Page 81 of Ship of Smoke and Steel

He nods, takes the slate, and scribbles in a rough but readable hand: “M. tells me about you. Says you are leader of…”

He taps the chalk against the slate, thinking. I take it back and write: “Pack. Like wolves.”

“Pack,” he writes. “Yes. To fight monsters.”

I wipe the slate clean with my sleeve and start again. “Yes. We fight monsters, to get food to eat.”

“I will fight,” he writes, smudging the letters with his eagerness.

“Before, when Ahdron was leader, you didn’t fight.”

He taps the word “Ahdron” and shakes his head. I gesture, indicating a tall young man, and eventually he gets the idea. He writes: “Did not understand. So long without understanding. No one reads my words here. Could not read yours.”

“You could have made us understand, couldn’t you?” I gesture at my tongue and my ears, to demonstrate.

He gives an uncomfortable shrug. “Tried. Others didn’t listen. Hurt me. Stopped trying.” He hesitates, then adds: “Thought I had died, and in hell.”

“May I?” Meroe says. When I hand her the chalk, she writes: “Who taught you to read your language? How did you get here?”

Aifin wipes the slate again. “Father taught me. Loved me, even though broken.” He taps his throat. “But Father died. Uncle wants rid of useless mouth. Sell to slaver for monster ship.”

So many on Soliton have some variant of the same story. For all her cruelty, what the Butcher told Meroe wasn’t wrong.

“We’ll practice sometime soon,” I write. “So you can show me what you can do.”

Aifin nods enthusiastically. He holds up one hand, and for a moment it’s outlined in golden light, his fingers moving so fast they’re a blur.

“Rhema,” I say aloud, surprised. The Well of Speed is relatively rare. Picking up the slate again, I write: “That will be useful.”

Aifin nods again. A curtain shuffles in the back, and Jack emerges with a flourish. “Dinnertime! Are you lot coming to the Crossroads?”

“Isoka and I will,” Meroe says, before I can say anything. She takes the chalk and puts the question to Aifin, who shakes his head. “And Berun is still shopping.”

“Thora is still snoring, so the three of us will have to make do.” Jack strikes a heroic pose, like an explorer pointing the way. “Onward!”

I don’t grumble. But Meroe has become adept at reading my expressions, and she rolls her eyes at me as we follow Jack down the corridor.

“Eating dinner in public is hardly torture,” she says. “It’s good to get to know people.”

“Getting to know people is your department. I handle cutting them into pieces, remember?”

“You’re the pack leader. And the Deepwalker. Like it or not, that means you’ve got a role to play.”

I make a face, but the truth is this argument is mostly for show. Meroe makes much of the small talk anyway, so all I have to do is nod along. And the food is usually better, though you never quite know what you’re going to get.

I have to admit, as we emerge from the tower and start threading our way through the market, that living on Soliton is starting to feel almost normal. The mix of people from every country on the planet no longer seems odd; when I get back to Kahnzoka, it will be strange to be surrounded by so many Imperials. I’ve gotten used to the haphazard clothes, the weird mix of primitive makeshift tools and luxury goods from the scavengers. I’m even coming to appreciate the differences between breeds of mushrooms, and know where the best meat comes off a crab.

I’m losing my edge, in short. Getting comfortable. At night I close my eyes, listening to Meroe’s soft breathing, and try to think about Tori. I try to picture what Naga will do to her if I don’t return.

It should be all I think about. But I keep getting distracted. Just now, I’m watching the way Meroe’s hair bounces as she walks, the sway of her hips.

Rot, rot, rot. Stay focused, Isoka.

When I first visited the Crossroads, it seemed like chaos. Now that I know what to look for, it’s still chaos, but organized chaos, if that makes any sense. The tables are roughly divided into clades, with pack leaders and important clade members drifting toward the center, and the rest surrounding them. There are no emblems for the clades, no explicit symbols, but it’s not hard to tell who’s who after a while. The Butcher’s people, for example, wear more trophies than anyone else, forever covering even their everyday clothes with bits of crab shell. Karakoa’s fighters wear plain, unadorned clothing, following the example set by their leader, whereas both men and women in Shiara’s clade seem to have some kind of competition to see who can wear the most jewelry.

Not everyone in Zarun’s clade dresses as gaudily as Zarun, but enough try to emulate him that a gathering of his servants is easy to pick out. My status as pack leader and Deepwalker gets us a place at the inner table, and a few others even push out of the way to make room. Jack seats herself at my left hand, Meroe at my right. One of the Crossroads’ young servers quickly comes over to offer us drinks, and I raise a mug in greeting, receiving nods from around the table.

At Meroe’s prodding, I’ve come to recognize a few of them. Pack Seventeen’s Attoka, an Imperial girl with a shock of bleached-white hair, chats with the somber Marcius, the southerner head of Pack Eleven. Sketor, a tall but skeletally thin iceling boy who trades in weapons, flirts with a trio of young men from one of the hunting packs. There’s a general buzz of conversation, and I’m pleased to see that the others are getting used to me, too. The first few times we joined the group, I spent the whole time fielding questions about the Deeps, none of which I particularly wanted to answer.