Page 123 of Ship of Smoke and Steel

“Some good I did as inspiration,” I say, after a while. “I basically told them we were all probably going to die.”

“I don’t think you said ‘probably,’” Meroe says, with a slight smile. “And you were honest with them. I think it’s what they needed.”

“I wasn’t, though.”

“About the Captain?” She gives a shrug, though I can see it troubles her, too. “Sometimes there’s value in a myth.”

“A lie, you mean.”

“It’s not the same thing, exactly.”

I don’t quite get it, but I don’t want to argue. The streets are empty of vendors and hawkers, the stalls crushed or ransacked in the aftermath. Dead crabs lie here and there, scorched by Myrkai fire or cut to pieces.

“What happened to Aifin and the others?” I ask, ashamed I hadn’t thought of it before now. Some pack leader I am.

“They’re all right,” Meroe says. “Aifin has been helping with my scavenging work. Thora and Jack are with Zarun at the walls.”

“Oh. That’s … good.” In truth, I feel numb, distant. “When are we leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning,” Meroe says. There’s a slight tremble in her voice. “I wish we could do more to prepare, but if the crabs keeping coming…” She trails off.

“You’ve done everything you can,” I say, quietly. “I don’t think anyone could have done better.”

“It’s not enough,” she says.

It will never be enough. Not for her. That’s what makes me want to wrap myself around her and keep her safe from the world. But Meroe is not like Tori, to be kept in blissful ignorance of the blood at the foundation of her fake, beautiful life. She understands.

She doesn’t want me to keep her safe. She just wants me to help, to try to be as good as she is.

Rotting Blessed, I want to kiss her.

25

By morning, there’s still not enough water, not enough food, not enough medicines or boots. But we’re leaving anyway, because there’s no time left.

The beginning is the trickiest part, a classic disengagement in the face of the enemy in a manner (Meroe tells me) straight out of Gero’s Campaigns. Everyone gathers together in the shadow of the First Tower, except for the bare minimum of fighting crew needed to hold the walls. Seven or eight hundred people, battered and dirty already, some of them injured. They pick up improvised packs, filled with a little bit of food, a little spare clothing, and as much water as they can carry and still stagger.

Zarun and Karakoa are still leading the defense, so Shiara and the Scholar assist Meroe in getting the column moving. Pack leaders fan out, taking to the edges of the crowd, making sure no one shirks their burden or gets left behind. Carts would make this easier, even without horses to pull them, but carts would never manage the spiral steps. So everything has to go on someone’s back, or not at all.

The youngest scavengers act as runners, darting off into the abandoned city to get messages to the walls. As the column moves off, heading away from the First Tower toward the Center, the fighting packs have to fall back to join it, but not so quickly that we all drown in a horde of crabs. It’s a delicate piece of timing, and I feel completely useless, walking next to Meroe and trying to ignore the pain of my wounds. She listens to returning messengers and gives them answers, telling pack leaders to move in ten minutes, or twenty, or to hold out for more instructions.

She manages it, somehow. The hunting packs come hurrying back to join the column, exhausted and bloodstained. I catch sight of Jack, still somehow with a spring in her step, and she gives me a jaunty wave as she bounces beside Thora. Meroe assembles them into a rear guard, protecting the column as it winds its way through the Upper Stations.

The crabs are coming. We’ve blocked off the stairs down to the Middle Deck and the Drips, but once the packs retreat from the walls there’s nothing to stop the monsters from wandering into the city. A few of them charge the rear guard, where Myrkai fire and Tartak force take them apart. I can see blueshells clinging to the First Tower, brightly colored in a shaft of sunlight, and a swarm of scuttlers working its way over Crossroads.

I don’t have to look at Meroe to know what she’s thinking. Not everyone joined the column. A handful were too hurt to walk; Sister Cadua had left each of them with a knife, for the crabs or for themselves. More had simply refused to leave, including several of the Butcher’s old packs. They’d holed up in the towers, or down in the Drips, determined to fight. Watching the crabs swarm across the city, I don’t think anyone has any illusions that we’ll be seeing them again.

Eventually, the head of the column reaches the barricaded door that marks the boundary between the Stern and the Center. Here the crew contracts to a dense huddle, reorganizing. I see Zarun and Karakoa for the first time since the Ring, particolored with the gore of a dozen types of monster. The two of them and the strongest of the hunting packs wait while we dismantle the barricade. I stand with Meroe, Shiara, and the Scholar by the door, listening to the sound of fighting behind us. The crabs are silent, as always. It’s the humans who blast them with fire, throw them against the deck with a clatter, or scream in agony.

Two Tartak adepts from Karakoa’s clade pull scrap metal out of the way, straining visibly as they wrap the barrier in blue light. As soon as there’s a clear space, crabs start to squirm through. Scuttlers, at first, and other small monsters that the hunters spear or fry. Then, once the gates open, larger beasts. A hammerhead, a pair of blueshells, even a shaggy. Others I don’t recognize.

I’d never seen a real hunting pack take on a crab. It makes me realize how makeshift Pack Nine’s efforts had always been, how much I’d relied on my own powers to handle things. Even tired, the packs operate with efficient teamwork, Tartak bindings holding their targets in place long enough for Myrkai fire to blast through their armor.

In places there’s a flare of green, a Melos blade, but not often. I’d always known Melos is one of the less common Wells, but I’d never really appreciated the difference it made, how it set me apart. Zarun and Karakoa are the only full-fledged Melos adepts apart from myself. They stride through the fight like glowing green gods, rending and breaking.

Eventually, the mass of crabs on the other side of the door thins out. The packs advance, pushing onto the long bridge that arcs into the great void of the Center, fighting their way toward the first of the big support towers. We follow in their wake, through a horrible landscape of twisted flesh and scorched chitin.

Most of the mangled pieces lying around us belong to crabs, but not all. A young man lies impaled on a blueshell’s claw, which in turn has been severed at one of its armored joints. The top half of a pretty young woman lies faceup, wearing an expression of blank surprise, her body below the hips trailing off into a red smear. I recognize Attoka, one of Zarun’s pack leaders, only by her white-blond hair; the rest of her is so tangled with the corpse of a many-limbed crab that I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.