by D. N. Bryn
An ignit the size of this boat’s would be impractical to carry and all but impossible to remove from the boat. And we didn’t come for it. We came for the compass device in Rubem’s cabin, where there will likely be more ignits of many sizes and colors which I can take instead. I refuse to try anything Thais would call stupid bottom-dwelling hurricane behavior. No matter how the pulsing rock tempts me.
Near the back end of the large boat, a tiny amethyst hits the water. It sinks straight down. Relief rushes over me at the sight, both because I missed its presence against my collarbone and because it means Xera made it.
I snatch the stone before it hits the swamp bed and fit it back into my necklace. Following its path upward, I poke my head out of the water to find an open cabin window. Xera crouches within, so motionless they nearly fade into the background of the tiny room. I search for any dangerous vibrations, but I only sense the rattle of something dice-like across wood in the nearest small boat and soft rumbles of human speech after it. No warning signals from Thais or Fern.
I grip the window and pull myself into the boat, drawing my tail after me. It fills almost the entire bathroom space. Xera climbs onto some kind of toilet to avoid me.
“Quiet,” they sign.
They arch over my bundled tail and open the door, landing beyond it with such light feet I barely feel their leather shoes touching the deep-red wood flooring. I slide out after them into a much wider main cabin. We both go still, two trespassers on a new planet.
The red wood stretches everywhere—floor, walls, and ceiling—framing the double-wide windows on either side of the cabin and reappearing in the tables and counters and shelves. Maroon stones line the bottom of a giant fish tank mounted across the back wall where an assortment of Murk-dwelling fish swim, including one mighty green bass nearly as long as my torso. A caiman relaxes on a bundle of scarlet blankets in the far corner, but it scuffles beneath a stool when it notices us. A blossom of brilliant red marks the back of a palm-sized spider locked in a ventilated glass jar beside a number of other small but terrifying creatures: beetles with horns, butterflies with bone markings, a lizard with two heads, and a bat hanging upside down, nibbling on a piece of fruit.
Only the bed diverts from the color scheme, its frame an ordinary tan. A mess of browns, reds, and blacks spreads across it, Rubem a part of them, sprawled on his stomach. His eyes twitch behind closed eyelids, and his mouth hangs open slightly, deep-purple stains in the cracks of his lips.
I creep closer, holding my breath. The cords of his braided hair tangle over his back and shoulders, gold beads gleaming throughout. The arm with his singed shirt hangs over the side of the mattress, fishnet glove torn away. His limp fingers cradle the top of an empty wine bottle. He smells less of alcohol now, and more of bile and misery, with a hint of cracking leather and smoke.
Despite my nearness, he doesn’t stir, his back rising and falling gently beneath a billowing brown shirt, vest crooked. One of his hoop earrings bends at an angle. With his chin kinked over a pillow, his neck lies open, vulnerable. I could squeeze my tail around it, a quick tight pressure against the veins coursing beneath his skin, and he would barely wake long enough for the life to leave him.
I hold my hand out, calculating the best way to do so. But then he shifts, small and tired. A twitch of his fingers knocks the wine bottle off-balance. Xera catches it before it can fall, gently sweeping it out from under his grasp and setting it off to the side.
If I kill him, then what? The thought feels like Thais’s smooth skin and exuberant motions. I have to answer it.
If I kill him, pathetic and asleep, then maybe the boat humans will leave Thais and me and the Murk alone. Or maybe they’ll keep coming. Maybe I’ll just have strangled the only one of them who’s ever tried to help me instead of shoot me, even if it was a weird, probably selfish kind of aid.
Selfish. My gaze darts through the room, hovering over all the creatures in Rubem’s collection. His own little hoard. A tremble runs through my outstretched arm as though my muscles can’t hold it there any longer.
Xera places their hand over mine, gently guiding it back. In the moment their fingers pass near the harsher boat-human lines of Rubem’s face, it hits me that his skin holds more of the red of the Murk than the river’s dustier brown. His ruby accents conceal it, but it remains: a hint of some past that once weeded with my forebearers.
I swallow down the weird lump that forms in my throat and turn my attention back to the room. “The device is handheld, mostly metal. If you find something like it, I’ll look.” I pause. “It may be on the deck, or with that bearded human.”
“That’s tomorrow’s waterfall,” Xera replies, but they move in jittery leaps, as though every vibration they keep from their surroundings is being used up inside them instead. They poke through the shelves and lean to check the clutter beneath the tables. It seems to be mostly animal supplies and alcohol, along with a music box surrounded by shark teeth and a broken clock.
I open the chest at the end of Rubem’s bed, and my heart leaps forward. An opaque box lies within, gleaming of ignits. I stop looking for the tracking device and jiggle its lock. It stays clamped. My attention settles back on Rubem. He must have keys. If I can get them.
Carefully, I slip my hands through the pockets of his half-discarded vest. Nothing. Twisting my torso upside down, I inspect the fabric of his shirt, trapped between his body and the bed. A piece of metal hangs from his belt, and the edge of a pocket pokes from his vest near his chest, another barely visible on his pants.
Xera taps my shoulder. They wave a little mechanical box at me, but I motion them away. “Bigger than that. Keep looking.”
“You, um, you know what it looks like. Shouldn’t you . . .”
But they sign too slow and fumbling for my patience. The ignits in that box call me back. I shoo Xera away. With the care of a parent tending their newborn child, I loop my tail beneath Rubem’s limbs, staying as far as I can from his gloved hand. His throat vibrates. I freeze. His eyelashes flutter once, but go still. Painstakingly, I keep moving, twisting my coils beneath him and elevating him off the bed.
I slip my hands along his belt and find a ring of keys, all far too big for the ignit box. His pant pocket yields a crushed paper with scrawling human words on it, the ink bleeding together from his dunk in the water. Twisting awkwardly to reach around Rubem’s fishnetted hand, I feel through Rubem’s drooping shirt pocket. My fingers hit metal. My heart leaps.
I yank out the little key so quickly that Rubem’s body drops back against the bed like a wet sack back.
His throat vibrates again and his face pinches. He presses his cheek into the blankets and curls his arms tighter, bumping a loop of my tail in the process. His motion stops. Slowly, he wraps his arms around my tail and snuggles it to his chest.
My lungs catch when the fishnet of his glove rides against my scales. The insides of my bones ache. I clutch my ignit in one hand, waving my other arm aggressively at Xera.
They cock their head to the side, and their shoulders shake. “I think he, he likes you.”
Motherfucker. “Get him off, get him off!” I make the one-handed motions aggressive enough that the constant stream of cursing in my head must come through.
Xera leaps to my side, gently sliding Rubem’s hold off of me and around a pillow instead. Between his unreadable expression and my shuddering bones, I have no idea what the sleeping cartel leader feels about this, but from one greedy silt-breather to another, I imagine his looser grip must mean the switch disappointed him. I can almost smell his melancholy.
Xera leaps back across the room to finish going through the final shelf while I slide the key into the ignit chest. It vibrates with the very soft bounce of metal against metal. I lift the lid.
The glow of the stones burst like a rainbow, glimmering off my scales and warming my chest. The colors come in more blues and reds than yellows or purples or oranges. Nothing green.
My heart drops, first, because there are no
poison ignits, but second, because I didn’t even think about Thais and her needs until now. It never occurred to me that finding new ignits could help her—save her. I can almost feel the subtle press of her cool necklace chain as I showed her the blood choke, and the glimpse of the pendant through her sopping clothes when she pulled herself out of Fern’s pool the night before. Selfish. Selfish stupid hurricane.
The brush of Xera’s hand against my shoulder makes me jump. They flinch back as well and wrap one arm around their chest. With the other, they offer me a new machine to look over. I need only one glance at the compass-like system attached to it.
“That’s it.” I fit the compass device into my wire necklace, behind its largest stone, securing it firmly, out of view. “I’ll keep it with me for now. We can find a way to destroy it later.” I’ll sink it into the river with a bag of rocks if it comes to that.
They nod, a tiny quick bob of their head. “Time to go.”
“Wait, help me carry—” Too late, I sign the words at their back as they slip through the cabin. With a little lunge, I grab for their arm, sliding my tail to gain the momentum. It knocks against a pedestal with a cage of giant beetles perched atop. The enclosure topples. It hits the floor, creating a vibration that feels all-consuming and sending the bugs into a frenzy.
Xera continues moving, oblivious to what they can’t feel or hear. As the cage finally rolls to a stop, they slip out the window, leaving me in excruciating stillness. I barely breathe, waiting for Rubem to burst from his bed, or his cartel subordinates to rush down the stairs. Footsteps clomp across the deck above the cabin, but they stop near the railing. I can almost feel the air moving out of the way as the human looks over. Instead of stomping down the stairs to check, though, their boots track back the way they’d come.
Rubem groans and wraps an arm over his head. At the foot of his bed, the ignits call to me once more. I slide toward them. But as I reach for their case, Thais and Fern spill through the open back window.
Thais rushes me, almost stumbling over her own feet. “You’re safe, thank—” Her haunting eyes fall to the stones in the chest before me, and her whole face goes slack. Then it pinches. “Cacao!” She signs my name like her hands are on fire. “When we heard the crash and Xera came back without you, we were worried—but spare ignits? You, you, you—” She pokes me in the chest in a repetitive sign for you, and I don’t know if she’s building toward an insult or just releasing her anger. “We thought Rubem had awoken and captured you or, or worse!”
Those last sentences cut like a knife into the slits between my scales, letting all the other accusations flow in. She’s not mad for her sake, or for Fern’s or Xera’s. Her hot terrible fear-stained anger that stings in my nose swathes off her because she worries about me.
My fingers jolt toward my necklace. “I’d feel better if I had these ones too. Just in case.” Guilt wraps around my stomach in sickening knots. I want to get rid of the feeling. I want to go back to not caring.
“You don’t really believe we’ll make it to the hoard?”
That’s not a question for me, not a phrase about me or for me. It’s Thais’s own fear now, for herself, so small she barely touches it, like it’s a ghosting breeze that will pass her by if she ignores it long enough. But it won’t be gone; it’s just circling back around.
“I believe it less and less the longer we stand around and talk,” I snap. She deserves a better answer, but this is all I have.
“Exactly.” Fern says it without signing, the scent of her agreement and determination so strong that it paints a picture of the word. But she ignores the way out, her gaze fixed on Rubem.
She springs at him, the muscles of her powerful tail tense and her jaw already unlatched. Thais slams into her. Together, they hit the bed, falling onto Rubem’s legs. Thais kicks Fern in the chest. Fern recoils, and they stare at each other, tight and stiff.
Rubem screams. He jerks upright. His gaze darts around the room, and his chest shudders. The scent of his fear blisters, acidic. He moves like a bloated corpse, groggy and red-eyed, as though he hasn’t quite reached a state of consciousness yet.
Outside the boat, his massive pet slips into the water. It feels like the rattling of our entire plan falling to pieces. Fuck plans anyway.
Rubem says something to Thais, his throat vibrating rough and sluggish, but she replies before his lips finish moving. The boat rocks as though it hit a log the size of a huge crocodilian. Or a crocodilian the size of a huge log hit it.
I wave to Thais, “Silence him!”
Her lips bunch together and her eyes widen obnoxiously, but she grabs the terrified half-asleep cartel leader and wraps her arms around his neck, just as I showed her earlier. She squeezes. Rubem’s brow shoots up. He gives half a thrash; then his limbs drop.
Thais lets go like he might burn her if she lingers. He slumps onto the bed. His eyelids flutter and his fingers curl, but his post-alcohol brain seems unable to fit enough pieces back together to do much more yet.
Fern rises up on her tail, her tongue flicking toward Rubem. “He still lives!”
“He’ll keep living,” Thais shoots back, sliding off the bed to stand in front of it.
As they argue, I dart into the little bathroom to check the window. Another small rock of the boat stops me short. Out the open hole, lumpy grey scales twist away, turning through the water to reveal the gaping mouth and jagged grin of Rubem’s crocodilian. Baring my own teeth, I wave a farewell to the crocodilian’s good eye and slide back into the main cabin.
Fern towers over Thais, her own lips drawn back, jaw open. “It’s his fault those bones were crushed! People gave me them, parts of themselves, trusted them to me, trusted me not to be a liar in this—this one thing. And he destroyed them. He defiled them.”
Thais scowls, both hands clenched. She peels her fingers apart like they’re welded together. “Killing him will not make it right.”
Neither of them points out that it was Xera who dropped the tree, or my life they dropped it for, that Rubem is a pathetic bystander in this mess. Neither do I. Maybe Thais isn’t the only hypocrite here.
As I approach them, my heart pulls me toward the ignits. “You don’t really believe we’ll make it to the hoard?” I have a new answer for her: We’d fucking well better.
I grab Fern by the arm, yanking her up the stairs. She goes limp in my grip, and as though forgetting to pull away, she lets me drag her, her shock thick as a midnight mist. A bug net blocks the top. I stutter, my tail slipping back down the steps without the forward momentum. Fern comes back to life. She shoves the net aside and bursts onto the main deck, hauling me with her, Thais so close behind that she nearly skids on my tail.
Boxes and empty seats populate the main deck, the canvas top wrapped up and laid across one rail. More stairs ascend on either side of the cabin entrance, wrapping around to the upper deck where the bearded human sits near the wheel. They startle at the sight of us.
Rubem’s crocodilian rams the hull, but the high railing rises too far out of the water for it to easily climb over. The small boat of three cartel members veers toward us, abandoned dice rolling across their little center table. One last human stands on the other vessel to our right, taking up position behind a massive mounted slingshot. A fist-sized purple ignit nestles in it, wrapped in a thin netting but activated and fully alight.
The ignit launches at us, propelled from the gun, fast enough to blur. It hits Fern square in the hips, immediately recoiling as the gunner drags it back with its netting by a rope. A tremor runs through Fern so violently I can feel it along my ridges. She goes limp, splaying across the wood, still breathing but very paralyzed, like the effects of the purple ignit stick Rubem used at the treehouse but amplified excruciatingly. Prickles spark across my scales in response.
I look at Thais, and Thais looks at that damn gun—that damn gun which reloads at lightning speed. I see the direction of her feet before she moves: the way she’ll swing herself in front of
me and take the next shot. But I won’t let her drop for me, especially if it brings about another spasm. I’m a hurricane and a thief, but I won’t be an idiot, not today.
I grab her by the shoulders, flinging both of us into the water. The ignit flies over our heads. The river engulfs us. From beneath Rubem’s big boat, his half-blind crocodilian twists its massive jaws our way. I am an idiot after all.
Grabbing Thais around the thighs, I shove her nicely padded rump into the small boat. As she sprawls onto its deck, I reach madly for something to pull myself up with. My hands close on the ankles of the human manning the gun, but the crocodilian’s jaws clamp around my tail before I can climb. Pain shoots up my spine, and I dig my fingers deep into the human’s skin. When the crocodilian yanks me back into the river, the gunner comes, too, their chest vibrating in a piercing scream that dies the moment the water covers their head.
They kick me in the shoulder. I let them go and turn my attention to the crocodilian chomping on my flesh. I wrap the rest of my tail around its neck. It shoots forward and slams me into the side of Rubem’s boat. The blinding pain makes my brain stutter.
My head breaks the surface. Just before the crocodilian drags me back under, my vision clears. I find Thais perched behind the cannon and loosing slingshots like she was born for it. Her ignit eyes flash with mine. Silt streams, I hope she’s thinking the same thing I am. Otherwise my tail might get a lot shorter today.
The crocodilian yanks me down and rolls us toward the riverbed, fish fleeing from our path like flickering silver and gold sparks. We hit the dirt so hard it knocks the air from my lungs in streaming bubbles. I don’t let us linger. Tightening my tail around the crocodilian’s thick neck, I yank its head back toward the surface. We come up near the front of Rubem’s big boat. I grab the railing. The crocodilian tries to drag me back down, and my tail screams in a flare of black agony. But I hold on.
Splinters wrack my arm muscles. My fingers slip. As I plunge toward the water, the netted purple ignit knocks into the crocodilian’s side. It trembles through the massive beast. The excess flows into my tail, jarring it, then numbing.
