more than skin deep, but that knowing had been different from understanding. I pictured how she must have looked when Ching pulled her out of the water: her skin necrotic, her joints swollen, her muscles twitching and aching and alive with pain. It would have been months before she could move comfortably, and months before the wounds healed to the scars I saw today. The deepest wounds, the ones on the backs of her legs, still pained her. I’d seen her rubbing them after a long day on her feet. How naïve I’d been to have ever thought them superficial—or healed.
Seconds passed.
I did not know what it said about me that I loved this woman, or that I’d been willing to sacrifice so much to stay at her side. At least the deaths I’d caused had been accidental. I’d never set knife to throat and drenched my ship with blood.
I hovered on this precipice, there on a foreign ship in waters I’d sailed into not because I shared Miranda’s twisted idealism, but because I’d had few other choices, and wondered which way I’d fall. To one side lay a path I wished I wanted, where I steeled my heart and will and pursued a life without Miranda in the hopes I could one day balance my ledger against the damage I’d done while in her orbit. In that life, I found a way to escape the Symbionts with Harper and returned her to Polaris, but there my imagination balked. Polaris was no longer my home. I had seen the Archipelago for what it was, and I harbored no illusions about my place within its walls.
On the other side of the knife’s edge lay the path I still ached to follow. In this life, Miranda learned to respect me as her partner, and together we brought down the systems that had shaped and alienated and cast us out, no matter the cost. But to take that path I’d have to accept the side of me Miranda claimed to recognize, which was, in its own way, just as brutal as she was—the part of me that burned beneath the cardinal points, simmering, magmatic, and furious; the part of me that had once longed to break the nose of a boy named Maddox in the North Star training room; the part of me that put off seeing my mother because I could not hide the truth: that despite the sacrifices she’d made to give me a better life, I was just as adrift as I’d been at birth.
I felt the blade with my bare feet and knew where I’d fall. I could not keep pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Perhaps that was why I’d been drawn to Miranda. It wasn’t that I had a thing for dangerous women. It was that I wanted permission to become one. I would never fully belong anywhere. Even if I found family in Symbiont, or if we reclaimed Man o’ War, I would always be a chimera. It was time to stop trying to belong and to be what I was—whatever shape that took.
I crossed the room and made my choice.
“No,” Miranda said when I knelt before her. “Rose, please go.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
She didn’t raise her head. Kraken held her braid out of the way of the puddle of sick, which, I noticed with a jolt of unease, was already vanishing into the moss.
“I don’t want you seeing me like this.”
I touched the curve of her ear. Her skin was clammy and cold, and she smelled of sour
sweat.
“Fuck,” she swore again. Her body shook as something wracked it, and her nails dug into the mossy floor, gouging tracks in the sporophytes. I put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched.
“Don’t touch her right now,” said Kraken.
I pulled away. Kraken saw me staring at his hand on Miranda’s back, and grimaced before amending his statement. “Touch her as little as possible.”
“Mere?”
“Neptune.” She lay her head on the moss, heedless of her bile, and screamed. I recoiled from the raw agony in the sound as it grated on all my senses.
“Is this normal for withdrawal?” I asked him. I longed to reach for Miranda, but when I touched her arm, she screamed again.
“For her, yes.” Kraken’s lips jerked downward as Miranda’s screams went on, and I longed to cover my ears and block out the sound. Sonar sliced like a knife across my vision. Pulses of the world ricocheted back, blurred and fractured. She sounded like she was being torn apart. I inched closer.
“This is why she drinks,” he said in the next pause.
My hand hovered over the back of Miranda’s head without settling. Quietly, I put into words what I’d only recently understood. “You pulled her out of the water, but the pain never stopped.”
Her scars gleamed in the blue light as he acknowledged the truth in my statement. I thought of my captain floating in a sea of man o’ war, tentacles trailing across her body and stinging her over and over and over, their bladders keeping her afloat even as she tried to drown herself. The ocean hadn’t let her die—nor had it let her forget.
The ocean never let any of us forget.
“What can we do?” I asked.
Kraken shook his head.
“There has to be something,” I said, my voice rising. “We can’t let her live like this.”
“The withdrawal will pass in another few hours.” Kraken moved Miranda’s braid as she heaved again. “She’ll manage.”
“I’ll talk to Lia. There’s rum on the trawler, and they have to have something—”
“No,” said Miranda. Sweat dripped from her skin. Heedless, I bowed my head to rest beside hers. She pressed our cheeks together. Her ragged breathing vibrated against my forehead where it rested on her shoulder. “No, Rose.”
