I DIED ONCE AND I haven’t been able to do it again since.
I was thirteen at the time, or some other number just as lucky. About a mile out from the Midasan shore, there’s a lighthouse on a small stretch of floating meadow. The sea wardens use it as a vantage point, while my friends and I used it to prove our bravery. The idea was to swim the mile, touch the soaking tufts of grass, and stand on top like the proud victor.
The reality was not drowning.
Nobody ever made the swim, because anybody stupid enough to consider it was too young, and anyone old enough had learned the usefulness of boats. But the fact that nobody had done it – that if I could, I’d be the first – only made the idea more appealing. And the roar of my brain begging me not to die turned to a quiet whisper.
I made it to the lighthouse, but I didn’t have the strength to pull myself up. I did, however, have the strength to scream before my mouth filled with water and I let the gold wash me away.
I’m not sure how long I was dead, because my father refuses to speak of such things and I never asked my mother. It felt like an eternity. After, the world must have felt particularly sorry for me, because of all the crazy, deadly things I’ve done since – which far outweigh a mile-long swim – I’m still alive. Untouched by another brush of mortality. Made invincible, somehow, by that first fatality.
The moment the bullet whizzes through the air and I feel Lira’s cold hands at my back pushing me to the ground, I’m angry at that. At my invincibility. My flair for survival while those around me continue dying.
“No!” Madrid screams, pitching forward.
She cracks her boot against Rycroft’s chin and sends teeth in so many directions, I can’t focus. Kye grabs her by the waist, holding desperately as she tries to tear herself from his grasp and finish off the pirate. The one who stole her captain. Who may or may not have sold her into slavery. Who just shot a girl right in front of her.
Madrid screams and curses, while Lira makes no sound at all.
She frowns, which seems louder, and presses her hand to the hole in her side. Her palm comes away wet and shaking.
She looks down at the blood. “It doesn’t burn,” she says, and then buckles to the floor.
I rush to her, skidding underneath her frail body before it cracks onto the wood. I catch her head in my hands and she lets out a choked sound. There’s blood. Too much blood. Every time I blink, it seems to pool farther and farther until the entire right side of her dress is soaked through.
I lay my hand on her rib and press down. She’s right: it’s not warm. Lira’s blood is like melted ice running between my fingers. The harder I press, the more she shudders. Convulsing as I try to stop any more of the cold seeping from her.
“Lira,” I say, the word more like a plea than a name. “You’re not going to die.”
I resist looking at the wound again. Not wanting to, for fear that she might actually die and my last words to her might be a lie and what a jackass thing that would be.
“I know,” Lira says. Her voice is steadier than mine, like the pain is nothing. Or at least, it’s something less than she’s felt before. “I’ve still got a mountain to climb.”
Her head lolls a bit and I steady my hand, propping her up. If she loses consciousness now, there’s no knowing if she’ll wake up.
“This evens the score, you know,” I say. “But I’m still a point up.”
Lira shifts. “Quick,” she says. My fingers are webbed by her blood, shirttails damp against my hip. “Take this to make up for it.”
She lifts a shaking arm and a small pendant falls from her hand to mine. Bluer than her eyes and far too delicate to hold so much power. The Págese necklace.
She got it.
I laugh and consider what smart comment I could make – telling her that it’s not really my style, or that maybe I already have it in gold – but then Lira’s eyes quiver back and there doesn’t seem to be much point in being funny if she isn’t the one to hear it.
“Captain!” Madrid yells, Kye’s hands still clinched to her waist. “She needs a medic.”
Torik shadows over me, squeezing my shoulder with his mighty hands and bringing me back to reality. I swallow. Nod. Stand with Lira far too light in my arms. Run from the dregs of Rycroft’s shitty ship, leaving a trail of blood in my wake.
“Get moving!” I shout, once I step foot back onto the Saad. “And blow that ship to hell in our backwash.”
The Saad lurches and my crew jumps into anarchy. They run from one end of the deck to the other, pulling the lines from their winches and recleating the boom. Trimming sails and scanning for the wind. I cleave forward, pushing past the ones who stop dead, noticing the blood-soaked girl in my arms and offering their hand.
“Elian,” Kye says. “You’re injured. Let me carry her.”
I ignore him and turn to Torik. His face is wretched as he stares down at Lira. She may not have been one of us before, but dying in the line of duty has a way of securing people’s loyalty.
“Make sure the medic is ready,” I say, and my first mate nods.
Rycroft is slung carelessly over his shoulder, his blood dripping down Torik’s back. He’s alive, but barely, and if I get my hands on him, then he won’t stay that way for long. With Lira still limp in my arms, I yell for Torik to get a medic and he throws Rycroft to the floor without hesitation before rushing belowdecks.
Really, we don’t have a medic, but my assistant engineer traveled with a Plásmatash circus and that’s close enough. As I carry Lira toward him, through the twists and tunnels of my ship, I’m caught off guard by the notion that out of all the princes and pirates and killers and convicts, a small boy from a circus is the only one who can help. It seems funny, and I think how Lira might laugh, knowing that a rookie engineer will be stitching her skin back together. What biting comment she would come back with and how it would sink into me like a perfectly wonderful kind of poison. Like a bullet.
I push my way into the cramped room, Kye rushing in behind me. The would-be medic gestures to a table in the middle of the engineering room. “Put her down there,” he says in a panicked breath. “And open her dress.”
I do as he says and grab my knife. The strange thing is that at first I don’t think I can see any more blood gushing from the wound – it seems to all be on her dress and on me – and then when I do see blood, it doesn’t seem like enough. Or perhaps it’s all already come out. Maybe there just isn’t any left.
“Gods.” Kye recoils as I slash open Lira’s dress. “Is she going to live?”
“Do you care?” I snap back.
It isn’t his fault, but yelling at Kye feels a little like yelling at myself, and I need to be yelled at right now. Because this is on me. If Lira dies, then it’s on me.
I can’t believe you came back for me.
But I left her first.
“I don’t want her to die, Elian.” Kye squeezes my arm, keeping me steady as the fraying parts inside threaten to dismantle me. “I never did. Besides” – Kye shoves a hand into his pocket and sighs through the next words – “she protected you when I couldn’t.”
“It looks like a clean shot,” the medic says, and I turn, the irony of it gnawing at me. It was a dirty shot, through and through.
“It just scraped her ribs,” he says. “I have to check no organs were damaged though.” He points a gloved finger at Kye. “Don’t just stand there shadowing my light. Get me some towels.”
Kye doesn’t bristle at the order, or argue that we should let Lira die to be sure she can’t betray us. He turns, hurries from the room, and doesn’t even waste the time to glare properly.
“She didn’t nick anything important,” the medic says.
He phrases the last part as an afterthought, but when he turns to me, his eyes are expectant.
“I’m not sure,” I tell him. “There was a lot of blood.”
He shrugs and grabs an instrument that does not look entirely legitimate from a nearby toolbox. “Haven’t met an engine I couldn’t fix yet,” he says. “The human body’s just another machine.” He looks at me with assuring eyes. “I saved a monkey with a knife wound to the ribs once. There was an accident with a balloon bursting. It’s not that different.”
I think this is supposed to be reassuring, so I nod just as Kye bursts back into the room with a handful of fresh towels. After, we’re both ushered back out the way we came, and I don’t argue. I’m glad to be sent away so the medic can work, free from staring at Lira’s limp body and thinking about how I’ve never seen her look so vulnerable. So capable of being finite.
I don’t give myself a moment to breathe before I walk back onto the deck and toward Rycroft’s body. My crew flares their nostrils, waiting to be let loose. Beside me, I sense the rigid way Kye stands. Barely able to restrain himself and hoping desperately I don’t ask him to restrain the others. That’s the thing about my crew. They don’t need to be friends. They don’t even need to like one another. Being on the Saad is the same as being family, and by saving me, Lira has proven something to Kye. I locked her in a cage and made her barter her way onto my ship, and she saved me all the same, believing that it was the right choice. A life for a life. Trust for trust.
Tallis Rycroft stares at me and he’s not alive enough to make it look menacing. His left eye is closed, a lump stretching out like a mountaintop, and the wounds on his face make his lips indistinguishable. The hole in his stomach bleeds on.
“What are you going to do with him?” Kye asks. His voice is not altogether calm, something unbalanced on those usually carefree tones. He wants revenge as much as I do. And not just for taking his captain, but for the broken girl lying in the dregs of our ship.
“I don’t know.”
Madrid walks a small pocketknife between her fingers. When it nicks her, she lets the blood drip onto Rycroft’s injured leg. “He doesn’t deserve to live,” she says. “You don’t have to lie to us.”
One of Rycroft’s eyes blinks, slowly, as he comprehends the storm he has created. The young prince in me wants to feel sorry for him, but I keep looking at the half-moons and long, serrated lines that crease into his biceps. Wounds made trying to fend him off. Nail marks so similar to the ones along my own chest.
I hesitate, caught off guard as a distorted image of the Princes’ Bane flashes across my mind. She could have snapped my neck or done any manner of things to disable me, but she let her claws tear slowly through my chest instead. That was the thing about sirens. They always went straight for the heart.
“Captain,” Madrid says, and I blink away the image.
“I’m going to find some shark-infested waters,” I tell her, regaining my composure. “And then drop his favorite appendage in.”
There is a phlegmatic silence, while everyone within earshot considers those words. Rycroft half-blinks again.
“Next time,” Kye says, clearing his throat, “lie to us.”
“What about Lira?” Madrid asks.
I shrug. “Depends on how pleasant she is when she wakes up.”
“I meant,” she says, “is she really going to be okay?”
I stare down at Rycroft, and it takes every scrap of strength I have to smile. “My crew is not so easily killed.”
It’s a bullshit line, but I need everyone to believe it. I need to believe it myself. I picture Lira, and it’s like I can feel her cold blood dripping through my hands like melted ice. If she dies, then my plan and this entire mission dies with her. More than anything, I’m counting the minutes until our rookie engineer emerges and tells me that everything is fine. That Lira didn’t die for me and that she can still offer the last piece of the puzzle to free the Crystal of Keto from its cage.
That maybe – just maybe – I don’t need to rip Rycroft into any more pieces.