Curiosity battled anger that the woman had spied on Maia's friend. "Cleaning … his mouth?"
"Yup." Naroin nodded. "You've seen that little brush of his? Well, he sticks it in seawater — even though he won't drink the stuff — then pops it in an' carries away like a deckhand tryin' to finish KP in time for a party! Scours those white gnashers good, with lots o' swishin' an' spittin'. Beats anythin' I've seen."
"Um," Maia replied, trying to come up with an explanation. "Some people would smell better if they did that, now and then."
"Good point." Naroin laughed. "But after every meal?"
Maia shook her head. "He is an alien. Maybe he's worried about . . . catching diseases?"
"But he eats our food. Kind o' hard to see what good mouth-cleanin' does, after the fact."
Maia shrugged. It might otherwise be a topic worth further speculation. But right now it seemed petty and pointless. Good intentions or no, she preferred that Naroin leave her alone. Fortunately the bosun seemed to sense this, and conversation lapsed.
Durga rose, backlighting the clouds and casting shafts of pearly radiance through gaps in the overcast, onto patches of choppy sea. Those patches, and the star-filled openings above them, corresponded like pieces of a child's puzzle and the holes they were meant to occupy. Maia glimpsed bits of constellations, and could tell the ship was fleeing southward before the wind. The bow's steady rise and fall felt like a slow, steady heartbeat, carrying them not just through dark seas, but through time. Each moment drew new patterns out of old configurations of wood, water, and flesh. Each novel, fleeting rearrangement set conditions for yet more patterns to follow.
It wasn't just an abstraction. Somewhere in the darkness, a fast, radar-equipped vessel prowled, ever closer. "Don't think about it," Naroin told the nervous women in her squad. "Try to get some sleep."
The idea was ludicrous, but Maia pretended to obey. She curled underneath her blanket as the bow rose and fell, rose and fell, reminding her of the horse's rhythmic motion while fleeing across the plains of Long Valley. Maia closed her eyes for just a minute . . .
. . . and woke to a sharp pain, jabbing her thigh. She sat up, blinking. "I . . . what . . . ?"
Women were milling around the forecastle, muttering in a dim, gray light. There was a smoky quality to the air, and a faint smell of soot. Something poked her leg again, and Maia turned to follow the impertinent curve of a deck shoe, up a scar-worn leg to a face belonging to Baltha. The tall easterling var had stripped to the waist, her breasts restrained with a tightly wrapped leather halter. Baltha's blonde hair was tied back with a pink ribbon that seemed anomalously gay, given the glitter of feral combativeness in her eye. She grinned at Maia, stroking her trepp bill. "This is it, virgie. Ready for some fun?"
"Get back to your post," Naroin snapped at the tall blonde. Baltha shrugged and sauntered away, rejoining her friends near where the cook tended a steaming cauldron. The rough-looking mercenaries from the Southern Isles stretched and toyed with their bills, poking one another playfully, showing no outward sign of nerves.
A cabin boy handed Maia a hot cup of tcha, which seemed to course through her, opening veins and briefly intensifying the dawn chill. There had been dreams, she recalled. Their last shreds were already dissipating, leaving only vague feelings of dire jeopardy.
Unlike the night before, there was no wind save a faint, intermittent zephyr, but a chugging vibration told that auxiliary engines were running, pushing the ship in clumsy flight. Holding her cup in one hand, Maia clutched the corners of her blanket and looked out to sea.
The first thing she noticed was an archipelago of jutting islets — resembling upended splinters of stone that had been wave-washed smooth over epochs far longer than humanity had been on Stratos. Erupting from abyssal water, the precipitous spires stretched like a sinuous chain of blunt needles, ranging from northwest to southeast. Rather than meeting a distinct horizon, they faded with distance into a soft, mysterious haze. Some of the nearer isles were large enough for their moss-encrusted flanks to converge on forest-topped ridges, from which spilled slender, spring-fed waterfalls.
"Poulandres was trying to reach those," explained the young rad, Kau, when Maia wandered near the portside rail. A scar near her ear showed where Renna had tended her wound, after the fight aboard the Musseli locomotive. "Captain hoped to slip the reavers' radar among 'em. But the wind let us down, and sunrise came too soon, alas. Now it's going to be stand and fight."
The dark-haired var gave Maia an amiable nudge. "Want to see the enemy?"
Do I have any choice? Maia reluctantly turned away from the entrancing isles to look where Kau gestured, toward a misleadingly rosy dawn. When she saw their pursuer, she gasped.
It's so close!
