Page 54 of Soulgazer

“Kiara isn’t here. Besides, it’s a new moon tonight. If we’re going to risk diving waters infested with all those soulstones, now’s the time to do it. Spirits go docile in the pure dark. Less likely to affect us.”

I battle the urge to touch my tattoo where the skin feels raw, itching, and exposed. Though the crew has been quieter in the spirits’ presence, reflective and a touch morose, I’ve dreamed of my brother and a half dozen deaths I’ve never seen. The longer we sail the Teeth, the more it feels like walking with a festering wound. “Can I have the sponge?”

It’s Brona who passes it to me, gritting her jaw while I dip it into a bucket of water. “You don’t have to do this.”

Over her shoulder, Faolan’s eyes lock onto mine—burning with that same belief I felt before. Seawater trickles down my throat as I press the sponge there, cooling a blush as it fights to rise along my skin. “It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not. He’s only pressing you because you haven’t learned to say no like the rest of us. Just tell him to piss off and wait until morning, and then we can—”

“I want to, Brona.”

Her mouth snaps shut, and any further response dies on my tongue as breathing air becomes painful, the gills knitting with my flesh.

Across from us, Lorcan grimaces as he paints his own gills with the sponge. The largest of the crew, he’ll come along in case a board or doorway’s fallen to block access to the ship itself. “Feck, that’ll take some getting used to.”

“So don’t get used to it.” Brona’s tone is short, but a deep crevice lines her forehead as she looks from Lorcan to me, then to the water. “Faolan, this is stupid. It’ll be pure dark soon.”

“We’ve hours of light ahead,” Faolan says with a quick wave of his hand, sweat dotting his temples and plastering his shirt to his chest. He tears his gaze from mine. “Oona?”

“Here!” The small striker appears, hair caught back in a tight braid and wearing a pair of worn trousers and a single strip of cloth over her breasts. I duck my head immediately, staring at the loose shirt I’ve already prayed twice over won’t turn translucent with the swim. It’s not just the tattoo I’m keen to hide. “What exactly are we looking for again?” she asks.

Too many eyes turn on me at once, and I wince as my back meets the railing, every breath raking through my lungs like talons. “I-I’m not sure. Faolan thinks my grandmother might have left a…”

I falter, and Brona directs her hard stare at him. “Left awhat, Captain?”

“You’ll see soon enough. That’s the adventure of it.” Faolan rubs at the bandages on his arm and grins, his eyes a touch too bright as though they’ve captured the setting sun. “Ready?”

Could someone ever truly be ready to search the sea for their elusive, mad grandmother’s bones?

Just her bones. Let her spirit not linger with them.

“Aye.”

Lorcan helps me onto the railing, neck stretched so his own gills don’t rub against one another. “If something goes wrong down there, Captain, we’ll all three be haunting you.”

“In shifts,” Oona says, grinning from my other side, “so we don’t waste the whole of our afterlives chasing round your sorry arse.”

Faolan’s rough laughter is the last thing I hear before we drop into the sea.

Silence swallows the world in seconds.

I fight the urge to gasp as waves tumble across my skin, sappingevery ounce of heat from my body. Silt and small bubbles rush past my vision, interspersed with eerie blue-lilac lights, and I kick hard until a hand wraps my jaw, forcing my mouth open. Water floods my throat and lungs, pools in my belly, then rushes out—working through the gills. They flare at my neck in a thousand pricks of sensation, fluttering with every breath.

I want to rip my own throat out.Gods.

Lorcan taps my arm, and I nod in thanks, forcing my focus onto the shipwreck lying just below us.

Most of the wood has rotted away, the deck caving in under a decade’s worth of barnacles. The mast juts out above the water, bearing that same outdated flag I’d noticed up on the Tooth, but its twin slithers snakelike from a rusted ring by the captain’s door. And that’s to say nothing of the wild surrounding it.

I’ve swum in the ocean since I was small, chasing after my brothers among the waves. But our waters at home are vengeful, the currents changing without prediction. We were told never to cross the first drop, where the water reached our hips. Anything of interest to see lay beyond that forbidden point.

Here, flat, speckled rays with needle-thin tails sail over our heads as a cloud of bright fish takes one shape after another. Kelp steals the final rays of sunlight, glowing bottle green save for the spots of blue, gold, and scarlet—creatures I have no name for living among the silken strands. Even the spirits seem surprisingly at peace here, drifting in and out of focus along the base of the ship.

My grandmother is not among them.

Lorcan jerks his thumb in Oona’s direction, and I turn to see she’s already halfway past the green field, swimming like she was born of the sea. For all I know, she may have been. It wouldn’t surprise me if Faolan’s crew included a child of the murúcha.

I follow just beside Lorcan, avoiding his powerful kicks untilwe reach what’s left of the deck, and heat ripples like lightning across my back.

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