“Ready?” Roach said over the lapping of water against rock. Silverfish nodded, and they dived. She followed Roach as he swam determinedly down, down, farther from the light and into the inky blue of deep water. Her ears were already beginning to ache, her chest still sore from decompression after the dives she’d made earlier that week. On those dives, she’d managed to retrieve only a few tiny pearls, half of them misshapen.
Today’s dive would be different.
It had to be.
The man she’d rescued—he’d told her his name was Boon—might claim to be wealthy, but all Silverfish cared about was whether he could pay her way off the Brackish. He was just as Captain Zharo said: a useless waste of food and water.
“What’s your name?” he’d asked this morning after giving his own.
“Silverfish.”
The response earned her a slight tic of his mouth, almost a smile. “I meant your real name.”
“As if Boon is your real name? You call me Silverfish or nothing.”
That earned her a sharp bark of laughter as he leaned against the wall of the cell, scratching at the dark beard filling in around his jaw. There was a tremor in his left arm that seemed to come and go at random intervals. “Fair enough. Where you from, then?”
“Moray. You’re Kharian, I assume?” His accent hinted at it, though it was watered down, as if he hadn’t stepped foot in his home country in years.
“You assume correctly.” He’d folded his arms, his crusty, buttonless coat straining at his elbows. “How’d you end up here, then, Silverfish?”
“How does anyone end up on a debtor’s ship?” Instead of answering, he’d just stared at her, his gaze as dark as the pitch they used to waterproof the fish buckets. “What, are you looking for a bedtime story? Fine. The debt collectors came for my family after my father was accused of trafficking illegal goods to the Rain Empire in order to pay off gambling debts. Never mind that he was innocent, or that his lies were about as obvious as a whale in the desert. They hanged him for something he didn’t do, and all that debt was slapped onto our shoulders.”
She had to pause to take a breath, to fill herself with something other than rage and grief. “My mother couldn’t pay, so here I am.”
Boon had sat there, quietly listening, fingers laced over his stomach. Every so often he would jerk his head to one side, as if shooing away a fly or trying to get water out of his ear.
“Sounds like a real winner, your dad,” he said after a while.
“Don’t you dare mock my father,” she snapped. “Someone like you has no right to judge the type of man he was. And he was a good man—one of the best. Unlike some others I’ve met.”
He ignored the gibe. “So how’d this flawless father of yours come to be wrongly accused?” he asked. “How much shit did he have to step in to get it to stain his breeches?”
“He was a pearl merchant.” She could still remember riding on her father’s shoulders as he brought her to the docks, as he showed her around his ship and let her hold a few small, perfect pearls. She had called them moons, and he’d told her that was his secret—that the earth had many moons, and he knew where they hid under the waves. “He was loyal to the Port’s Authority. But they turned around and claimed he was a smuggler.”
Boon made a clucking noise with his tongue and jammed a pinkie finger in his ear, wriggling it around. “Doesn’t surprise me. The Port’s Authority are fickle bastards.”
“You have experience with them, do you?”
He examined his earwax-coated finger, even going so far as to smell it before rubbing it on his shirt. “Unfortunately.”
“Are you a merchant?” She had held her breath. It was the question she had wanted to ask since pulling him on board; if he was indeed a merchant from Moray, then he might have enough wealth waiting for him on shore that he could easily spare some for his rescuer.
But he had shaken his head, reading the disappointment on her face. “Not anymore. Not that kind, anyway.”
She didn’t know what that meant, and at that point was too afraid to ask. “Then why were you at sea? And…why were you covered in marigolds?” Marigolds were a symbol of death and remembrance in Khari, mostly used in shrines and for funerals.
“Don’t have to tell you my life story, do I?”
She scoffed. Hypocrite. “Well, the Port’s Authority is the reason I’m here. We never even saw any evidence. They were probably protecting one of their own.” She shrugged, although the injustice of it still pained her. “Or maybe it was a competition thing. Maybe Chandra’s Pearls was making too much profit and it spooked them.”
Boon had stared hard at the opposite wall of his cell. His head twitched a couple of times. Then he jumped to his feet so suddenly that Silverfish took a step back.
“Chandra,” he’d muttered. “Chandra, Chandra, Chandra.” His voice rose until he was practically shouting it, laughing with disbelief. “Chandra!”
He’d given a single loud yell and smacked his palm against the holding cell’s wall. Silverfish had flinched back, watching as Boon muttered to himself and leaned against the wall while holding his head, his laughter bleeding into snarls.
Then he had lunged for the bars, grabbing them with thick, scarred hands and pressing his forehead against them, dark eyes unnervingly wide. Silverfish had been frozen by that look.
“I see it now,” he whispered. “I see it.”
“See what?”
“Your father.” He had paused then, his grip slackening. He shook his head as if coming to his senses. “I knew him. Arun Chandra.”
Silverfish had closed her eyes for a moment, trying to will away the dizziness that was beginning to make the room spin. Arun Chandra. She hadn’t heard her father’s full name in years. Like Amaya, it felt like a dead thing suddenly resurrected.
For a moment, just a flash of a second, she’d almost imagined she could hear her father’s laugh, low and sonorous in his chest.
“You…You couldn’t have. He didn’t…” Consort with the likes of you, she wanted to say.
He stepped back and ran his hands through his hair. “Chandra. A pearl merchant in Moray, yeah. I knew him before…” Boon had looked at her again, hands still tangled in his hair. “You mentioned a gambling debt. Easy to gamble away a fortune in a place like Moray, no? Mayhap your dear dad wasn’t a smuggler, but every man carries his sins a different way.”
Sins? The man was a mess and had no idea what he was talking about. Silverfish had taken a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself enough to speak.
Finally, she’d said, “I can’t believe you thought that would work.”
He’d frowned. “What?”
“You didn’t know my father. You never met him—you have no idea what kind of man he was. You’re just trying to get me to help you escape.”
“Now hold on—”
“It was a nice try, but I don’t trust that easily. The only way I’d help you is if you had a fat diamond in your pocket. Even then, I’m not so sure.”
She’d thought Boon might get angry, but on the contrary, he just gave that harsh bark of laughter again. “Sounds to me like you don’t want to face the truth,” he had countered. “That your father maybe wasn’t the oh-so-perfect man you recall.”