The Pit, Port Pelagie, Fleet Territory

  Mid-Dry Season, Year 17

  “Seriously,” Seiwuai complained, setting my arms with splints she’d made from some broken chair legs. “I can’t believe you tried to escape like that.” She frowned, giving me a quick pinch on the forearms that made my entire torso vibrate with pain. “And without me! That’s mean! I could have told you it wouldn’t have worked out, too! You’re lucky Mr. Alba was there to break your fall, or you’d have gotten worse than broken arms.”

  I glowered at that, deciding not to correct whatever mistaken impression the old guy had given her while I was face down in the dirt. The memory of one Mister Byron Alba was still fresh in my head and while I wouldn’t categorize myself as lucky, I had to admit, I probably could have come out of that worse. I mean, one moment I was facing that...freaky shadow thing then the next thing I knew, I was waking up with Seiwuai poking my injuries and more bruises than I’d racked up in the rest of my goddamn life.

  I had two broken arms! I’d never broken anything before!

  “Don’t give me that look,” she said, leaning back to sit on her heels. We were both on a - relatively - dry patch of sand just beyond our tents, just a few steps closer to the center of the pit. “The one time I send you for food in days, and I end up hungry and having to fix you up! If you didn’t want to go, just say so!”

  I looked at her, then looked away, taking a deep breath - and letting it out.

  My arms really goddamn hurt.

  “Seiwuai,” I said. “What’s...briny blood?”

  She paused, looking at me suspiciously for a moment. “That depends on the context,” she said slowly. “Usually, it’s talking about someone and their natural potential to learn the Fleet’s inheritance techniques.” I looked at her blankly. “Our...blood? The Brineblood?” I shrugged one shoulder. “...oh my god, we are not doing this now.”

  I closed my eyes, thinking. If that was briny blood… “Then brinier blood is…saltier? Stronger? Like...what’s saltier than brine, brack?”

  “No, that’s more dilute, brine is saltier than typical seawater,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s not really how it works anyway. It’s just...better? I don’t know how to explain it succinctly. Why are you asking me about this, anyway?”

  “No reason,” I said, wincing as she poked me in the bruises on my face. I opened my eyes to glare at her and she smiled sheepishly. “What’s hoisting energy, then?”

  “Hoisting? Did you get one of the fleet’s former flagmen to lecture you or something?” she said, laughing. I looked at her having absolutely no clue what the hell she just said. “Sorry, um, it’s just an old term. It’s um...like when you shape your energy to do things. Like techniques, or the formations.”

  “Oh,” I said. “And those are like...sword tricks, or cow-”

  “Oruban Cattle Chucking, yes,” she said, giving me the side eye. “I still don’t think that’s real.”

  “That’s because you’ve never had to smuggle aurochs,” I replied absently, thinking. That...shadow wall...was a technique? And...I had energy too, right? So...I should be able to do that.

  But how?

  “You okay, Johannes?” Seiwuai asked, leaning over until she was directly in front of me. She moved a finger from one side of my vision to the other, before sitting back. “You seem a little...out of it.”

  “Mm,” I replied, shrugging and feeling my arms surge with pain. Seiwuai said there’d probably be medicines with dinner based on what happened with other people who’d gotten hurt, but it seemed like a real bad deal that I was a Seeker and a Seaman and could still get my arms broken.

  She patted me on the shoulder sympathetically. “It’s...it’s okay to feel bad if somebody said bad things about you,” she said. I looked at her wondering where the hell this was coming from, but she kept going. “It’s- it hurts, but it’s not the end of the world. Even if you have thin blood, it’s good enough for the Fleets.” She smiled bitterly at that. To my horror, she found room to continue. “Ah, not that you have thin blood or anything! I mean, your skin is really smooth but your hair is starting to coralize, so you probably have thick blood or at least thick enough that it shows so I’m sure you’re gonna be really good-!”

  “Seiwuai,” I said, and she stopped suddenly, freezing in place. “I’m fine. My arms just hurt.”

  “Haha, yeah,” she laughed, leaning back. “Right, of course you are.”

  I looked at her, getting the sense there was something behind that, but a little more focused on ignoring the pain from my broken arms to really think about it any harder.

  “You know, if you really want to get out of here, you should be practicing the Warship Formation,” Seiwuai scolded me. “I mean, it’s been days and I haven’t seen you try even once!”

  “Practice the what?”

  “You know, the Warship Formation? The standard technique of the Fleets?” Seiwuai looked at me like I was clueless. “Makes an illusory seaworthy vessel that moves according to the will of the formation’s captain? Has masts, sails, cannon?”

  Sails and cannon- that thing was what I was supposed to be practicing? That shadowy phantom was literally me getting hit with the broadside of a ship? How the depths was I supposed to do that? “Why do you think I would know that? How would I even know how to do that?”

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  “It’s in the manual!” she huffed, folding her arms.

  “The what?”

  “The- this!” She unzipped one of the pockets of her jumpsuit, pulling out a spiraling shell, about a thumb’s length across and inscribed with...letters, I guess? Fuck, if she expects me to read that then-

  She pressed the shell to my ear. Uh.

  “What was this supposed-?”

  Knowledge poured into my ear and through to my brain, as I suddenly saw myself in places I had never been, fighting people I’d never seen, twisting an...energy that I’d never known about into a Seeker’s technique I had only seen for the first time earlier today. The clarity was startling. The casual ease of it was incredible.

  The proportions of the limbs were wrong: I could feel the elbows too high up on my arms, and the legs longer than my own, the memories fitting uncomfortably. The fights were too amateurish: I didn’t know the weapons or the attacks, but they were roundabout and flashy, an emotional overtone of disdain throughout it at all instead of the sheer conviction of needing to win. To live and get home, no matter how many other people wouldn’t.

  But the energy...it didn’t matter that the rest of it wasn’t quite right, for me. The way it circulated from deep in my stomach, below and behind the rumbling pit of gas and fullness, then surged outwards along major paths of pulsing power to my arms and legs. The way it branched and split, then again, then again, until it was like my entire body was being brushed on the inside by fine hairs of fire and vivacity. I could feel this, and it felt good.

  It felt damn good.

  “Ow, fuck!” I yelled, jerked out of my thoughts by a sudden stinging pain in my left arm. I raised them defensively, glaring at- “Seiwuai, what the depths are you doing?”

  She pouted at me. “I’m tending to your injuries,” she said. “And don’t swear at me! Did you forget about your broken arms?” She gestured upwards where I’d pulled them away from her, a slightly annoyed expression on her face. “Mind putting them down so we can get on with it?” I grimaced and carefully lowered them into her reach. Seiwuai held them steady, and smeared a pungent smelling yellow ointment on them from a ceramic tub. “So many scars...You must have been such a reckless kid. Why didn’t you ever get these taken care of?”

  “You can’t get rid of scars,” I frowned. “That’s what makes them scars.”

  She looked at me strangely. “Any decent doctor could make golden cocoa butter cream, Johannes.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s great news for people who’ve been to a doctor,” I muttered.

  “Wait,” she said, pausing to look at me as she delicately worked the ointment into my fingers. “You’ve never been to a doctor? What were your parents thinking? I mean, it’s normal-”

  “Don’t have any,” I said, telling she was winding up to some speech or other. I’d already started to recognize the expression. “Never did. And since I’m still walking and talking, I think I came out alright even without any doctors.”

  She didn’t say anything after that for a while, just rubbing the yellow sticky muck up to my biceps, before packing away the tub. “You should be fine by morning,” she said, her voice quieter than before.

  “Huh,” I said, blinking as I held my arms up. “Pain’s gone. Heard that normally takes weeks. Never broken an arm before but I was not looking forward to that.” I’d never broken an arm myself, but I’d doled out enough for tales of the experience to get back to me. They were all true: it sucked. “Thought you said we wouldn’t get that stuff until dinner got dropped in.”

  Seiwuai looked up at me, then at the half-empty jug of fish head soup beside me, then at the starry sky twinkling through the hole of the pit. She looked back at me, and nodded. “Yep.” I looked up at the night sky in confusion. “You really got sucked into that memory shell. I thought you were just being focused, but...was it your first time using one?”

  I looked at her, then pointed at myself awkwardly with my splinted arms. “I’m a regular guy,” I said. “I didn’t even know what a memory shell looked like, I just heard about them in the occasional bar story or from a market swindler.” I shook my head. “Shit, I was worried you were gonna ask me to read it and then I’d really be stuck.”

  She blinked at me. “Wait, you can’t read?”

  “What good’s reading? Not like I can eat words. Or spend them.” She half-gaped at me in horror, and I felt the urges to roll my eyes and shake my head at her. “Actually, Seiwuai, can you do me a favour?”

  She pouted at me again. “You mean aside from getting food for you? And taking care of your injuries? And apparently teaching you how to be a Seaman? And-”

  “Okay, another favour. Seeoh’s saggy-”

  “Don’t- don’t you dare finish that!” she yelled, waving a hand at me and with an expression somewhere between disgust and shock. “That’s-! Filthy! I just told you not to swear at me!”

  “Huh,” I said thoughtfully. “I didn’t take you for the religious type.”

  “It’s not about religion, it’s about respect,” Seiwuai said intensely, clapping her hands. “You should consider yourself lucky that I’m the only one that heard you, and I’m so tolerant. Or you’d have more than a couple of broken arms to go to sleep with tonight.”

  I whistled softly. “Testy.” I looked at Seiwuai. “Which were what would be sagging, by the way.”

  “Okay, I’m not listening to any more of this,” Seiwuai said, face wrinkled in disgust. “What did you want?”

  I tried not to grin as she gave in without haggling more, distracted from the issue by a little needling. I swear, it was too easy with these people. “I wanted to practice that...Warship Formation thing,” I said.

  “You’re gonna need to get someone to work with you,” she said.

  I looked at her and nodded, gesturing towards her. “Okay, and…”

  “You- you want me to help you?” she said, surprised.

  “Well...yeah, who else am I gonna ask? The tents?” I raised an eyebrow. “If you don’t want to, I-”

  “No, I’ll- I can do it.” She looked away as she said it then back to me, apparently losing confidence mid-sentence.

  “-can...okay, great.” I pushed myself up to my feet. “Then let’s go.”

  She reached up slowly, holding her forefinger back with her thumb, and flicked it against my splinted wrist-

  “Agh, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-” I groaned, my entire arm suddenly on fire with pain.

  “I’m not doing this twice,” she said, shaking her head. “Especially not after you insulted The Seeoh. Maybe in the morning, if you get breakfast, and you’re really nice to me.” She smiled at me sweetly and, grudgingly, I adjusted my opinion of her to include a certain level of conniving.

  Maybe she was alright after all.