The Abyss Surrounds Us (The Abyss Surrounds Us #1)(38)

My eyes fall on the syringe of cull serum. Santa Elena had this on the ship the whole time. Only IGEOC agents are supposed to have this stuff, and somehow it ended up on the Minnow. And Code stole it. He knew what it was, what it was for.

And there’s something more, something I noticed that’s itching at the back of my mind. Swift knew what it was too.

I pick up the syringe and pitch it out into the inky November sea. One more mystery to unravel later.

I need dry clothes, so I lock the trainer deck’s hatch behind me and make my way to Swift’s room. She still isn’t back yet, and for a moment I worry that Code overpowered her before she could get him up to the captain’s quarters. I’ve got to start having more faith in her if I’m ever going to pay her back for saving me. I pull open her hatch—unlocked, like she always leaves it when she’s not there—and step in.

Swift’s room is starting to smell like home. There’s always that scent—the one that sticks in your memory but doesn’t really surface until you find it again and all of a sudden it’s crashing over you like a wave. I guess I’ve collected a lot of these scents over the years: the sickly sweet smell of amniotic fluid from Mom’s lab; the rough, earthy tones of a Reckoner’s hide; and now this, the sort-of-musty, sort-of-woody odor that characterizes the little nest Swift’s carved for herself in the middle of a den of pirates.

Her floor’s still carpeted with dirty clothes. I’ve yet to see her wash them, but I know she must because there’s definitely some sort of rotation going on, and there’s always clean stuff in her drawers. I nudge one of them open and root through it until I find a tank top and a set of shorts that I quickly swap into, dumping my soaking wet clothes in a less-than-convenient heap by the door. I shake out my hair while I’m at it. It falls in my eyes now. Maybe I’ll live long enough to grow it back to shoulder-length.

For a moment, I consider going back to the trainer deck, but all I can see there is Code with the knife, wearing the invincible grin of a boy who’s trapped an animal in a corner. Tonight, that place is haunted. Here is safe.

So I sit on the edge of Swift’s bed and wait until I hear the shuffle of her bootsteps in the corridor outside.

“Cas?” she calls as she sticks her head through the door. She rolls her eyes when she spots me perched on her bunk. “Should’ve known. You are aware that you leave a trail of water pretty much anywhere you go, right?”

“What happened to Code?” I ask, drawing my knees up to my chin as she pushes into the room and closes the hatch behind her. Suddenly my chest feels tight, like I’ve dived too deep and the pressure is crushing my lungs.

Swift pauses, and something bitter flashes in her eyes. “Captain’s having a long chat with him. She threw me out after a point. I dunno what she’s going to do, but I don’t think I wanted to be around to see it anyway.”

I don’t know how to tread here. She’s been on this boat for five years, and so has he. And they’ve been working closely together for at least a year. The night after we took down that bucket, they were celebrating together. Code with a drink in his hand, and Swift with a girl in her lap. But then that afternoon in the Slew a month later, Code had it out for Swift. He wanted to humiliate her, to make her suffer.

And today he wanted to kill her.

I remember how it felt in the Slew, with the crew’s support at my back. That invincible, top-of-the-world feeling—to have that all the time, to have the loyalty of the Minnow. For a moment, I let myself crave it.

For a moment, I understand why Code would do anything to captain this ship.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Swift, figuring it’s the best I can do.

Swift shakes her head and pulls up her shirt, revealing a fresh bandage that’s been slapped over her side. She catches my eye. “Tried to tell the captain it was nothing, but she insisted on having Reinhardt patch me up.”

“It looked pretty bad. Are you sure it’s okay?”

She shrugs, yanking her shirt over her head. “It’ll be a scar, that’s all.”

“Just adding to the collection?”

“It’s yours, I guess,” she says, then draws a sharp breath as if the words came out wrong.

I wrinkle my nose. “That’s hella weird, Swift. It’s on your body, for Christ’s sake.”

She chuckles, grabbing an oversized T-shirt from the drawer. “It’s my body, but I don’t let it get carved up by meaningless marks. Every one of them’s got a story, and every one of them is for someone. This one’s for you. Deal with it.”

“Am I supposed to say thank you?”

“You can if you want,” she says, grinning impishly as she starts unlacing her boots.

“Well, I did kind of want to thank you—not for naming your weird scars after me, but for, y’know, saving my life back there. Even if you were just saving your own life, I mean … what I should … thanks. Just … yeah, thanks.”

Swift freezes, her mouth slightly parted, and for a moment I think she’s going to tip over with her boots half off.

“Also, can I sleep here tonight?” I blurt before I can think better of it.

The impish grin is back. “Knew you weren’t buttering me up for nothing,” she chuckles. “Yeah, it’s fine. Dunno why you sleep out on the trainer deck anyway.”