Reapers (Reapers #1)

Chapter 1

1

Toorin

Gliding the TigerLark into Toonu’s sheltered harbor, I knew one thing… Bodie would be the death of me.

I piloted my salvage boat into position, using the old navigation charts I’d long ago memorized. The charts called the area Green Bay, an offshoot of what used to be Lake Michigan. Now, the lakes were called the Interprovince Waterways. The IP for short.

“Anchors away,” I called out to my first mate, Darwin, as the rest of the crew hauled in the sails.

We’d anchored far enough from shore to keep the average miscreant with a rotting raft and one oar from commandeering the TigerLark or stealing its meager contents.

Not that the TigerLark was a shining example of maritime wonderment.

Its leaky hull, questionable sails, and motley crew allowed the boat to do what it had always done since my grandfather had won it in a game of dice—buy, sell, and transport scrap around the IP.

It wasn’t pretty, but at least it hadn’t sunk yet.

Except for that one time and I refused to talk about it. I’d been a kid then. You couldn’t put all the blame on me.

“That’ll do, mate,” I hollered as the anchor caught and the bow swung into the wind. The sheet on the foresail snagged again, and the loosened sail flapped in the mild breeze.

I spun away from the helm to find my partner, Bodie, rubbing his hands together. That carefree grin on his face told me he had plans for when we hit shore that would likely land us in trouble.

To date, we’d been able to buy our way out of most predicaments. In the post-war provinces, chips and credits spoke, especially in the lawless fringe outside the settlements.

After the haul we’d unloaded at the previous port, we had plenty of chips in our pockets.

To be clear, when I said partner , I didn’t mean that kind of partner. Bodie’s type—strong, brooding, intelligent, mischievous—totally turned my crank, but Bodie and I had grown up on the scrap ships together, so, ew.

“Whatever you’re about to say, the answer is no.” I didn’t stop as I walked by. We had sails to stow and lines to manage before anyone could leave the boat.

Bodie followed, pleading his case. As much as I told him no, Bodie and I both knew I’d eventually say yes.

“…all I’m saying is we’ve been on this heap of rusting steel for weeks. It won’t hurt us to spend one evening at the Bull.”

The Singing Bull . I’d rather be staked out in the sun on a pile of fresh camel dung than step foot in the Bull again.

“I don’t know why you like that place. It’s loud. It’s obnoxious. It’s in the worst part of the fringe, and—”

“It’s also where we’re almost guaranteed to get laid.”

I grunted and started flaking the mainsail with Bodie’s help. His smile widened. He had me on that last point.

“And it’s within crawling distance of the wharf if you spend all your chips on moonshine.”

We finished stowing the mainsail, and I double-checked to make sure it was secure. “We could go to—”

“ Yawn .”

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“Don’t have to. It’ll involve a quiet bar with food that won’t make you wonder if you’ll vomit your guts out later. Followed by returning to the Lark before the sun comes up.” Bodie gave me the look. The one that said the bar definitely wouldn’t include any dick. “You know I’m right.”

“Dick isn’t everything.”

“Wrong, Captain.” Darwin laughed as he passed and jumped onto the Lark’s forecastle to assist with the snagged sheet on the foresail. He started scaling the mast with bare feet and hands, stopping long enough to look down at us. “Classic definition. If I could read, I’d point to it in a dictionary to you dense knobs. Dick. Is. Everything .”

“I’m not sure the bloody things exist anymore,” Bodie said. “Dictionaries. Not dicks.”

“Not outside a pre-war museum in the bigger settlements, they don’t.” I shielded my eyes from the setting sun. For the first time in a long time, a dusty haze didn’t surround it. Maybe the badlands had gotten some much-needed rain. Darwin clung to the top of the mast, dangling above our heads.

“Get down from there,” I yelled with my hands around my mouth so Darwin could hear me. “One of these days, you’re going get yourself killed.”

Darwin didn’t listen. He never did.

At least he was loyal.

“Maybe. But not this day.” Darwin laughed as he fixed the snagged sheet. Then he leaped from the mast. Luckily, Lyric held the line, and Darwin slid down the slack sail instead of crashing to the deck.

Lyric’s hold on the rope shot him in the air, his booted feet dangling above our heads. I shielded my eyes again as I followed his ascent. The breeze kicked up, turning Lyric’s skirt into a mini sail and—

Oof . I shut my eyes and shivered. I should have known to keep my gaze lowered. Bodie leaned in. “Now we have to go to the Bull if you hope to wipe the sight of Lyric’s hairy ass and balls from your mind.”

Bollocks. “ Fine .”

It wasn’t fine.

I’d rather stay on the Lark, but someone had to keep a sloshed Bodie from swimming for the boat in the middle of the night like last time. I still had gooseflesh from jumping into the icy water to save his sorry, drowning ass.

“ Oi ,” Lyric hollered from above. “Get off me sail, you bloody boob.”

Darwin rolled out of the sail, and Lyric dropped on his ass with a thud.

Bodie helped Lyric to his feet, and I gave Darwin a hand up. “One of these days, that sail’s gonna rip, and your ass will punch a hole in the deck.”

Darwin tossed me a cheeky grin, his chipped front tooth peeking out from behind his chest-length black beard. The tooth he’d shattered when he’d tried jumping onto the Lark as it sailed away from the wharf last year.

The squeak of the dinghy’s hoists caught our attention. Before I could say anything, Darwin yelled at one of the new crew members I’d picked up at our last port. The new men were lazy and didn’t know the bow from the stern or port from starboard. I’d have shipped them to shore for good if I’d had any other prospects.

But the life of a scrapper was a hard gig. If the gales didn’t kill you, the pirates would. Eventually. Most people preferred to take their chances on the fringe or go it alone in the badlands between the provinces than face the dangers of the IP.

“Where you be going?” Darwin grabbed the line out of the man’s hand, not raising an eyebrow when the man laid a hand on the hilt of the blade on his belt. “No one leaves until the captain says so.”

I turned away. Darwin may have a death wish, but he could handle the crew without my help.

“You done with me?” Lyric asked. “I wanted to change before we go ashore.”

I could straighten the rest of the lines. Lyric worked hard. I had no problem letting him go to his cabin before the rest of the crew. “Go.”

Bodie helped me and the rest of the boys clear the decks. We started at the bow and worked our way to the stern. By the time Lyric came back on deck, all the immediate chores had been completed. We dropped the four-oar dinghy into the water with practiced ease and rowed to shore.

We beached the dinghy near the wharf, and I hopped to shore from the bow and tied the line around a boulder. My new crew hopped out of the stern, dropping into the knee-deep water, in too much of a hurry to remove their boots and roll up their trousers.

Darwin stepped into the shallows, his boots in hand, and waited for Lyric to climb onto his back so he wouldn’t get the long dress he changed into wet.

Darwin protected Lyric with the ferocity of an outlier guarding his last skin of water. They weren’t together. But they had a bond. The type of bond forged from spending every day together trying to survive.

I pitied the person who said a cross word about Lyric within earshot of Darwin. The last man nearly didn’t live long enough to apologize.

The man’s comment had nothing to do with the fact that Lyric wore dresses. In the near century since the fifth world war and the ensuing worldwide famine that decimated the world’s population, people had bigger problems. No one on the fringe cared what you wore or who you fucked.

Bodie followed Darwin, landing and sinking a few inches in the soft sand. He waggled his brows at me, rubbing his hands together as his pace picked up. Brodie couldn’t get to the Bull fast enough. I jogged a few steps to keep up.

The whole walk there—past the boats resupplying on the wharf, past the beggars and sex workers and con men, past the patched streets and the rutted, dark back alleys—my gut twisted worse than a loose sail in a winter gale. I’d learned long ago to trust my gut. Unfortunately, I hadn’t learned if that twist meant a guy would fuck me… or fuck me over and leave me for dead.

Yet, as Darwin wisely said, dick was everything. Especially when you’d been on the water for so long.

Here’s hoping I lived to regret it.

Marcelis

My days were numbered.

Likely in the single digits.

Then again, doctors had been predicting my imminent death since they’d discovered my congenital heart defect shortly after I was born. First, they said I wouldn’t see my second birthday. Then, it was my fifth. And then there had been that scare at eleven when I’d ended up in the hospital’s private wing for months. It had been the first time I thought the doctors might be right.

But now… now, nearly thirty years after my diagnosis, I felt death in my being. In my bones. I even smelled different. Or maybe all the disinfectants had leached to the center of my being.

I didn’t want to die.

But I also didn’t fear death.

Especially if it got me out of inheriting the chancellorship of the Tranquility Province. Which really wasn’t all that tranquil. Especially if you included all the violence on the fringe. Not that I’d ever been allowed to go anywhere near the fringe, not with me being the chancellor’s spawn.

And especially not when catching a simple illness could kill me.

I’d heard enough stories about it, though, from the workers in the chancellor’s residence. I shouldn’t have been jealous of their ability to leave the settlement, but I was.

Once I was better—

“I’m afraid he’s not getting better.” The doctor stood far enough away from my sire that he’d have an escape route if the man lost the short leash he had on his temper.

“Your job is to make him better.”

“ Chancellor —”

My sire straightened to his full height, and the doctor swallowed whatever he’d been about to say in his defense. “If you can’t do your job, you are no good to me. I should send you to the fringe and—”

“You can’t—” The doctor took another side-step toward the door and then another after realizing he’d interrupted the chancellor. What my sire lacked in stature, he more than made up in sheer bullheadedness wrapped around an entitled package. Having zero empathy, except maybe where I was concerned, made him more dangerous.

Did my sire love me? Maybe as much as a man like him was capable of that sort of soft emotion.

One of my sire’s brows rose, his voice deathly low, more of a rumble when he said, “ Can’t what?”

The doctor took another crab step toward the door, probably abandoning that initial line of thought because the chancellor could—and would —send anyone to the fringe that displeased him. It didn’t happen every day, but it happened frequently enough to validate the threat.

Over the beep of my monitors, I heard the doctor swallow. “What I meant, Your Excellency, is that he’s not going to get better without the transplant.”

“Then do it now.”

This wasn’t a new conversation. I tuned it out. Nothing I said or did would change my ability to get a transplant. I turned my head and stared out the window at the bright and shiny sign flashing the Reparion logline. “ Just like you .” Only every few seconds, the word you changed to new.

Just like you. Just like new. Just like you. Just like new.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were mocking me.

Specialists from Reparion had harvested cells from my heart months ago, but even with some of the newer technologies, growing a whole fucking organ took time.

I didn’t kid myself that my sire worried for my life. The chancellor worried for the province. More specifically, that the province stayed under Toft control. The way it had since its founding.

“I talked to the representative from Reparion this morning. Your spawn’s heart won’t finish growing for at least a few more days. Could be a week or so if—”

“We may not have a week .”

“I’m fully aware, Your Excel—”

“If the Reparion heart won’t be ready in time, find another.”

“No.” I tried to sit up, but I only lost my breath. I held up a hand to keep anyone from talking over me. “We talked about this. No harvested hearts.”

My sire turned to me, his waning patience nearly gone. Only those with a death wish challenged the chancellor of Tranquility. Luckily, the chancellor had a soft spot for his spawn. Or at least a not-so-hard one. “You could die without one.”

The monitor’s beep increased with my heart rate. If I didn’t have the stress of my sire to deal with, even with a bad heart, I’d probably live forever. “Then I die.”

“That’s unacceptable.”

I struggled to sit again, and when the doctor realized I wouldn’t give up this time, he hurried over to help. My breath came in fast, ineffective puffs, and stars swirled around the periphery of my vision. If it were the last thing I did, I’d get my words out. My heart rate soared, the beeping nearly a continuous sound. “That’s life .”

Beep, beep, beep.

“Calm down,” the doctor said. “It’s dangerous for you to get excited.”

But I couldn’t calm down. Not when it came to something as important as this. Every jagged breath cut as it sawed in and out of my lungs. My fingertips went numb. My mouth went dry.

Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.

“That’s—” The tiny stars took flight across the center of my field of vision as the darkness settled into the corners. “That’s my li—”

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeee—