by D. N. Bryn
I slip my tail over the side of the boat, grimacing as my bite wound’s scabs catch, and slide in beside her. The flat wooden deck lifts slightly near the front, with a bench-style sitting area in the center and a giant fan at the back. My full tail barely fits within it, and I slide awkwardly over the old blankets and empty canteens that litter the floor.
Thais fiddles with a steering lever beside the driver’s seat. “Check the engine.”
“Do I look like I know anything about human machines?”
But she twists her hand in the bitter two-fingered sign for fuck you while she watches a group of cartel humans mingle on the other far busier end of the dock.
I rustle my tail aggressively at her as I examine the engine below the fan. Pipe and metal and cogs form a block of human nonsense inside a wooden casing. I peel back a little insulated trap door. A subtle red glow comes from the ignit at the engine’s center, the scale-sized stone fully charged with heat and ready to launch this thing into the Murk once activated. Or to sit neatly in my palm with my other glowing stone. My fingers twitch. A canteen hits the back of my shoulder, and Thais stares at me.
“You’re getting an entire hoard of them. Lay off, you greedy parrot dropping.”
“Yeah, yeah, silt-breather.” I wiggle at her and slam the little door back into place.
She thrums her fingers against the side of the driver’s seat. The scents of sun and leather and wine hit me, paired with the harsh musk of Rubem’s monster crocodilian. Beyond the slits in the boat’s giant fan, the crocodilian plops, one clawed foot after another, onto the lower floating dock, its missing eye covered in a bandage. Rubem strolls after it. His fishnet gloves vanish into the short-sleeved vest of ruby red he wears over his browns and blacks. Wolf walks at his side, head bandaged but otherwise looking no worse for the wear since his fall last night. Shame.
Lily charges up behind them, shouting something without signs. All three of them turn toward the boats. Their gazes find me first, then Thais.
I grab Thais’s arm, yanking her down, but the shot of a pistol rings before we can hide behind the low railing. My heart ricochets like the bullet that scatters wood chips along the dock at my side. My side, specifically, as far from Thais and her precious hoard knowledge as possible. Thais screams all the same. I coil backward and accidentally smack into a knob. It must activate our engine’s ignit, because the machine whirls to life.
Our boat’s fan flies into motion. We shoot out of the dock, careening to one side. Thais screams again. We knock into the vessel next to ours, and she rights our course, aiming us out onto the main river.
“They’re shooting at us!” She signs it with one shaking hand, steering us through village canoes and mat rafts. We whip up water as we swerve past a confused merchant boat.
“Shooting at me,” I sign huge sweeping motions to make sure she sees me. “They’d want you alive. For now.”
“And the shooting doesn’t bother you? You’re just—” Her final sign must require two hands, because she flings her free one out obnoxiously instead of continuing.
“It’s kind of been my usual life since leaving the Murk.” Not that I want to talk about that. I slap the engine. “We have an hour before the ignit needs a recharge. Probably.”
“Probably?”
“I’m familiar with the ignits, not the human machines!”
About five boat lengths behind us, a dozen vessels zip onto our foam stream, creating a mismatched diamond formation. Most of them bear the cartel’s symbol, but the nearest three are all dark wood and netting. Lily wields the helm of one, her flaming orange hair billowing out behind her as Wolf preps their weapons. She draws closer, two extra fans giving her small arrow-shaped vessel an extra boost. The nets draped over the bottom send shudders along my spine.
I clutch my ignit to my chest. My eyes meet Thais’s for a heartbeat, and they settle me like a sweep of mist and a dosing of rain, an ignit glowing from within them, all power and light and peace. The boat pulls up across from us, and Wolf launches a net, barely missing our railing. A volley of shots follows.
I wrap myself around Thais, leaning over her shoulder. “Faster!”
But it’s not my panic that saves us. Rubem draws up on the other side of our boat. He shouts at the fishers, and his hands follow a fluid pristine series of motions: “I have them. Back off.”
Lily stands still as a shadow, her chest barely moving. She pulls her boat off to rejoin the others. Rubem does not follow them. He swings his vessel closer to ours, but Thais swerves away, dodging a floating log. I coil tighter around her seat.
She brushes me off with a frazzled pat-slap on the tail. “Go! Help! Lazy coward!”
I want to snap back that I’m neither of those things, but I have very little proof to the contrary. Unfurling slightly, I cling to the bottom of the boat. Rubem’s bearded crewmate draws out a grappling hook, their sweaty muscles gleaming in the sun as they hurl the metal toward us. It hits the deck and scrapes a deep groove through the wood before catching on the rail.
Our boat twists. I grip Thais with my tail, keeping her in her seat as the momentum flings me against the far railing. Pain shoots through my shoulders, but over the spray of the water and the ringing in my head, I faintly sense the vibration of a machete hidden under our boat’s center seating area. I unhook the weapon and dive for the grappling hook. Its rope takes three swings to sever.
Rubem shouts as our boat careens away from him once more.
“We have to get into the Murk!” I sign.
“Yeah, you think?”
The dense line of the Murk rises like a wall of green and grey not far to our right, but in our peril, the fisher boats slipped between us and it, making a small moving wall a few boat lengths away. With a yank of the lever, Thais turns us straight for them. They lift their guns, and Wolf mounts the net shooter on his shoulder.
I drop to the deck as the fishers fire at me. The shots ring through my skull, swaying my vision. I want to dive into the water, to block out the crazy rush of the world, but I steady myself as best I can, focusing on the thrum of my ignit. If I don’t do something about the fishers and their nets soon, it might not be enough of a distraction.
Bunching my tail beneath me, I spring at the boat beside Lily and Wolf’s. My tail thumps against the deck and slides, nearly spilling me over the other edge, but I grab the boat’s driver, using my momentum to help sling myself around them. I squeeze their neck. They collapse. The boat’s second fisher rushes me with a half-loaded pistol and a spear gun, but I shove my shoulder against their belly and knock them into the river.
I bare my teeth at Lily and Wolf as I turn my stolen boat toward Thais. She curves her vessel around. I aim the stolen boat to zip back toward the rest of the fishers’ wall and jump back to Thais. My lungs burn, and last night’s bruises ache afresh, but I grin as the now driverless boat forges us a path through our attackers. Grin, at least, until I focus on the edge of the Murk.
The small riverside mangroves on the far bank look like hatchlings compared to the Murk’s towering swamp trees, their branches interwoven in a canopy so thick only the dimmest light peeks through. Their roots create a similar barrier beneath, strangling boulders to pieces and forming pools of salty stinking water that flicker with sheens of rainbow. The last hints of the night mist still linger between the thick groves. Within, a series of wide rivulets form paths through the unbreachable trunks, one running so near that the deep green and blue water gleams amidst the trees. But the line of mangroves along its outskirts creates an impassable divide at this spot in the river.
Thais points to where a partially underwater boulder separates two of the trees, letting half a boat’s width of water flow from the river into the Murk. “We can enter through there!”
“No, we can’t!” I protest. “Thais, we can’t fit—” But she watches that tiny break in the trees instead of my hands, veering us toward it so quickly I scramble for the railing to keep from falling.
; “We’ll make it,” she replies. “If we tip the boat.”
I slap the very flat bottom with my tail, the tip bouncing off the solid but slim railing. “If we sink the boat, you mean?”
“We’ll only need to lift one edge enough to scoot over the rock’s high point on the right.” She points to the grappling hook.
“Do I look like I’m made of muscle to you?”
She stares at me a moment longer than feels comfortable, especially with our probable death speeding toward us. “Actually, yes.” Her gaze snaps away, settling back on the split between the trees. “Ready?”
“No.”
But all her attention fixes on the tiny gap she’s determined to drive us through.
Motherfucking Murk mist. I tweak the grappling hook free and wrap the remaining bit of rope around my wrist to stabilize my grip. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I half sign, half glare.
She waves dramatically at the quickly approaching trees.
Fixing my tail through the large metal latch on the side of our boat, I add a quick “I hate you” and prepare to jump.
The gap flies toward us. I leap for the branches intertwining above it. Slipping my grappling hook between them, I drag upward with all my might. My muscles blaze and bite, and my side of the small boat lifts out of the water. The hull scrapes along the rock, but we barely slow.
I loosen my grip on the hook. Before I can drop onto Thais’s head, the latch I wound my tail through snaps free of the boat. I hang, disconnected from the vessel that zips under me.
The subtle vibration of a weapon firing turns into that of Wolf’s net opening in the air behind me. It slams into my side, wrapping its terrible biting lines around my arms and head. Thais’s boat skims past the rock with a grind and a splash, and I drop a moment too late, falling into the river behind it.
I struggle to reach my necklace beneath the netting. Too much fire runs through my being. My lungs catch, drawing in water. I writhe. The surface falls away, the bottom of Thais’s boat fading into the distance. From beyond the Murk’s edge, a spear shoots through the water, narrowly missing me as it latches into the net. It drags me into deeper water.
I fight the net’s confines, but its agonizing sensation against my scales tears into me like a toxin, my body reacting in a range of reflexes and fears. A cord attached to the net jerks taut. It pulls me along. The netting and I break the surface, and Wolf’s spotted pale hands yank me onto a black deck.
I gasp in air but it feels like water, like fire, like fear, polluting me from the inside out. The slight brush of Wolf’s skin when he lets me go hurts worse than a hundred bruises. My lungs clench, and I writhe on reflex alone. I concentrate on the heartbeat of my ignit, trying to block out all else. Wolf vanishes, my world caught somewhere between darkness and pain. He reappears with a knife.
With his free hand, he signs the continuation of a conversation. Not a conversation. A death sentence. “—get rid of this one.”
Lily must concede, because through my scale-shattering haze, he grabs hold of my neck. His fingers dig, shoving up my chin, revealing the weakest scales where my jaw meets my ear. The blade comes down. I jerk, and he repositions, one foot on my chest. He rolls his eyes from something Lily speaks, and this time I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I can’t—
Rubem leaps onto the boat at my side, his footsteps eerily soft. He knocks Wolf out of the way with a quick jab from his elbow, stealing the knife in the same motion. I barely have time to flinch before he cuts the top of the net down the middle. More still entangles half my hips and wraps around one of my wrists like a cuff. I roll frantically away from it, straight into his fishnetted hands.
He traps me against the deck, his leg across my waist, and his knee putting pressure on my shoulder, like he’s pinning down his massive crocodilian. “None of that, now,” he signs, the fishnet distorting his words into a fever dream.
I snap my tail around, but the crocodilian tackles it, keeping it in the water despite my frantic wiggling. I cling to the ignit on my necklace with my free hand, as though my world will fall apart if I let go. It might. Half of me believes it already has.
Over the side of the boat, the crocodilian bares its jaws. The wound it left on me last night aches in response, but Rubem signs a few simple words, “Stay, girl,” and then, “Close mouth.”
His pet obeys.
I stare at his hands, and my body protests the sight, rolling my eyes up to the overhanging mangrove branches above him, until his fishnet blurs with his skin.
Lily appears like a bullet. “What the fuck?”
His reply comes swift and smooth. “The boiuna is mine—that was the deal. Everything from the Murk—”
“A deal you keep expanding upon without ever fulfilling your end of the bargain,” Lily snaps, jabbing a finger toward Rubem on the your like she can spear her long nails straight through his chest. “You refused us an ancient because you claimed this hoard was the easier target, yet I’m still stuck here in your despicable jungle because you can’t even hold on to the damn girl who’s meant to bring us to it.”
An ancient. The motion of the sign—both thumbs linked, fingers like claws, pounding like a heartbeat—sends skitters along my scales. How the fuck do Lily and Rubem know what those are?
Rubem shoots to his feet, the beads in his braids tingling together. “She’s not gone far! I can get her back. We can still make this work.” His motions come out sharp and small and deadly. “We will make this work. And you’ll give me the damn boiuna. In one piece, I should add.”
I wiggle, so slow and slight the two fools arguing above me don’t notice. The netting falls away, little by little, but each brush of it makes my skin scream and my bones cry. I cling to the ignit in my necklace all the harder, to its gentle soothing pulse, and try to keep from writhing out of my own scales.
Lily’s jaw pulses. “Fine. Just keep it out of the way. For whatever goddamned reason it seems to be helping the girl.” She wheels around. I barely make out her final signs. “There’s a bigger opening to that foul swamp a little ways south. Take the snake. We’ll meet you there.”
Motion from the trees draws my attention. Thais drops from a branch, landing her heels straight into the back of Rubem’s head. He grunts and collapses over the side of the fisher boat, into the water. His crocodilian shifts. I prepare to dodge its jaws, but it only shoots to Rubem’s rescue. From the other end of the boat, both Wolf and Lily charge Thais and me.
“Come on!” Thais clutches my arm. She dives with me into the river, toward our idle fan boat drifting just within the Murk.
I glance behind us as we flee, expecting shots or nets or crocodilian teeth. Glares greet me, hands on guns paired with eyes tracking the inches of space between Thais’s body and mine, likely calculating their chances of hitting me and not her. They break for wheels and engines in a lagging attempt to chase us down, leaving only Lily staring. As we scramble over the rock, she takes aim.
Thais slumps.
My chest feels pierced from the wrong side. I search for the smell of blood and a cloud of red in the water, but instead Thais curls around her stomach, her face twisted and sickly. Her empty healing necklace presses against the inside of her wet shirt. My lungs release. It’s just another poison spasm.
I dip into the water to scoop her up, and a bullet whizzes past my head. It rattles my skull, throwing the world into a disarray. But I plow forward, swimming Thais to the boat. She flails with her hands, but she’s too weak to fight, too weak to do anything more than lean over the railing and heave the rest of her breakfast into the river while I restart the fan. The boat zips forward. We leave our pursuers behind, Lily as red as Rubem’s scarlet accents, and the cartel leader climbing, dripping, back onto his boat.
As we drive deeper into the Murk, Thais curls up beside the middle seat, lunging for the side every few minutes. Her hair frizzes into messy waves in the muggy air. But her haunting eyes slowly go from a fogged-over grey to their eerie ignit
glow, dancing across our surroundings.
The sun rarely breaks the canopy, its touch a golden spotlight between endless dim green. Birds call from all sides. The branches liven with snakes so large they could be trees themselves and sleeping monkeys patterned in poisonous colors, their blind eyes and oversized teeth a terror at night. A spider as large as my face works through a web that spans the entire river. I bat it away with a branch when the top of our fan tears through its silken creation.
The water is no less populated and no less dangerous. I hold in my scent name, turning the boat onto a new rivulet every time I smell a boiuna in the distance. Despite my best efforts, we still sneak up on a youngling, less than half my length, looped over a root and yawning, their tiny baby fangs as sharp as they are cute. They stare at our boat. When they spot me, the smell of their fear turns to confusion.
“Fuck off!” I sign.
They poke their tongue out but flop to the water, swimming deeper into the roots. A branch overhead vibrates from the steps of something too large and agile to be a mere monkey. Through the leaves, I glimpse feathers and leather shoes.
I coil tighter around the driver’s seat and poke Thais with my tail. “There’s someone here.”
“Another boiuna?”
“Not unless we’ve evolved legs since I left.” I shift my eyes back to the trees, searching in vain for the person. By the time the boat’s fan pitters to a stop, I give up looking.
I check on the ignit. “It should need about fifteen minutes to recharge. The grains are good, close together, and the deep color contrasts imply hefty ignetic strains. Rubem’s cartel has good stock.”
“How do you know this stuff?”
With a shrug, I lie out along the deck, my tail still twisted up in the driver’s seat. I tug my ignit out of my necklace to rub it before I sign, “I like rocks.”
The gentle lap of the peaceful Murk water vibrates against the side of the boat, small animals romping through the trees around us. Thais stares at me, her expression a crinkled mess. Then her chest shudders violently.
