She measured the curve, plotted the course. With their proximity to Nexus, it worked out to half the travel time of a course back the way they came.
The lines outside her cabin groaned, straining. She circled the island in red and tossed the pencil back into the case as she turned from the table. She heard it miss and bounce onto the floor. That was a mess she could live with. She was already halfway out of the cabin.
“Tisker, circle Nexus and keep it to our starboard.” She leaned against the side of the wheelhouse.
He was steering the ship with his wrists, bracing them against the spokes of the wheel to spare his burned palms. His despondent expression cleared for a moment. He looked up at her voice, and his posture straightened. “Found something?”
“Think so,” she said. “Ease us off to a radius about twice where we’re at, and angle down three degrees, then you can tie off the wheel and take a break. We’ll trip over a Rakkar island in about half a day.”
“Rakkar,” he said. He brought up his arm to itch his cheek on the sleeve of his shirt. “Never met one’a them. Are they as strange as you hear?”
Strange was an abstract that no longer had a place in the world after what they’d just been through. “They’ll be the prettiest faces you ever see if we can get there in one piece.”
“Aye, Cap.” It was emphatic.
“Don’t risk the lines we have left for the sake of speed. I’ll send Sophie up to bandage those hands soon as I find her.”
Tisker nodded his thanks. “Something to drink would be good, Cap.”
She nodded. Her own throat wanted for moisture.
“And we’ll drink something stronger when we get there,” she promised. “Rakkar put the fire to their spirits, too, and I owe us all a round or four.”
He grinned, lopsided and something like his usual self. It warmed her.
She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Just get us there, yeah?”
“Aye, Cap.”
The crew quarters were a complete loss. By the time Talis followed the smell of lingering smoke to its source, Sophie and Dug had gotten the worst of it out. Dug was stomping on the remaining embers while Sophie swept the charred husks of their personal belongings into a metal bucket.
Gods-cursed stinking winds. As if her crew hadn’t paid enough of a price already.
The crew quarters were designed for more people than she had, but they weren’t spacious by any means. Nothing kept aboard was a frivolous item. It was family portraits. Mementos. Things that all that gods-rotted money in the hold couldn’t replace.
Her gaze went to Dug’s throat. His locket wasn’t there.
Emotions seized at her lungs, as though her rib were broken again. Anger and guilt backed up and overwhelmed her. She hit the frame of the door with the side of her hand.
Sophie looked up at the sound and tugged the bandana down to her collar. The smile it revealed was melancholy but wholly Sophie. “Looks like those alien weapons crossed with the lamp wires. Sparked a fire that started with the blankets on Tisker’s bunk. Got it out, but…”
But they’d lost everything.
“Inda’s picture?”
Dug shook his head.
Talis inhaled a shaky breath through her nose and her sinuses stung with the cloying smoke. “Dug, I’m sorry.”
Dug nodded but said nothing.
She shook her head. It wasn’t fair. Her crew had lost so much. As she brushed a bit of soot from her eye, the burned skin of her forearm tightened and stung. She wished she’d let Meran heal that rotted mark. This was where it led when people put blind faith in symbols, gods, and waste like that. Guilt whispered that it should have been her quarters fed to the flames.
But no, the charts. What fortune remained had given them that. They’d walk—or at least limp—away from this. And that was no small thing. Take their shares, and fix the ship. Or retire from this nonsense. Go live proper, honest lives. Make some new memories to replace the portraits and the lockets and the pieces of their lives they’d lost.
“We’re, uh,” she started, then had to clear her throat. “We’re headed to Heddard Bay, on the Rakkar side of Nexus.”
“Rakkar.” Sophie exhaled the word in a breathy whisper. The corner of her mouth twitched up a tick.
Talis nodded. “Not far, at this radius, and we can ride the distral winds. How they managed to settle so near without the headaches crippling them, I’ve no idea, but my charts are up to date, and I can’t ignore what it trims off the time we’ll be relying on just three lift lines.”
Sophie blanched, the smile still on her face but empty as a dried husk. She’d gone to fight the fire earlier and hadn’t seen the lines snap.
“I’d hoped it was just the wind on the chewed up hull creating the drag I’m feeling,” she said. Didn’t have to say she knew better. Sophie knew the ship better than anyone.
“You two finish up here,” Talis said. She’d tend to Tisker’s hands herself. The crew cabin was their space, even covered with ash. “Then we can do short shift rotations to reinforce what we can. Get yourselves fed or rest in my cabin. Hear?”
They nodded and put themselves back to work. Wind Sabre needed them, and they’d never failed her before.
Half the galley was missing.
The gimbaled oven was gone, and the spice rack that had been mounted above it, but they still had the cooktop and ice chest. The port-side hull breach opened onto empty skies. Taking with it, Talis realized, the folio with Sophie’s ship design. She’d stowed it in the cabinet there before they left Subrosa. If she’d given it back to Sophie, it would have been in her pocket, likely as not. Talis closed her eyes. She might not want Sophie to leave, but the thought of all that work just… lost.…
Her crew had
