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“Quiet,” my father barks out before turning to me. “Where’s the treasure, Alosa?”
“I didn’t find it.”
My father draws his pistol and points it at me. I stare at it, unblinking.
“I don’t care what you do to me.”
“I thought not,” he says, and rotates his arm slightly to the right, to one of the other cells.
Before I can scream, he pulls the trigger. Niridia’s leg buckles, forcing her to the ground, blood seeping through a hole in the leggings over her knee.
I stare at the red spreading across the floor, trying to make sense of it, pressing myself against my father’s men to reach her.
Another shot fires.
My gaze snaps back up to my father. He has out a new pistol, smoke coalescing from it. Reona, one of my riggers, jerks to the right and falls.
Father pulls out a third pistol.
“Father, stop it!”
He ignores me. A change is coming over him. Maiming them isn’t enough now. He’s angrier with me than I’ve ever seen him. I know that the next shot will claim a life.
“Please!” I shout as I try throwing my father’s men off me. There are too many of them.
It’s Deros who takes the shot through the heart. Deros who sinks to the ground with lifeless eyes. Deros who I’ll never see again.
I want to run until my legs fail me. Yell until my voice runs dry. Pound at my father’s head until it flattens into a puddle on the ground.
But none of those things would change the fact that he’s gone.
“You cannot get to the treasure from the island!” I scream at him. “It’s under the water, where only sirens can reach it.”
The fourth pistol he’d drawn lowers slightly. “How do you know this?”
I can barely see through the water that’s gathered at my eyes, but I somehow manage a quick lie. “I’m unaffected by the siren’s song, but I still hear it. They sing about it. I heard them singing as they counted their coins and moved about under the water. The only way to that treasure is below the surface.”
Father is silent. I can tell he thinks over the words very carefully, deciding whether or not to believe them. I’m desperate for him to believe the lie.
“Then we’ll have to deal with the beasts first,” he says, “before we go exploring underwater with our diving bell.”
“No!”
“You care what happens to the sirens now? Good. You can watch from the porthole.” He grabs me by the arm, and it takes him and three others to restrain me, but I don’t go without a fight. I get a good kick in between the legs of one of the pirates, then take a fist to my jaw. My nails rake down the face of another man.
In the end, they wrestle me into my own cushioned cell. The one with a tiny porthole, too small to shimmy through, were I to knock out the glass.
“You don’t have a say anymore,” Father says. “You’re going to stay locked up until you’ve learned your lesson and watched every member of your crew suffer and die.”
I scream at him, rattle the bars, but I know there is no escapingfrom these cells. They were builtforme, so I could stock up my abilities. I know there is no getting out of them.
No running to my bleeding crew members who are still alive. Mandsy is already at Niridia’s side to help her. She shouts orders to Sorinda, who is in the cell with Reona, trying to staunch the bleeding wound.
I can’t even warn the sirens about what’s coming for them. They are too far away for me to sing to them. Were I under the water, I could do it, but like this, trapped above it—I’m useless.
Father exits the brig, satisfied by my temporary punishment. He leaves Tylon and several of his men to guard us, now that my ship is his. As if. Not while I draw breath. TheAva-leeismine.
Tylon offers me several sneering, preening looks before saying, “Thank you, Alosa,” much too loudly with the wax in his ears. Only when he’s satisfied with his own gloating does he leave me and my crew belowdecks.
