Tress of the Emerald Sea (The Cosmere)(74)

But now—as she dug in the remnants of the flare for the timer—she wondered. Each of those preachers had acted like they had the answer, like there was one purpose in life. All life. She understood the inclination. A single answer would certainly make things tidier. Two plus two is four. Water boils at a specific temperature. Also, the purpose of life is to learn to imitate the call of a marmoset. Go.

For Fort, finding a good trade was the purpose of life. While for Ann, the purpose was to learn to fire a cannon without blowing the limbs off her friends by accident. So were there many answers? Or were they all the same answer with different applications?

It should be noted that Tress would have made an excellent philosopher. In fact, she had already determined that philosophy wasn’t as valuable as she’d assumed—something that takes most great philosophers at least three decades to realize.

She finally pried out the timer, then set it on the table. The flare gun, she noted, worked a lot like an ordinary pistol. You loaded it with a separate charge for firing.

“So…what are we doing?” Huck asked.

“Look here,” she said, prying a silver bit off the timer. Conical, sharp on one end, like the tip of a pencil. “This is what makes the flare go off. The silver breaks through the roseite core, which is filled with water.

“What I’m going to do is reverse this. I’m going to put this pointed bit on the top of the flare, but facing backward. So when the flare hits something, the silver will be pushed back, break the roseite ball, and let out the water.”

“I mean, sure,” Huck said. “That sounds like it would work. But why?”

“I need to find a way to stop Crow,” Tress explained. “But as we saw when we attacked those merchants, a normal gun won’t hurt her.”

“And you’re hoping a flare will?” Huck said.

“Not exactly,” she said, then began to rebuild the flare. Not only did she put the silver detonator under the cap instead of at the base of the flare, she replaced the sunlight spores with sand and a few grains of verdant spores. She closed the device back up without the timer, then inspected it. “I asked Ulaam earlier today, and he said that the spores living in Crow’s blood will protect her from any weapon that tries to break her skin. So I figure I’ll stop her without hurting her.”

“How on the seas would you do that?”

“Same way we stop ships without sinking them,” she said. “I build a flare that explodes with verdant vines, then use those to stick her to the wall or the floor. If I can make this work, I won’t have to kill—or even hurt—her. I can immobilize her, then let Salay take over the ship.”

“That’s brilliant!” Huck said, peeking out farther from beneath his bowl. “Do you think it will really work?”

Tress loaded the flare—along with some zephyr spores—into the flare gun, which had a stubby, oversized barrel. She sighted down it, but didn’t pull the trigger—which would inject water into the barrel and launch the projectile. Testing this sort of thing in her quarters didn’t seem healthy.

But how could she test it? She needed to be able to hit something solid to break the water cartridge, so she couldn’t simply fire it out the porthole. But she also didn’t want to let Crow know what she was building.

She’d have to find another way. She set the gun down, then glanced to the side as Huck—finally abandoning his hiding spot—came crawling over.

“Hey,” he said, “you look sad. It’s all right, Tress. You’ll find a way out of this. You’re good, and you’re smart. You’ll make it.”

“If I do,” she said softly, “it will mean consigning Crow to death. Her disease will eat her from the inside if she doesn’t make a trade with the dragon.”

Huck wrung his paws, his nose twitching. He didn’t say the obvious thing: that Crow absolutely did not deserve sympathy. Tress knew this already, and he knew that she did.

Unfortunately, sympathy is not a valve, to be turned off when it starts to flood the yard. Indeed, the path to a life without empathy is a long and painful one, full of bartered humanity sold at a steep discount.

To distract herself from what she was planning to do to Crow, Tress inspected the timer that she’d left out in reconstructing the flare. The small device looked exactly like the schematic had described: a bit of verdant vine for a fuse, already grown from spores, and a small glass vial, which—being far more flimsy than the roseite bead—would break upon firing.

She pried out the vine, then—causing Huck to back up in concern—poured a little water on it. The small vine curled and trembled. She watched it for a time, then figured she should practice with her tools.

The vine wiggled a little more vigorously.

Tress hesitated, then leaned down closer. The aether grew steadily, though it was still no longer than her finger. Then the tip—the part that was growing—turned toward her. The little vine crept in her direction.

Tress scooted to the side. The tip of the vine began growing in that direction instead.

Her confusion deepening, Tress scooted her chair the other direction. Again the vine moved, leaving a zigzag in its expanding length as the tip followed her.

It was running out of water, so she wet it again. Then she got down low, watching it creep toward her. Was it…looking for something? Back home, she’d found some weeds in a dim shed that had somehow survived the salt. Those weeds had all grown directly toward the single knothole of light in the boards.