“This evens the score, you know,” I say. “But I’m still a point up.”
Lira shifts. “Quick,” she says. My fingers are webbed by her blood, shirttails damp against my hip. “Take this to make up for it.”
She lifts a shaking arm and a small pendant falls from her hand to mine. Bluer than her eyes and far too delicate to hold so much power. The Págese necklace.
She got it.
I laugh and consider what smart comment I could make – telling her that it’s not really my style, or that maybe I already have it in gold – but then Lira’s eyes quiver back and there doesn’t seem to be much point in being funny if she isn’t the one to hear it.
“Captain!” Madrid yells, Kye’s hands still clinched to her waist. “She needs a medic.”
Torik shadows over me, squeezing my shoulder with his mighty hands and bringing me back to reality. I swallow. Nod. Stand with Lira far too light in my arms. Run from the dregs of Rycroft’s shitty ship, leaving a trail of blood in my wake.
“Get moving!” I shout, once I step foot back onto the Saad. “And blow that ship to hell in our backwash.”
The Saad lurches and my crew jumps into anarchy. They run from one end of the deck to the other, pulling the lines from their winches and recleating the boom. Trimming sails and scanning for the wind. I cleave forward, pushing past the ones who stop dead, noticing the blood-soaked girl in my arms and offering their hand.
“Elian,” Kye says. “You’re injured. Let me carry her.”
I ignore him and turn to Torik. His face is wretched as he stares down at Lira. She may not have been one of us before, but dying in the line of duty has a way of securing people’s loyalty.
“Make sure the medic is ready,” I say, and my first mate nods.
Rycroft is slung carelessly over his shoulder, his blood dripping down Torik’s back. He’s alive, but barely, and if I get my hands on him, then he won’t stay that way for long. With Lira still limp in my arms, I yell for Torik to get a medic and he throws Rycroft to the floor without hesitation before rushing belowdecks.
Really, we don’t have a medic, but my assistant engineer traveled with a Plásmatash circus and that’s close enough. As I carry Lira toward him, through the twists and tunnels of my ship, I’m caught off guard by the notion that out of all the princes and pirates and killers and convicts, a small boy from a circus is the only one who can help. It seems funny, and I think how Lira might laugh, knowing that a rookie engineer will be stitching her skin back together. What biting comment she would come back with and how it would sink into me like a perfectly wonderful kind of poison. Like a bullet.
I push my way into the cramped room, Kye rushing in behind me. The would-be medic gestures to a table in the middle of the engineering room. “Put her down there,” he says in a panicked breath. “And open her dress.”
I do as he says and grab my knife. The strange thing is that at first I don’t think I can see any more blood gushing from the wound – it seems to all be on her dress and on me – and then when I do see blood, it doesn’t seem like enough. Or perhaps it’s all already come out. Maybe there just isn’t any left.
“Gods.” Kye recoils as I slash open Lira’s dress. “Is she going to live?”
“Do you care?” I snap back.
It isn’t his fault, but yelling at Kye feels a little like yelling at myself, and I need to be yelled at right now. Because this is on me. If Lira dies, then it’s on me.
I can’t believe you came back for me.
But I left her first.
“I don’t want her to die, Elian.” Kye squeezes my arm, keeping me steady as the fraying parts inside threaten to dismantle me. “I never did. Besides” – Kye shoves a hand into his pocket and sighs through the next words – “she protected you when I couldn’t.”
“It looks like a clean shot,” the medic says, and I turn, the irony of it gnawing at me. It was a dirty shot, through and through.
“It just scraped her ribs,” he says. “I have to check no organs were damaged though.” He points a gloved finger at Kye. “Don’t just stand there shadowing my light. Get me some towels.”
Kye doesn’t bristle at the order, or argue that we should let Lira die to be sure she can’t betray us. He turns, hurries from the room, and doesn’t even waste the time to glare properly.
“She didn’t nick anything important,” the medic says.