Chapter 5
5
Toorin
“Ow.” My body thumped to the deck when Bodie and Juniper rolled me over the gunwale of the Lark after they’d hoisted the dinghy up the side.
Bodie fell to one knee, his arm hanging over the gunwale. Juniper jumped on deck and put a shoulder under Bodie’s arm, helping him to his feet. “Which way?”
He must have pointed toward his cabin because the deck beneath me shook with their steps. I honestly never expected to see the Lark again. Too many people knew how to sail a ship, but at least the Lark had a reputation in these waters. It would be hard for anyone to claim it as their own.
I had no clue where the rest of my crew was. The new guys had probably already moved on to something else—which was well and good—but I worried about Darwin and Lyric. They should have been on the Lark.
I didn’t want to think about them somewhere on the fringe, or maybe they’d ventured into the badlands searching for us when we never showed up at the night’s end.
Juniper returned without Bodie, locked wrists with me, and started dragging me across the deck. It didn’t hurt too bad, all in all, especially with some of that pill Bodie had given me in my system, but moon and mars and the stars, I didn’t want to be conscious when she dragged me down the steps and around the corner to my cabin.
She grunted. I groaned.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
I sucked in a breath through my teeth and held it until I hit the deck by my cabin, but that only made my lungs expand, and pain sear a path across my chest. I yelled out.
“Sorry.” Juniper didn’t stop to let me catch my breath. She kept pulling and pulling.
My chest hit the bulkhead as she dragged me around the corner and into the cabin. I must have passed out because when I opened my eyes, I was laid out on a pallet of blankets beside my bunk. She held a water-soaked rag to my forehead.
“You’re awake.”
I didn’t want to be. Unconsciousness had a quiet nothingness to it that agreed with me.
“Drink this. I put antibiotics and pain meds in it.”
I took a swallow from the tin cup she held to my lips. It tasted like dirty, warm water from the bathhouse after the nightly rush and smelled worse. I turned my head away. “If you’d wanted me dead, you could have left me in the alley. You don’t have to make me drink this swill.”
“Why are men such babies? I swear.”
“Someone stole my heart.”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s not like you’re the first.”
I coughed out a feeble laugh. Brutal crowd. Juniper didn’t suffer fools, but she was there, on the Lark, looking after me and Bodie. If it hadn’t been for her, we never would have been able to haul the dinghy up and board the Lark. We probably would have floated around the harbor until we washed up on shore dead.
Though the way I felt, dead was a distinct possibility.
I took another sip from the tin. My stomach roiled, but the pain meds had started to kick in. The ceiling of my cabin went wonky.
Time passed in a blur. I saw Juniper and Bodie above me, their frowns of concern, worrying. More of the swill Juniper was sure would cure me had been poured down my throat. Over time, I got stronger. Strong enough to eat something solid and have Bodie help me to the head to relieve myself before I passed out again.
The fevered dreams came and went. Me and Bodie out-running pirates on the Lark, my sire sending us to scavenge a boat sunk in the shallows with nothing but a rope tied around our waists in case we passed out, me and Bodie in our wiry six-year-old bodies begging my sire to take us on the Lark.
In between the dreams came the nightmares.
Me and Bodie walking with the two men he’d picked up from the Bull, one of them holding some sort of scanner to my wrist and calling out to his friend, bright lights above my head, pain in my chest, the steady thump, thump I’d heard all my life replaced by a constant whir.
The darkness.
I was starting to love the darkness.
I stopped wondering if that was a bad thing.
“Oi,” Bodie patted my cheek. Pat pat pat. It annoyed the bloody bejesus out of me, and I tried to swat his hand but only managed to hit my nose. “Wake up.”
“Am… am I alive?” The answer could have gone either way. I almost felt too good to be alive. I felt like shit, but better than I had.
“You’re not leaving this world without me. Someone has to look out for me.”
Fat lot of good that did when Bodie never listened.
A wave from a passing vessel rolled under the Lark as I lay in my bunk. I didn’t know how or when they’d gotten me off the deck.
“How long?”
Bodie knew exactly what I meant. “A little over two weeks.”
I blew out a breath as Juniper walked in with a steaming tin of something. I was almost too afraid to ask. “’Bout time you woke.” She set the tin aside, and Bodie helped boost me up so I could eat.
She set the tin in my lap and dropped a spoon into it. I stirred it. The thick stew had lumps of some sort of meat in it. I’d long ago learned not to question the origin of any meat. Usually, you were better off not knowing.
I took a bite and then another. It was warm, with a bit of a kick from some spice, and better than expected, so I kept eating. I took a break between bites. “What’s the plan?”
“Plan? What plan?” Bodie looked like a man who’d walked into a meeting he knew nothing about.
“The plan to get my heart and your kidneys back.”
Juniper scoffed. Bodie laughed. I stared at him, took another bite, and waited…
Bodie eventually sobered. “Wait. You’re not joking.”
“Moon and mars and the stars, Toorin.” Juniper’s exasperation dripped with stinging sarcasm. “What are you going to do? Hunt the person down and rip your heart out of his chest?”
I dropped my spoon into my empty tin. “If that’s what it takes.”
Toorin
It took another week before we both felt strong enough to leave the Lark. The infections had cleared, my chest no longer shifted when I moved wrong, and I’d nearly gotten used to the whirring sound of my heart.
Bodie’s piss still had hydraulic fluid in it, but he’d discovered tiny refill ports inserted in his sides, so at least he could lubricate his mechanical kidney if the leak got too bad. Provided we could find hydraulic fluid. It didn’t grow on trees on the fringe. Not that the fringe had many trees, but you get the idea.
We had a few hours before darkness fell. We didn’t have much of a plan besides finding the reapers who’d hijacked our organs. If they were smart, they wouldn’t be anywhere around here. But the fringe around Toonu was one of the largest in the provinces. If I were a reaper, it’s where I’d be.
“You should stay here,” I told Juniper, “It’s safer.”
She laughed in my face. “Good one.”
I caught her arm as she went to put rations in the dinghy. “I’m serious.”
Juniper shook off my grip and got in my face even though I had more than eight inches of height on her. “I’ve survived alone for half my life, you meat-headed boob. I kept you two alive. I went out by myself and brought back supplies, and now you think I shouldn’t go with you?”
She hadn’t just gone out by herself. She couldn’t raise and lower the dinghy herself, so she’d left it in the water and had thrown a thick rope over the side that she slid down to the dinghy and scaled to get back on board. She was strong. I would give her that.
“We need her.” Bodie came up behind me, slapped me upside the head, and dropped a small travel pack into the dinghy.
She stared at me, waiting for me to give in.
I tried pulling rank. “I’m the captain.”
“Of what? A ship that can’t sail because you have no crew?” Juniper asked.
Didn’t mean I wasn’t captain. But I was tired of arguing with her. “You can leave anytime you want. Why do you care what happens to us?”
“You saved my life.”
“And you saved ours. I guess the slate is clean.” Maybe the low blood flow was affecting my brain. If I were thinking clearly, I’d take all the help I could get.
That whirring in my chest stopped with an alarming clunk . The sudden silence hit me, and then the edges of my vision went dark. I crumpled to the deck, and Juniper called out to Bodie.
She put her ear to my chest as my vision narrowed. “His heart stopped.”
Clasping her hands together, she raised them over her head. I knew what was coming next. Moon and mars and the stars. This was gonna hurt.
I woke to Bodie patting my cheek again. I was getting sick of him doing that. “Oi, we thought we lost you.”
Opening my eyes, I found Juniper and Bodie leaning over me. The whirring had returned, and I held out my hand for Bodie to help me to my feet. “What happened.”
“I think your heart seized,” Juniper said. “But I must have knocked it loose.”
Bodie voiced the obvious. “She saved your life. Again.”
I rubbed the center of my chest, and the bruise blooming there. “You didn’t have to hit so hard.”
Juniper raised her arms and let them drop to her side. “Great, I’ll be sure to let you die next time.”
She went to untie one of the lines on the dinghy hoist, and I caught her arm again. “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to say it so begrudgingly.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. When I opened them, I said, “Really, why are you here?”
She leaned a hip on the gunwale, and for once, her defiance dissolved, and I saw the scared girl beneath. “You two are all I’ve got.”
“Well, that’s fucking depressing,” Bodie said.
Juniper’s lips slid into a slight grin. “Right?”
I wrapped my arm around her neck and planted a smacking kiss on her temple. “I’ve always wanted a little sister. Though I didn’t expect her to be such a brat.”
She pushed me away with a playful shove and wiped the kiss off her temple as if it had come from a camel and not me. At least I didn’t slobber and spit.
We made it to shore. Bodie and Juniper carried our small packs on their backs with enough chips and supplies to last us for a few days. I’d go up and down every alley, visit every bar, bathhouse, or brothel until we found those reapers.
And that’s what we did. But we hadn’t seen the men anywhere. Neither had anyone else when we’d described them. After nearly four days of searching, we stumbled back into the Bull for a mead. Rocco didn’t seem to recognize Juniper, but she kept her head down whenever he came near.
The mead cooled the back of my parched throat, and I drank it in long, thirsty swallows. I set my tin down along with a chip, and Rocco gladly refilled it.
There came a commotion at the door, and we were all too exhausted to turn our heads.
“Oi, I need me drink,” a familiar voice called out.
Bodie and I both spun around. “Darwin! Lyric!” we said at the same time.
Juniper jumped up with us. “Is that them?”
“That’s them,” Bodie said. “Bloody good sight to see.”
We rushed over to their table. “We thought you were dead,” they said to us as we said it to them.
Laughter rolled all around the table, along with relief. “Rocco, get my men some mead.”
They were dusty and dirty, and Lyric had ripped a hole in the side of his dress. We stole stools from other tables and sat. “Where have you been?”
Darwin and Lyric looked at me like I had camel dung for brains. Darwin swiped at a lock of matted hair that fell into his eyes. “Looking for you two.” His eyes went to Juniper. “Who’s this?”
“I’m with them now,” Juniper said, making her place in this dynamic clear.
“Reaper’s got us,” Bodie said. “Juniper saved our asses.”
Rocco brought around five tins of mead, and I knew before the night was over that it would cost me at least another chip. But I didn’t care.
“Noooo,” Darwin said, dragging out the word. He looked us up and down. “What did they take?”
“My kidneys,” Bodie said. “They gave me cheap knockoffs.”
“What about you?” Lyric asked me.
“My heart.”
Lyric took a swig of his mead and bumped shoulders with Darwin. “See? I told you he had a heart.” Then he looked at me with dry humor in his eyes. “Well… guess not anymore. Sorry, Cap.”
“We’ve been looking for the reapers for days.” Juniper took a long swallow that would put the bigger men to shame. “But they’re gone.”
“Won’t find those vermin around here,” Darwin said. “They hit, then scatter like roaches back into the dark crevasses. Might have more luck in Salvation Province.”
Salvation was the closest province to Tranquility, but the depravation and despair there paled to Tranquility’s. That’s where all hope went to rot and die.
I must have paled because Juniper went to hit my chest again. I caught the glancing blow off my arm. “Knock it off. It’s not my heart.”
“How am I to know? You lost all color like before.”
Bodie didn’t look so hot, either. Normally, we stayed well clear of Salvation. Scrapping that far inland wasn’t worth the price of your life. Hard to enjoy your chips and credits when you were dead.
Juniper polished off her tin. “I ain’t going there. If you’re going, I’m waiting on the Lark.”
“No one is going to Salvation,” I said. “If the reapers are there, we’ll catch them the next time they roll through Toonu. Enough people know we’re looking for them now.”
Rocco refilled our tins and brought some cooked meat with the bone. He was working extra hard for his chips, but he knew I was good for it. We ate and drank, and Darwin told us about their search for Bodie and me while Lyric continued to drink. They’d made it deep into the badlands before turning around, afraid they’d starve to death before returning to Toonu if they didn’t.
“I’m singing,” Lyric said, his voice more slur than understandable words.
“Lyric can sing?” Juniper asked.
Bodie scrunched up his face. “ Weeell .”
“Lyric is bloody amazing.” Darwin clapped and whooped as Lyric approached a tiny stage in the corner of the Bull. “Listen.”
The grin on Darwin’s face matched that of a man who’d received the best treat ever. He stood and clapped again, not caring that he drew attention to himself as Lyric looked up and smiled.
The one thing about Darwin was that he had the biggest heart.
No music played, but that didn’t stop Lyric. He started belting out a sea shanty I remembered from when I was a kid. It took me back, and even though Lyric couldn’t hit a note or carry a tune in a camel-hide bag, everyone in the bar started singing along.
Juniper’s eyebrows nearly rose to the center of her forehead before she laughed and started singing along.
Lyric curtsied at the end, his dress having seen way better days. I knew I’d have to find someone to make him a new one to make up for the one he’d destroyed looking for us.
Darwin whistled, blasting our ears, the pride on his face more infectious than the lice that ran rampant on the fringe.
Lyric returned to our table with a shy smile. “How did I do?”
The crowd started to settle down. Darwin clapped him on the back. “That was the best one yet. You get better every time.”
“That was something ,” Bodie said. Lyric took it as a compliment.
Juniper remained speechless, which was how I had been the first time I’d heard him sing. She looked at me, and I smiled. Lyric lived to sing, and no one at the table had the heart to tell him he couldn’t.