Scavenge the Stars Read online

Cayo inclined his head to the duchess. “It was quite busy, Your Grace. My father has many ships in his employ, as I’m sure you know. Overseeing them is no small feat.”

  He risked a glance at his father, who dipped his chin slightly. Good.

  “And what exactly is it you do to oversee them?” the duchess asked, swirling her wine with a practiced hand.

  It was an innocent enough question, but he knew better. This was a test. So Cayo carefully explained the process of unloading and sorting inventory, as well as all the numbers involved in bookkeeping. Soria, who had been in quiet conversation with Gen, fell silent at his side, but she wasn’t quite listening to him. She was mostly staring at her plate, their soup exchanged for small game hens cooked with rosemary and honey and topped with a hibiscus sauce.

  “Good thing you have a young buck like this to help out at the docks,” the duke said with a low laugh. “I imagine it’s difficult to spend all day in the sun at your age, Kamon.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Better that than wandering the city like a scoundrel,” the duchess muttered into her wineglass.

  Cayo tensed. He felt his father tense as well. Soria kept her head down, picking at her hen.

  The duke laughed that low laugh again. “I believe what my wife is saying is that it’s good for young Lord Mercado to be in an honest line of work.”

  “I quite agree,” said Kamon, though his voice was strained.

  Cayo tightened his hold on his fork but said nothing. Under the table, Soria found his other hand and squeezed. Her skin was clammy with nerves.

  When dessert finally came—coconut and brown-sugar rice cakes with a pineapple coulis—one of the kitchen staff came to ask Kamon to select the after-dinner port. Panic swept over Cayo when his father left. The Hizons were eyeing him like two vultures about to pounce on the same scrap of meat.

  “I’ll go help him,” he blurted, scraping back his chair.

  He caught his breath in the hall. His heart had been racing since seeing Sébastien. He still couldn’t get his face out of his thoughts, nor the terror in his words.

  Bas, you fool.

  His father was already making his way back toward the dining room. Seeing Cayo, he frowned.

  “You’re supposed to be entertaining our guests,” he said.

  “I needed some air,” Cayo said. “Father, I…I have something I wanted to ask you.”

  Kamon crossed his arms, head lowering. It was the stance Cayo had come to call the Negotiator.

  “What do you want?”

  “I was wondering if I could get a larger stipend per month. It doesn’t have to be much, it just—What’s so funny?”

  Because his father was laughing softly, incredulously, while swinging his head side to side. “That didn’t take long, did it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Kamon pressed his lips together, white with suppressed fury. “What happened to your month’s allowance, Cayo?”

  Cayo hesitated. “I gave it to a friend. He—”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Kamon snarled. “I should have known that as soon as you had a few drinas in your pocket you’d go back to the tables.”

  Cayo flushed hot all over, his headache returning with a vengeance. “I haven’t gone to any of the gambling halls in months! You can go to the Vice Sector yourself and ask around.”

  “Even if that’s true, how am I supposed to know you won’t eventually go back to your old habits?”

  “I’ve been clean for six months,” Cayo said through clenched teeth. “When are you going to trust me?”

  “Respectability doesn’t come quick, Cayo.” Kamon straightened his dining jacket. “As you’ve seen with Duchess Hizon. No, respectability is earned, and you have not yet proven yourself.”

  Cayo was about to retort when there was a loud thump from the dining room followed by a scream. Cayo exchanged a startled look with his father before they ran inside.

  “Soria!”

  She had collapsed to the floor beside her chair, her hair spread about her like a pool of blood. She must have tried to excuse herself from the table before falling. Cayo dropped to his knees beside her and turned her over. She was unconscious, her eyelids fluttering while she struggled to breathe. Gen had gotten out of his chair to try to help, but he just stood there with his hands extended uselessly. The duke stood as well, pale and wide-eyed, while the duchess covered her mouth in shock.

  “Soria,” Cayo said, cupping her face with his hand. She was burning up. “Soria!”

  Then some of her hair fell away beneath a sweep of his fingers, revealing a spot of gray behind her ear.

  Ash fever.

  The sea gives and takes, alternating like the tide. Be careful lest you take too much. The waves remember what you owe.

  —PROVERB FROM THE RAIN EMPIRE

  The man, as it turned out, was not rich.

  He was delusional.

  The next morning, Silverfish brought water and a bit of hardtack down to his holding cell. There were three cells in total on the Brackish, all used for isolation and starvation to punish the Water Bugs who got on Captain Zharo’s bad side. Silverfish had once been locked up for three days without food or water, nearly dying of dehydration only because the captain had forgotten she was down here.

  After long minutes of deep, racking coughs, the man she’d rescued just yesterday looked straight at her. Though his face was weathered by long hours between sun and sea, she guessed he was somewhere in his early midyears—though there was something ageless and off-putting about his eyes. A shiver ran down her spine at the intensity of them, how they mapped out her face, her matted black hair, her ragged clothing stained with fish blood and crusted with salt.

  “You saved me, huh?” he said, his voice rough and low.

  Silverfish crouched before the bars. His dark eyes followed her down.

  “And now you owe me,” she said.

  Several hours later and standing in the surf of the small island that was one of their usual harvesting spots, Silverfish tried not to grind her teeth. She and Roach were diving for pearls today, their last stop before they reached the waters outside of Moray. They only had about an hour and a half of light left, but still she lingered in the shallows, unable to take a deep enough breath to submerge.

  Roach stood beside her, limbering up for the dive. The tattoo of a briar patch on the tawny skin of his chest was visible. One of the older Bugs had given it to him a few years ago before their seven years had ended. The same Bug had inked a tiny knife on the inside of Silverfish’s left wrist, a reminder to her that she had to be sharp and ruthless. No matter what, she had to survive.

  “You look ready to spit rocks,” he remarked. “Did your new pet piss on the carpet?”

  “He pissed on something, all right,” she muttered. “My hopes and dreams.” She angrily pulled her shirt off, leaving her in only her underthings and the pouch she wore for collecting oysters. She had long ago forsaken modesty, as had Roach, who had once admitted to her that the sight did nothing for him anyway; physical attraction was about as foreign to him as currency from the Sun Empire.

  “Such dramatics!” Roach put a hand against his chest, over his heart.

  She threw her clothes down, frustration welling in her. “Don’t start.”

  Roach dropped his hand, sobering. “I’m sorry, Sil. What happened?”

  She took a shaking breath, staring out over the waves to where the Brackish was anchored. The smaller Bugs were on the shore nearby, others finding tide pools to collect mussels, all supervised by Captain Zharo as he stalked the beach with a hand near the whip he kept coiled at his belt.

  “I thought…” She shook her head, laughing bitterly at herself. “I thought that if I saved that man, he would repay me. That I could pay off my indenture early and finally go home. He had gold buttons.”

  Roach frowned as he listened, nodding that he had seen them, too. She felt suddenly grateful that he was here with her—the familiar strong line of h
is jaw and the warmth of his green eyes made her feel significantly less alone. “And let me guess,” he said. “Turns out he’s just broke?”

  “He claims,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm, “to be the wealthiest man in the world.”

  Roach’s thick eyebrows shot up. “Oh,” he said lightly. “Well, then.”

  “He’s lying, Roach. Or he’s delusional.” Silverfish ran her fingers through her long, tangled hair, sighing. “He won’t say who he is or where he came from, of course. He carries no money with him. He just wants me to bust him out before the captain decides to kill him.”

  “I’m sorry, Sil. But you were the one who decided to haul him up like a bundle of fangfish.”

  “If I’d known it would come to this, I would have let him drown.” Somewhere inside her, she thought she felt Amaya flinch.

  “Is that why you volunteered to dive?”

  “I might find enough pearls to pay off those additional weeks. It’s the only chance I have at getting home in time.”

  “In time?”

  Silverfish bit her lip. The waves were dark and tipped in gold as the sun sank. They pulled at her legs, urging her forward, pointing her north—to Moray.

  “My mother’s birthday is at the end of the month,” she mumbled. “I wanted to be home for it.”

  Roach let out a long sigh. He put a callused hand on her shoulder and shook it affectionately. “All right. Let’s find you some pearls, then.”

  Silverfish waded farther out with him. Together they swam under the current, toward the shelf of spiky rocks on the island’s northwest shore where the fattest oysters were found. The water was choppy this time of day and desired nothing more than to keep her under. She broke the surface and latched on to the nearest rock shelf to collect her breath. She used to love the water in Moray, swimming through its blue, cradling warmth, but the water here was colder and less forgiving.

  “Ready?” Roach said over the lapping of water against rock. Silverfish nodded, and they dived. She followed Roach as he swam determinedly down, down, farther from the light and into the inky blue of deep water. Her ears were already beginning to ache, her chest still sore from decompression after the dives she’d made earlier that week. On those dives, she’d managed to retrieve only a few tiny pearls, half of them misshapen.

  Today’s dive would be different.

  It had to be.

  The man she’d rescued—he’d told her his name was Boon—might claim to be wealthy, but all Silverfish cared about was whether he could pay her way off the Brackish. He was just as Captain Zharo said: a useless waste of food and water.

  “What’s your name?” he’d asked this morning after giving his own.

  “Silverfish.”

  The response earned her a slight tic of his mouth, almost a smile. “I meant your real name.”

  “As if Boon is your real name? You call me Silverfish or nothing.”

  That earned her a sharp bark of laughter as he leaned against the wall of the cell, scratching at the dark beard filling in around his jaw. There was a tremor in his left arm that seemed to come and go at random intervals. “Fair enough. Where you from, then?”

  “Moray. You’re Kharian, I assume?” His accent hinted at it, though it was watered down, as if he hadn’t stepped foot in his home country in years.

  “You assume correctly.” He’d folded his arms, his crusty, buttonless coat straining at his elbows. “How’d you end up here, then, Silverfish?”

  “How does anyone end up on a debtor’s ship?” Instead of answering, he’d just stared at her, his gaze as dark as the pitch they used to waterproof the fish buckets. “What, are you looking for a bedtime story? Fine. The debt collectors came for my family after my father was accused of trafficking illegal goods to the Rain Empire in order to pay off gambling debts. Never mind that he was innocent, or that his lies were about as obvious as a whale in the desert. They hanged him for something he didn’t do, and all that debt was slapped onto our shoulders.”

  She had to pause to take a breath, to fill herself with something other than rage and grief. “My mother couldn’t pay, so here I am.”

  Boon had sat there, quietly listening, fingers laced over his stomach. Every so often he would jerk his head to one side, as if shooing away a fly or trying to get water out of his ear.

  “Sounds like a real winner, your dad,” he said after a while.

  “Don’t you dare mock my father,” she snapped. “Someone like you has no right to judge the type of man he was. And he was a good man—one of the best. Unlike some others I’ve met.”

  He ignored the gibe. “So how’d this flawless father of yours come to be wrongly accused?” he asked. “How much shit did he have to step in to get it to stain his breeches?”

  “He was a pearl merchant.” She could still remember riding on her father’s shoulders as he brought her to the docks, as he showed her around his ship and let her hold a few small, perfect pearls. She had called them moons, and he’d told her that was his secret—that the earth had many moons, and he knew where they hid under the waves. “He was loyal to the Port’s Authority. But they turned around and claimed he was a smuggler.”

  Boon made a clucking noise with his tongue and jammed a pinkie finger in his ear, wriggling it around. “Doesn’t surprise me. The Port’s Authority are fickle bastards.”

  “You have experience with them, do you?”

  He examined his earwax-coated finger, even going so far as to smell it before rubbing it on his shirt. “Unfortunately.”

  “Are you a merchant?” She had held her breath. It was the question she had wanted to ask since pulling him on board; if he was indeed a merchant from Moray, then he might have enough wealth waiting for him on shore that he could easily spare some for his rescuer.

  But he had shaken his head, reading the disappointment on her face. “Not anymore. Not that kind, anyway.”

  She didn’t know what that meant, and at that point was too afraid to ask. “Then why were you at sea? And…why were you covered in marigolds?” Marigolds were a symbol of death and remembrance in Khari, mostly used in shrines and for funerals.

  “Don’t have to tell you my life story, do I?”

  She scoffed. Hypocrite. “Well, the Port’s Authority is the reason I’m here. We never even saw any evidence. They were probably protecting one of their own.” She shrugged, although the injustice of it still pained her. “Or maybe it was a competition thing. Maybe Chandra’s Pearls was making too much profit and it spooked them.”

  Boon had stared hard at the opposite wall of his cell. His head twitched a couple of times. Then he jumped to his feet so suddenly that Silverfish took a step back.

  “Chandra,” he’d muttered. “Chandra, Chandra, Chandra.” His voice rose until he was practically shouting it, laughing with disbelief. “Chandra!”

  He’d given a single loud yell and smacked his palm against the holding cell’s wall. Silverfish had flinched back, watching as Boon muttered to himself and leaned against the wall while holding his head, his laughter bleeding into snarls.

  Then he had lunged for the bars, grabbing them with thick, scarred hands and pressing his forehead against them, dark eyes unnervingly wide. Silverfish had been frozen by that look.

  “I see it now,” he whispered. “I see it.”

  “See what?”

  “Your father.” He had paused then, his grip slackening. He shook his head as if coming to his senses. “I knew him. Arun Chandra.”

  Silverfish had closed her eyes for a moment, trying to will away the dizziness that was beginning to make the room spin. Arun Chandra. She hadn’t heard her father’s full name in years. Like Amaya, it felt like a dead thing suddenly resurrected.

  For a moment, just a flash of a second, she’d almost imagined she could hear her father’s laugh, low and sonorous in his chest.

  “You…You couldn’t have. He didn’t…” Consort with the likes of you, she wanted to say.

  He stepped back
and ran his hands through his hair. “Chandra. A pearl merchant in Moray, yeah. I knew him before…” Boon had looked at her again, hands still tangled in his hair. “You mentioned a gambling debt. Easy to gamble away a fortune in a place like Moray, no? Mayhap your dear dad wasn’t a smuggler, but every man carries his sins a different way.”

  Sins? The man was a mess and had no idea what he was talking about. Silverfish had taken a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself enough to speak.

  Finally, she’d said, “I can’t believe you thought that would work.”

  He’d frowned. “What?”

  “You didn’t know my father. You never met him—you have no idea what kind of man he was. You’re just trying to get me to help you escape.”

  “Now hold on—”

  “It was a nice try, but I don’t trust that easily. The only way I’d help you is if you had a fat diamond in your pocket. Even then, I’m not so sure.”

  She’d thought Boon might get angry, but on the contrary, he just gave that harsh bark of laughter again. “Sounds to me like you don’t want to face the truth,” he had countered. “That your father maybe wasn’t the oh-so-perfect man you recall.”

  Anger had spiked low in her gut, and Silverfish had grabbed the bars. “I don’t care what it sounds like to you, or even if you did know him. You say you’re wealthy? I say you’re riffraff. One of the Landless, if I had to guess.” There was a flash of indignation in his eyes. “I don’t expect someone like you to understand what loyalty is.”

  “And you do?” he’d asked quietly.

  She had stormed out after that. But his words continued to trail her in her shadow, written in the crinkles of her palms, murmured under the susurrus of the sea. They followed her down into the depths now, cold and dim and haunting.

  “ Every man carries his sins a different way.”

  Roach stopped swimming and pointed to an outcrop of rocky reefs below. It was crusted with coral, spindly stalks of pink and blue like small waterlogged trees. Silverfish swam toward it and eagerly reached for the nearest oyster, but Roach grabbed her wrist. He met her eyes and shook his head, pointing again. She followed his finger and accidentally let a few air bubbles escape.