“Get moving!” I shout, once I step foot back onto the Saad. “And blow that ship to hell in our backwash.”
The Saad lurches and my crew jumps into anarchy. They run from one end of the deck to the other, pulling the lines from their winches and recleating the boom. Trimming sails and scanning for the wind. I cleave forward, pushing past the ones who stop dead, noticing the blood-soaked girl in my arms and offering their hand.
“Elian,” Kye says. “You’re injured. Let me carry her.”
I ignore him and turn to Torik. His face is wretched as he stares down at Lira. She may not have been one of us before, but dying in the line of duty has a way of securing people’s loyalty.
“Make sure the medic is ready,” I say, and my first mate nods.
Rycroft is slung carelessly over his shoulder, his blood dripping down Torik’s back. He’s alive, but barely, and if I get my hands on him, then he won’t stay that way for long. With Lira still limp in my arms, I yell for Torik to get a medic and he throws Rycroft to the floor without hesitation before rushing belowdecks.
Really, we don’t have a medic, but my assistant engineer traveled with a Plásmatash circus and that’s close enough. As I carry Lira toward him, through the twists and tunnels of my ship, I’m caught off guard by the notion that out of all the princes and pirates and killers and convicts, a small boy from a circus is the only one who can help. It seems funny, and I think how Lira might laugh, knowing that a rookie engineer will be stitching her skin back together. What biting comment she would come back with and how it would sink into me like a perfectly wonderful kind of poison. Like a bullet.
I push my way into the cramped room, Kye rushing in behind me. The would-be medic gestures to a table in the middle of the engineering room. “Put her down there,” he says in a panicked breath. “And open her dress.”
I do as he says and grab my knife. The strange thing is that at first I don’t think I can see any more blood gushing from the wound – it seems to all be on her dress and on me – and then when I do see blood, it doesn’t seem like enough. Or perhaps it’s all already come out. Maybe there just isn’t any left.
“Gods.” Kye recoils as I slash open Lira’s dress. “Is she going to live?”
“Do you care?” I snap back.
It isn’t his fault, but yelling at Kye feels a little like yelling at myself, and I need to be yelled at right now. Because this is on me. If Lira dies, then it’s on me.
I can’t believe you came back for me.
But I left her first.
“I don’t want her to die, Elian.” Kye squeezes my arm, keeping me steady as the fraying parts inside threaten to dismantle me. “I never did. Besides” – Kye shoves a hand into his pocket and sighs through the next words – “she protected you when I couldn’t.”
“It looks like a clean shot,” the medic says, and I turn, the irony of it gnawing at me. It was a dirty shot, through and through.
“It just scraped her ribs,” he says. “I have to check no organs were damaged though.” He points a gloved finger at Kye. “Don’t just stand there shadowing my light. Get me some towels.”
Kye doesn’t bristle at the order, or argue that we should let Lira die to be sure she can’t betray us. He turns, hurries from the room, and doesn’t even waste the time to glare properly.
“She didn’t nick anything important,” the medic says.
He phrases the last part as an afterthought, but when he turns to me, his eyes are expectant.
“I’m not sure,” I tell him. “There was a lot of blood.”
He shrugs and grabs an instrument that does not look entirely legitimate from a nearby toolbox. “Haven’t met an engine I couldn’t fix yet,” he says. “The human body’s just another machine.” He looks at me with assuring eyes. “I saved a monkey with a knife wound to the ribs once. There was an accident with a balloon bursting. It’s not that different.”
I think this is supposed to be reassuring, so I nod just as Kye bursts back into the room with a handful of fresh towels. After, we’re both ushered back out the way we came, and I don’t argue. I’m glad to be sent away so the medic can work, free from staring at Lira’s limp body and thinking about how I’ve never seen her look so vulnerable. So capable of being finite.
I don’t give myself a moment to breathe before I walk back onto the deck and toward Rycroft’s body. My crew flares their nostrils, waiting to be let loose. Beside me, I sense the rigid way Kye stands. Barely able to restrain himself and hoping desperately I don’t ask him to restrain the others. That’s the thing about my crew. They don’t need to be friends. They don’t even need to like one another. Being on the Saad is the same as being family, and by saving me, Lira has proven something to Kye. I locked her in a cage and made her barter her way onto my ship, and she saved me all the same, believing that it was the right choice. A life for a life. Trust for trust.
Tallis Rycroft stares at me and he’s not alive enough to make it look menacing. His left eye is closed, a lump stretching out like a mountaintop, and the wounds on his face make his lips indistinguishable. The hole in his stomach bleeds on.
“What are you going to do with him?” Kye asks. His voice is not altogether calm, something unbalanced on those usually carefree tones. He wants revenge as much as I do. And not just for taking his captain, but for the broken girl lying in the dregs of our ship.
“I don’t know.”
Madrid walks a small pocketknife between her fingers. When it nicks her, she lets the blood drip onto Rycroft’s injured leg. “He doesn’t deserve to live,” she says. “You don’t have to lie to us.”
One of Rycroft’s eyes blinks, slowly, as he comprehends the storm he has created. The young prince in me wants to feel sorry for him, but I keep looking at the half-moons and long, serrated lines that crease into his biceps. Wounds made trying to fend him off. Nail marks so similar to the ones along my own chest.
I hesitate, caught off guard as a distorted image of the Princes’ Bane flashes across my mind. She could have snapped my neck or done any manner of things to disable me, but she let her claws tear slowly through my chest instead. That was the thing about sirens. They always went straight for the heart.
“Captain,” Madrid says, and I blink away the image.
“I’m going to find some shark-infested waters,” I tell her, regaining my composure. “And then drop his favorite appendage in.”
There is a phlegmatic silence, while everyone within earshot considers those words. Rycroft half-blinks again.
“Next time,” Kye says, clearing his throat, “lie to us.”
“What about Lira?” Madrid asks.
I shrug. “Depends on how pleasant she is when she wakes up.”
“I meant,” she says, “is she really going to be okay?”