Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(22)

Raz appeared at the upper deck’s rail. “What kept you?”

“Meetings,” she said.

He leapt over the rail, somersaulted, and landed light-footed on the boards. His eyes were true red in the moonlight, not the burned scab color they seemed in daytime shadows. “Anything important?”

“Probably,” she said, “but it’ll keep. Glad to see you aren’t on fire anymore.”

He wiggled his fingers. Thin scars crisscrossed his palm, tracks left by sunlight. The regrown skin was even darker than the rest of him. “There’s a reason I tan. Course now I’ll have to even out, or I’ll get blotchy.”

“Some leech you are. Isn’t your guys’ thing more a sort of deathly pallor? I knew girls on the club circuit who went through my salary in white pancake makeup every month.”

“Dumb. Scenesters imitating form over function. Shoreland suckers in the Old World, the ones with castles, drew lines from skin to status—if you were pale, it meant you could afford people to do things for you in the day. The paler you are, the faster you burn, so if you’re really pale it shows you’re not scared of the peasants-with-pitchforks routine. Which is all well and good until you forget to adjust your clocks for daylight savings time, some traveler you wanted to put the moves on pulls off the window blinds at dawn, and you go up like dryer lint.”

“Daylight what?”

“It’s an Old World thing. Are you ready to sail?”

Her pocket watch was ticking. “Yes. Everyone’s aboard?”

“Hold’s packed with your creepy friends.”

“Again with the creepy.” She waved at the crew scuttling, skittering, and lurching around the Kel’s Bounty deck. “What do you call these?”

“Sailors,” he said, and turned from her and raised his hand. “Cast off!”

In the rigging, a woman with the legs and abdomen of a spider shouted, “Aye!”

They made good time out of port—the Bounty’s wind walker filled their sail with a steady breeze, and Raz took the helm. “Promise to cover for me with the pilots’ guild. I don’t want to end up on their bad side.”

“As far as the port authority is concerned, none of this is happening.”

“They don’t like to be reminded some of us have been sailing this harbor since before they were born.” He spun the wheel, called for depth, adjusted again. Sighted on something she couldn’t see with his spyglass, collapsed it, let it dangle from his neck.

The ship swayed, and Cat almost fell, but caught herself with a lunge for the rail. “You have the edge of experience?”

“This spyglass of mine’s older than most pilots on the river.” He touched the symbols stamped into the bronze. “A relic of my vital days. Locals sail the harbor more often. If there’s a new wreck I don’t know about, if the sandbanks have shifted, if you put in port chains or kraken mines, we’re in trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Can you swim?”

“In my own body, yes. If I put the Suit on, I sink.”

“I’ll try not to wreck us, then.”

“You weren’t doing that already?”

Fangs glinted in the moonlight as he grinned.

Despite Cat’s misgivings about the skeleton crew, they seemed at least as competent as the mortal variety. Raz’s sailors were not linked like the Blacksuits were through Justice, but they’d worked together long enough to even out the difference. A hand of bone tossed a coil of rope to the chitinous claw of a mantis-thing, who scrambled up the mast so lightly its needle-tipped feet left no tracks on the wood. The spider-woman called depth, a skeleton whose bones were half-replaced with metal checked the charts, and a raven cawed from the crow’s nest.

“The Dream is moored,” Raz said once they cleared the harbor, “just leeward of the cape. You can see her lanterns from here.” There were no lights on the Bounty’s deck—most of the crew could see by moon and stars as if by daylight—so Cat’s eyes were well-adjusted to the dark. He pointed to three small bright flickers near the ocean’s face, like candle flames or stars. “That’s not good,” he said. “Plan was, run silent until we’re alongside. We’ve snuffed the running lights—which, in case you ever try this on your own—”

“Without our civilian contractor?”

“Running without lights is stupid, and dangerous. Never, ever do it unless you can see at least as well at night as you can during the day, and want to sneak up on someone, and are a pirate.”

“What’s the problem?”

“They’re past the city’s no-fly zone. You see that line there, where the water’s less shiny?”

“Yes.”

“They’ll have scouts in the sky, and any sky watch worth its salt can see in the dark. There goes our element of surprise. We can probably still catch them—but then this goes from a sneak-and-board to high-seas battle against professionals.”

“Isn’t that your area of expertise?”

“Part of lasting long enough to develop that expertise,” he said, “has been deploying it as seldom as possible. I have people who can take out their recon if we make it to the open ocean, but we’re inside the zone. Your Suits can fly, right?”