25. TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-FIVE
CALVEROUS
Location: North Sea
In the dream, Arleena smiled at Calver: brows raised, tongue tucked between her teeth.
She was different than he remembered. Pim’s age.
Mature and burgeoning, on the blade’s edge between girl and woman.
She ran, laughing in the way that no other could replicate: a squealing, side-stitching cackle, funny in its own right.
Her nose scrunched toward sable eyelashes.
Her cheekbones glistened in light reflected from sun-sparkled waves.
Calver’s chest swelled—he’d forgotten what that felt like.
Around them, the ocean roared like ten thousand wind-whipped trees. The water pulled inward in a cascading rush, like a hole had opened up beneath the sea bed.
Calver’s eyes opened into darkness. He was himself; something had pulled him from the void. He sucked in a breath and held it. His stomach fluttered. After dozens of rehearsals, this might be his chance.
The room around him shifted, rising and falling.
The ocean? His chances had never been high, but this complicated things.
He took stock of the Survivor’s memories.
They were on a warship returning from a conquest of Pazir’s southern Isles.
With a jolt of horrified guilt, he shut out the visceral memory of his dowaga protruding from a child’s back. Bile rose into his throat.
There was nothing to be gained from dwelling on the things he did when he was not of his own mind—he didn’t want the Survivor to wake.
That meant he must remain stoic. Calver retrieved more memories.
He bunked alone: a box of a room, which was better than the majority of the crew’s quarters.
An honor bestowed on him for obedience. Cul’Mon’s bunks were located…
Calver searched, but came up short. Cul’Mon wasn’t here.
Calver’s lips pressed into a line. He’d aided this invasion independently.
It would seem he’d become a compliant apprentice after all.
He fumbled for the hooks along the wall, clasping the straps of a canvas satchel.
Within, not one, but three glass orbs clinked against one another.
Calver could scarcely believe his luck. They’d remained there, untouched, undiscovered by Cul’Mon since he’d stolen them and altered them… When? A day ago? Months ago?
It didn’t matter when he’d last rehearsed his escape. All that mattered was that he’d found his chance. His heart raced as he pulled the first lamp from the satchel. This was it. One bright light away from freedom.
His mouth went dry as he paused, thumb over the activator. There was another option.
The lamp’s potential throbbed in his fingertips, distilling a strange sense of calm into his limbs, his core, his mind.
He’d returned to this place again, and again, and again.
He could press it and not escape. Because someone who had done the things he had couldn’t be trusted. They didn’t deserve to keep breathing.
The sea hissed. The ship rose and fell. Only one thing was certain: he wouldn’t lose his chance at escape—no matter the method—because of his hesitation.
Calver thrust his hand back into the satchel.
Two more lamps of equal size, both with their influx retainers adjusted, both deadly. Identical in every way.
Except he knew only one was red.
Calver blinked in the darkness, searching for color on the lamp he’d just retrieved—color that would determine his Fate.
There was none.
He swallowed. It felt like pushing a stone down his throat. Red would have been so much easier.
He slung the bag across his back, took a steadying breath, and pressed the first lamp’s activator. Somewhere, a part of him knew that it was the wrong decision.
The lamp began to whir. A too-bright light shone at its center.
If he’d miscalculated, nothing would happen.
If he hadn’t, he had six seconds. With the lamp’s illumination, Calver found the door.
He darted past the dozens of occupied hammocks tilting with the ship.
He climbed the ladder that led to the deck.
The explosion sounded. The resonant BOOM and cracking of wood were louder than he would have thought possible. A wave of heat radiated at his back. His mouth popped open.
{I can help}, the creature offered, summoned by the forbidden romance of water touching flame, the smell of singed aether.
No.
He’d find a way out of this on his own. If he was going to escape, he wouldn’t willingly succumb ever, ever again. He would start his life over. A life without bloodshed.
{I’ve seen your futures, Calverous. Worry not. I’ll be here when you fall.}
FANKALO
Fankalo stood at the helm of the Rogue’s Rapture, the polished wood of the wheel reaffirming to her fingers.
The wild open air, ripe with the tang of salt and fish, whipped her growing curls—now ear length—into her eyes.
It was good to be back at sea, perilous northern waters or not.
They’d wallowed away in Chira’na for months.
But the money ran out, as money did, and the time had come for them to pull a new heist. This time, she got to steer.
Her Luck danced steadily abreast the forward wind, steering her from the foreboding shroud blanketing the waters to starboard. Its discerned route was moving against the ocean’s natural currents.
“You’ll need to tick two degrees north to hit the slipstream.
” Drogus Meinforg, the outlaw refugee Thacklore had insisted her father employ, served as her mentor today.
He was an excellent helmsman. His presence had quickly become a boon, as their crew had lost both a pilot and a mercenary during their stay in Chira’na.
Why anyone would choose to remain in that fortress city over the freedom of the sea baffled her.
“Before the war,” Drogus continued his lecture, “Chori oceanographers were commissioned to map the currents of the Casowhatan. The ocean became an artwork of buoys for as far as the eye could see. My records were commandeered by the Nelfinden Blue Wing, twenty years ago now.” He pointed to his head.
“But they still live in a place that no army can take from me.”
Despite his continual retort that “a twelve-year-old should not do these things”, Drogus was a rare gem among the raiders.
He spoke about books and science and history.
She’d learned his name meant “Mighty Warrior” in his native tongue.
That was its own silent comedy. While Drogus might have been the size of a small ship himself, she had never met a gentler person in all her life.
She popped a cheek. “I don’t need a map of the ocean currents, eah? I can feel them. Why do you think they put me up here? I’m lucky.”
When they left Chira’na, her father had decreed she would inherit his title of captain, when he was ready to relinquish it.
He’d taken to letting her sail for longer stints to practice, labeling it insurance to steer them from any of the northern ills.
But she could have done that from beside the wheel, rather than behind it.
She secretly believed her father just wanted to catch a nap below deck.
Still, putting an entire ship in her hands stood as a high compliment.
The crew gladly accepting it, higher still.
Except for Gelhard, who proved particularly sour about it—but Gelhard was sour about everything.
Drogus folded his hands behind his back, his smile easy. “Aha. And yet, you have chosen the slow route to the Rollard Isles.” Fankalo loved the sound of his voice. His accent made his words thick like taffy.
“Using my Luck to find the currents and using my Luck to stick to them have inherently different outcomes.” If they followed the current, she didn’t say, it would end in certain death.
Drogus hummed low. He was a good tutor, better than most. Helpful, but not patronizing.
“Thacklore told my father you commanded your own ship in the Chori Navy during the Gray Period.”
“I commanded a fleet.” It was a gentle correction, not a boast.
“Did you know Captain Kotar Avelius of the Green Wing?”
“No,” he chuckled. “I was not what you would consider ‘friendly’ with Nelfinden command. Quite the opposite. But years can change many things. Why do you ask?”
“It’s just someone I’m looking for.” It had been a shot in the dark, but no one she’d asked seemed to have heard of Kotar Avelius. “So if you were an enemy of the Nelfinden state, shouldn’t you be in prison?”
“There is a deeper story to that. But the short of it is that I was forsaken and left behind on Nelfinden soil—shamed—after our loss at the battle at Casowhatan. I evaded capture. But only by taking refuge in Chira’na’s encampments, where I faced many years of struggle before Thacklore recovered me. ”
It was a vague answer. Then again, it had been a sensitive question. The refugee camps outside of Chira’na were horrifying. Worse than the Kaidechi slums. She would have rather faced execution than be forced to stay there.
“How many years?”
“More than ten.”
The response shocked her into silence. The captain of a fleet, with more power than most men ever dreamed of, had spent her entire lifetime squatting in the dirt, begging for notes. How could a person fall so far? How could he stand it?
“So long… Have you ever thought about what you might have done with those years?” She regretted the question the moment she asked.
Drogus’s eyes were as cold as the sea, but they didn’t hold a drop of anger.
“No sense in waging war with time. There is only hope in making peace with it, no matter what it robs of you. I am indebted to Alberous Keane. Where most Nelfinden captains would not have taken on Chori help, he did. A second chance is a blessing seldom received.”
Drogus’s expertise had certainly proved to be worth any risk. It wasn’t as though the Rapture operated within the laws of the Nelfinden state anyway.
“I’m glad you’re here.”