The Abyss Surrounds Us (7 page)

11

Weeks pass. I become practiced in the art of quick naps, stealing sleep whenever Bao will let me. I forget what the rest of the
Minnow
looks like. All I know is the trainer deck, every inch of it. Bao eats voraciously, and it's not long until he's the size of the leatherback turtles that make up part of his genetics. He's finally big enough to swim alongside the ship.

Santa Elena claps me on the back when I tell her.

We flush him in the morning, just after the sun rises. Two pirates haul down the partitions separating Bao's tank from the channel that washes out into the sea, and out with the bathwater goes a seven-hundred-pound, monstrous baby, squalling almost as loudly as the day he came into the world. He plunges into the NeoPacific and bobs up immediately, his blowholes flaring as he takes in his new environment.

I toss a fish at him, hitting him in the side of the head. Bao blinks, snaps it up, then looks to see where it came from as I scoop another one out of the bucket at my side. When he spots me, fish in hand, he gives an impatient thrash of his tail. At his current size, a single fish is enough to get his attention, but that will soon change.

“Give it to him,” Swift mutters from behind me, but Swift doesn't know shit. Now that the trainer deck is vacant, she's been assigned to full-time guard duty, and she's probably pissed because tonight she'll have to share her bed with me again.

Santa Elena's somehow furnished a working beacon for me to train her beast on—no surprises there. It takes some fiddling to get its signals off the factory defaults and on to something unique. There's one signal set I know by heart, one that no other beast on the NeoPacific is going to respond to, so I futz with the dials until the device communicates in those low tones and pulsing blues that make my heart ache with loss.

The beacon hangs on hooks that jut from the edge of the trainer deck, allowing me to stand over it as I issue commands. I kick on the homing LEDs and hold the fish out toward Bao, wiggling it back and forth. He pumps his stubby legs, swimming closer until his nose brushes the flashing patterns of lights.
Then
I drop the fish.

And that's lesson number one. Come to the beacon, get a reward. I snap off the LEDs and step back into the recesses of the trainer deck, waiting to see what Bao does. Some pups don't take kindly to sharing waterspace with their companion vessel, but this is an interesting case, since the
Minnow
is the only thing he's ever known. So far, he seems to be comfortable. He knocks his beak against the ship's hull a few more times, then turns and begins nosing farther away.

Now comes the real test of whether he's ready to start bonding training. I nod to Swift, and she plucks the radio off her belt. “Swift to navigation, get us moving at a slow clip,” she orders.

The
Minnow
's engines are right below us. They roar to life, kicking up a steaming froth in the water as the boat crawls forward. Bao lifts his head, shuddering as the heat hits him, then starts to paddle after us. It could be simple curiosity driving him, though. We need to set a pace and see if he keeps it.

Most of Reckoner training is a waiting game, and it's one that makes Swift steam at the ears. She sits on the counter where I've grown used to sleeping, knees drawn up to her chin, tossing the radio back and forth from hand to hand. I would have thought the monotony of ship life had prepared her for a couple of boring days, but apparently there are better things to do today aboard the
Minnow
than watch a beast pup swim.

Bao keeps the pace that the ship sets, and for the first time this morning, I allow myself to relax. If he continues to follow these instinctive patterns, his imprinting behavior will engage, bonding him to the
Minnow
, and the part that's up to him will be over.

Which means the part that's up to me is days away.

Bao's cunning. He'll learn quickly. He's a Reckoner, bred to be trained. And I'm going to train him to kill. Not to defend a ship, no—this beast is going to be taught to hunt down and destroy innocent vessels. To ravage the NeoPacific, just like Santa Elena wants.

And if I can't escape, if I can't get myself back to shore, it will all be by my hand. The possibility of failure hits me like a bullet to the chest, and all of a sudden I can feel it—I can feel the slug that'll be put in me if I do anything to sabotage the captain's plans. My heart thunders and my jaw locks tight. If it comes to that, I'll have to keep going along with her orders. I'm too scared to do anything else.

I slump to the floor of the trainer deck. Dampness soaks into my shorts as a small wave breaks against the side ports.

“What's eating you, shoregirl?” Swift drawls from her perch.

A twinge of annoyance rattles through me. “Don't play that game. You don't want to know what I'm feeling.”

“I'm bored as shit—I'll listen to anything.”

I consider. She's the closest thing I have to a friend on this boat, even if she does want to gut me most of the time. And after today, I have to move back in with her. “I'm thinking about home,” I lie.

“You're SRCese, huh?”

“Yeah,” I say, crossing my arms. “We're based just outside of New Los Angeles.”

“Never been,” Swift shoots back.

“It's nice. Good beaches. Of course, it's empty three quarters of the year. The coast's lined with summer homes and hotels, so there's not much in the way of permanent residents. But during summer it comes alive.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Gimme open sea any day. Couldn't stand living on a beach.”

“Oh yeah? You've never tried it?”

Swift grins, stretching her arms behind her head. “Nah, shoregirl. Flotilla, born and raised. Didn't touch solid land until after I'd started my bleed.”

Of course she's from a floating city. Now that I think about it, that's the only place that a crew like this could come from. Those behemoths thrive on piracy, unregulated by any state as they drift with the currents cycling the NeoPacific. They're too big to be taken down by a military force, and no state has the balls to try. The last attempt was twenty years ago, when a Filipino armada tried to blockade a floating city and starve out the pirates supplying it. The retribution was ruthless. Pirates across the NeoPacific began wrecking any ship flying the flag of the Philippines, and their ocean trade is still struggling to put itself back together in the aftermath.

It suits Swift to be from such a volatile place.

“How long have you been on the
Minnow
, then?” I ask. My gaze flicks to the ocean outside, and I'm relieved to see Bao continuing to keep pace.

“Captain took me on when I was thirteen, started me off as a deckhand. So, uh, five years?”

Confirming that Swift is, indeed, about my age. I nod. “And when did you get appointed one of Santa Elena's … trainees?”

“Christ, is this a job interview? I've been in the running for a good year and a half now. My turn to ask a question.”

I roll my eyes.

“You go by anything shorter than Cassandra?”

I wasn't expecting a question like that. I sit there blinking for several seconds. “Uh … I mean, most people call me Cas.”

“One syllable. Nice.”

“Ooh, syllable. Big word for a Flotilla kid.”

The smile drops from Swift's face, but her teeth remain, bared and ready to bite. “You're a piece of shit, you know that?”

I don't dare say anything.

Swift pushes off the counter, padding over to my side. She crouches until she's nose to nose with me, her blue eyes unblinking as she leers into my face. “You think the SRC's the peak of civilization, huh? You think the little bubble you live in is as good as the world gets, that the rest of us are just hanging onto the fringes.” She's close enough that I can feel the soft push of her breath against my cheek. “You've thought it for so long that the idea's just a
joke
for you to banter with. And then you get all hurt when we call you shoregirl, as if there aren't a thousand worse assumptions rattling around inside that empty head of yours.”

She doesn't touch me, doesn't scratch my still-healing scalp or shove me in the ribs. I have hundreds of vulnerable points right now, but Swift isn't looking to hit me there. She wants me to feel guilty.

But I don't.

Everyone on this boat is complicit in taking everything I hold dear from me. They're killers and captors and thieves, and if I hurt their feelings, so be it. It's not my aim to play polite with a girl who can't hurt me any worse than the damage I've already taken.

So I just keep still until she stands up straight and goes back to sulking on the counter.

Bao homes to the ship for the rest of the afternoon, and by the time Hina puts out the all-call for dinner, I'm certain that he's completely locked onto the
Minnow
. For the first time in weeks, I'm allowed off the trainer deck and into the main body of the ship. I follow Swift to the mess, realizing that I've already forgotten the twists and turns of the
Minnow
's halls.

She doesn't invite me to sit with the other lackeys when I get my tray, but I do it anyway. When I'm not on the trainer deck, the safest place on this boat is glued to Swift's hip. I haven't said a word since this afternoon; at this point, I think pretty much anything out of my mouth will offend her.

The lackeys all seem too happy to see me. Even Lemon lights up a bit when she spots me tailing Swift over to their table.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Varma says, grinning extra wide as I slide onto the bench next to Swift. The guy probably gets kicked out of funerals for looking too pleased with himself.

I eat in silence and leave with Swift. We go back to her room, she throws a change of clothes at me, and it's just like the first night, minus the punching. She just collapses in bed, rolls over, and I follow.

But this time I don't let her drift off. I have questions, and the first is, “Why do you guys like each other so much?”

Swift startles. She lifts her head, her half-there hair flopping over as she twists to look at me.

“You and the other lack—trainees,” I continue. “Only one of you is going to be captain in the end, right? Shouldn't you all be at each others' throats?”

For a moment I think she's not going to respond, but then she rolls over to face me, and something seems to soften in her.

“We've been through a lot of shit together,” she says.
“When you work like we do, when you hunt side by side—it's something that bonds you. Sometimes the captain does stuff like this. She sets up situations where someone's clearly getting special treatment, and yeah, it gets messy sometimes. But when you suffer with someone, you le
arn them. And it's hard to kill a person you've learned.”

I nod. I've seen that kind of suffering-bond firsthand every time we have a pup in the stables—the caretakers of the newborn Reckoner become caretakers of each other. “But it can't last, right?”

“It might have,” Swift sighs. “But then you came along.”

I don't know what to say. Does she expect me to
apologize
for being dragged bodily aboard this ship to raise a beast I want to destroy more than anything?

“You still on those pain meds?” she asks. “You're awfully talky today.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Reinhardt weaned me off them a week ago.” My ribs still twinge on occasion, but I don't want Swift to know that—she'd probably jab them if she knew.

“Ah, so you're just getting more comfortable.”

“Well I
am
sleeping in your bed,” I grumble.

She grins, and for a moment her eyes light up in the same way they do when she's joking with the other lackeys. “Don't get too chummy with me, Cas. I'll eat you alive.”

I can't help it. I snort, and it gains momentum until I'm cackling. “Was that a
threat
? God, you're the least intimidating pirate I've ever had the misfortune to meet.”

“Then clearly you haven't spent enough time around Varma.”

It's like Swift's room is a whole other world, a subdimension of the
Minnow
where Swift isn't a pirate and I'm not a prisoner. Here, away from the gaze of the rest of the crew, we're talking and laughing together as if we're something like normal. There's something that unlocks in Swift when she's sealed away from the rest of the ship, something honest. Something I actually can respect.

12

The next morning, the captain wants to oversee my training session with Bao. She paces along the trainer deck as I lure the pup back to the ship with the homing LEDs. There's a spark of excitement in her eyes, and it's keeping the tension in my muscles.

Bao's blowholes flare as he approaches, blasting a fine mist into the air that hangs over the morning sea. A piece of fresh meat hangs out of the corner of his mouth, the twisted remnants of some fish he's caught. At least he's figured out how to feed himself on his own. That's a weight off my shoulders, and the fact that he's eaten recently makes me much less apprehensive about what's about to happen.

I'm dressed in a brand-new wetsuit that Santa Elena furnished. It's made of some of the most breathable fabric I've ever encountered, but it's snug and warm around my torso. A new, top-of-the-line respirator hangs around my neck. If it weren't for the circumstances, I'd feel utterly pampered.

Bao's had a night to adjust to the ocean, which means today's the day I start water work with him. If he's going to be in my charge, I have to get him comfortable with having me in the sea at his side. Mom and Dad never let me do this stage of training. It always went to the most experienced, the bravest. I've only ever watched first contact from behind the glass of a tank.

But now that's going to change, because I'm the only one on this ship who knows how to make a Reckoner comfortable with human presence. I haven't told Santa Elena that I've never done this before, but I think she senses it somehow. She's so intent on watching this part of the training process that she's forgone her other duties on the ship just to be here.

She probably just wants to see me get eaten.

I toss Bao a few fish when he noses up to the beacon and then wipe my hands down on a towel. Reckoners have keen noses, and I don't want him to mistake my fingers for anything they aren't. With the beast pup distracted by the food, I slip into the water feet first.

I haven't swum in so long that for a moment I hang beneath the surface in shock, the NeoPacific's gentle rhythm cradling me back and forth. I blink, then slip the respirator up over my nose, my gaze fixed on the monster next to me. He's still pointed toward where I threw the fish—the little idiot hasn't noticed that anything's changed.

This is the hardest part. I have to touch him to get his attention, but there's a sweet spot I need to hit. If I go too fast, I might trigger him, but if he's aware of me for too long, that gives him time to think, to plan a move that might rip my arm off. He's at least five times heavier than me, and his personality is as changeable as the winds.

I kick forward and reach out, fingertips stretching toward his foreleg.

When I make contact, Bao's muscles twitch underneath my hand. His eye flicks toward me, and I can see him calculating, deciding exactly what this means and exactly what he's going to do about it. I hold my breath, the respirator whining, waiting for the air that I'm bound to expel.

He turns, his head looming toward me as I push myself backward, doing my best to avoid making sudden movements.
Come on
, I plead, releasing my breath in a slow hiss that fizzles out of the mask in tiny bubbles.
Come on, little shit. You know me.

Bao puts his nose right up against my chest, and I'm acutely aware of the razor-sharp beak that nudges at my wetsuit. Cautiously, as slowly as I can manage, I bring my hands down and place them on top of his head. He snorts, a stream of bubbles blasting out of his blowholes, and I jerk my head back enough to startle him.

My breath's caught in my throat again as Bao tenses, his mouth hanging open. All he needs to do is push forward and bite down, and he'll have my guts decorating the ocean.

But he doesn't.

The little monster—no, for the first time I think of him as
my
little monster—blinks at me, waiting. His eyes are huge, the crinkles at the edges of his eyelids making him look much more wizened than he has any right to be. He's curious. He wants to know why I've joined him in the water.

I let my hands slip down around his head until I'm cradling his jaw, my grip snug on the bones that jut out there. I kick my feet once, twice, urging him to follow me upward. So long as I hold his jaw, he can't bite me. So long as we're connected, I'm safe.

And Bao follows my push until we break the surface. He blasts air out of his blowholes and squalls, tossing his head. I let him lift me just a bit, my respirator crackling as I laugh through it. I glance up at the trainer deck, where Santa Elena towers over us. There's a flash of disappointment in her eyes that a savage grin quickly replaces.

That's right, bitch
, I think, my fingers crimped so tightly on Bao's jaw that they've gone bone-white.
If you want me dead, do it yourself.

Just beyond her, I catch the quick motion of Swift lifting her head, but the smile she wears is nothing like the captain's. It's the smile that cracks through right when you're on the edge of tears, the smile that comes in the wake of sheer, numbing fear. I lived, and so Swift gets to live too. I see another flicker of movement, this time the flash of a middle finger that jabs up toward the captain's turned back.

“Swift, put out an all-call for the rest of the crew. I think this'll be good for them to see,” Santa Elena snaps, and Swift stows the gesture just as quickly as she whipped it out.

Ten minutes later, the
Minnow
's brethren are packed onto the trainer deck, all leering out at me in the water. In the front of the crowd, I spot Varma dangling a bill over Chuck. She has to jump to swipe the money from him, but there's a self-satisfied grin that accompanies it and lets me know that I just helped her win a bet. And it seems like Varma bet against me. That's interesting.

Bao's large eyes flick back and forth, taking in
the crowd staring down at him. He hasn't been around this many people since the day he was born, and I worry that it'll throw some switch in him, something that will make him dangerous. Already he's starting to lean away from my grip, and I can feel the tension in him building, like a wound-up spring ready to burst forward.

Santa Elena's got one arm wrapped around her son, the other resting easily on the gun in her holster. She looks like a founder of a city, meant to be immortalized in bronze. “Well done, Cassandra,” she says, her tone musical.

Her praise stings, but I can't let it take my focus.

There's an urge building up inside me, and I don't realize quite what it is until I release my hold on Bao and slide one of my arms across his back. When I'm out in the water, I'm free from the
Minnow
and everything it stands for. I'm my own entity, with all the power that a Reckoner can give. And I want to show them just how powerful I am.

I've tried this trick with a few terrapoid pups, but Bao's no ordinary terrapoid. His eyes roll when he realizes what I'm doing, and he beats his forelegs against the sea, a growl of protest building up in his throat. I shift my weight on top of him, push my torso up, and bring my leg swinging around so that I sit squarely on top of his keratin-plated back.

Bao tenses. I can feel his intention to buck me off building in the coils of his muscles, but before he can act on it, a wave of noise paralyzes him. The trainer deck erupts into cheers.

It comes all at once, in a cacophony of shouts and hollers and slaps on the back. But the pirates aren't cheering for me. They're celebrating what I've done, and a horrible, sick feeling rushes over me as I realize exactly what that is. I've taken a monster used to destroy them and tamed it in their favor. I've hatched the enemy's tool and shaped it into something they can wield. And here, sitting squarely on his back, I'm the very image of a conqueror, my full weight thrown on the subjugated.

I'm not a girl. I'm a symbol.

And I represent everything that I shouldn't.

The shame burns from the back of my eyes and I feel tears start to well up. But I can't let them see how this is affecting me. I've got to keep playing the part they want me to play. So I wind my fingers tight around a plate protruding from Bao's neck and thrust my fist in the air, swallowing back the salt water threatening to drown my eyes.

I force myself to smile when the cheers get louder.