The Abyss Surrounds Us (9 page)

Have my weeks aboard the
Minnow
changed me? When the
Nereid
was under attack, my very first thought was not for myself, but for Durga's well-being and the passengers on the ship. But the situation I'm in is so far removed from anything I trained for. My Reckoner's life is synonymous with my own now, and there's a pirate girl thrown into the mix. When I forced Bao to board the ship, who was I saving?

Who was I supposed to be saving?

Another shell.

I curl up against Bao, folding my arms around my knees. I don't want the other ship to win. I just want it to be over.

15

Finally the noises of the fight fade away, replaced by the sound of heavy footsteps above, laden with the take from the ship. I roll up the trainer deck doors and dive into the sea behind the
Minnow
. The sun's gone down, but the waters are lit with dancing flames. My stomach churns as I take in exactly what Santa Elena has done to the ship we hit.

It's burning from the inside out.

They fought back viciously, and this is how they paid for it. I shudder, imagining what would have happened to the hundreds of people aboard the
Nereid
if I'd thrown Durga into battle instead of reining her in.

Bao perks up once he realizes that the water is within his reach again, and this time he needs no signals or encouraging. He kicks and scrabbles against the deck until he topples back into the NeoPacific with a shriek. The water paralyzes him and for a moment he simply floats, catatonic. After all the stress he's been through today, he's as at-risk as he was when he first hatched, and I realize with a sinking feeling that I'm going to have to sleep on the trainer deck to keep an eye on him for the next few days.

With the flames from the ship heating it, the water's unnaturally warm for a night in the middle of the ocean. I let myself hang for a moment, watching as the hull blisters and crackles. We'll be underway soon. If the ship managed to get out a distress call, there'll be aircraft inbound to pick up the pieces.

If the wreck wasn't so … on fire, I could find somewhere to hide. Somewhere the pirates wouldn't realize I'd slipped away, where I could wait for the searchers to come. Provided they're coming.

But the ship is on fire. Just a blazing ruin, a star of heat in the middle of the ocean. The closest thing I had to a chance at escaping is now a smoldering heap of metal, waiting for the sea to consume it.

I could probably construct it as a cosmic sign, a flashing neon banner emblazoned with the words
YOUR LAST CHANCE AT FREEDOM
. I'm not likely to get another.

The trainer deck hatch is still locked, but there are other ways of getting into the
Minnow
, and now that Bao's back in the water, there isn't much more that I can do for him. A righteous anger crackles through me as I swim around the ship's portside and find a series of handholds built into the hull. My grip is unsteady, and several times I plunge back into the water and have to start all over again, but I'm on a mission. I'm not going to let some slippery ladder be the thing that stops me tonight.

When I finally manage to swing myself onto a deck on the ship's lower levels, I can't help but pause. I've never walked these halls without Swift escorting me. Theoretically, there are several people on this ship who want me dead, and now's their perfect chance. I can hear the thunder of celebrating pirates from all the way down here. No one's concerned about the captive Reckoner trainer, and no one would notice if she disappeared.

But I've got business to deal with, so I start off toward the mess, leaving a trail of water in my wake.

I burst into the middle of the celebrations without anyone noticing. The entire crew seems to have packed themselves into the mess hall. There's food flying, stringers injecting, and a thrumming beat blasting from speakers as the pirates relish their victory. When they took down the
Nereid
, the feast was reserved. But this was such a vicious fight that they can't help but go a little wild. I didn't even realize I was starving, but the sight of the fresh food laid out has me salivating within seconds. The air is thick with sweat and the bitter scent of stringlets, which the pirates pass around like candy.

I spot Swift tucked away in a darkened corner with a girl on her lap and Code slumped next to her, nursing a bottle. He perks up when he sees me, one eyebrow arching. “Hey, Swift, your wife's here,” he says as I approach, his words scarcely audible over the din. “And she don't look too pleased.”

Swift startles. Her arms slide from around the girl's waist and she almost stands, then seems to think better of it. “How the hell'd you get here?” she asks.

“Took the long way 'round.”

Her eyes are rimmed with red, and a stringlet needle dangles from her elbow. The girl pushes out of her lap and disappears back into the crowd, leaving Swift looking rumpled and flustered. “You're lucky,” she slurs. “You could have been killed coming up here.”

It's taking everything I've got to keep myself from punching her again. “You want to talk lucky? Your worthless ass is lucky that I got the damn beast on this ship before it took off, that I had the sense to take care of the thing that both our lives depend on after you
locked me on the trainer deck
.”

“Can't hear you,” she mouths. “Too loud.”

I grit my teeth and lean in, propping one foot up on the bench next to Swift as I tower over her. A satisfied smirk curls over her lips, but I can't let that throw me if I'm going to make her understand just how pissed I am at her. “You almost got us both killed,” I start, yelling right into her ear. “If you had just
listened
to me instead of rushing off at Santa Elena's whistle, we could have kept Bao in the water, and you'd still have taken the ship.”

I draw back, searching her for any sign of guilt or worry or any of the things I want her to be feeling, and for a second I think I see it in the glint of her eyes as they wander. Her expression shifts, and I can see her on the cusp of spitting something out, see the gears in her brain churning as she tries to process this information.

And for a split second, just when the light shifts, I stop seeing and start noticing. I notice the muscles in her jaw pulse as she bites her lip, notice the curve of her collarbone where her tank top has shifted, notice the imprint of teeth on her earlobe.

Something lights inside me.

It's not like with the girls I've dated at school—no, she's too much of a disaster for anything like that. She's a
pirate
. But there's a hunger in Swift, and maybe it's just my trainer impulse that makes me want to feed it for a moment.

Then her attention flicks back to my eyes. “When an all-call goes out that we're about to hit a bucket, I'm at the captain's side no matter what. If I'm not there for her, I'm as good as dead anyway. It's your job to save my skin when the beast is concerned.”

Moment's over.

“Also, you're dripping on me,” she adds.

I push away from the bench and catch Code's eye. He sniggers, taking another swig from his bottle. “C'mon, have a stringlet or something. You need to relax, girl.”

“No thanks, my life's a living hell already,” I snap back at him. “Swift, I'm sleeping belowdecks tonight. Bao needs to be observed after today's ordeal. No need to come get me.”

She shrugs, her hungry eyes roaming over the crowd of pirates. “Was probably going to need the room to myself tonight anyway.”

I don't have anything left to say to her after that. I scoop some of the spoils onto a tray and carry it with me down into the bowels of the ship. Since I'm still locked out of the trainer deck, I find the closet full of cleaning supplies where I spent my first hours on this ship. I close the hatch behind me and feel around for the switch. When I flip it, a bare bulb flickers on, filling the closet with a dim, sickly light.

In the thick of the fighting, I thought I'd be too nauseous to eat the food we took today, but the dead aren't using it, and my stomach is growling. I eat with my hands, running my fingers over the tray until I've scooped up every last bite. The meal sits heavy in my stomach, but not on my conscience.

It should horrify me. It doesn't.

16

I get used to sleeping on the trainer deck again. Santa Elena's liable to burst in at any time, but it's the closest thing I have to a space to call my own on the ship, and with a few extra pieces of bedding ferreted out of Swift's laundry carpet, I make the counter comfortable enough that I no longer wake up sore.

Autumn deepens, and in bits and snatches of conversation that I catch from the crew in the mess, I discover that it's the last week of September already. If all had gone right, if the
Nereid
had continued her voyage, I'd be back in school now. I'd be a high school senior, trying to convince my parents that I don't need to go to college, that I can be a trainer full time, that my future is in the industry.

Given the circumstances, I think that future's been dragged out back and shot.

But I've fallen into the
Minnow
's rhythm so easily. I sleep with the trainer deck doors wide open, listening to the sea against the ship's hull as I drift off and rising when the sun crests over the horizon to glare murderously into my eyes. In the hours before Swift comes to drag me to the galley, I hop into the sea with Bao and give him a once-over, and it's in that moment each day that I let myself pretend all of this isn't happening. In the cradle of the NeoPacific, with the
Minnow
to my back, I imagine that I never left home, that this massive, round baby is just one of the new additions to our stock and I've been assigned primary care on him.

I slip a respirator over my nose, dive under his belly, and check for any abnormalities, making sure that his keratin plates are fusing properly as he grows and ensuring that he hasn't run afoul of anything that might hurt him. I make a mental checklist of everything I notice, imagining that when I turn around and swim back, I'll be pulling myself up onto the meridian between the observation bays and logging all of my data in a logbook. But it's always the keel of the
Minnow
that greets me when I leave Bao's side, and I always haul myself up onto the trainer deck, disappointment gnawing at my stomach.

But it might just be hunger, since I don't get to eat in the morning until Swift comes. She's almost always late. On the one hand, I want to accuse her of doing it purposefully, but she always looks so disheveled when she forces her way through the hatch and slumps in the door frame, waiting for me to get my act together. I think she just always sleeps in.

I'd buy her an alarm clock, but I don't exactly have the means.

I start to get more privileges as the days wear on, and finally Santa Elena presents me with a key to the trainer deck that was formerly Hina's. “You've learned the ship well enough that I think it's time you get some say in your protection,” she says when she presses the little sliver of metal into my hands. “But just remember—if you get yourself killed, my girl goes too.”

I want to tell her that Swift's well-being has no bearing on the risks I take, but I know the captain can smell lies.

It's not that I care about Swift; she's one of my captors, one of the people who makes my life a living hell on a daily basis. But I slept next to her for a month and learned all of her little quirks, and when you know a person to that level of detail, you can't get them killed.

Since she doesn't have to escort me to meals anymore, I see less and less of Swift. As one of Santa Elena's lackeys, she's part of a rigorous, strange training program that I observe from afar. Each of the five has their own unique focus, which they learn at an advanced level and help pass down to the others. For Chuck, it's the mechanics of the ship. She spends all day in the engine room, and, from rumors I hear tossed around the deck, she sleeps there most nights rather than in her own bunk. Varma trains with the helmsman, learning the art of maneuvering the ship. It's occasionally his fault that we lurch against a poorly placed wave, and once I almost chew him out when the
Minnow
clips Bao under his command. I'm fairly certain it wasn't an accident. I don't dare speak up, though; anything that calls attention to myself and what I'm doing makes me a target.

Code has the job that I least understand, maintaining the ship's navigation systems. The computers are complex, artful things, and he has an uncanny way with them. Lemon's apprenticed to the lookout, and of the five of them, I'm convinced she's the smartest. She has a strange intuition for the sea and somehow feels the squalls before we ever see them. Of all the lackeys, she seems like the one most on my side—she always passes an alert down to the trainer deck when we've got something bad on the radar, and I've been able to get Bao to dive every time.

Swift's apprenticeship has her maintaining the ship's guns, Phobos and Diemos. When the captain isn't on deck, she climbs up on top of the barrels and suns herself like a big cat.

Bao's training crawls along. With fewer resources and only one trainer, he can't pick up things as quickly as most of the pups in our stock back home, but he gets by. We usually have a robotic sub to tote around beacons for teaching dive commands, but I take its place, the massive LEDs strapped to my chest and a buoyancy vest locked around me to prevent the extra weight from taking me to the depths. I start to introduce more audio signals to the visual training—things that draw Bao's attention to the beacon so that no matter how distracted he might be, the lights still call him, still have him under their command.

By mid-October, he's clearly recovered from the ordeal that left him beached on the trainer deck, and his repertoire has grown to include sustained dives, staying absolutely still, and even basic fetching, which we practice with a life preserver until the day he grows too big to hold it properly in his jaws.

But the harder stage is still to come, and it's something the
Minnow
is woefully unprepared for. Back home, the owners of the Reckoners in our stock buy ships that have been decommissioned: tugs at first, but eventually even aging yachts and warboats. Those skeleton ships become practice targets for baby beasts that need to cut their teeth. First we train them to ram the ships, then to target their guns, Finally, when they're big enough, we teach the Reckoner pups how to crack a tug in half, and everything from then on out is instinct. But I doubt Santa Elena's going to let me loose Bao on one of her precious Splinters, and until I come up with an alternative, his training will stagnate.

But the captain won't notice. Not for a while.

And that's what I'm counting on. It's a risk, but it's worth it if it will keep Bao harmless. It gives me more time to unravel the mystery of his origins and figure out how I'm getting myself off this boat.

All the same, I fear the day the captain finds out what kind of games I'm playing.

We stop at islands from time to time to trade for fuel and food. I'm never allowed to accompany the landing party, of course. I always get stuck in a Splinter with the homing beacon on my back, left out at sea with Swift to watch over me and Bao. Santa Elena wants to keep her pet Reckoner under wraps—show people something they've never seen before, and they're bound to talk. The captain can't afford word getting out about Bao while he's this young, when he relies on the ship to defend him and not the other way around.

So we wait.

This afternoon, the
Minnow
's gone to do business with some Islander millionaire who's staked out turf on a chain of artificial atolls, and so once again Swift and I load into the Splinter and put out around a league away, using the LED beacon to keep Bao in place as the ship jets off to the welcoming dock. Bao gets antsy the second the
Minnow
leaves his eyeline, his imprinting behavior taking over, but the lights and noise from the beacon keep him rooted next to us, bobbing at the surface with his blowholes flaring in and out.

I climb out of the Splinter and drop into the sea, leaving Swift to twiddle her thumbs and fiddle with the controls. She's not too happy about this either. She hasn't gotten shore leave since I got on the boat, and as much as she disparages people who live on dry land, she's itching for a chance to get away from the
Minnow
for a bit. “Can't wait for the day when we can just roll into port with this guy,” she grumbles, rolling her head back. Her eyes are hidden behind a pair of mirrored aviators.

“I'd say the same, but the captain would probably just lock me in a closet on days like that,” I shoot back as I climb onto Bao's back. His keratin plates flex beneath my feet as I scramble to the ridge above his head, where he's grown accustomed to me sitting. The Reckoner pup makes an exasperated noise, but he doesn't shy under my weight.

Swift's grown a little colder after our encounter the night that the pirates took down that other ship. She doesn't try to joke around with me, doesn't try to participate in Bao's training or anything. I shouldn't be too bothered, but before that day it felt like at least I had an ally on this boat. Now I have nothing.

Well, I have a fat baby sea monster. But Bao doesn't tell jokes, and somehow I need that.

I hate how I need that.

“How heavy is he?” Swift asks.

I want to shoot back “Hell if I know,” but that's not constructive—it's not what she's looking for. I shrug, glancing over my shoulder at Bao's length. Reckoners are designed to mature unnaturally fast so they'll be ready to serve as soon as possible. Bao's growth has accelerated so quickly over the past few weeks that he's now large enough to take down a neocete. He never finishes his meals, though, and often ends up following the
Minnow
, dragging a carcass behind him like a pull toy. It's disgusting, but also sort of adorable.

“Maybe fifty tons?” I hazard. It's difficult to judge by sight, but he's around the length of a semi truck. “He's been gaining weight like crazy, now that he's got neocetes in his diet.”

Swift nods, then lets her head roll back against the headrest, her fingers tightening on the controls. “I remember someone telling me that neocetes are just fleshdumps for Reckoners to eat.”

“I mean, they're genetically engineered, just like the beasts. They're meant to be extreme omnivores so they'll survive in any climate, and they have to be slow-swimming enough that pretty much any type of Reckoner can take them down.”

She lets out a low scoff. “That's super messed up.”

“You ever had beef?” I counter. “Same thing, except meat cattle live in packed conditions and get slaughtered en masse. At least the neocetes live a natural life.”

Swift pauses, considering the perspective like she's testing the taste of it on her tongue. “I just like neocetes. Like 'em lots more than cows, that's for certain.”

“They're smarter than cows. They're in a similar class with most toothed whales. Orcas, dolphins, you know. Social creatures.”

“Yeah, that's why I like 'em. Stop making me sympathize with them—you're just making it worse,” she grumbles.

I laugh. It's pure nature that Reckoners eat neocetes. If we hadn't created a prey animal to feed them, they'd have devastated the NeoPacific's biosystem within months of the first beasts' creation. We gave the Reckoners an easy target, and in the process spared pretty much every other animal in the ocean. It's one of the reasons that the IGEOC regulations exist. Only a certain number of Reckoners can exist at a time without depleting the NeoPacific's stock.

Of course, Bao throws a wrench in that plan.

Unregulated Reckoners aren't supposed to happen. If Bao's the only one, it might be okay, but if a whole ocean of pirate-grown Reckoner pups crops up, it will wreck the biosystem. I don't know what circumstances led to Bao being in Santa Elena's possession, but whatever they were, they were orchestrated perfectly. He hasn't shown any sign of growth defects—in fact, he's grown far faster than any Reckoner I've ever raised. He had to have been created in a lab at some stable, because no independent lab without IGEOC support could produce a beast so perfectly made. He came out of the purse with no obvious defects, so whatever journey brought him from that lab to these circumstances had to have been carried out flawlessly.

Could he be stolen property? I've never heard of a stable reporting theft of a pup, but then again, the IGEOC would shut down any stable that admitted to theft of their stock. Maybe someone's covering for a missing pup, reporting him as unviable on paper. It'd certainly explain how he showed up out of nowhere. But the infiltration of a Reckoner facility would involve an elaborate heist, not just the brute force I've seen the
Minnow
display. Maybe Santa Elena hired out some independent contractors to pull it off.

I almost ask Swift. When I glance up at her, the words building in my throat, her gaze is fixed on the distant horizon. Not toward the shore where the ship's disappeared to, but somewhere farther than that, out on the open sea. Her lips are set in a bitter line.

Better not to show my hand now. Better to let her dwell on whatever it is that has her thoughts.

We wait out the rest of the afternoon, me on Bao's back and Swift in the Splinter, until the
Minnow
appears on the horizon again. I stay on the pup while Swift jets back toward the ship, but Bao can't resist his imprinting. He swims after her, nose pointed directly at the boat he's come to identify as his home and charge. I watch from his back as claws on tethers descend from the ship, scooping the Splinter back up into its resting place. Swift gets out to meet Code and Chuck, who wait for her on the deck with packages in hand. She snatches the goods roughly from their grasps, and something clenches inside me as she moves out of sight.