22

I wake in a muddled, overslept haze to the all-call crackling on. “We’ll be docking with the Flotilla in three hours,” a voice announces. I still haven’t figured out which of the crew lends her voice to the announcements. “Report to stations for instructions.”

I roll over, and my empty stomach keens.

Two minutes later, someone pounds on the door. “Cas, I know you’re in there,” Swift calls. Her voice is choked and hollow, like she’s holding something back. She’s probably holding a lot back. “Captain wants you on the bridge. Got you some food and shit. Leaving it here. See you in five.”

I wait until her footsteps fade down the hall before crossing to the hatch and yanking it open. Sitting outside in a neat pile is a water bottle, a few protein bars, and a set of clothes that, under closer inspection, appear to be almost folded. I gather them up and lock the door behind me.

I make my way up to the navigation tower a few minutes later, still chewing on the protein bars, which must have been sitting in the Minnow’s stock for all five of the years that Swift’s been aboard this ship. Crew members rush back and forth around me, making preparations for the docking. They hardly notice me. I guess I’ve finally become part of the landscape.

When I climb the ladder into the navigation tower, the four lackeys are the first thing that greet me. Chuck and Varma seem curious, Lemon looks distant, and Swift’s trying to burn holes in the floor with her stare. The captain stands at the navigation instruments with Yatori, muttering to the helmsman in low tones. When she spots me, she gives me that shark smile I’ve come to know so well. It repels me, but I step forward anyway.

“Cassandra, glad to see you out. Got a bit of a surprise for you today,” Santa Elena says, clapping her hands once for emphasis. She’s decked out in her best leathers, looking fit to swashbuckle her way back to civilization. If she’s mad about me stagnating Bao’s training, she doesn’t show it.

My meager breakfast churns in my stomach.

“We’re rolling into the Flotilla in full regalia today, Reckoner and all.”

Panic floods me. Bao’s unpredictable, and putting him in a busy environment is the last thing we need right now. Reckoners are introduced to the complexities of ports in stages. Even in the Reckoner-free harbors of a floating city, Bao’s curious enough that there’s no end to the trouble he could get himself into.

“We’ll set his beacon to get him patrolling and see where it takes us,” the captain continues. “If he starts to cause a ruckus, we’ll rein him in. But in the meantime, I want the world to see what we’ve got. He’s ready. It’s time for a show of strength. Nothing fancy, mind you. But the fact that we have a beast bonded to our vessel’s going to be enough to get everyone talking, and that’s exactly what we’re going for.”

I can’t contradict her. Any urge I have to speak out against her gets pushed back down my throat by the thought of Code’s blood billowing in the water. Of the crack Bao’s beak makes when it slams shut. Of the captain slamming me into the wall of this room. All I can do is nod again, short and curt, and wait for her to dismiss me.

But Santa Elena’s grin widens, and I want to wipe it off her face even more. “You’ve been doing well aboard this ship, Cassandra. It’s time you got some time off it. You’ll get shore leave while we’re docked. I feel like you could benefit from a day away.”

She can’t have said what I think she said. Santa Elena’s letting me loose? In an entire city? I don’t even know the Flotilla’s layout—I could get lost in there so easily.

I could get lost and never return.

And just as the thought is settling in, just as the hope is kindling in my chest, I feel the chill of metal around my wrist and hear the light snap as the handcuffs lock into place.

Should’ve expected that. But Santa Elena doesn’t ask for my other wrist to bind to the one already locked in. Instead, she beckons Swift.

“Oh no,” Swift protests.

“She’s been your charge from day one, Swift. That isn’t changing just because she’s getting off the boat for a bit.”

“Boss, you can trust me to make sure she doesn’t run off. C’mon, this is the first time I’ve had leave in months. I’m going—”

“I take risks, Swift, but not stupid ones. Give me your hand.”

And two seconds later, I’m handcuffed to the one person on this entire boat that I can’t even look in the eye right now. Chuck and Varma whisper to each other over in the corner, and I can see them barely holding back their laughter. They stand up straight when the captain’s glare finds them.

“Both of you are on treasury duty today,” Santa Elena says. “Make sure salaries go out before we dock—I really don’t want a mutiny on my hands in the most popular port this side of the meridian.”

They accept their orders with quick, cocky salutes and plunge down the ladder. I hear a cackle float from below as their footsteps patter away.

Santa Elena turns back to us. “Report time is noon tomorrow. Cassandra, if you somehow get it in your head that you’re going to make an escape attempt, know that I will hunt you down and bleed you out, and there are only so many places to hide on a floating city. Enjoy leave.” She claps me on the shoulder, then disappears down the ladder.

“Well,” Swift huffs.

There’s not much else to say. And Santa Elena hasn’t even given us the luxury of cuffing us after we descended the ladder. Truly her sadism knows no bounds. Swift and I end up working it so that we go down side by side, wedged together in the tiny chute, which is uncomfortable, to say the least. Several times I elbow her, and I bet she thinks I’m doing it on purpose by the end. But the fact of the matter is, it’s really hard to go down a ladder handcuffed to someone you don’t want to talk to.

When we get to the bottom, Chuck and Varma are waiting for us with several cloth bundles slung over their shoulders. Varma holds one up. Swift’s name is scrawled on it in blocky, childish print that I recognize as her own handwriting immediately. “Your winnings,” he says, tossing it to her.

Swift catches it with one hand, and I don’t miss the slight bounce she gives it as she evaluates the weight.

Chuck nudges her as she walks past, tossing her mane of wavy hair so that it slaps Swift in the face.

“Oh come on,” she yelps, but the mechanic lackey only laughs.

“Have fun, you two,” Varma calls over his shoulder as the pair of them disappear around the corner.

I’ve never seen Swift go redder. “This can’t be happening,” she mutters under her breath. “Okay, look. I have business I need to take care of at the Flotilla, so you’re gonna have to just shut up, play cool, and come along for the ride.”

“I shouldn’t leave Bao—” I protest, but Swift silences me with a jerk of her wrist that causes the handcuffs to bite into my flesh. “Ow, Jesus!” I yelp.

“This is non-negotiable. The Flotilla’s our biggest stop on the trade chain—that’s why we get paid here. I have to—” She cuts off, her face souring. “Never mind. Just work with me, okay?”

I nod. There isn’t much else I can do.

We go to one of the midlevel decks to keep an eye on Bao while the ship makes its approach. He spots the Flotilla looming on the horizon and swims out ahead of us, blowholes flaring curiously, but then the trainer deck beacon flashes on, and he returns to the Minnow’s wake like a well-behaved dog. Santa Elena is giving the signals herself this time. She wanted the feeling of rolling into port with a Reckoner at her beck and call. It gives me the afternoon off, and there’s no way someone else will make a pass at Bao with the captain on deck. All that remains is for him to handle being in port like a properly trained beast.

He’s never had a problem with the ship’s Splinters, so it’s no surprise that as we draw closer, he pays little attention to the smaller ships that dart around in the distance. Some are ferries, carrying crew to and from massive smuggler ships that anchor out on their own where their autonomy is unquestionable. Others are fishing vessels returning from the net stands, loaded with enough meat to feed a hundred families for a week. My lip curls when I spot one of them dragging a bundle of neocete carcasses.

The Flotilla towers over us as we creep closer.

I’ve seen pictures of this place in textbooks, usually in the context of the justification for the Schism. Dividing the world into smaller states was supposed to ensure that governments were small enough to take care of all of their people. But some people still slipped through the cracks and floated out to sea, and the currents coagulated them into the floating cities, the fringe civilizations that live off both their wits and their availability to the pirate trade.

The Flotilla’s a Jenga game of shipping crates piled on skeleton hulls piled on what looks like real concrete foundation but must be something far lighter. The pile winds its way up into towers that steam and smoke in the noon sun. It’s a place that’s been carved out of salvage and wrought into something alive, something that rises and falls with the sea, a breathing being in its own right. Though it towers above us, it also splays out into a winding network of docks, like a cephalopoid’s arms, that host a veritable armada of pirate vessels.

I’ve never seen so many hunter ships in one place before. They slumber right next to each other, just waiting for a crew to wake them, to take them out and blaze their guns. I can feel an old impulse rising inside of me, the one that orders me to point projections, to direct Reckoners at the largest threat. Unleash a fully grown, fully trained Reckoner like Durga on this place, with all of the ships in such tight quarters, and we’d squash a good percentage of the NeoPacific’s infestation within hours. But everything here is bristling with heavy artillery, and I know that it’d be a waste to pit a single Reckoner against it.

It’s not like Bao would be up for the challenge anyway.

Or me, for that matter.

There’s some sort of nervous energy thrumming away in Swift. She keeps on fidgeting with the sack of cash, her eyes fixed on the looming Flotilla. If it wouldn’t take me along for the ride, I’d push her over the side of the boat. In all of her twitching and glancing and picking, she hasn’t bothered telling me what’s eating her. I don’t want to ask. Being chained to her is bad enough—it only gets worse if we have to have a conversation.

The Minnow prowls into the Flotilla’s inner harbors. We’ve gotten docking permissions at a prime slot, and I have no doubt that Santa Elena paid an arm and a leg to get us such a prestigious spot, just so she can show off her new pet. Bao follows quietly behind us, and already people are lining up along the docks, scrambling over haphazard stacks of crates and rickety platforms that balance on barrels and slabs of foam. Their eyes are wide, and some are already snapping pictures with their phones. When Swift spots them, she tugs me back from the railing and into the shadow of the ship’s interior.

Because of course we can march into the harbor with an unregulated Reckoner, but god forbid a presumed-dead girl turns up alive and well in the background of a viral video. It’s not like anyone would recognize me anyway—all of my hair is hacked off and I’m dressed in Swift’s clothes. It’s been months since the Nereid went down. Everyone’s probably given up on me by now.

When did I start thinking that?

The realization doesn’t bowl me over or anything. It’s something that’s always been there. Everyone at home thinks I’m dead. They think the pirates killed me when they sacked the Nereid, or else I took the pill when I was captured. Nothing’s given them reason to assume otherwise. No one’s looking for me anymore.

And it’s sort of freeing, being a dead girl walking. As the docking arms extend and bring the Minnow in, I feel lighter. There’s an itch building in me, a longing for something other than the ship’s deck below my feet. I want solidity and stillness and everything I’ve lost at sea. I want to run without running out of hallway.

That’s obviously not happening with my wrist chained to Swift, but I can dream.

As the Minnow puts down its ramp and the crew pours off the ship, Swift guides me through the crowd, her knuckles white on the bag of money. She’s so protective of it that I can’t help but wonder if it’s been ripped from her hands before. Swift wasn’t always one of the top dogs on this ship. While she hasn’t told me much about the time before Santa Elena raised her out of the ranks, looking at the way she guards her sack of cash, I’m starting to think that the captain’s favor was sorely needed.

We spill out onto the dock, and immediately Swift takes off, dragging me after her. I yelp when the cuffs bite into my hand, but nothing’s slowing her down now. She charges for a set of rickety steps at one end of the dock and thunders up them, climbing furiously for the upper levels of the city. I barely have time to look down, and given how much the stairs shake underneath us, I don’t think I want to. I glance back over my shoulder at the Minnow, and then we’re around the corner. For the first time in months, the ocean is out of sight.

Not out of mind, but it’s good enough for now. I can feel a pressure releasing from my back, though I still have a niggling sensation that urges me to check on Bao. Leaving him back in the harbor without any sort of trainer supervision is probably the captain’s weird idea of a show of force. Hopefully he doesn’t wreck all of the shit before I get back from wherever Swift is dragging me.

I hook two fingers inside the cuff, trying to keep it from chafing as I stumble along in her wake, but they just pinch against the bone when she jerks and I have to withdraw them. “Swift, slow down.” I warn her.

She lets her pace slacken a little, eyes still fixed determinedly forward.

Now I’ve got time to see the sights, but in that regard, the pirate city is sort of disappointing. True, most of the people here are packing more heat than anyone in the streets of New Los Angeles, but there’s a sense of normalcy that permeates the people we pass in the streets. It’s like the world out here is just a different, more dangerous flavor of the same stuff I’m used to. Even the fact that I’m cuffed to my companion doesn’t bother many of the people we pass. I puzzle over it until Swift offers a solution when she notices me glancing after one man who stared too long. “They think you’re a slave,” she hisses, then yanks me down a side street and up another flight of stairs.

I try to keep her pace more gracefully after that.

The city gets rougher and more chaotic the higher we climb. On the lower levels, there were paths resembling roads, where rickshaws ran wild and porters with inhumanly large loads strapped to their backs wandered the streets. Up here, the buildings are balanced precariously together, supported by massive iron beams that the sea winds have turned a dull orange. The paths are either narrow walkways that jut out from the sides of the buildings or spindly plastic bridges that stretch between them. Most of the construction is done with the cannibalized remains of shipping containers that have been haphazardly welded together to create homes and little shops, shops we pass up despite the heavenly smells wafting out of them. The protein bars I had this morning feel like nothing in my stomach.

“We’re getting close,” Swift blurts. “Okay, no matter what, you can’t tell anyone on the ship about where we’re going or what you see there. Understood?”

I nod.

“Say it.”

“I understand. Not a word,” I spit, rolling my eyes, though inside I’m getting worried. Swift’s business here is apparently so important that she practically had to run the second the ship docked. If it were an errand for Santa Elena, she wouldn’t have sworn me to secrecy. All she’s carrying is the sack of cash, her entire salary bound in one scrap of flimsy, well-worn cloth. Is she running some sort of smuggling job on the side, working for some Flotilla crime boss underneath the captain’s nose? Or maybe there’s a debt to some dangerous warlord, something where she’s in so deep that her entire salary is forfeit.

She pulls up at one of the rickety hovels, and I can see the tension building in her shoulders. “This is it. Just stand back, be cool, and let me do the talking for us.”

“Got it,” I tell her, wishing that she was wearing more than her pistol at her belt.

Swift raises a hand and knocks three times on the door. There’s a shriek and several thuds, followed by the pounding of feet. I shrink back just a bit, just in case. If this gets ugly, I guess I can try to run, but I go where Swift goes, and something tells me she’s making ready to stand her ground.

The rust-tinged door swings open, and I freeze mid-flinch. Standing there, beaming wide and spreading his arms, is a middle-aged man with a baby in a sling on his chest and a child clutching his ankle.

“Welcome home!” he says, beckoning us inside urgently.