The crescent moon taunts me with its smile. Tries to pull a different sort of hurt forth.
“You reckon watching her family get eaten alive messed with her head?”
Screech.
Blood dribbles from my nose to my chin, then drips.
Drips.
Drips.
“Perhaps. I don’t know. Something about it doesn’t add up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I look in her fucking eyes and I don’t see a survivor. I see guilt and ghosts and my own death flying at me. I think she’s cursed. I think her family learned that the hard way and paid the ultimate price.”
Guilt and ghosts …
Swallowing, I close my eyes and pretend I’m drenched in sunlight, folded on a windowsill in Stony Stem—not tucked in the crow’s nest halfway up the aftermast, shackled by a bold blue cupla and feasting on my pain. Molding it into a different sort of Safety Line.
A numb shield for my bruised and battered heart.
Soft light spills through the wide gaps between the rails—a warm kiss to the cheek that seeps into my pores and kindles my blood. I squint across the sea that looks like a stretch of undulating rose petals.
Morning.
I’ve been scratching swirls and jagged bends into the wooden floorboards by lantern light, adding to my busy mural for so long I barely registered the darkness lifting.
I wrap my diamond pickaxe with a small piece of cloth and tuck it in my back pocket, turning the dial on my lantern hanging off the balustrade. Stretching my back and arms, I push my legs through the rails and reach my toes toward the sun—imagining them dug deep into grass or sand or soil while warmth paints the bare pads of my feet.
I miss plucking round stones off the beach while Kai frolics in the bay. I miss the steady ground and the morning breeze rich with the smell of dead leaves and dew-dappled moss.
Forcing my legs to recoil, I roll onto all fours.
Shuffling around the thick, wooden post pierced through the center of the nest, I crouch beside the bucket tied to a makeshift pulley and slosh a cloth through the water, wringing it out over the soil-stuffed jars tied to the mast, feeding my clippings a few drops of treasured water.
Thinking about my last-minute balcony dash around Stony Stem—wielding a tiny wooden dagger to cut small branches off my favorite plants—I almost smile. Wisteria, lemon tree, various roses … they all found lodgings in my sack with a few jars of soil.
Small snippets of home.
Sponging my face and behind my neck, I steal peeks at the bleary-eyed sailor climbing the central mast to assume his daytime shift in the nest. Jerid, I think. The only one who makes a concerted effort to keep his back to me as much as possible.
I bag my blanket, noticing three dark shadows circling just below the surface of the ship’s wake. At least until the cook tips a bucket of fish frames and sloppy innards overboard.
But it’s not the bones and the guts they’re after. It’s the seagulls that swoop down from their midair coast, risking it all for a scrap of offal—some falling victim to the lunging sharks that erupt from the water with cranked maws and fierce, thrashing bodies. They chomp on their feathery prey so fast there’s barely a fluttered wrestle.
Kai used to tell me sharks prefer warm water. Made me promise not to go swimming in Bitten Bay without him during the summer.
Now I understand.
The farther south we’ve sailed, the more turquoise the water’s become, and the more skulking shadows drift through it at all hours of the day.
The bell attached to my bucket line jingles—loud and crisp.
Tucking a length of hair behind my ear, I lean forward and pry the metal loop from the divot in the floor, heaving the hatch open. I peer down the ladder at the peppering of sun-stained men slugging away at their chores, my stare drawn to the boy standing at the base of my mast over thirty feet down.
His head is tipped, heaped plate in one hand, the other shielding his eyes from the morning glare while he looks at me.
