Page 109 of The Space Between Stars

As he stared into it, Fankalo didn’t let her eyes leave the horizon. Her heart fluttered against her ribs. Closer still. If she did not reach him now, the nearest he had been in six years, she would never forgive herself.

Gelhard trod to the upper deck, his face a mask of fury. “Have you lost your senses? We cannot steer this boat any farther into new Tera’thian territory.”

Her jaw jutted. “Then I will take the dinghy and paddle the rest of the way.”

Gelhard turned to her father. “Captain, I beg you to turn south. Whatever phantom you are chasing is not worth it.”

Fankalo wrapped her arms around her father’s waist. She had grown taller—as tall as Mitek, even—rising to the height of his shoulder. “In this perfect life you have given me,” she whispered, “he is the only thing that has been missing. I cannot let him go.”

Her father’s black eyes stared into her. He cupped her face. “There is no thing a man wouldn’t do for his daughter.”

Daughter. Her lips popped open at the word—his first break in the facade they had maintained for so long. She burrowed her face into his powerful chest. No more hiding now. She had the final assurance: he would accept whatever she was, or chose to be.

“But Fankalo,” he continued. “When a captain chooses a course like this, he does so knowing his entire crew will pay any toll he crosses.”

A memory of Calver tickling her until she laughed helplessly floated from the depths of her mind. And one of him giving up the honeyed cake a stranger in the slums had passed him to her. Those memories were distant now, but they were as real as the starlike impression in her mind. His heart beat just a league away from her own.

“Yes, Father.”

Like an apparition, a dark smudge appeared against the indigo waters of the horizon. Her Luck squirmed. She ignored it. There was no risk she would not take to bring her brother back.

“That’s it,” she said. And be damned whatever Gelhard thought. “That’s him.”

Gelhard calmed. “It’s… not a ship.”

As they drew closer, a pressing sense of foreboding rose from her stomach into her throat. The impression of Calver neared in her mind, but all around it swirled the jagged, writhing lines of bad Luck.

Something was wrong.

The closer they moved toward the smudge, the worse the feeling became.

“Driftwood,” Gelhard said, his tone bitter. “There’s a man on it.”

A man? Her head spun. How old was Calver now? Six years her senior—that would put him near enough a man. Somehow, all this time, she had imagined that when she found him, he would still be a twelve-year-old boy.

Her father looked through his own scope before setting it back into his belt. “Send out a skiff. This is now a rescue.”

“Yes, Captain. And then we can get out of these cursed waters.”

Ten minutes passed. Fankalo watched as the three men in the skiff hauled the slumped form of a naked giant from what looked to be little more than a floating beam. She shook. Harrowing tethers of Fate pulled her away, back in the direction she’d willingly steered them from. But there was no enemy vessel. Why?

Her knuckles were white on the wooden rail at the bow, her muscles in rigid contest with it. Faster. Faster.

The skiff returned, the rescued figure aboard but indiscernible from so far away. She waited, ready to see the face she’d dreamt of for years. As the skiff rose on the pulleys toward the main deck, its oarsman, Timbre, signaled something to her father she couldn’t catch sight of behind the rigging. Her father sucked in a breath and looked at her with a more severe expression than she’d ever seen.

Something was truly wrong.

A stinging began behind her eyes. Calver was dead—she’d found him only to lose him. But… that wasn’t right. She still felt him. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—feel such light from a corpse.

Her father moved to her side. “I need you to get below deck.” His urgency sent a renewed spike of alarm through her.

“What?”

“Now. Find Mitek. Sit with him a while. I’ll collect you soon.”

“Father, I—”

“That’s an order.”