That without me, Santa Elena has nothing.
I just went from an absolute nobody on this ship to its most protected resource. The captain can’t lose her Reckoner after putting him on display like that. But now word’s gotten out that she has a hostage, and the hunt is going to start. They can’t take out the Minnow without attempting to extract me first. I’m both the reason we’ll have a pursuit on our tail and the only thing keeping them from blowing the ship out of the water.
And somewhere in this closet, there’s probably that little pill I was supposed to take, a little pill my parents now know never made it down my throat. I failed in my duty as a trainer, and now they’ll see just how bad the consequences are. They’ll be so disappointed.
I scoot into the corner and hug my knees, trying to preserve my body heat. Night’s fallen, the cold has set in, and I’m still soaking wet.
I must fall asleep like that, because the next thing I know it’s morning, and Varma is throwing the door open. “Rise and shine, rani,” he says. “Big day today. Captain’s got a surprise for you.”
“Oh, she shouldn’t have,” I simper as I crawl to my feet. When I pass through the door, I notice that Varma’s grin stretches the tattoo on his cheek. I wonder if the artist had to knock him out to put it on him.
Varma escorts me down to the trainer deck, where Santa Elena and a very rumpled-looking Swift wait. She lurks behind the captain, and as we draw near, I spot the bruise shining on her cheek. Whatever she and Santa Elena discussed last night, it doesn’t look like it was friendly.
“So,” the captain says, clapping her hands with a flourish. “The news is out. An unregulated Reckoner is escorting the Minnow and Cassandra Leung is training it. It’s time to move our operation into its next stages.” She sweeps over to the door controls and jams down the button. As the doors wheel up to let the sunlight in, a prickling sensation creeps over the back of my neck.
Chained to the back of the Minnow is a decommissioned tug.
“I trust you know how to make the most of this,” Santa Elena says, gesturing at the smaller ship. “And there’s one more thing.” She lifts a duffle bag from the counter and lobs it at my chest.
I catch it with a grunt and unzip it. Lying there, waiting for me, is a pair of Otachi. Wrist-mounted laser projectors with blazing beams a hundred times more powerful than the flashing lights of beacons. The tools of a real Reckoner trainer.
I used to dream about using them in battle. Watching my dad throw beams across the waves was like watching a swordsman at his craft, and I’d stand at his side, counting the seconds until the day that I would get to do the same. But in my fantasies, it was always Durga who followed me as I slashed the lights across her targets.
And it was always pirates at the other end.
I turn on the captain. Something’s broken loose inside me, and as I meet her narrowed eyes, I finally ask the question that’s been burning in me for three months. “Where are you getting this shit?” I snap, throwing the duffle at her feet. “These tools are only sold to Reckoner trainers. The cull serum, Bao—how the hell are you—”
Santa Elena raises an eyebrow. “You have all of the pieces, Cassandra. Put them together.”
“What pieces?” I sputter. There’s no rational explanation for why high-end Reckoner gear and a Reckoner itself ended up on a pirate ship. Even if the pirates were willing to pay through the nose. Even if the broker had access to every facet of the industry. Even if—
Cold gray eyes. A man who had no reason to be on the Flotilla. Unless …
“Fabian Murphy,” I spit through gritted teeth, fists clenched at my sides. The pieces fall into place.
“When you want to run counter to an imbalanced system, you have two options,” the captain says, her voice grave. “Either you find the pure of heart willing to fight for your cause, or you find the most corrupt willing to forsake their own. Fabian Murphy is the latter.” She says it with a note of bitterness, as if she’d hoped for better things from him.
“Money?” I hazard.
“The only reason men of his mold do anything,” she says with a nod. “Murphy is willing to sell his industry for a cut from ours.”
I think back to that morning in Mom’s lab. The security concerns he’d mentioned with hesitancy. He was throwing us off his scent, ensuring his access to the inner sanctum of the Reckoner industry.
And then there was the pup himself. A chill rushes through me as I remember the cyro-crate Murphy hauled out of our lab, the unusually high number of unviable embryos he’d found, my mother’s hesitation. He was stealing pups right out from under our noses, under the guise of protecting the industry’s investors.
Yet Bao clearly isn’t one of my mother’s monsters. Murphy must have been preying on dozens of stables.
“So he was the one who poisoned Durga,” I blurt. Murphy had access to the observation bays—he easily could have slipped in and dosed her with some IGEOC serum. Maybe he didn’t expect them to take me alive. Maybe that’s why he seemed so surprised to see me.
“If you say so,” Santa Elena drawls, her lips edging into a lopsided smile. It’s not an answer, and I hate that it’s not an answer. The agony of Durga’s death is still raw inside me, and all I want, all I need to close the wound, is somewhere for the blame to fall.
My gaze falls on the duffle I’ve unceremoniously deposited at the captain’s feet. “But if he’s your broker, why would he try to get me rescued?”
“Who knows? He’s a friend of your parents. He has an inkling of a conscience. He never anticipated uneducated pirates successfully hatching and training one of the monsters he sold us. Or maybe we’re not his most valuable clients.”
The last thought sends a shiver down my spine.
“Go ahead,” Santa Elena prompts, indicating the Otachi. “Give ’em a spin.”
I crouch, pull one of the devices out of the bag, and set it over my forearm. There’s a set of straps that I have to adjust to keep the Otachi in place and some loops that go over my fingers. It takes a few minutes to get everything where it should be. I roll my shoulder, adjusting to the weight, then switch the device on. As the dials beneath my fingers glow to life, a rare sensation takes hold of me, something I haven’t felt since that night on Bao’s back.
I feel powerful.
With a few twists of the dials, I set the Otachi to project Bao’s signal set and call up the homing signal. The tech responds at the lightest touch, a far cry from the heavy switches I’m used to. I step up to the edge of the trainer deck and raise my teched-up arm, pointing it at the tug’s side as my fingers hover over the triggers.
I pull them, light blazes from my wrists, and the tug’s side lights up with the familiar pattern. Speakers on the Otachi ring with the low noise that draws our Reckoner to the ship, and somewhere off in the blue, a puff of steam rises as Bao hearkens to the call.
The devices are heavy. The beams waver in the air as I keep them fixed at the spot I projected to. I duck my elbows down to compensate.
A minute later, Bao surges out of the sea, his nose pointed right at the projections on the tug’s side. I draw them down the ship’s hull, and he follows. It’s like a cat with a laser pointer, but with a beast the size of a house. Varma chuckles from somewhere behind me. I click off the projections and let my arms fall to my sides.
“Optimistically, we’ve got about three days before some sort of shitstorm comes raining down on us,” Santa Elena says. “Less, if SRC politicians by some miracle deliberate relatively quickly. Either way, whenever our reckoning comes, we’d better have a Reckoner of our own.”