“Wait, so you haven’t been home in—”
“Over a year, yeah. Santa Elena likes to make the Flotilla a rare thing. It’s our biggest hub, so we make one big stop to trade and flaunt when the Northern fall’s over. It’s just one more nail in the coffin, the fact that I can only see them for at most a month out of the entire year. And this time around it’s even shorter. She wants us shipping out tomorrow. Probably has something to do with Bao.”
I nod, my fingernails digging into the gravely edge of the platform we’re sitting on.
Swift blinks. “I’ve been talking about myself this whole time! This was supposed to help you, not be all about me venting my issues.”
“It helps when you vent your issues,” I say with a shrug. “Your shitty life distracts me from my shitty life. It’s a win-win.”
She gives me a shove with her shoulder, her mouth drawn into a taut smile, and something inside me takes flight. Onboard the Minnow, the constant scrutiny and the balancing of power makes it nearly impossible for me to be certain of Swift’s motives whenever she does something like that. But out here, in a space that was completely her own until she decided to share it with me, Swift’s laid bare. I can see her for who she really is.
And I guess I really like her when she’s honest.
She catches my eye. “Hey, if it’d help put your mind at ease, we can go check on Bao. I’ll bet the crowds have died down, so there’s less of a chance you’ll end up in a video.” Swift stands, reaching down to help me up with her cuffed hand. As she grabs me by the wrist, I feel her nervous energy buzzing from her palm into my arm, and for once in this whole messy disaster, I feel like I have the upper hand.
“So how do we get out of here?” I ask, searching the walls that surround us. None of them look climbable, even by a single person. With the two of us chained together, it seems impossible to reach the roofs we slid down over.
But Swift isn’t looking up. Her gaze is fixed on the jungle of metal below us, on a spot that I can’t quite see, and my feeling of upper-handery vanishes. Suddenly I want my wrist back. She whips around her other arm, snaring my waist again, and just as the first word of protest is leaving my lips, she topples backward off the ledge, dragging me along with her.
24
We fall.
I scream, flailing my unchained hand as if I’m going to catch something. Panic threads in my veins.
But Swift is laughing, her fingers fisted in the back of my shirt. Her idiotic hair whips into my face as she yanks me closer and says, “Brace yourself.”
I don’t have time to question it. Swift twists in the air, rolling me off her so that we’re plummeting on our backs, and it’s not a second too soon. We hit canvas with a whumph and get tossed back in the air, gasping to recover the breath that’s been driven from our lungs. The second hit is better. We sink in, float up, and then come to rest.
“Holy shit,” I wheeze.
Swift’s still cackling.
I raise my free arm to hit her, but it’s shaking so badly that I can’t go through with it. “Warn me. Jesus, Swift, I thought we were going to die.”
“If I’d warned you, you wouldn’t have made that amazing face.”
I groan. She’s high on the adrenaline rush, her cheeks pink, her hair wild. Up above I can spot the ledge we fell from, a little sliver glowing with the light of the setting sun. Internally I remind myself that even when Swift’s in her natural environment, she’s still a tricky little bitch who can’t be trusted.
We’ve landed on a tent that covers some sort of shop, as I deduce from the yells of a man below us. Swift perks up. “I didn’t know Vorsta still ran this joint,” she says as she pushes herself into a sit. “Oh, by the way, it’s time to run.” She grabs my hand and yanks me up.
We leap from the roof of the stall and land hard in the street. There’s a shout from behind us, and a mountain of a man comes crashing out from the racks of fruit and fish, brandishing his fists. “You!” he bellows.
“Me!” Swift shouts as she whips me into an alleyway. We plunge down a narrow flight of stairs. The shouts fade from behind us, but Swift keeps running until we’ve spilled out onto the lower levels of the Flotilla. My heart is still pounding in my chest, and it takes me a few seconds to realize that I’m clutching her hand as if it’s a lifeline. I let go.
“Figured out that trick by accident a few years back. Shopkeeps around here roof their stalls with old sail, stuff that’s supposed to swell in the wind. Nice and bouncy. But Vorsta’s a real pain in the ass about it.”
“By accident.”
“I … slipped, yeah.” Swift shrugs, but something dark flickers over her face for a second, something I know I’ll never be able to ask her about. “C’mon.”
We weave through the bustle surrounding the docks, dodging traders, slavers, and seemingly everyone in between. The chatter around us shifts effortlessly from language to language. I swear everyone around me is fluent in at least three. English dominates the conversations—pre-Schism colonialism at its finest—but as we slip through the crowd, I catch snatches of Spanish, what I think is Tagalog, and a few strains of Canto that I instinctively try to translate. We make our way toward the heart of the harbor, where the not-quite-sleek form of the Minnow awaits us.
There are still a few spectators on the dock when we arrive, but there isn’t much to see. Bao sulks behind the ship, his bulk barely eclipsed by it. Reckoners are finicky creatures, and they’re notoriously shy when they’ve got hundreds of people ogling them. They’re built for the privacy of the open seas, not the speculation of ports, but the homing signal keeps him bound to the Minnow’s side, regardless of how bashful he feels.
“He needs a chance to get out and hunt,” I say as we approach the knot of people still watching our beast. “Do you think the captain would let us take a Splinter and—”
The words die in my throat. Something’s risen over the babble of the crowd, two words that need no translation:
“Cassandra Leung.”
I turn so fast that the cuffs all but cut my wrist, and there’s Fabian Murphy, our IGEOC agent, his cold gray eyes fixed on mine. His suit looks as out of place on the Flotilla as it did in Mom’s lab all those months ago, and he seems just as startled to see me as I am to see him. I don’t blame him. To Murphy, I’m a ghost made flesh, a long-dead girl who’s somehow managed to crawl out of the sea.
It takes Swift a few seconds to realize exactly what’s happened, but when she does, it only takes her an instant to react. She pulls hard on the cuffs, jerking me away from him as he takes a step forward, and before I can choke out a protest, her hand is over my mouth. “We need to get away from the ship,” she hisses in my ear.
“Calm down, miss,” Murphy says, shifting after a few uncertain syllables into the voice he always uses to negotiate. “Look, I’m sure we can talk this out.”
Swift hauls me backward just as Murphy reaches out, his cold grasp latching around my wrist before she can tug me out of reach. I try to speak through her fingers, but all I get is muffled vowels.
His grip is unrelenting, and it feels like he’s about to rip me in half. “Cassandra, it’s your handiwork, isn’t it? The beast? Please, I can get you away from them. I have contacts in the SRCese military who could—”
“Who is this guy?” Swift scoffs, her breath hot on my neck. Murphy pulls so hard that I feel a pop in my shoulder. I’m caught in a tug of war between savior and captor, and the worst part is that I know exactly who I’d go with if given the choice. But neither of them are giving me that choice. The people around us are starting to stare.
“I can tell your parents—”
“Cas,” Swift warns.