Page 35 of Ship of Smoke and Steel

Meroe touches his arm, lightly, and he looks up at her. I almost laugh out loud at the puppy-dog devotion in his eyes. He’s fallen for her, hard.

“I’ll do it,” he says. “I don’t know how well it will work, but I’ll do it.”

“That’s the spirit, Coward,” Ahdron says.

I drift over to Meroe and lower my voice. “What’d you tell him?”

“Just that I needed his help,” she says. “I talked to him instead of threatening him. It wasn’t difficult.”

“And you think he’ll hold up?”

“He gave me his word.”

“Sure, because he wants you to rut him.”

“He doesn’t.…” She hesitates, though if she’s blushing her dark skin makes it invisible. “All right, maybe he does. But still I think he’ll try to help.”

“Boys have done stupider things for a pretty girl.”

Meroe snorts. “You were the one saying you’d be happy to sleep with Zarun if it got you what you wanted.”

“If it got me what I wanted. He’s not just a boy with a pretty face.”

“Not just a boy with a pretty face. But he does have a pretty face.”

I glance at her, and there’s a faint, mischievous smile on her lips. I smile a little, too. Trading barbs, in a strange way, makes me feel closer to her than anything else. It reminds me of Hagan and Shiro, standing on the street corner and swapping insults and improbable exploits.

“What about the other boy?” she says. “The Moron.”

“Not to my taste.”

She rolls her eyes. “No, I mean, can he help?”

“According to Ahdron, he never talks and doesn’t seem to understand anything anyone says to him.”

“Maybe he doesn’t speak Imperial or Jyashtani.”

“He looks Jyashtani.”

“There are a lot of languages in Jyashtan,” Meroe says. “Especially in the south.”

“You’d think he’d have said something, then, even if no one could understand him.”

“I wonder if anyone’s tried.”

Her thoughts on the matter are interrupted by the clang of the cell door opening. Haia is waiting for us on the other side with a mocking grin.

“All right, Pack Nine,” she says. “Time to go down into the dark again.”

9

When Ahdron warns me about rattlers, I picture some kind of snake. This turns out to be almost completely wrong, and I find myself wishing he’d been a little more descriptive.

These rattlers are spherical creatures a bit larger than my head, looking like nothing so much as a ball of rust-red needles. They move by rolling across the metal deck, their spines making a distinctive rattle-click sound. Two fleshy pink “feet” like stubby tentacles emerge from either end to give them periodic kicks, enabling them to move at high speed.

And, I discover, to jump several feet off the ground with unexpected force. Three of the creatures had careened into the circle of light shed by our torches, then come at us all together. I step toward them, putting myself in front of the others as I ignite my blades. A blast of flame whips past my shoulder, blowing one of the rattlers into a spray of smoking fragments, but the other two keep coming. I get ready to slash the leading one in half, winding up and ready to swing, when the damn thing springs into the air with a quick thump of its foot against the deck. I try to get my other blade around in time but don’t make it, and it slams into my chest. Melos armor crackles, keeping the needles from my skin, and a wave of brutal heat rolls across me. The impact sends me reeling backward, and the rattler bounces away. It does a quick roll on the deck and starts coming back at us, ready for more.

There’s a scream from behind me. It’s Berun, who’s down on his knees, clutching at his arm. The rattler that hit him skids to a halt farther on, and another bolt from Ahdron intercepts it and blows it to bits. I return my attention to the creature that bounced off me, which has gotten back up to speed for another try. Now that I’m expecting the jump, I’m ready for it, and my blade is in just the right place to slash the thing clean in half. The two pieces thump to the deck, oozing watery fluid and crackling briefly with green lightning.