25. TWENTY-FIVE #3
“I’ll be the one to make that assessment,” she snarled, trying to shake off both her fear and her fury to maintain face in the presence of the man she respected above all others.
His nostrils flared. “Go to my quarters. Wait. I’ll let you see him, but… I want the medics to look him over first. We’re going to sedate him.”
Sedate him? This was lunacy. He was unconscious—the clear victim of a shipwreck. He needed food. Water. Warmth.
Her teeth clenched so hard her head began to hurt, but one look from her father stopped any possible refusal in its tracks. She spun away from him and stomped the whole way to his cabin.
She slammed the door, restraining a shriek. It was fine. All would be fine now. They had Calver. The moment she thought it, the light of her brother snapped into darkness again.
Time passed. Time spent clutching at her knees in her father’s hammock and trying to ignore the bad Luck that encircled her. Zeb brought her dinner that she couldn’t find the stomach to eat. He didn’t speak to her, but the wrinkles in his face sagged in solemnity.
He knew what was happening and she didn’t. Kindling to her fury.
An hour or more ticked by. The porthole in her father’s room grew dark.
They must be back on course towards the Rollard Isles, but the bad Luck only thickened with every passing breath.
What was about to happen that all of the Casowhatan warned her against?
Fankalo shuddered. She wasn’t going to keep sitting around to find out.
As she reached for the door, there was another knock. This time, Mitek pushed his way in.
Without knowing why, she threw her arms around him.
He stiffened in shock that mirrored her own.
Ribbings of the elbow, celebratory fists, kicks in the ass: those were all acceptable interactions.
But never an embrace. Not like those she’d shared with Calver in their youth.
Especially not with the way Mitek had taken to gallivanting off with every girl in Chira’na.
But suddenly—here, now—pressing her face into his neck seemed to be the best thing a person could possibly do.
“Brat,” he whispered, voice hesitant. What in fucking Chaos was it that everyone knew but her? “Captain Keane said you can come and see him.”
She took what felt like her first full breath in hours and released him. They both shifted awkwardly, and Fankalo sought to cover her embarrassment by reaching for the door.
“But wait.” He grabbed at her arm. “There’s… something wrong with him, Brat.”
She shook him off. “What do you mean? Is he hurt? Is he drugged? Just tell me, what is going on?!”
Mitek fiddled with his tunic sleeves. “It’s like he’s some kind of animal.
” The unease visible in her usually egotistical idiot made her skin squirm.
“And he’s got all kinds of things under his skin.
Half of them ripping through.” Mitek made a face like he felt sick.
“Covered in more scars than there are stars in the sky. And burns. And… a Tume’amic brand. And—”
She shook her head. “Maybe it isn’t him.”
“He looks like you. Just like you.”
Where moments before she had been determined to bolt out the door, now she didn’t want to move. Suddenly, the room didn’t have enough oxygen.
“You should just go and see. They’ve got him sedated in the brig.” Mitek braced a hand on the doorframe, like he felt as unsteady as she. “He keeps trying to hurt people. And himself. Your father let the dosage wear down for a bit, so that you could have a chance to get eyes on him.”
“You mean speak to him,” she insisted. He was a person. Her blood.
Mitek only stared at the floor. Chewing his bottom lip, he took a few plodding steps away from the door so she could move past.
The brig was on the ship’s lower level, two down from her father’s quarters and on the opposite side.
As she went, her magic darkened until she had to fight the urge to run.
She usually had to focus to feel Luck at any capacity, but now foreboding pressed around her unbidden. It was a walk toward certain doom.
Calver. It should be the only thing that mattered. We have Calver.
They rounded a corner. The section they usually used to store wine and potatoes was occupied by an enormous form. He wore shackles on his arms and his legs. Outside, her father and Turiel, his primary guard, stood wearing grave expressions.
Her blood seethed. “You have him in chains?”
Without warning, a mangled scream erupted from the man in the brig, sending her throat into her stomach. She jumped back as he struggled against his bindings to claw at her, fingers reaching for her throat.
“And that’s sedated,” Turiel said.
Heart thumping with incomprehension, Fankalo peered at the figure—naked except for ill-fitting sirwal, body rippling with muscle, broken by a hideous smattering of scars.
He bled openly from both his leg and a gash along his head.
The blood matted cropped dark curls into a smear that marred an otherwise familiar face. Familiar—and haunting and beautiful.
Her chest tightened. She stepped closer anyway. “Calver?”
The man did not respond. His breath came erratically, causing his chest to spasm like a sea in a storm.
“Calver, it’s me.” Her throat choked. Her eyes stung. “Arleena.”
Those behind her shifted. She was vaguely aware that Mitek had joined their party, standing beside her father. She’d never told anyone her name. She was Fankalo—the Captain’s fate-touched boy—the occasional “Brat” thrown in by Mitek.
Calver did not move.
Fankalo closed her eyes and opened herself to the swirling wall of dark Fates around her. She searched for him, but he was as empty from her sights as ever. How was that possible? He was nearly close enough to touch.
“Calver. Answer me. You’re… You’re safe. I’m here. I’ve—”
The creature behind the bars, so deceptively like her sibling, lifted his chin. It was those eyes that did her in. They looked the way she felt: so very far away from everything that was good in life. Icy tendrils ran the length of her spine.
“He won’t respond to you,” her father said, voice sterner than she’d ever heard. “He doesn’t have a tongue.”
Fankalo gagged. It was all she could do to remain upright—to breathe in heady wafts to steady herself—but her vision blinked into pin-pricked darkness. A hand supported her elbow as she sank to the floor—Mitek’s.
“Head between your legs, Fankalo,” she heard her father say. She obeyed instinctively.
She gasped, pulling the moldy air in like it was honey-sweet. Slowly, her heart returned to its normal pace. She lifted her head to stare at the man inside the brig. He moaned in that same, guttural timbre and hung his head.
Her father looked at her for a moment. “See that marking beneath his collarbone?”
She squinted. There were so many markings, but over his lungs were unmistakable lines: two a thumb’s width apart and an oblong slash through them.
Her newfound breath came short. “You think this was done to him by the Shadewalker?”
Her father’s face darkened. “Based on location, timelines, physical form and… demeanor, I mean to say that he is the Shadewalker.”
The words throbbed in her ears.
No.
No no.
Her feet found purchase beneath her. She latched onto the bars and pleaded, “Calver. Calver. Look at me—Arleena. The pain in your ass. The tagalong. The sugar fiend.”
His eyes held her face, but nothing looked back. She kept babbling. “Arleena. The one Mother was always mad at. The one who bit your sparring partner and half beat him senseless when he got you into a chokehold.”
No response.
She slumped against the brig, tears bleeding freely now. “Calver,” she sobbed. “Calver…”
Her chest spasmed, and it took her several breaths to realize that the man just beyond her reach had stretched his chains to lean in closer.
She was getting through to him.
“Calver?” She smiled, wiping her tears away with her tunic sleeve.
Calver lunged for her. Metal chains clanged as he thrashed, clawing for her face with a bellow that brought her hands to her ears. She stumbled backwards, tripping over Mitek, and fell onto her backside.
“Captain?” Turiel asked. “Permission to release the next dose.”
Her father nodded curtly.
Turiel prodded a blue-tinted needle affixed to a stick through the bars and into Calver’s thigh.
Her brother’s body seized as he screamed again, thrashing and pulling at the manacles tethering him to the ship’s side.
Fankalo gasped as the wood where the irons met the hull cracked.
But Calver’s fit subsided moments after.
Ten heartbeats later, his limbs fell limp. His head lolled to one side.
Fankalo’s father locked eyes with her. The look on his face was, perhaps, the worst part of it—as if her association with this monster made him see her differently.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She backed away. When he opened his mouth to say something else, she turned and ran for the main deck. Up the rungs. Through the hatch. Into the unforgiving moonlight.
Fankalo tucked herself between two cargo crates, so that all she could see were stars, and let her tears bleed.
Preservation help her, out here maybe the wind would cover the sounds of her suffering. No one would hear her. No one would know how damaged she was.
She reflected on the moment she’d first felt Calver vanish back in Kaidech—when he’d left her.
What a fool she was; he had been gone all along.
All this time, she’d thought the impression she’d been chasing was her brother, the sun and moon.
But it was only a shadow from the world that had come between them.