Scavenge the Stars (Scavenge the Stars #1)(23)

She pulled away. “This is your fault. If I hadn’t rescued you, I would have been able to walk off the Brackish and go home. I would have…”

She was about to say I would have seen my mother, but Captain Zharo’s words came rushing back. Like the wound on her arm, the delayed pain suddenly came all at once, stealing the air from her lungs. She doubled over, whimpering.

“Whoa, what’s gotten into you?” Boon demanded, but she ignored him.

My mother is dead. She died three years ago, and that bastard never told me.

She was too dehydrated to cry, but her eyes still stung, her throat tightening with the force of her grief. She pounded a fist into the sand.

“I’m going to kill him,” she seethed.

“Hold on, now. Before we go killing anybody, there’s something I gotta show you.”

Silverfish looked around the blank shore of the atoll. “Show me?” she repeated. “What could you possibly have to show me?”

But he only gave her a funny little smile. “Think you can dive once more?”

She didn’t want to dive. She needed to get off this atoll, to find Zharo and plunge a knife in his heart. Breathing heavily, she hauled herself to her feet, ready to swim to Moray if she had to.

At the sight of what awaited her, she froze. There were whirlpools surrounding the atoll, the waves churning in slow, spinning cyclones.

I see the monsters didn’t eat you. Boon had been talking about Usaad and Broma, the twin sea serpents said to lurk to the southeast of Moray. They were fabled to cause devastating maelstroms that sank countless ships. The riptide was connected to the whirlpools, which must have spat her out on the atoll.

She was trapped.

Slowly, she turned and stared at Boon, who grinned at her knowingly. She suddenly saw the situation for what it was: She belonged to him now, much in the same way he’d belonged to her on the Brackish. He was the only one who knew how to escape. She had to follow him.

Silverfish grabbed her shucker and tucked it into her pocket. At least she had a weapon, however puny, in case this all went belly-up. As she finally approached the lagoon, Boon handed her a water skin. She greedily began to guzzle the freshwater, but he yanked it away before she could get more than three sips.

“It’ll make you sick,” he admonished. “You ought to know that. You can have more when we get there.”

“Where is there?”

“You’ll see.”

She followed him toward the middle of the lagoon, sucking the residue of water off her lips. The sand eventually fell away, and she swam slowly behind Boon, her arms leaden as she tried to keep up.

“Ready?” he asked once they had made it to the middle of the lagoon. “Take a deep breath.”

“I know how to dive,” she muttered, but he had already plunged into the water. She gulped a breath and followed.

It almost felt like when she had jumped off the Brackish into the orange water, swimming down as far as she could go just because Boon had told her to. And now here she was, doing it again.

Down and down, through layers of aquamarine water. They swam past a ring of coral, a reef naturally formed from whatever island had once occupied this lonely spot on the sea.

Suddenly, a hole appeared in the reef, forming a natural corridor. Boon pressed on until he reached the end, where carved into the lava bed that had originally birthed this atoll was…

A door?

Boon pushed at a hatch-shaped hunk of rock, revealing a dark hole as it slid away. He beckoned her through first.

Silverfish’s instincts told her to swim up instead of down. But Boon insistently gestured again, so she quickly swam through the hole and waited for him to do the same. He led her through the dark until he tugged on her arm and pulled her up.

They broke the surface of a pool. Silverfish, stunned, saw they’d surfaced inside a cave of blackish stone.

“What in Trickster’s name is this place?” she demanded.

Boon hauled himself onto a lip of dark rock and helped her stand. “Back on the ship, you called me Landless. You weren’t entirely wrong.”

When a person committed crimes against their country or people, they were sometimes sentenced to become Landless, exiled from their homes and blacklisted in other empires. Some of them were also escapees of debtor ships. Their only resort was to either roam the seas or find a hidden community of other Landless.

“This is a Landless comm,” she guessed.

“For simplicity’s sake, yeah, it is.” Boon wrung out his shirt. “Come on. The others will wanna meet you.”

She once again followed him. She felt as if she were half-asleep, and there was a small part of her that didn’t particularly care what happened to her now.

Her mother was dead. There was no one left in the world to love her.

There was only the promise of retribution.

The caverns they walked through were cramped and impossibly dark, the rock columns on either side damp and made of a black stonelike material. Boon kept clicking his tongue, and Silverfish was reminded of how a bat used sound to map out its surroundings. She wondered how much time he’d spent in darkness, alone.

The columns eventually opened up to a larger cavern with a lantern swinging from an unseen rope, water dripping down the walls like miniature waterfalls, glittering hunks of fluorite embedded in the rock. Stalactites branched downward in varying lengths, a few stalagmites reaching up toward them as if seeking to become one.