I push away from the bench and catch Code’s eye. He sniggers, taking another swig from his bottle. “C’mon, have a stringlet or something. You need to relax, girl.”
“No thanks, my life’s a living hell already,” I snap back at him. “Swift, I’m sleeping belowdecks tonight. Bao needs to be observed after today’s ordeal. No need to come get me.”
She shrugs, her hungry eyes roaming over the crowd of pirates. “Was probably going to need the room to myself tonight anyway.”
I don’t have anything left to say to her after that. I scoop some of the spoils onto a tray and carry it with me down into the bowels of the ship. Since I’m still locked out of the trainer deck, I find the closet full of cleaning supplies where I spent my first hours on this ship. I close the hatch behind me and feel around for the switch. When I flip it, a bare bulb flickers on, filling the closet with a dim, sickly light.
In the thick of the fighting, I thought I’d be too nauseous to eat the food we took today, but the dead aren’t using it, and my stomach is growling. I eat with my hands, running my fingers over the tray until I’ve scooped up every last bite. The meal sits heavy in my stomach, but not on my conscience.
It should horrify me. It doesn’t.
16
I get used to sleeping on the trainer deck again. Santa Elena’s liable to burst in at any time, but it’s the closest thing I have to a space to call my own on the ship, and with a few extra pieces of bedding ferreted out of Swift’s laundry carpet, I make the counter comfortable enough that I no longer wake up sore.
Autumn deepens, and in bits and snatches of conversation that I catch from the crew in the mess, I discover that it’s the last week of September already. If all had gone right, if the Nereid had continued her voyage, I’d be back in school now. I’d be a high school senior, trying to convince my parents that I don’t need to go to college, that I can be a trainer full time, that my future is in the industry.
Given the circumstances, I think that future’s been dragged out back and shot.
But I’ve fallen into the Minnow’s rhythm so easily. I sleep with the trainer deck doors wide open, listening to the sea against the ship’s hull as I drift off and rising when the sun crests over the horizon to glare murderously into my eyes. In the hours before Swift comes to drag me to the galley, I hop into the sea with Bao and give him a once-over, and it’s in that moment each day that I let myself pretend all of this isn’t happening. In the cradle of the NeoPacific, with the Minnow to my back, I imagine that I never left home, that this massive, round baby is just one of the new additions to our stock and I’ve been assigned primary care on him.
I slip a respirator over my nose, dive under his belly, and check for any abnormalities, making sure that his keratin plates are fusing properly as he grows and ensuring that he hasn’t run afoul of anything that might hurt him. I make a mental checklist of everything I notice, imagining that when I turn around and swim back, I’ll be pulling myself up onto the meridian between the observation bays and logging all of my data in a logbook. But it’s always the keel of the Minnow that greets me when I leave Bao’s side, and I always haul myself up onto the trainer deck, disappointment gnawing at my stomach.
But it might just be hunger, since I don’t get to eat in the morning until Swift comes. She’s almost always late. On the one hand, I want to accuse her of doing it purposefully, but she always looks so disheveled when she forces her way through the hatch and slumps in the door frame, waiting for me to get my act together. I think she just always sleeps in.
I’d buy her an alarm clock, but I don’t exactly have the means.
I start to get more privileges as the days wear on, and finally Santa Elena presents me with a key to the trainer deck that was formerly Hina’s. “You’ve learned the ship well enough that I think it’s time you get some say in your protection,” she says when she presses the little sliver of metal into my hands. “But just remember—if you get yourself killed, my girl goes too.”
I want to tell her that Swift’s well-being has no bearing on the risks I take, but I know the captain can smell lies.
It’s not that I care about Swift; she’s one of my captors, one of the people who makes my life a living hell on a daily basis. But I slept next to her for a month and learned all of her little quirks, and when you know a person to that level of detail, you can’t get them killed.
Since she doesn’t have to escort me to meals anymore, I see less and less of Swift. As one of Santa Elena’s lackeys, she’s part of a rigorous, strange training program that I observe from afar. Each of the five has their own unique focus, which they learn at an advanced level and help pass down to the others. For Chuck, it’s the mechanics of the ship. She spends all day in the engine room, and, from rumors I hear tossed around the deck, she sleeps there most nights rather than in her own bunk. Varma trains with the helmsman, learning the art of maneuvering the ship. It’s occasionally his fault that we lurch against a poorly placed wave, and once I almost chew him out when the Minnow clips Bao under his command. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t an accident. I don’t dare speak up, though; anything that calls attention to myself and what I’m doing makes me a target.
Code has the job that I least understand, maintaining the ship’s navigation systems. The computers are complex, artful things, and he has an uncanny way with them. Lemon’s apprenticed to the lookout, and of the five of them, I’m convinced she’s the smartest. She has a strange intuition for the sea and somehow feels the squalls before we ever see them. Of all the lackeys, she seems like the one most on my side—she always passes an alert down to the trainer deck when we’ve got something bad on the radar, and I’ve been able to get Bao to dive every time.
Swift’s apprenticeship has her maintaining the ship’s guns, Phobos and Diemos. When the captain isn’t on deck, she climbs up on top of the barrels and suns herself like a big cat.
Bao’s training crawls along. With fewer resources and only one trainer, he can’t pick up things as quickly as most of the pups in our stock back home, but he gets by. We usually have a robotic sub to tote around beacons for teaching dive commands, but I take its place, the massive LEDs strapped to my chest and a buoyancy vest locked around me to prevent the extra weight from taking me to the depths. I start to introduce more audio signals to the visual training—things that draw Bao’s attention to the beacon so that no matter how distracted he might be, the lights still call him, still have him under their command.
By mid-October, he’s clearly recovered from the ordeal that left him beached on the trainer deck, and his repertoire has grown to include sustained dives, staying absolutely still, and even basic fetching, which we practice with a life preserver until the day he grows too big to hold it properly in his jaws.
But the harder stage is still to come, and it’s something the Minnow is woefully unprepared for. Back home, the owners of the Reckoners in our stock buy ships that have been decommissioned: tugs at first, but eventually even aging yachts and warboats. Those skeleton ships become practice targets for baby beasts that need to cut their teeth. First we train them to ram the ships, then to target their guns, Finally, when they’re big enough, we teach the Reckoner pups how to crack a tug in half, and everything from then on out is instinct. But I doubt Santa Elena’s going to let me loose Bao on one of her precious Splinters, and until I come up with an alternative, his training will stagnate.
But the captain won’t notice. Not for a while.
And that’s what I’m counting on. It’s a risk, but it’s worth it if it will keep Bao harmless. It gives me more time to unravel the mystery of his origins and figure out how I’m getting myself off this boat.
All the same, I fear the day the captain finds out what kind of games I’m playing.