Halciday, 24th of Frostember, 1788

  Laila had not slept well. The bunk was adequate. The engine’s hum was tolerable. Navarro’s calm refusal to discuss anything until morning was neither.

  Morning had come. Such as it was.

  The crew sat in their habitual places. Vera nearest the engine hatch, Grimshaw with his back to the wall, Bram filling more than his share of the bench, Pip cross-legged with her device. Mira had set out the same thin stew. No one was eating with any conviction.

  Navarro stood at the head of the table. A man who had carried one duty for six years and wore it the way the Nautilus wore its hull: load bearing.

  “You have two objectives,” he said. “Both are contrary to this ship’s mission.”

  Laila’s spoon had not moved.

  “The first is a jailbreak on Undertow Keep. You wish to extract a prisoner from a siren fortress at the bottom of the ocean. The patrols out of that Keep are the reason we do not surface, do not signal, and do not exist.”

  The crew did not react. They had heard this already, in the hours between last night and this morning. No surprise to note.

  “The second is the egg.”

  Vera’s hand paused on her toolkit. Pip’s device went still. Grimshaw’s attention, which had been spread evenly across the room, gathered and focused.

  The Autumn Court had its own obligations that bound tighter than rank. A close cousin.

  “This crew took its charge after Aeloria’s attack,” Navarro said. “Some of you remember that night. Some of you lost people.” His voice did not change, but the silence around it deepened. “Safeguarding the egg is not a mission I will put to a vote. That decision is mine.”

  He looked at Laila.

  “You will need to convince me that you can manage what we have protected. And your jailbreak will need to convince my crew that the risk to this ship is justified.” He sat. “The floor is yours.”

  Laila let the silence hold for a moment.

  “Captain, do you remember Isabella?”

  Navarro’s hands, which had been resting flat on the table, shifted. “Little Isabella.” Something in his voice loosened. “How is Issy?”

  “A prisoner of Undertow Keep.”

  The looseness left. Navarro looked at her, then at Lambert, then back.

  “A great deal has happened since you last saw us,” Laila said. “I will spare you the full account. What matters is that Isabella made choices that put her in the custody of the Autumn Court, and the Accords did not protect her.”

  “You’re talking about a jailbreak on a siren fortress,” Navarro said. “I heard that part. What I need to understand is why I should risk my crew for it.”

  Lambert leaned forward. “Isabella has been privy to sensitive intelligence. The Eclipse Society. Aeloria’s network in Pharelle. The locations and movements of people the dragon cult would very much like to find.”

  Navarro’s expression did not change, but his attention did. His weight settled.

  “If that information is extracted by the Autumn Court,” Lambert continued, “we cannot predict the consequences. They may see an opportunity. They may see a threat. Either way, they act on intelligence that was never meant to leave our family.”

  “She knows about the egg,” Wylan said.

  The table went quiet.

  “Isabella is aware that you have it,” Laila said. “She does not know precisely where, or precisely how. But if the Autumn Court extracts what she does know, they will begin looking. And your six years of silence will have been for nothing.”

  Navarro sat very still. Two loyalties pulling at the same face. Laila knew which one would win. She also knew which one needed to hear something else first.

  “She is Alexios’ daughter,” Laila said. “He would have asked the same of you.”

  Navarro’s jaw worked once. He looked at the table, at his hands, at nothing in particular.

  “The egg and the girl are separate matters,” he said, finally. “I will not discuss the egg’s disposition until I am satisfied you can be trusted with it. That conversation happens on my terms, in my time.” He looked at his crew. “The question of whether this ship goes to Undertow Keep is one I will put to you. You’ve heard what’s at stake.”

  “No.” Vera did not look up from whatever she was adjusting beneath the table. Her hand kept working. The vote and the maintenance were, apparently, of equal priority.

  Bram raised his. Slowly, and with a hand that could have palmed the table.

  “No.” Pip did not raise her hand. She did not look at the family. She looked at Navarro. “We’ve kept this ship hidden for six years. We’ve avoided every patrol, every sounding, every contact. And now we sail into the teeth of it for people we met yesterday.”

  Laila held Pip’s gaze. The gnome held it back. Whatever she saw there, she did not flinch from.

  Grimshaw had not moved. The room waited. Then his hand went up, slow and deliberate, and his eyes stayed on the door.

  Two for. Two against.

  Mira had not spoken. She sat at the end of the bench; her hands folded around a bowl she had not touched. Laila had been watching her throughout, trying to read her the way she would read a courtier: the posture, the silences, the careful allocation of attention. But Mira was not a courtier. She was not performing calculation. She was simply still. Water that had not yet decided what to do.

  “I cannot cast my vote on this testimony alone,” Mira said. She addressed Navarro, not the family. “If you would permit it, Captain, I would speak to them myself.”

  Navarro studied her for a moment. Then he nodded.

  “I need to hear them without the sound of others around us.” Mira looked at Lambert, then Wylan, then Laila. The gaze was direct and unsparing. “You will answer my questions. Plainly.”

  Navarro pushed back his chair. The crew followed. Vera pocketed her project. Pip collected her daggers, point first. Bram ducked through the hatch. Grimshaw was already gone. Divina caught Laila’s eye, read the answer there, and slipped out after them.

  The door closed. The engine hummed. The mess hall contracted to three people and a siren.

  Mira did not take the head of the table. She did not sit at all. She stood between them and the hatch the crew had left through, her back to the door, her arms folded. Not blocking the exit. Guarding what was on the other side of it.

  “I do not think you understand what you are asking.”

  Laila smoothed her skirts. Mira gave her nothing. Her face was composed, her stance balanced, and whatever she thought about the three strangers sitting in her mess hall, she kept behind her teeth.

  “I understand the danger,” Laila said. “And I understand that everyone aboard this ship will bear the cost of it.”

  “Your plan,” Mira said. “What is it?”

  Laila opened her mouth. Closed it.

  Mira watched this happen. “You do not have one.”

  “Not yet,” Lambert said. “But we have the intelligence, the capability, and the time to formulate one. We have done this before.”

  Mira’s gaze moved to him and stayed there a beat longer than it had on the others. Whatever she found there, she did not share.

  “I will not ask you to produce a plan on the spot,” she said. “You get my vote when I am convinced you have a viable one. Not before.”

  “Then let us begin with what you can tell us,” Laila said. “Has this ship frequented the waters near the Keep?”

  “We avoid them.”

  “Of course. A passing thought, then.” Laila kept her tone light. Conversational. The tone she used when she was not being conversational at all. “I had heard tell of a creature resembling the kraken in the vicinity of the Keep. Sightings from traders. Rumours from the coast.” She paused. “If those sightings were not this ship, then I wonder what they were.”

  Mira’s expression did not change. But something behind it did. A flicker at the corner of her mouth, quickly governed.

  There. She filed it. Pushed.

  “So the rumours are true. And that is why some of your crew voted against this mission. Not the fortress. Not the patrols.” Laila let her voice carry the implication without stating it. “Something else.”

  Mira’s eyes hardened. “It’s a fucking underwater fortress. That’s not enough for you?”

  “I simply expected more bravery from a crew that has spent six years in these waters.”

  The words landed wrong. Laila knew it the moment they left her mouth. A courtier’s gambit, calibrated for pride. Mira was not proud. Mira was furious.

  “How would you like to take our place, then?” Mira’s voice dropped. “Stay down here for six years. Watch the dark. Listen to the hull. Count the days your crew has left before the provisions run out or the engine fails or something finds you. Then talk to me about bravery.”

  Laila’s chin lifted. The old reflex. “I have stayed in dark places for longer than six years.”

  “So you’re volunteering.”

  “That is not what I said.”

  “Don’t talk to me about courage.” Mira stepped forward. “Not when you’re trying to win our favour. Not when we have stood here and you have not.”

  The mess hall was very quiet. Lambert had gone still. Wylan’s hand rested on the edge of the table, and his eyes tracked between the two women.

  “You’re right,” Wylan said. “We haven’t. We haven’t faced what you have.” He held Mira’s gaze. “But we have faced a great many things of our own. And we are not asking lightly.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Mira looked at him. The fury did not leave, but it settled. Found its level.

  “Which is why I am willing to consider your plan,” she said. “When you have one.”

  Mira brought charts.

  She unrolled them across the mess table and weighted the corners with whatever was to hand: a wrench, a bowl, Pip’s depth gauge. Salt-stained, annotated in a hand that predated the family’s arrival by several years. The crew had consulted them often and agreed with them rarely.

  ? The Gallian Navy had attempted to standardise underwater cartography in 1762. The committee drowned. Their maps, recovered posthumously, were considered the most accurate the discipline had yet produced.

  Navarro stood at the far end, arms folded, watching. He had not taken the head of the table. He had ceded the room to Mira. Divina had returned with the crew and taken the bench, already bent over the charts.

  Lambert studied the charts for a moment. “What are the capabilities of this ship? Does it have any specialised armaments? Can it, for instance, shoot a torpedo?”

  Mira looked at him.

  “It’s a reasonable question,” Lambert said.

  “The Nautilus is a submarine disguised as a colossal squid,” Mira said. “Her strengths are deception and subterfuge. She is not a combat vessel. She has defensive measures. Deterrence, not assault.”

  “We will not be crashing this thing into the Keep.”

  “No.”

  “One option off the table, then.” He filed the disappointment and moved on.

  “The Nautilus can get you close,” Mira continued. “She can deposit you without being detected, provided we time the approach correctly. But once you are inside, you are on your own. She cannot extract you under fire.”

  “Could I cloak the approach?” Laila said. “An illusion over the ship. If they cannot see us—”

  “They would feel you.” Mira let the mistake pass without comment. “You are not hiding something in air. The Nautilus displaces water. A cloaked ship is still a ship-sized object pushing the ocean aside. Every siren within range would feel the pressure change.”

  So much for the easy approach.

  Wylan leaned over the charts. “Guard rotations. What do we know?”

  Laila straightened. This was where she had been waiting to arrive.

  “The garrison is complacent,” she said. “My intelligence suggests approximately forty guards on rotating watch, concentrated at the main gate and the arbiter docks. The interior patrols are sparse and infrequent. The only vessels that approach are official siren transports. They have never been infiltrated, and they do not expect to be.”

  Mira’s head turned. “How current is this?”

  “Within the season.”

  “Ours is six months old.”

  “Then you will find mine more useful.”

  Mira studied her. Then she turned back to the chart and waited for the next question.

  “The prisoners,” Wylan said. “Where are they held?”

  “Freely, within limits.” Laila traced the interior outline on the chart. “The Keep’s security relies on the ocean itself. There is nowhere for a prisoner to go. They are permitted to move within designated areas.”

  “Which means Isabella could be anywhere inside those areas,” Lambert said.

  “Which means we do not need to break into a cell. We need to find her and leave.”

  Mira folded her arms. “There is something else. In the event of a disturbance, the Keep has an emergency override. They flood the prisoner quarters.”

  The table absorbed this.

  “They are sirens,” Mira said. “They are not concerned about drowning. The prisoners are. It is the simplest form of crowd control imaginable.”

  “Charming,” Wylan said.

  “Efficient,” Mira corrected. “It means you have a limited window. The moment they know something is wrong, the water comes in. Everyone who is not a siren dies.”

  Lambert studied the charts. “The Bore. It passes near the Keep. Is there a way to use the current to approach?”

  Mira chose her next words with visible care. “The Bore is the undertow generated out of the Black Trench. If you are caught in it, you will be pulled down into the ravine. The undertow reaches as far as the Keep itself. That is where it gets its name.” She paused. “We would not take the Nautilus through the Bore.”

  Wylan’s head came up. His fingers stopped moving on the chart.

  “You said ‘would not,’“ Wylan said. “Not ‘could not.’“

  Mira looked at him. Said nothing.

  “Interesting.”

  “I have no obligation to discuss what we can or cannot do in regards to the Bore.”

  Wylan held her gaze for a moment longer, then let it go. He filed it. Her own method. My son.

  “Let us set the Bore aside,” Laila said. “If the Nautilus deposits us near the Keep, we approach on our own. The question is how we breathe and how we manage the pressure at depth.”

  Wylan reached into his pack and produced a vial. The liquid inside caught what little light the mess hall offered: pale, faintly luminous, restless in the glass. “Water breathing. My own formulation.”

  Mira’s eyebrow rose. “Does it handle the pressure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are certain. Not just the breathing. The depth. The cold. The compression on your lungs and your blood.”

  Wylan looked at her. The temperature in the room dropped several degrees, all of them localised to his expression. “I am an Alchemist,” he said. “Yes. I thought of that.”

  Mira held his gaze. Whatever she was measuring, he did not flinch from it.

  “All right,” Lambert said. “We have transport, we have breathing, we have intelligence. This is an infiltration. We go in quiet, we find Isabella, we leave. The question is where we enter.” He looked at the schematics Mira had spread beneath the charts. “The main gate is out of the question.”

  Wylan was already examining the schematics. His fingers traced the outline of the Keep’s interior, pausing at junctions, doubling back, counting something Laila could not follow. She had seen him do this before: the way the engineering consumed his attention until everything else fell away.

  “The flooding,” he said. “You said they flood the prisoner quarters.”

  Mira nodded.

  “To flood that volume of space at the rate you’re describing, you would need significant water intake. Not a pipe. Not a channel.” His finger tapped a section of the schematic where the outer wall met the interior. “Vents. Large enough to move thousands of gallons in minutes.”

  Divina leaned forward. “Dual-layer seals, probably. Manual override for emergencies. The pressure regulation alone would require openings of considerable size.”

  “Large enough for people,” Wylan said.

  “If you knew where they were,” Mira said.

  Wylan looked at her. “They would need to be distributed evenly across the prisoner quarters to flood uniformly. The schematic shows the load-bearing walls.” He traced four points. “Here. Here. Here. And here. The vents sit between the structural supports, where the wall is thinnest.”

  Laila looked at the marks, then at Mira.

  Mira’s expression had not changed. But she had stopped challenging.

  “As a contingency,” Laila said. Her voice shifted before she caught up with it. “If the plan fails. If we are discovered and cannot extract her through the vents.” She looked at the schematic, at the flooding mechanism drawn in faded ink. “Isabella is a siren. She would survive the flood. If we triggered the override ourselves—”

  Lambert’s head turned.

  “—the water would clear the corridors. The guards would not expect it from the inside. And Isabella—”

  “No.”

  The word was quiet. Laila’s hands lifted from the chart.

  “The prisoners are political detainees,” he said. “Most of them. People imprisoned for defying the Autumn Court, not for any crime you or I would recognise.” He looked at her. “To flood those quarters, to snuff out that many lives so that we might save one, is unconscionable.”

  She could feel the shape of what she had just proposed, and it was uglier than she had let herself see in the moment of saying it. A mother’s arithmetic: Isabella’s life against strangers’ lives, and the answer coming too easily.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  Lambert held her gaze a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and returned to the schematic.

  Wylan had been watching. He said nothing, but his eyes moved to Laila and stayed. She did not want to know what that look meant. She smoothed her skirts and addressed the table.

  “Then we enter through the vents, find Isabella, and leave the same way. No flooding. No assault. No casualties.”

  “Which brings us to the interior,” Lambert said. “What do we encounter once inside? Guards, certainly. Sirens. How do we move through the Keep without being identified?”

  “You could not disguise yourselves as sirens,” Mira said. “Not mundanely. Illusions might serve, but Laila’s intelligence suggests magical protections inside the Keep. Unreliable.”

  “Prisoners, then,” Wylan said. “If the Keep holds as many as we think, the guards cannot know every face.”

  Mira tapped the interior outline on the chart. “They do not care to. The prisoners are contained by the ocean, not by attention.”

  Lambert frowned. “Have we any idea what the prisoners wear?”

  “Orange,” Mira said. “Bright enough to see against the ocean if anyone tries to swim for it.”

  “Of course it is,” Wylan said.

  ? The Autumn Court had invested considerable thought into prisoner uniform design. The guiding principle was the same one used in lighthouse architecture: if it cannot be hidden, make it visible from orbit.

  “It also means you cannot wear armour,” Mira added. “How many prisoners have you seen in plate mail?”

  Lambert’s frown deepened. Laila watched him arrive at the same conclusion she had: that he was going to walk into an underwater fortress wearing a bright orange uniform and no protection beyond his faith and whatever Wylan had in his pack. The theology had not prepared him for this.

  The crew dispersed to prepare. Vera left for the engine room. Pip collected her depth gauge from beneath the chart and followed. Bram and Grimshaw were already gone.

  Navarro paused at the door. He looked at Mira. She gave him a small nod, and he left.

  Laila had begun to rise. Mira’s voice stopped her.

  “Sit down.”

  They sat. Mira remained standing. The mess hall was quiet again, the way it had been before the crew returned. The planning had been one conversation. This was another.

  “I have not given my vote,” Mira said. “Because I wanted you to have a plan before I told you what you are walking into.”

  She pulled out Navarro’s chair and sat. Every movement remembered water.

  “I am a siren,” she said. “This is a siren holding. I know what it means to go inside that place in ways my crew cannot. In ways your intelligence cannot tell you.”

  She looked at each of them in turn. Lambert. Wylan. Laila.

  “The sirens of the Autumn Court are not like the sirens you have met on the surface. They have lived in the deep for generations. They are attuned to the Leviathan in ways that surface sirens are not. Faster. Stronger. Their senses are sharper in the water than anything you have encountered.”

  She let that sit. Wylan’s fingers had gone still on the chart.

  “They are lost to him. You understand? They do not serve the Autumn Court out of politics. They serve because the deep has claimed them, and the Court is simply what the deep built.”

  She had understood the Keep as a political structure, a prison, an institution with guards and rotations and exploitable complacency. Mira was telling her it was something else. Something that wore a court’s shape but answered to a thing Laila had no framework for.

  “If they detect you,” Mira said, “you will not outswim them. You will not outfight them. Your only advantage is that they do not expect you, and that advantage lasts exactly as long as it takes for one of them to notice something wrong.”

  The mess hall hummed. The engine breathed. Somewhere beyond the hull, the ocean pressed in with its vast, patient weight.

  “Your plan is an infiltration at high risk to yourselves,” Mira said. “At negligible risk to this ship. If you succeed, we manage the extraction. If you fail, you die inside that Keep and the Nautilus withdraws.” She folded her hands on the table. “That is an acceptable risk.”

  “You’re voting yes,” Laila said.

  “I am voting that your plan is sound, that the risk falls on you and not on my crew, and that you have demonstrated enough competence to deserve the chance.” Mira looked at her. “Do not confuse that with optimism.”

  Their eyes met. Neither yielded.

  “There is one more thing.” Mira’s eyes moved to Lambert. The same lingering attention Laila had noticed earlier, sharper now. “You. The priest. You carry something with you. Something the deep recognises.”

  Lambert went still.

  “I felt it the first night,” Mira said. “When I set the bowl in front of you. You hear the water. The water hears you back.” She studied him. “Whatever it is, keep it quiet inside those walls. The sirens of the deep will feel it before they see you.”

  Lambert said nothing. His hand had moved to his collar. The seminary never quite left him.

  Mira pushed back her chair and stood. “You have my vote. Use it well.”

  They packed in the bunk room.

  Laila laid her kit out on the mattress. She had done this before and preferred not to discuss when. Silent shoes. A glass cutter. Lockpicks in a leather roll. A listening cup. A compact makeup case for becoming someone else on short notice. She checked each item, returned it to its pouch, and closed the bag.

  Wylan was methodical. Medicines lined up on his shelf: elemental resistance, poison resistance, the water-breathing vials in their padded case. The bubble components in a separate kit. He weighed each item in his hand, considered, kept or discarded. His armour went into the corner.

  “You’re leaving it?” Lambert said.

  “Armour is weight. Weight is noise. Noise is detection.” Wylan set his pack on the bunk and tested the heft. “We need to swim. Can you swim in plate mail?”

  “I can barely swim without it.”

  “Then you’re also leaving yours.”

  Divina packed tools. Spanners, a hand drill, wire cutters, a set of hatch picks. She arranged them in order of likely use and secured each one, so nothing rattled. The tools submitted to this without complaint. They had worked with Divina before.

  Lambert stood in front of his bunk. He had been asked to pack for an underwater journey and had no idea what it required. His armour was in the corner. His prayer book was in his hand. He set it down, picked it up, set it down again.

  “Fishing tackle,” he said, finally.

  Wylan looked at him.

  “I have fishing tackle. It’s light. It’s rope and a hook. It might be useful.”

  “You’re bringing fishing tackle to a prison break.”

  “I can’t think of anything else.” Lambert put the tackle in his pack. “I’m a priest, Wylan. I don’t know what infiltrators bring.”

  Laila watched her sons pack and kept her mouth shut. Lambert’s honesty about his limitations was worth more than a full armoury. And the fishing tackle would find a use. Unlikely things always did, in her experience, provided they were packed by someone too stubborn to leave them behind.

  The Nautilus changed course. Laila felt it in the floor before Navarro’s voice came through the speaking tube, clipped and steady: “Underway. Five hours to the Keep.”

  Five hours. She sat on the edge of her bunk and listened to the engine’s hum shift pitch as the ship turned toward Undertow Keep. Lambert was stowing his pack. Wylan was checking his vials a second time. Divina had finished and was reading, because Divina was always either working or preparing to work and the distinction between the two was largely theoretical.

  Five hours to reach the place where her daughter was held. Five hours to go over the plan, check the equipment, rehearse the approach. Five hours in which nothing could go wrong because nothing had started yet.

  It almost sounded like enough time. Almost.