He gives me the drive. “It’s done. Let’s get back to him before things get any worse.”
10
Poseidon
I’m sitting in the captain’s quarters on the new ship.
At least, this is where they will be, if Mark isn’t a liar. Right now it’s a slab of steel in an overheated tin box. The air-circulation system won’t power on until tomorrow. When he said cosmetic fixes he meant installing the actual interiors of some of the spaces. Including this space, which is supposed to be mine.
It’s in roughly the same spot as it was on the Trident. Down a flight of stairs, first door on the left. Easy access for people to find me and easy access for me to find my bed at the end of the day.
I wish there was a bed now.
The ship rolls gently in the water by the dock. A breeze from the open window explores the room, which is larger than my old quarters on the Trident. It has a separate sitting room and a larger bathroom and more built-in storage. Not that I need more storage. I don’t. Most of what I’d collected over the years went down with the ship. Nicholas asked me if I wanted the men to move it, and I said no. I was clinging to hope back then. Clinging to the hope that I wouldn’t have to do what I did.
The Trident bought us a little time. She was worth forever. Her sacrifice should have been enough to convince the Navy to leave us alone.
But I know better than anyone—that’s not how sacrifices work. You can make them again and again and again and in the end it might not be enough. No matter how many times you run from a deranged man. No matter how many times you crisscross the ocean looking for pieces of the love you lost.
I sit on a folding chair in the middle of the new quarters, listening to the men moving through the ship around me, listening to the sea ripple and wave through the cracked window. This vessel is more spacious than the Trident but just as sleek, and just as fast. I don’t know her yet. I knew every bolt and every board on the Trident. The footsteps echoing around me now sound subtly off, their spacing wrong. It’s a combination of the different men—some of them are not my crew, and I know it by the way they walk—and the different ship.
There’s one pair of footsteps I listen for in particular. I feel them more than I hear them. Ashley, up on deck with Nicholas and Buddy.
I should go up there with them. I should be with her constantly, because danger is pressing in more and more with every minute that passes. The sea hums underneath the ship. If I tip my head back and close my eyes, the whispers start. They’re getting louder. As if I’ve been away too long. There’s nothing on the horizon now, no enemies in the water. Not yet, the sea says. Not yet, not yet.
But it’s coming.
It whispers about a vague distrust of the land, too. I understand that. The land is the fucking worst.
I should go to Ashley, but I can’t get up yet. I just need a few minutes to get myself together. I almost lost it stepping on board. Almost went to my knees. The cramps in my calves loosened with that single step and faded out with every step after. Sharp pain that’s been twisting into my back disappeared. I could have curled up on the deck and passed out. It very nearly happened.
Instead, I got a fucking grip and went on a tour of the ship with Mark, who was slightly smug about it. I wanted to punch him, but I also wanted to hug him. That’s how I know things have deteriorated. I’m not a hugger. Only for Ashley. The rest of us communicate through shoulder-punches and slaps on the back.
It’s so good to be on the water.
And with the filtered sunlight on my face, with my eyes closed and my mind wandering, my thoughts are coming in clearer than they have in days. Clearer than they have since the Trident gave up and went under.
Part of my drive to go back to the sea is that I always equated it with escaping my family. When I finally left the farmhouse and got my first ship, I told myself it was simple. I was going to the sea for the love of it, and to find my mother’s pearls.
But it was never simple.
Leaving the land meant putting distance between me and Cronos, the foster father from hell. I don’t blame myself for that. I don’t blame Hades for getting out as soon as we turned eighteen. Things had gotten bad for him by then. Near-death bad. There were times he seemed strangely all right, which must have been Demeter’s early attempts at painkillers. But other times...
I don’t blame him for leaving. And I don’t blame Zeus for going along with whatever Cronos wanted at the whorehouse. He was trying to save those women in his own way, even if he would never admit it.
I know how he paid for that, too.
So it wasn’t out of anger that I left, and it wasn’t because I blamed them. It was because I was sick with guilt. Sick that I’d let it go so far with Hades. Sick that I hadn’t done more to protect them all. And Demeter…
If my mother knew, she would be so disappointed.
Talking to Hades and Zeus before the Trident stirred all of it up again.
The ship pitches and rolls, slight, subtle movements, and I make a small request of the sea. The rocking intensifies. Not so much that it will disturb the people working to build this thing around my useless, exhausted ass. Just enough to let the thoughts keep coming. I’ve been pushing them away for so long that it’s hurting me. I see that now.
My most recent conversation with Hades—about Demeter, about a shared problem we have—makes me think I have to go home. Not home—back. They’ll never be home to me.
The sea rocks the ship a little harder than I asked it to. “Fine,” I say into the air, which is not empty but filled with the wash of the sea. “They could be like home. But I don’t want it.”
The ship rocks again. “Fine. Maybe I wanted it at one point, but I couldn’t let that happen. You know why I couldn’t let that happen.”
No one is close enough to hear me. I’m not sure I’d care if they did. The sea is perhaps the only person who knows why I couldn’t let them be my brothers. Why I’ve insisted to everyone that I only call them that out of convenience.
Because letting that happen—letting them be my brothers—would mean letting go of the idea that it was only my mother and me.
Pain spikes through my chest, pain like a heart attack, and—fuck. I have to find her. I have to know what the truth is. If she’s gone, the way I knew she was gone all these years, then I would have no one but Zeus and Hades left. And Ashley, if she’d even want me. And if my mother is alive—
It’s a choice, isn’t it? I’d have to choose.
No, whispers the sea. Your heart is vast.
I laugh at that bullshit. My heart is a shriveled thing, barely beating.
I shift in my chair, but I can’t open my eyes. Not yet. They’re too heavy, and I need to get through this—whatever this moment is. That decision is far in the future. The more pressing consideration is what to do about my brothers. About Demeter.
This time, I can’t stay away. Not forever. I have to go back, because the four of us are the same in this one, twisted way. We are all the products of our foster father’s legacy. The sick fuck might be dead, but that legacy is alive.
More alive in some of us than others. I let myself hear my conversations with my brothers again in a half-dream, my feet stretched out on the footrest of this folding chair. Most chairs like this can’t handle so much height and muscle, but this one can. It’s a good chair. Now that I can focus on their voices, it’s clear my brothers sound different. Hades has always been freakishly good at hearing the differences in people’s voices, probably because of his fucked-up eyes, but I’m a close second. It’s from all my time listening to the sea.