Page 131 of The Space Between Stars

“Preservation, Brat.” He pulled her into a hug. His fingers curled into her hair. He smelled wonderful, like tung and seawater—distinctly not like vomit and piss. But then again, he’d already had his chance for a bath. She had not.

She sank into him despite all reservations. With everything that had happened, she hadn’t given herself the chance to feel any relief. But as she pulled in a shuddering breath, it was quickly displaced by anger.

“I,” she started, pushing him away, “am fine. You took your sleep shift. Let me have mine.”

Mitek looked at her like she’d chosen to adopt Pazirian fashion. “You can’t seriously mean to sleep behind closed doors with that thing? Are you forgetting that he tried to eat you not even a full sun ago?”

“Have you forgotten that he’s saved us both since?”

“It doesn’t change anything!”

Fankalo crossed her arms. “He’s… been through a lot. You saw what they’ve done to him. I just need a few days with him, maybe he’ll come around.”

“Is that a bet you’ll stake our lives on?”

She glared. “Yes. I’d do it if it were you, too.”

That stopped him flat. He fidgeted with the hem of his shirt, unable to meet her eyes. “He killed five of ours last night in the time it takes to tie my boots. Traitors or not, evisceration has never been a part of our code. We need to drop him at first landfall. I would hope you would do that if it were me, too.”

Had he not witnessed the past six years she’d spent searching for her brother? “No.”

Mitek’s face screwed up. “I found out today that I don’t want to lose you. That I would give anything not to lose you. And if he—”

“I will not have sacrificed my father to gain nothing!” Her anger swelled into lip-curling fury. “I refuse it! And by my demand, even the fucking Fates will listen!”

Any low chatter in the ship’s rooms beyond them fell into silence. Their eyes met. Only then did she realize what Mitek meant. He had not been crying for fear of his life the night before. He’d been crying for hers.

“Damn it, Brat.”

She tore her gaze from his. “I need to get some rest. Calver’s on guard.”

“Yeah, sure.” Mitek ran his fingers through his smooth black hair. “Great.”

Fankalo stormed back to her room and slammed the door behind her. Calver moved back in front of it. The events of the day boiled over, and he was the closest target available.

“This is all your fault!” She slammed the heel of her hand into the door over his head where he sat. “I waited for you! I looked for you! It’s not my fault that—” She gestured to all of him. “This. Happened.” A sob punctured her tirade. “If you’d only come home, maybe we would have… We would have…” She crumpled, head pressed into the planking beneath her.

Only the Fates were to blame. “I swear, if you kill me in my sleep, I’m going to—”

Child or not, acting like one was not how she would start off as captain of the Rogue’s Rapture. She inhaled, the sound of it stuttering and wheezing as it flooded her shaking chest. Calver hunched lower in his boulder-like position, chin pressing toward his chest.

Damn it all. How could she expect to put their relationship back together when she’d started off by breaking it? Then again, who was she kidding? Regardless of whatever he’d intended, Calver had left her. You couldn’t break something that had never been whole in the first place. She slung herself back into the hammock and closed her eyes, hoping the steady rocking of the sea might bring her solace where nothing else could.

Her dreams were strange, shifting from one to the next before she could settle into them. A sky on fire. Drogus cutting up melons in the galley with Calver’s blood-soaked dowaga. A sea that opened into oblivion.

Fankalo woke to whimpering.

A beam of light lanced the darkness, slashing across Calver’s hardened face. A vein bulged in his temple. His hands clawed at his hair.

“Calver?” she whispered. She still couldn’t sense him with her Luck.

He moaned, bare feet sliding across the floor as if trying to find purchase. Fates help her. The Shadewalker was neck-deep in a psychotic breakdown three feet from her. The funerals of the day before hung sashimi-fresh in her mind: she too was about to become fish food.

“It’s me. The little slumling you left behind to go chase the Red Wing?” She approached him at a crouch, speaking like she was convincing a wild animal not to sink its teeth into her. “I sailed the ocean ten times to find you.”

She reached to lay a hand on his arm. The Tera’thian numerals branded there churned her stomach, inspiring the thought of hot iron sizzling against flesh. She flinched before setting her hand on him.

He roared, exploding from his fetal position into a defensive stance. Fankalo scrambled away, heart beating so hard she could feel it in her knees.