“Is that all true, Kindred?”
It was Scindapse asking, her voice quiet and broken. Kindred imagined her sitting alone in her cell, the excitement that had burned in her eyes while keeping the fire gone now, replaced by the soul-gnawing terror that she would die there, that they would all die there, that she would never see family or friends or sunlight again.
Pain stabbed through Kindred’s stomach at this, nearly doubling her over. The rest of them were hardened crew, veterans of more voyages out than most people had years alive. But not Scindapse.
“Yes. I wanted to find my grandmother, and it was the best chance I had to come this way. When the captain proposed the idea of sailing out here, I voted for it. And when there was a chance we would turn around and head back, I lied to make sure we sailed east. I thought it would work out. I thought we would be okay. We’re going to be okay,” Kindred said. “We’re going to make it out of this. We just have to pass this test.”
“What’s the test, Kindred?” Quixa’s low, sonorous voice came next, turning hard when she said Kindred’s name.
She explained the little Ragged Sarah had told her, and as she spoke, she realized how little she could offer. There was a test for those who couldn’t beg sanctuary. Or there had been once. Maybe.
“Why should any of us trust you on anything?” Little Wing shouted from her distant cell.
“Because I want to get out of this cell too,” she shouted back. “And because we don’t have anything else.”
Yet after what felt like too long examining their cells, even some approaching the line and the abyss of the Sea beyond, nothing had changed. The watchers watched. The Sea moved. And they were, all of them, fading. If it was a test, they were failing.
Kindred found her voice had begun fraying with thirst, so she was happy to rest. She lay down in the middle of her cell, listening to their yelled discussion and deliberation. After a time, Little Wing declared it all another of Kindred’s lies and went back to cursing pirates and raging at her imprisonment.
She thought of the buildings on Arcadia—small and big, blocky and angular, finite and contained, as if they were a bulwark against the maddening forever of the prairie Sea just outside the island. Buildings for huddling together, spaces created to cultivate human dimensions, to cut off the sight of a horizon impossibly far away.
The cell, though, was exposed to the Sea; grasses frayed against its edges at all times. There, a prisoner was forced to confront the Sea’s sights and songs, its horrors and beauties. Staring into a space too big for imagining, a space not built for human comfort—a space not built at all—a prisoner could lose their mind.
Infinity was the air there; forever a noun, not just an adjective.
There was the true fear all sailors faced every day on the Sea: that beneath them lay an unknown world, one they ignored at every opportunity. The Sea was for traversing; it was a great plane stretching in only two directions.
This, Kindred realized, was the Marchess’s great crime; this was the cause of Cantrev’s sneer, of the confusion and bewilderment among Revenger’s crew, of the guard on the dock who had so callously delivered the news to Kindred: the Marchess had allowed the Forever Sea, the prairie, to become a place of depth and complexity, a place of the unknowable, and that seeing—that way of knowing differently—was a threat none of them could abide.
Kindred felt her gaze pulled back again and again to the Sea, and she wondered if that same sickness had not already begun to work on her. While the rest of her crew shouted and screamed and cried, Kindred watched the Sea.
And still she heard that melody, fractured and broken and lagging, like a hearthfire singing out of tune, set edgewise, off.
A shape—something furry and long, brown flashing to red—slid by the Sea wall, there for just a moment and then gone. Kindred could not summon the energy to feel fear. Bare hints of light threaded down through the Sea from the sky above like ghosts from a previous life, stripped of anything like the warmth of an afternoon sun or the cool austerity of the moon. The movement of the grasses left room only for light, bereft of time.
A ghost wind riding a deep-Sea current pushed through the grasses, curving lines of green and animating shadows, and Kindred let her lungs fill with its susurrating sway.
In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind. It was a phrase her grandmother used to whisper, in moments of panic and moments of fear. The natural world always held the answer to her grandmother’s problems, and Kindred gave herself over to that same sentiment now. The litany ran circles in her mind as she breathed and watched, wondering if the man behind her stared at her still or if he, too, found rapture in the Sea.
* * *
“Fail!”
The shout disturbed Kindred from her examination of the white line. She’d been entertaining the possibility that whatever the test was had something to do with whatever lay buried under the line, but there was nothing but more wooden floor underneath it. She’d bloodied the fingers of her unburned hand picking at the paint, and all for nothing.
“What was that?!” came Little Wing’s voice. “What’s going on?”
Confused responses quickly settled into crewmembers sounding off. They had been nine only a few moments before: Little Wing, Kindred, Stone-Gwen, Grimm, Scindapse, Long Quixa, Cora the Wraith, Talent, and Quell.
But Grimm was not responding.
“Grimm! Grimm!” Stone-Gwen’s voice rang out, louder than Kindred had ever heard it, calling for her partner over and over, breaking each time.
They all called her name. They called for her watcher. Over and over they called.
Grimm did not answer. Whatever the test was, it seemed she had failed.
* * *
At some point, the movement of the Sea rubbing against her cell walls had the happy effect of dropping a few leaves of a plant Kindred recognized into the cell. The sheaves of green cut down through the air, shifting and slipping back and forth, to land near the white line.
She scampered forward, bringing her body right up to the line and then shooting a hand over it, quick as could be, snatching the leaves and scrambling back.
The rest of the crew had stopped talking with her by that point. Some too tired to talk at all; some flinging curses back at her questions and ideas.
“Leave her be, traitor,” Cora the Wraith had said when Kindred tried to join in the comforting of Stone-Gwen. “You’ve done enough.”
“Look, we need to come up with a plan,” Kindred said back. “I don’t want anyone else to fail. If we can just work together, we can—”
“We’re not working with you. You turned your back on all of us, Kindred,” Cora shouted, and a low chorus of agreement sounded from most of the other cells.