Chapter 12 #2
“The ones you recited to me three times before we left the dock,” Ezra said mildly.
“I like my brain to have things to hold onto.”
“You and me both,” he said. “May I make a suggestion?”
“That depends,” she said. “Is it going to involve extra chaos?”
“Quite the opposite.” He wrapped his hands around his mug, fingers long and steady. “I like your rules. They’re very thorough. I’d just like to accessorize them.”
She gave him a look over the top of her notebook. “Accessorize.”
“Yes.”
“You know they’re rules, not outfits, right?”
“Everything benefits from the right finishing touches,” he said.
“Fine.” She sighed, but it was the softer kind. “What did you have in mind?”
He nodded at the notebook. “Write this down, or it won’t feel official.”
Bossy, but not in the annoying Joell way. She uncapped her pen. “All right,” she said. “Rule One: Ezra has opinions. Proceed with caution.”
“Rule One,” he said, ignoring that. “We eat three meals a day. Actual meals. Not coffee plus whatever’s within arm’s reach.”
“That’s not a rule, that’s a suggestion.”
“It’s a safety protocol,” he said. “I’ve dealt with artifacts that prey on exhaustion. When you’re tired and hungry, your judgment goes slippery. You start saying yes to things you wouldn’t entertain with a full stomach.”
She hated how reasonable that sounded. “So now you’re my nutritionist.”
“Think of me as your boring future self, calling from a week ahead to say, ‘Please eat something that doesn’t taste like caffeine, sugar, and despair.’”
She snorted. “Fine.” She wrote: We eat regularly. “Happy?”
“Ecstatic,” he said dryly. “Rule Two: We sleep in shifts.”
“I had that in mind,” she said. “I just hadn’t written it down yet.”
“Then we’ll record it now,” he said. “No one stays up all night on watch alone. Not even you.”
Especially not me, hung unsaid between them. She added: Sleep in shifts. No solo all-nighters.
Ezra continued, “Rule Three: If either of us hears or feels anything unusual—voices, visions, dreams that are clearly not ours—we say so. Immediately. No ‘it’s probably nothing.’ No waiting to see if it gets worse.”
That one slid under her skin like a key finding the right lock. Sahara stared at the blank space on the page for a moment before writing: If we hear/see anything, we tell each other.
“I don’t—” She cleared her throat. “I don’t want to overreact to every strange thought.”
“I’m not asking you to overreact,” Ezra said quietly. “I’m asking you not to handle it alone.”
She kept her gaze fixed on the paper. “You say that like it’s easy.”
“It isn’t,” he said. “Believe me, I know. But if that thing tries to crawl into your head through a side door, I would like to know before it redecorates the place.”
She made a face, half grimace, half reluctant amusement. “My head does not need a guest redecorator.”
“Exactly.”
She underlined the rule once.
Ezra’s voice stayed soft when he spoke again. “Rule Four.”
She looked up. His eyes were steady on hers, gray as the sea outside.
“Neither of us volunteers to be the sacrifice,” he said. “Not as a first option. Not as a last resort. Not at all. That’s not on the table.”
Sahara’s fingers tightened around the pen. “You can’t just remove ‘last resort’ from the universe by writing it in a notebook.”
“No,” he said. “But we can decide, ahead of time, not to treat it as noble or inevitable. We can decide that the goal is that we both walk off this ship together, under our own power.”
“That’s sentimental,” she said. It came out softer than she intended.
“It’s practical,” he said. “You are a limited resource, Sahara. The League can’t just order another you from a catalog, if this one wears out.”
Her throat tightened. “I don’t usually get compared to office supplies.”
“I’ll work on my metaphors.”
She looked down and wrote, slowly: No self-sacrifice. We both walk off this ship. There. Ink on paper. A promise she hadn’t realized she wanted until he forced her to say it.
She set the pen down. “Anything else? No making deals with sea monsters? No adopting cursed barnacles as pets?”
“I thought those could go without saying. But if you feel tempted to befriend magical marine life, we can revisit.”
She huffed a laugh and closed the notebook. “Four rules. Plus, the original set. That’s enough constraints to make even me happy.”
“It’s not constraints,” he said. “It’s scaffolding.”
“Now you’re really leaning into the metaphors,” she said.
“I’m out of practice,” he said. “My last long voyage involved fewer feelings.”
She took a sip of the coffee. It had cooled to a temperature that couldn’t be used as a chemical weapon. “For the record,” she said, “I’m not going to like it if one of your rules saves my life.”
“I’ll try to be discreet about it,” he said.
They lapsed into a companionable quiet, the kind Sahara seldom got with anyone who wasn’t a book. The ship creaked and hummed around them, slicing forward through water that could cheerfully swallow all of them in a heartbeat.
Ezra tapped the closed notebook lightly. “Thank you,” he said.
“For writing things down? It’s my brand.”
“For agreeing,” he said. “To all of it.”
She shrugged, staring at her cooling coffee. “If we’re going to do this, we might as well do it like adults.”
“I suspect that’s the only way either of us knows how,” he said.
She risked a glance at him. His expression was unreadable in that maddening, calm way, but there was warmth at the edges of it. Something that looked suspiciously like comfort.
“All right,” she said. “We have rules, we have a coffee-like substance, we have a homicidal relic in a box. I think that counts as being officially underway.”
“Then let’s hope the worst thing that happens is bad television,” Ezra said.
“Don’t jinx it,” Sahara said.
He lifted his mug a fraction, as if toasting. “To not jinxing it, then.”
She clinked her mug lightly against his.
Up there, at a bolted-down table with terrible coffee and a closed notebook between them, Sahara allowed herself one small, treacherous thought: Maybe, just this once, I don’t have to carry every weight alone.