Nira and Fi huddled together at the prow, hugging each other and hiding their faces. The old prayers they’d been taught by the Sun’s Sons came unbidden to Nira’s lips and they chanted them together, forgetting in an instant all the time they had spent ridiculing the faith of their backwater friends and elders. The cleansing of the Light had come, and they would be spared, just as Papa and Madra had taught her.
Except that then Fi’s hands had flown to her forehead, and she’d said it hurt. Her questing fingers had felt the change before Nira could see it, and she began to cry, great gasping heaves that rose in volume and fear as the moments passed. Nira had sought to comfort her friend, thinking her overwhelmed by the horrors that surrounded them – and then she saw it. Fi’s head was splitting in half.
The insanity of mutation that had overtaken them all had not spared her friend. As Nira watched, Fi’s hairline had descended inch by inch down the center of her forehead, new hair sprouting blonde and wild as the halves of her head began to draw away from each other, a valley beginning to form where the peak of her head had been moments before. Her crying took on a hysterical edge, a terror deeper than she had ever heard before. “It hurts, it hurts!” she screamed. “Please, make it stop!” Similar cries had echoed from all around, but Nira heard only hers. “It hurts!” Over and over and over. As the split reached the bridge of her nose the words turned into gabbling and nonsense. Skin and hair had drawn over her eyes, and she scarcely looked human. Once the cleft had reached her upper lip, she could see through the gap all the way to the wet, pink recesses of her throat.
So Nira had done the only thing she could think of. She drew the coral dagger the handsome bosun had given her and drove it into her chest. The fragile coral blade snapped at the hilt, the porous shard turning pink as it soaked up her blood. Fi screamed anew and Nira retreated to throw up over the railing. There she had stayed, hearing her gasp and bubble until, finally, she didn’t.
We found the thing the Sun’s Sons spend their lives praying and hunting for. Madra would be so jealous. If the hot-eyed, hard-handed woman had been in front of her, Nira would have gladly stabbed her too. But why aren’t I dead?
It was too big of a question, and she was so tired. None of it seemed to matter. Neither did the rapidly approaching docks. The chitinous Seafarer liveship cut through the harbor’s chop, seeming to pick up speed. The bosun had tried to tell her that the ship was a living creature, an intelligent thing living in symbiosis with the crew, but she hadn’t listened. She’d been too busy keeping track of where he was putting his hands. But now she remembered and wondered what changes had been wrought in the ship itself. It was definitely moving faster, and the prow pointed right at the docks like a moth flying for the flame.
Better this way. All she had to do was stand here. Everything would take care of itself. After all, she was now the embodiment of everything the Sun’s Sons taught. It was the bitterest, cruelest draught she’d ever tasted, but it was true. I can deny them this victory, at least. I won’t be the one to justify their rabid beliefs. Just because they were right doesn’t mean they’re right. And so she stood still and gave the rapidly-approaching dock workers an airy little wave.
The dock looked bigger up close. It was a Weaver-made affair: a single massive tree that grew sideways through the water, shaped and cultivated to be flat on top, grippy underfoot, and as extensible as the growing city needed as the years passed. Each docking slip sported a set of whipstays – living branches that would reach out and grab any moving object nearby. It was an efficient way to secure incoming ships, even if they resulted in the occasional gruesome death of an unwary dock laborer. Such was the price of progress. As the liveship streaked into reach the whipstays darted out and lashed themselves around the ship’s crustacean-shell cleats along the starboard gunwale.
At the speed she was moving, though, the ship was undeterred by such everyday constraints. With a groan and a snap, each of the whipstays tore free from their mother branch, one after the other. One stout dockworker stationed to receive the ship was too slow on the retreat and caught the torn end of a flying whipstay across the back. It lifted him off his feet and across the broad dock, where he windmilled off the edge and sank. New cries of alarm and terror rang in Nira’s ears. She was not moved.
The ship hadn’t slowed at all, but the pull and jerk of the ropy branches on the cleats pulled the ship off its straight course and sent its jagged, crustacean-pocked starboard hull plowing into the side of the dock. Timbers shrieked and groaned against the ship, sounding almost like a wounded animal’s cry.
Nira found herself airborne for a heartbeat as the ship slowed and she kept going. There was a moment of weightlessness, and then her ribs bisected the breastwork right by the prow. She felt a snap inside, and pain bloomed through her body, blotting out the world. Her head struck the hardened, chitinous deck and everything went white. Not as white as the Light, though. Nothing so
