The Abyss Surrounds Us (The Abyss Surrounds Us #1)(17)

Bao snorts.



The next days pass in a haze. The trainer deck hatch is kept locked tight, and my twenty-four-hour supervision begins. I sleep in bursts, woken by the pup whenever he gets hungry and starts to squall. As my scalp starts to heal, I cut the rest of my hair short to even out the damage. My ribs ache constantly.

Every morning the ship’s cook, a giant Islander woman named Hina, comes down with a new barrel of fish caught by the Minnow’s trawler. The entire trainer deck starts to reek of what goes into Bao and what comes out. I have to flush out his filthy tank water every day.

It’s hell. There’s no lighter way of putting it. I realize after the first week that I wouldn’t have a chance if someone decided to come and kill me. I’m too exhausted to put up a fight.

And if Swift was on my side after watching me birth the pup, that ship has sailed. She brings me food and escorts me to the head on my breaks, but I can tell that her patience with this game is running thin. If her life didn’t depend on it, she’d probably be first in line at my throat.

Once a night, I let myself grieve Durga. I let myself imagine that I trusted my instincts, that I never let the Nereid depart with a dying Reckoner as its escort, that I’d figured out what was wrong with her. I don’t know what caused her body to fall apart like that, but it’s clear as day that the pirates were behind it. Someday I’ll figure out exactly what they did to her.

Until then, I curl up on my counter with my head in my hands and cry until there’s nothing left.



One night, I wake up to the hatch swinging open, and for a second I’m certain that a bullet is about to find my brain. In the darkness, I can’t make out the figure that steps through the door.

Bao sleeps on. The little bastard is actually snoring.

Only three people on this ship have the key to get into the trainer deck. One of them just drops off fish, one doesn’t want anything to do with me, but the third …

“Captain?” I ask.

“Just checking in on things,” Santa Elena replies.

I want to ask her why that’s necessary in the middle of the night, but if I’ve learned anything on this ship, it’s that Santa Elena is beyond questioning.

She hits the dim lights, filling the deck with a warm glow as she approaches the pup’s tank. The captain is dressed in a red bathrobe, which she hugs tighter around herself as she peers over the edge at the slumbering baby Reckoner. “It’s always hardest at the start,” she says.

I should probably warn her to step back from the tank. I’ve seen pups pretend to sleep, just to trick people into coming closer to them. Bao’s playful side is still developing, and I don’t know if he’d take Santa Elena’s arm off or just try to startle her. But I want to see how this plays out, so I hold my tongue.

The captain’s lips curve into a soft smile. “When I had my boy, I don’t think I ever really slept for the first month. People always tried to tell me that motherhood was this beautiful, sacred, precious thing, but god as my witness, motherhood’s nothing but a hot mess.”

“I’m not a mother,” I say as I sit upright, pushing off the musty towels that cover me.

“You sure as shit look like one, Cassandra.”

It’s not untrue. My scalp is still patchy and misshapen from where Bao tore out my hair, my shirt is covered in stains from fish guts, and though I haven’t seen a mirror in ages, I can feel the weight of dark circles under my eyes.

“I miss the days when my boy was small, though,” she continues. “I was stranded out on a floating city with a newborn baby, but it felt like the beginning of something, you know? When I took this ship, it was with him strapped on my back. People will tell you differently. They want me to be a demon in their stories, and a demon carrying a baby doesn’t fit that image, right? Now it’s the middle of the story, and it’s monotonous.”

I can’t wrap my head around monotony in a life of piracy. I can’t understand how she could consider raising a Reckoner pup that could upset the balance of the NeoPacific monotonous. There are so many ways she could have an unfortunate accident on this deck, and I know the triggers to at least three of them.

“You’re thinking about killing me right now, aren’t you?” she asks.

My head snaps up.

“Don’t look so surprised. I developed an instinct for this sort of thing years ago. You’ll find it’s a very useful skill on a boat like this.”

“I’ll work on it,” I deadpan. Bao chooses that moment to heave a snore so thunderous that he wakes himself up. Santa Elena leans out farther over the tank. Some sort of thrill lights up in her eyes, and I wonder if this is her break in the monotony.

Bao regards her with one beady black eye, stretching his stubby legs until his keratin plates creak. Go on, you little shit, I urge him. Do it.

But he doesn’t.

Of course he doesn’t. She’s doing nothing to provoke him, nothing to make him see the worth in lunging for her. And somehow I doubt Santa Elena is slow enough to let herself get caught by him.

I know what really stays Bao, though. It’s something that’s instinctive to every monster I’ve ever worked with—the recognition of when you’re overpowered. Bao sees the hurricane behind Santa Elena, and he respects it. He sees no storm in me.

Not yet.