I made an altar of myself, stretched out across the console with controls sticking in my back in ways that would in any normal circumstances have made it a really fucking hard to get off, but this was the captain, and when she was with me she was all my faith and all my hope.
“Will it be a last act of worship to the only god who has ever touched my soul, or will it taste”—she raked a single fingernail down my neck; her touch was the lightning and the storm—“of ashes and dust and base earth? Is this—”
And then, from some deep, passionate, extraordinarily misguided place in the pit of my physiology, I said, “Please.”
A spell broke.
“No pleading.” She was looking into my eyes now, intense and on fire and walking the garrote wire between sanity and the grave. “No prayers. No bargains. No gods. No masters, no payments, and no debts.”
And from the same wrong, wrong, wrong place, I said, “Stay.”
She recoiled from the word. Or from me. Probably a bit of both.
Never having known what was best for me, I went on. “I know I’m just… this is just…” Sitting up, I hugged my undershirt around me and turned my face from her. Outside, the Leviathan was twitching its last. And though a creature so vast and strange could never look remotely human, it feltpersonal.
“You know what I am,” the captain said. And she said it tome, not to fate, or the world, or the storm.
“I knowwhoyou are,” I corrected her. “I know you brought me here for a reason.”
Her gaze flickered between my body and the body of the beast. Between the marks of her mouth and the marks of her spear. “You distract me. There are times I favor distraction.”
Once again, I was reminded of how fucking dead I’d be if something went wrong with the boat while I was half naked and three-quarters fucked. I began—only slightly regretfully—struggling back into my atmosphere suit. “And in the moment?”
“What moment?”
I was officially over it. “The moment we find the Beast. Will I distract you then?”
For a horrible, tantalizing, tempting third of a second, it almost seemed like I was getting through to her. “I will finish what I began.”
It would have been churlish to point out that she often didn’t. That I was quite regularly left to finish myself because she was off on some tear about flight paths and brit-clouds and storm-currents. So instead, I went, if anything, one step more churlish and said: “Why?”
“Don’t be a child.”
“I’m sitting half naked in a ship full of monster blood asking why you’d rather risk your life than fuck me. If that’s what a child sounds like to you, you shouldn’t be around children.”
“I have come too far to turn aside.”
I wanted to call bullshit.
Etymological note: I don’t really know whatbullshitis or why its meaning is distinct from regular shit. My theology tells me that bothbullandbullockare beasts of Old Earth but not what they are or whether they ’re different from each other.
“Look me in the eye,” the captain went on, “and tell me that you would want me were I a different kind of woman. If I had two legs and no purpose, rather than one of each.”
I wanted to call bullshit again. Except I couldn’t because she was right. The part of me that pretended to be a sensible, functional human being with a reasonable life expectancy desperately wanted to say that I’d have still desired her even if she were an accountant working in the head office of a subsidiary branch ofOccator Financial Services. That I’d still want her even if she wore cardigans and had the median number of flesh-and-blood limbs and never did anything that might get anybody killed. Even if she were ordinary.
But that part of me was shit out of luck. The truth was that I wanted her because she didn’t want me. Worse, I wanted her because she wanted something so vast and inexplicable that just being close to it made me feel the uneasy peace of my own irrelevance. And I craved that like I craved a hundred other things I didn’t dare name.
Once it had become abundantly, overwhelmingly clear that I had no answer, she gave me a slate-cold smile and nodded. “We return to the Pequod.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-THREERache
In these more prosperous hunting grounds, it wasn’t only Leviathans that crowded thicker in the sky. Ships too were a more common sight. Of course, “more common” is relative. Spoiler, reader: We only saw two more vessels before things went—to use the technical terminology—completely to shit.
The first of those was called the Rachel by its ident but the name painted on its hull (some ships did this, some didn’t, the Pequod might have at one point, but she was so bedecked with bones that it was impossible to say) had worn away, leaving onlyRache.
“Vengeance,” said the Old Ionian. “In one of the tongues of Old Earth. It’s an omen, you mark my words.”
