I say nothing.
“Everything in this city works because of the pirate industry. I feed those kids back there with money that I earn by hunting ships full of innocents. I’m not oblivious, Cas—I know that’s not right. But it’s all I have, and it’s all I can do. So just … don’t look at me like that, okay?”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like you have more respect for me because you know where I come from.”
I try to come up with something to protest with, but I’m grasping at straws. This morning, I didn’t know anything about why Swift had gotten into the pirate trade in the first place, beyond the fact that she’d done it willingly. I’d never imagined what kind of life would lead to that. I guess in my head, Swift was born into piracy the same way I was born into the Reckoner trade, and I’d never pictured her growing up outside of it.
She gives my wrist a tug and starts picking her way down a dangerous-looking path, past racks of laundry hung out to dry in the afternoon sun. We descend a few levels to a grocery store that deals in both fresh catch and the far more expensive preserved items that ship in on the vessels trading here. Swift pulls out the wad of cash she siphoned and uses it to pay for a few giant sacks of rice and some assorted staple foods that she gets me to help carry back up to her house. It doesn’t do much to dispel the impression that I’m a slave. Her father rolls his eyes when we show up loaded with groceries, but he lets us store them in the baskets woven from plastic scraps that dangle in the kitchen area.
It’s so normal, after months at sea, that I want to cry. I’ve been bottling up how much I miss home, how much I miss late night runs to the little corner grocery down the road and cooking with Tom and Dad and just plain old stability, for god’s sake. What’s even worse is that I’m absolutely terrible at concealing it. I let my fingers fidget, trying to subtly vent off the effect all of this is having on me, but Swift feels it. She glances down at my hand, then catches my face before I can swallow back the emotion showing there. “What’s eating you?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“C’mon, Cas.”
“Outside,” I hiss.
I expect her to put up a fight, but Swift immediately moves for the door, taking care that she doesn’t yank the cuffs against my wrist for once. We emerge into the sunlight, where the sea winds tousle her hair and the ocean stretches far into the distance. I watch her for a moment. She glows here. There’s something about the sunlight and her home and the straightness in her spine that makes her radiant.
“Come with me,” she says, a soft smile on her lips. “I want to show you something.”
She leads me around the side of her house to the space where another roof slopes just below hers. Before I can protest, she jumps from the path and slides onto the rough corrugated metal, towing me along for the ride. I panic, trying to stop, but she grabs my hand before I can get out a word of protest and guides me into a skid that sends us flying off the edge.
For a moment, all I can see is ocean.
Then we strike the next roof below us and Swift slams on the brakes, snaring my waist with her free arm to make sure I stop with her.
My heart thunders in my chest as Swift jumps back, stowing her hands nonchalantly in her pockets. We’ve landed in a little alcove, a den of metal and plastic siding that looks out on a spectacular view of the Flotilla’s western docks. The sun is sinking in the sky. It’s only early evening, but we’re on the cusp of winter.
As I look around, I realize that this place isn’t accessible by any other means. Every house around us has its back turned, and none of them have any sort of door or window. It’s like a little space that the Flotilla forgot, a secret it kept so long that everyone stopped looking for it.
“Was goofing around on the roof one day when I was a kid, slipped, and ended up here,” Swift says. “Nearly broke my ass, but I guess it was worth it, ’cause … well, y’know. House like that, never a moment to myself. I came here to think a lot. First when Mom shipped out. Then when Teresa and Eva’s mom shipped in. And then when she shipped out, and then … well, you get the picture.”
Her words echo against each other in the space, and I notice that there’s a little plastic bucket sitting quite intentionally in the middle. I picture a little blonde kid sitting on it, elbows on her knees, staring out at the sea. “It’s a good place to be when something’s bothering me, so I thought … ” She trails off, shrugging. “Want to talk about it?”
The bucket’s too small for either of us, let alone both of us, so we sit on the edge of the platform, our legs dangling out over the roofs below.
“I got overwhelmed,” I start. “Just being in there, being with a normal family—”
Swift scoffs.
“Shut up, your family’s plenty normal. I mean, it’s just …
god, I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again. I don’t have any way off the Minnow. When the people around here think that I’m a slave, they aren’t far off. If I weren’t, well … ” I lift my hand, giving the handcuffs a shake. “I’d run. No question about it, I’d try to find a boat shipping off that I could stow away on and just go. But I’m chained to you, and … and I don’t mean that in just the literal way,” I say, trying not to let bitterness tinge my words. Swift’s shared the truth with me. It’s only fair that I do the same.
“I’d run with you,” she blurts. “I’m so sick of who I have to be for the captain every damn day. I’m tired of her stupid mind games, of her playing us against each other like it’s all a big joke and then executing us when we slip up. No lie, I’d go wherever you’d run to, if it weren’t for … ” She jerks her head upward toward the house we just left.
“You provide for them.”
“I’m the only one who can. Oma’s too weak to work, Dad has to take care of all of the kids and that’s a full-time job, and … well, Mom shipped out when I was seven. And Teresa and Eva’s mom left when I was thirteen. Every time Dad gets someone to settle down with him, they always end up going back out to sea, and they never come back. The second time it happened, we got left with two little kids, and we didn’t have any income. So I became the income. Found a captain who’d take me, worked my way up, and every penny of that salary goes to keeping them alive. If that stops … I don’t know what’s going to happen. Dad’s got the kids to look after. He can’t work, and now there’s this new baby—I still haven’t gotten that story—I just—” She punches the ground with her free hand, her teeth bared in a snarl. “I didn’t sign on for any of this, but I can’t stop it now.”
When I first met Swift, I thought she was only tense around me. I thought that I was the drag in her life, the thing that sealed her off when she was around her fellow trainees. She always seemed so carefree when she didn’t have to deal with me. But that’s not right—that’s not who Swift is. She’s been showing me who she is all along. Swift is a scared, stressed, angry girl, but she’s trying. She’s trying so hard.
And because of the way our lives have been twined together, it’s only now sinking in that there’s far more at stake than just me, Bao, and Swift. There are four children and two adults whose existences depend on Swift. And Swift’s existence depends on me. And my existence depends on Bao. And he depends on me, and I … well, as much as I hate to admit it, I depend on Swift to keep me alive. We’re all stuck together, and if any of us falls, we all fall.
“Captain’s got us good,” I groan, and Swift laughs.
“Fuck her,” she says. “I mean yeah, she’s everything I aspire to, but god, I was barely thirteen when I begged her to take me on. We scraped by in those years, but we only had two babies to feed. Then Rory came along, and I had to convince the captain to bump me up from deckhand to crew. And Dad didn’t tell me about Pima. With this new baby, thank god I made trainee on this last rotation.”