Talis loved when Wind Sabre was fully stocked, but the weight created drag. She chewed her lip. Suddenly she was feeling as though they would need to run. With the ship’s belly hanging low in the skies, she felt vulnerable. At least their only new cargo was the Yu’Nyun payment. But that only made her want to fly faster. There were no secrets in Subrosa.
Sophie finished her notations, fanned a hand over the wet ink for a moment, then pushed the book aside. Her right hand gripped her coffee mug, and she picked at the edge of the table with the thumbnail of her left.
“Listen, Captain,” she started.
“Stow it,” Talis said. “I’ve had no sleep, and I don’t want to start that again.”
She raised the mug to her lips. The liquid was still too hot, but she didn’t want to be seen hesitating in any decisions in front of Sophie just now, so she let the coffee burn her tongue and then lowered the mug back to the table without reacting.
Sophie took the pause as leave to keep going. “I need to apologize. To you. I already did to Tisker.”
Talis thought of the logbook. Entries made in two different pens. The last line Sophie had entered was the engine part; only the price was in Tisker’s hand.
“Yeah, well, he was rash, too.” Compulsively, Talis lifted the mug again. Burned her tongue one more time. Least of her personal injuries that night, she figured.
Sophie watched her thumb trace the edge of the hinge in the table’s stowed side. “He’s worried I’m gonna leave. Hoped getting the bi-clutch would smooth things over.”
Talis put the mug down a few inches farther away than before, trying to keep her hands off it and spare her mouth. Her tongue had developed a bumpy texture where the hot liquid kept scalding her. She leaned back against the bulkhead behind her and crossed her arms.
“Well? Are you?”
A light thud sounded as Sophie opened her mouth to speak. It came from somewhere along the hull. Instead of answering Talis’s question, Sophie cursed the carelessness of the dock workers.
But here they were. Talis had asked the question, and she was going to get an answer.
“You know, owning your own ship isn’t all open skies and cool breezes.” She shifted her hips so the angle of her slouch was more comfortable. “Sometimes you have to make a decision between what’s right for the long run and what you think you want in the moment. And your crew will have their own opinions.”
Sophie pulled a wire-bound folio out of a cargo pocket in her pant leg and put it on the table. There was a pencil hung on a string and tucked into a makeshift loop of elastic that kept the folio closed. Unfolding it to lay open on the table in front of her, she traced the contour of a carefully folded sheet of paper inside.
Sophie’s ship design. That thing went almost everywhere with her.
“It’s the one thing I’ve always wanted.” Sophie looked up at her. “You know that.”
“A shiny new ship to be proud of,” Talis said. “Doesn’t mean you have what it takes to be the captain.”
Sophie flicked one corner of the folio’s back cover. “I don’t want to be told how to take care of it. As long as someone else is captain, I’m always going to have to swallow my arguments about what’s best for the ship and its systems.”
“Don’t remember you ever swallowing your arguments with me.” And that was why Talis didn’t want to be having this conversation right now.
Sophie bristled. “I hold back my opinion a lot more than you think,” she said, leaning forward and snapping the folio closed. “That’s why when I finally do speak up I need you to hear me. Tisker sees it. He went off and sold all his stuff so I wouldn’t have to argue it with you. So you couldn’t fly this ship into disrepair and leave us stranded until your old boyfriend comes by and scoops us up.”
Talis pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. Was that coffee cooled off yet? She reached out, took a sip. Close enough.
“So you are leaving?”
Sophie absently turned the folio in a slow circle while she chewed her lip. Another thud sounded outside the hull and she glared in the direction of the sound, twitching. When she answered, her voice was small and strained. “If that’s what you think is best. There was a first mate on the docks, told me Sky Opus needs a new wrencher.”
Talis scoffed. “That sagging retrofit trawler? I don’t see that as very likely to earn you your new ship anytime soon.”
Sophie eyed the spot on the floor where the coffer had been laid open at dinner. “Could be nearly there with the extra share you said I’d get for the business aboard The Serpent Rose. Wouldn’t take much more for a deposit at Jones’s shipyard.”
Scratching at her cheek, Talis frowned. “Okay, so you wanna go? Go. But a deposit isn’t a ship. It isn’t the signing bonus for a crew. It isn’t the cost of your first contract, or the fuel you’ll need, or supplies.” Sophie’s shoulders were slumping. She knew this already, but Talis pressed on, feeling herself at her limit and backed up against a wall in this conversation. “You wanna be captain of a half-framed hull, you can show yourself to—”
The entire conversation was punctuated with small sharp thumps accosting the hull, and each one made Sophie twitch and eye the bulkhead as if she could see the culprit through the joined planks. But the next thud that hit the hull was so strong, it rattled the flatware stowed in their cabinets, and was accompanied by the sharp staccato clinking of chains gone loose. Sophie planted her hands on the table and propelled herself to her feet.
“Are they rotting drunk
