Chương 58: 2.5. Just Minding my Own Business

Uncle Arron had owned three books, and two of them were about thieving. The third one was about fish. Not modern fish—the candy-colored fish of the pre-emergence. Before the seraphs emerged from the oceans, and the oceans died in their wake, there had been all manner of bright and alien beings swimming through the salt. Seth had spent hours staring at them, had taught himself to read among the reefs and the clownfish.

One of the other kids—Shannon, probably, who was a total rat—had spilled Seth's love of the book to Arron, who took it away and made time with it one of the reward choices. As much as Seth was fond of the lovely colors and gawping faces, once he'd faced the decision between an hour with the book or a meal, his rumbling stomach had chosen for him. But he'd never forgotten the fish.

Seth wedged himself into the crag he'd been crawling, and settled across his bent-knee rest hold, and as he beheld the vessel before him, it was a long-extinct fish he thought of. A barracuda, it had been called. In the candle-lit basement where Seth spent his childhood, he'd named it Barry.

"Damn, Tiago," he said.

"I can see why you love those things. Big and fancy." Tiago sent an affirmative trill through his beak. At the pelvic fin of the sky-fish there protruded a bulbous fuselage, studded along its side with portholes and hatches.

"Windows," Seth observed. Tiago gave him a dinosaur-eyed gaze as if to say duh. Seth peered down the cliff, picking his route out from its coarse face.

"I can downclimb this crevasse to get close," he said.

"We've got that slab there to keep us out of eyeshot. But that last scramble to the line is pretty open. Gotta be fast." The tightness on his grin cracked his lips' dry skin.

"Oh, yeah. This'll be fun. You ready?"

"Scraw," Tiago replied, doubtfully.

"What am I asking you for? You can fly." Seth found his handholds and straightened his leg.

"Here we go." He inched himself down the crack, secreted in its shade like a breechloaded bullet packing itself into a barrel. To the rhythm of his slow heartbeats and his breath, he eased across a dihedral, scaled the cliff face, and settled onto the camouflaging slab. Right before the breakaway, he took a bracing breath. Tiago landed on his shoulder.

"Give me a flyby," Seth said.

"Other side of the ship. Call out to them too, maybe. Everyone loves looking at cool birds." Tiago's wings roused and spread, and he was off, corkscrewing upward toward the vessel. His avian shriek bounced off the rock and back to Seth's pricking ears. Time to go. And then Seth was properly scampering. Skidding down what slopes he trusted his control over, catching and downclimbing through the rough sections or the steeper falls.

Above the stone anchor's metal maw, where it bit like a bear trap into the cliff, he launched himself into the aether and fell the last few spans onto the cable that linked the anchor to the barracuda. He allowed himself one trapeze somersault, cackling into the clear air. The braided metal cable was spotted with rust and shavings; he tucked in, caught it with his knees, and, hanging upside down now, tugged a pair of gloves onto his stinging hands.

Thus protected, he skittered arachnoid up the tether, toward his floating target. Through mist he caught views of the endless range beneath him like a crumpled sheet of vellum. Despite his recent spate of boldness in the custody of the al Ydrises, Seth had never considered himself a brave person—but acrophobia, that common condition, had never registered with him. He loved heights. Maybe that's why you're dating a woman you can climb, he thought, and snorted at his own stupid joke.

He slowed his climb as he entered the vessel's shadow. The cable snaked into the body of the stormship through a cramped chamber built to house its heavy-gauge spindle. Seth hauled himself onto the riveted structural steel floor, and retrieved the rope he'd been charged with planting. He looped it around the spindle array, gave it a firm tug, and tied it fast. He kicked the rope's coil out the trapdoor and watched it whisk away. A darting dot detached from the mist and flew a tight circle around the dangling rope.

Seth saluted it on the assumption that it was Tiago. The speck looped one more time, then disappeared into the fog again. Tiago's task was now to find his sister and mother and lead them to the rope's terminus; Seth's was to climb down, sit tight, and let the ladies do their work. In theory. What if you could make yourself more useful? What if you could impress Annalise? What if when she came aboard, there were a pirate or two with their throats already slit?

Or what if they found you, with the captain held hostage at sword point, and a grateful Corbin clinging to his rescuer's leg, his dog licking your face? Or hey, here's a thought: what if they have a fuckton of treasure and you pilfer some of it before Annalise gives it all back? Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

His hands rarely got that itch anymore—and whenever they did, the only treasure he needed to fill them with was the voluptuousness of the woman whose lap fate had spilled him into. But Annalise's big beautiful butt was not here right now. And Seth was. He examined the passage that led deeper into the metal barracuda's guts, and thought about the sort of fancy frippery that storybook pirates squirrel away. He hunkered next to the rope and checked in with the Fox on his back. What do you think, Mister Fox?

Am I a stupid son of a bitch? The Fox said nothing. Seth cracked his knuckles. This was not a new vessel—that was obvious by the corroding cadmium on the wall joists and the pale scrapes along the swinging hatch. The sort of metal that announces you like a Master of Ceremonies. And okay, true, the place was not quiet. The wind wailed and the cable let out a tensile groan, and all around him was the whoosh of the trapped storm and the whirr of the machinery that penned it.

But Seth was good because Seth was thorough. He dug his tallow from the slouchy leather crescent bag he carried, and worked it between his fingers until its alpine stiffness was gone. Flaking paint speckled his hands as he oiled the hatch's hinges; a catwalked corridor waited for him on the other side. He stole down the passageway, his shadow caught-and-released over and over by green light—healthy mint from the sky portholes, sickly seafoam from the corpselamps.

The floor echoed and the space was cramped, and this was a pretty fucking rotten place to sneak through, all things considered. A chorus of thumping feet alerted Seth to the approaching group before they rounded the corner ahead of him. Hastily he tried the heavy knob of a door to his left, found it unlocked, and took a risk on cracking it open. Finding no pirate with their pants down on the other side, he hustled into the chamber beyond—a cabin, it seemed.

The square footage this room stole from the cramped stormship, and the brocaded coat hanging from the metal bedframe in its center, spoke to Seth of status. Well, he decided, since I'm already here, and he flicked the latch on the footlocker. He found within a finely wrought cavalry saber, its scabbard rings filigreed to appear like serpents. This he took, reasoning it was high time he graduated from his chipped cutlass. A semiautomatic pistol, sleek and modern with a box-cannon magazine and a broomhandle grip.

Seth wasn't much for guns, but Tiago would probably love this. The hat, he left behind, dashing as it was. Too late to become a fancy hat guy; the al Ydrises would never stop giving him shit for it. He fastened a coin purse to his harness, thought better of the way it would jingle, and stowed it back, making it a silent promise that he'd return. The clomping boots continued past his hiding-place. He gave it a few seconds— One-praise-the-deathspell, two-praise-the-deathspell —and then he was out and probing again.

He was in a cluttered storage room, scanning through the shelves, when he heard it: the frenzied heavy-throat barking of a herding dog. He practically leaped into the air, eyes darting back to the entrance. The door was shut, but saints help him, now there was a clattering scrape from its exterior. The fucking thing was pawing at the door. Jagged adrenaline raked along his nerves. Fucking dogs. Seth didn't share Tiago's disdain for them, but he despised what they did to infiltrations.

Ofelia's protests aside, he'd thought her brother was right, that they'd dumped that hound off a cliff. Another voice threaded through the syncopated baying. An annoyed man chastising the beast. Seth cast about for a hiding spot and found a gap in a storage rack beside a crate full of stockfish. He rolled into it and raised a silent prayer to St. Procas that the man would dismiss the barking as some expression of nerves at the foreign environment.

A thump and a creak, and metal scraped on metal in a panicky symphony. Seth freed his new saber from its scabbard. Maybe this one was enchanted, too. Maybe it'd turn them into fondant or liquefy their bones or go back in time and erase the dumb bravado from his brain. The door opened. A man in stitched rawhide and padded cloth stepped through, with wispy bleached hair and skin bitten to leather by a lifetime of whipping wind.

His palm rolled forward and back on the bulbed pommel of a Sarkani scimitar slung round his waist. At the first rack, he paused, crouched, and checked the low shelf by his knee. Seth bit his tongue hard. Why'd he have to pull a thorough pirate? Next rack. Check up, check down. Seth's knuckles pulsed with his monochrome heartbeat as they squeezed down on his wire-wrapped hilt. He raised his blade, ready to bring it slashing across the face that was descending to his level.

Later Seth would wonder if it was some unlit intuition that stilled his sword—the metamorphic certainty the caterpillar has, say, when it spins its cocoon—or if he'd semiconsciously identified the man's demeanor, the loose posture and the gormless expression. And the relaxed way in which—as if discovering an ant, not a swordsman—he asked, "What're you doing down there?" Just minding your own business, the fox whispered.

"Just minding my own business," Seth said, and he felt every syllable lance out of him like predestined lyrics, like he was two cups in and singing along to some perfect anthem, and the pirate before him knew the words were as right as he did. The man's face pinched itself into a pensive expression, like he was trying hard to remember the name for some concept floating just outside his grasp.

"All right," he said, and stood up, and left Seth braced and baffled in the room.

"What the fuck," Seth whispered, and then a warhammer made of goose down walloped him in the brain. He wavered to his feet, took a clumsy step to widen his stance, and blinked against the wall of fatigue that he'd slammed into. It was like he hadn't slept in three days. What had happened to him? Ofelia dropping into her mother's arms. Tiago sleeping the afternoon away in the carriage. Annalise out of breath. After using their Darkness.

He hugged the wall by the hatch and listened to the departure, pinching hard at the skin of his wrist to force alertness through the dirty cotton filling his skull. Then he slid out from the hatchway and crept unsteadily down the hall. Back toward the unoccupied captain's cabin he'd scoped earlier. He could barely summon the energy to lug the cabin's door open and roll under the corner bunk. He shoved the footlocker in front of his hiding spot and curled himself tight in the crawlspace.

Your Darkness, he thought, loopy from exhaustion and giddy from success. You've found your fucking Darkness. And then Seth fell asleep on the pirate stormship his girlfriend was about to raid.