The Abyss Surrounds Us (14 page)

I hook two fingers inside the cuff, trying to keep it from chafing as I stumble along in her wake, but they just pinch against the bone when she jerks and I have to withdraw them. “Swift, slow down.” I warn her.

She lets her pace slacken a little, eyes still fixed determinedly forward.

Now I've got time to see the sights, but in that regard, the pirate city is sort of disappointing. True, most of the people here are packing more heat than anyone in the streets of New Los Angeles, but there's a sense of normalcy that permeates the people we pass in the streets. It's like the world out here is just a different, more dangerous flavor of the same stuff I'm used to. Even the fact that I'm cuffed to my companion doesn't bother many of the people we pass. I puzzle over it until Swift offers a solution when she notices me glancing after one man who stared too long. “They think you're a slave,” she hisses, then yanks me down a side street and up another flight of stairs.

I try to keep her pace more gracefully after that.

The city gets rougher and more chaotic the higher we climb. On the lower levels, there were paths resembling roads, where rickshaws ran wild and porters with inhumanly large loads strapped to their backs wandered the streets. Up here, the buildings are balanced precariously together, supported by massive iron beams that the sea winds have turned a dull orange. The paths are either narrow walkways that jut out from the sides of the buildings or spindly plastic bridges that stretch between them. Most of the construction is done with the cannibalized remains of shipping containers that have been haphazardly welded together to create homes and little shops, shops we pass up despite the heavenly smells wafting out of them. The protein bars I had this morning feel like nothing in my stomach.

“We're getting close,” Swift blurts. “Okay, no matter what, you can't tell anyone on the ship about where we're going or what you see there. Understood?”

I nod.

“Say it.”

“I understand. Not a word,” I spit, rolling my eyes, though inside I'm getting worried. Swift's business here is apparently so important that she practically had to run the second the ship docked. If it were an errand for Santa Elena, she wouldn't have sworn me to secrecy. All she's carrying is the sack of cash, her entire salary bound in one scrap of flimsy, well-worn cloth. Is she running some sort of smuggling job on the side, working for some Flotilla crime boss underneath the captain's nose? Or maybe there's a debt to some dangerous warlord, something where she's in so deep that her entire salary is forfeit.

She pulls up at one of the rickety hovels, and I can see the tension building in her shoulders. “This is it. Just stand back, be cool, and let me do the talking for us.”

“Got it,” I tell her, wishing that she was wearing more than her pistol at her belt.

Swift raises a hand and knocks three times on the door. There's a shriek and several thuds, followed by the pounding of feet. I shrink back just a bit, just in case. If this gets ugly, I guess I can try to run, but I go where Swift goes, and something tells me she's making ready to stand her ground.

The rust-tinged door swings open, and I freeze mid-flinch. Standing there, beaming wide and spreading his arms, is a middle-aged man with a baby in a sling on his chest and a child clutching his ankle.

“Welcome home!” he says, beckoning us inside urgently.

23

Swift and I step through the door. We both have to duck. The tiny shack is sparsely lit—most of the light comes from the holes that the rust has eaten in the roof. It bakes like an oven in here, the metal reflecting like a hotbox. There are random strips of cloth nailed up everywhere in a feeble attempt to offset the effect, but I immediately feel the sunken weight of the humidity inside settle over me.

I'm still trying to process what's happening as I watch the man hug Swift, who squeezes him back, careful not to disturb the baby on his chest. When she releases him, he regards me with a curious eye, but I remember Swift's instructions and keep my questions to myself.

“Prisoner,” she explains as she bends down to greet the anklebiter still clutching the man's leg.

“Ah, delightful. Hi, prisoner. I'm Saul,” he says sticking out his hand. His voice has the same easy cadence as hers, the same accent dragging at his syllables.

“This,” Swift says, deflating just a bit as she lets the words out, “is my dad.”

Oh.

Oh
. It's all very clear now. The secrecy, the salary—everything. I grasp his offered hand, still reeling, and give it the firmest shake I can manage.

“And who the hell is this?” Swift asks abruptly, pointing at the baby.

“Language, girl,” Saul warns, and she rolls her eyes. “This is Pima. She's your half-sister.”

“Thought I had enough of those already,” Swift grumbles as two small girls scamper from the shadows and attach themselves to her legs. “Yes,
hello
!” she says, patting each of them on the head and shooting me a panicked glance. “Shouldn't you be out of the house? Doing kid shit?”

“Swift,” Saul warns.

“Sorry. Kid
activities
.”

“Xiao saw your ship on the horizon. We wanted to be here when you got back!” the larger one yelps.

“That's very kind of you, Teresa,” Swift replies, her voice thick with sarcasm.

“Is it true that you have a monster with you? Xiao said he saw a big beast following your ship, but it wasn't attacking it,” the other girl says, still locked onto Swift's leg. “Is it true?”

Saul raises
his eyebrows.

“Yep, it's true. Captain decided it wasn't fair that all the buckets had beasties fighting for them, so she went and got us one of our own. And a trainer to go with it,” Swift says, hitching her cuffed thumb at me.

The girls' eyes go wide, and the kid at Saul's side lets out a whispered “
Wow
!
”

Swift grins, and it's the most honest smile I've ever seen her wear. She holds out the bag of cash to her father, who takes it without hesitation. This exchange is practiced—there's no embarrassment or wavering in her handing over everything she's earned to her dad, and I can immediately see why it's happening, just looking at this place. I can't even tell how three kids, a man, and a baby manage to get by in a living space so small, but I spot the hammocks strapped to the walls, the crib lashed to one of the beams that supports the roof, and the tiny stove tucked in one corner, and I realize that they get by.

It also does a lot to explain why Swift was so comfortable sharing her cramped bunk with me right from the start. When you come from a place like this, having your own room on a ship is a damn luxury.

“So, you're a Reckoner trainer, huh?” Saul asks as he dumps the bag out on a table in the corner that seems to be cut out of the same material as the walls of the house. “Where from?”

“SRC,” I say, still lost in processing everything around me.

“Interesting. So the
Minnow
went after an escorted SRCese
ship just to get its trainer?” he asks, more to his daughter than me.

“Not … exactly. Cas was a bonus on top of a good haul,” Swift says, her voice struggling to stay conversational. “Our focus was on killing the beast. Seeing if it could be done.”

“And how'd that go?”

Swift pauses, but when she speaks, it's the word I know she wants to use. “Magnificently,” she says, and there's so much sick pride in it that I start to feel a little nauseous. Of course the attack on the
Nereid
was about killing Durga. But more than that, Swift's essentially confessed that Durga's illness was
arranged
. That suffering, that inhumane end to her life—it was all orchestrated under Santa Elena's command. A fury alights in me, but there's nothing I can do about it with the kids watching.

Pima chooses that moment to wake. She stirs in her sling and lets out a vicious, piercing cry. Saul's attention immediately shifts from the money to the squalling baby, and I feel a twinge of sympathy. I got off easy with Bao. He only took a month or so to mature to the point where he didn't need my supervision. I can't imagine years in that situation.

Saul bounces her up and down, lifting her from her sling so that he can cradle her closer and croon soft words against her head until she calms. I wish that worked with Reckoner pups. It's such a pity they aren't cuddly.

I don't realize I'm staring until Swift tugs the cuffs, snapping my attention back to her. “So, uh,” she starts.

“I … ”

“This … this is where I come from.” She shrugs. “It's not much, but y'know. It's home.”

“It's nice.”

“Bullshit.”

“Heard that,” Saul warns. “Teresa, Eva, you two get gone. You've gotten a chance to greet your big sister, now give her a chance to rest. Be back for dinner, okay?”

The two girls nod and scamper off, banging the corrugated metal door shut behind them. The sound startles a mound of blankets in one of the hammocks that shifts to reveal the wizened face of an elderly woman. She lifts her head, peering suspiciously from her nest. “Oh,” she croaks, her lips twisting. “You're here.”

“I'm here, Oma,” Swift says, spreading her arms. My wrist goes along for the ride.

“Thought you'd run off for good this time and left us to starve. Like your mother.”

“Mom, let her rest,” Saul mutters from over by the stove as he prepares a bottle for the baby.

Swift smirks. “You know I'd never do that. If you got it in your head that I wasn't coming home, you'd get up out of that bed and do something useful with yourself.”

Her grandmother sighs exaggeratedly, tugging the blankets tighter around her. I don't know how she can stand it in the sticky heat that swamps this house, but I guess this particular woman has managed to become part lizard in the face of her hardships. She narrows her eyes at me. “Did your crew become slavers? That thing's far too skinny to sell on this raft. She looks like she'd snap if you asked her to bend.”

“Santa Elena's taken a prisoner, and it's my job to guard her while we're on shore. Captain wanted her secure, so she cuffed me to her.”

“Doesn't look like it'd do you much good. She could slip right out of those things.”

“Hush, Oma. Go back to sleep. Dream about that Islander prince who's going to take you away from this wretched life.”

Swift's grandmother mutters under her breath. I catch something about horrible girls and mothers, and then she's burrowed back under her blankets and seemingly out like a light
.

“Dad, do you need me to do anything?” Swift asks, moving toward the stack of money on the table. I trail her, nearly tripping over the little boy as he tries to dart between us. “Watch it, Rory!” Swift yelps, taking a gentle swipe at his wild red curls, but he dodges her and slips out the door.

“You go ahead and relax. I'll take care of everything.” Saul nudges her gently to the side. He's got Pima slung against his chest again. She nurses greedily from the bottle as he reaches over to the notes from the sack and takes a bundle. “Go see a show or something. Make the most of your shore leave—don't waste it on little old me.”

“I want to waste it on little old you,” Swift whines, but he gives her another nudge toward the door.

“Show your captive the sights. T
he SRC's got nothing on this place, you know?”

“Dinner's at the usual?”

“As always.”

When his back is turned, Swift sweeps a handful of cash into her pocket and tugs me insistently toward the door. We burst out into the bright sunlight, and for a moment I swear I see a tear in her eye. She stops a moment to take in the view, so I share it with her.

As I take in the Flotilla's sprawling jumble, I squint
against the light and pick out the shapes of people on the farthest docks bringing in the fishing haul for the day. Seagulls glide through the network of bridges beneath us, their beady eyes fixed on the fresh catch coming in. This whole place is like a giant organism, an ecosystem that thrives on sheer willpower and the strength of the people who hold it all together.

“This place is a fucking dump,” Swift groans, leaning against the railing. “And don't you dare try to tell me different, don't you give me any of that shoregirl bullshit. I can already see it in your eyes—you want to make us into these noble poor people.”

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?”