Paolo Bacigalupi - Ship Breaker

RUNNING OR NOT, they needed to get away from their captors. In whispered conference they made a plan and settled in to wait. It was a fight for Nailer to stay awake. Even though he’d been out for three days, he was still having a hard time keeping his eyes open. The breezes in the trees and the warmth of the night made him sleepy. He put his head down, telling himself he would keep watch. Instead, he slept, woke, and slept again.

Blue Eyes, alert and wide-awake, switched to Tool, who simply sat and stared. Every time Nailer peeked between slitted lids there was Tool, staring back at him with his yellow dog’s eyes, patient as a statue. Finally, Tool stood down to Moby. The skinny bald man settled himself comfortably against a stump and started drinking. He was half reclined and it wasn’t long before he had drunk himself back into his deep slumber, trusting in the shackles and the sleeping forms of young people for his sense of security.

Nailer lay awake, waiting. Glad to still be unrestrained. Even if he wasn’t one of this adult crew, he was one of his father’s and so he had some trust. Between association with his father and their own memories of him as a feverish invalid, he had some wiggle room. He wasn’t a risk in their minds, just a skinny light crew kid recovering from sickness. That was all to the good.

The problem was that Blue Eyes had the keys to the girls’ shackles, and she scared the hell out of him. Nobody who got in with the Life Cult was good news. Novices were always looking for new recruits. And they were always hungry for sacrifices.

As soon as Moby was snoring, Nailer began easing toward where he had seen Blue Eyes bed down. He went slowly, as slowly as any child who has learned to steal at an early age, whose best chance of survival is in silence and remaining unnoticed.

He gripped his duct knife with sweaty fingers, his hand slick with fear. There was no way to search Blue Eyes and find the keys without waking her. The knife felt small and useless in his palm, a toy. This was a necessary thing, but he didn’t have to like it. It wasn’t as if he felt guilty. He didn’t. Blue Eyes had done worse in her time and would do worse in the future. He had seen her torture people who held back on quota, or who fell behind on loans. He had seen her take off a man’s hand for stealing from Lucky Strike, and then watched the man bleed out under her cool blue gaze. And who knew how many beach rats she’d drugged and collected into the mysteries of her church? She was hard and deadly and Nailer had no doubt that if his father asked her to do it, she would kill him and Pima and Lucky Girl, and sleep well afterward.

He didn’t feel guilty.

And yet still, as he stole close, his heart pounded in his chest and the blood thudded in his ears like beach drums. It was the sort of killing that his father would accomplish with quick efficiency. Richard Lopez understood the qualities of kill or be killed intimately, the zero-sum calculations that said it was better to be alive than dead, and he would not have hesitated to take advantage of a sleeping opponent.

Quick and fast , Nailer told himself. Across the throat and be done .

A few years before, his father had made him kill a goat, to show him the method of the knife, to show how a blade pierced flesh and snagged on tendons. Nailer remembered his dad crouching over him, wrapping his fist around Nailer’s own. The goat had lain on its side, legs bound, its sides heaving up and down like a bellows, breath whistling through its nostrils as it sucked its last air. His dad had guided Nailer’s hand, setting the knife against the goat’s jugular.

“Press hard,” he’d said.

And Nailer did as he was told.

Nailer parted the ferns. Blue Eyes lay before him, her breathing gentle. In sleep, her features were smooth, unbitten by the smolder of violence that lurked there otherwise. Her mouth was open. She lay on her belly, arms tucked under her and held close against the relative cool of the night. Nailer said a prayer to the Fates. Her neck wasn’t as exposed as he had hoped. He needed to strike fast. She needed to die immediately.

He slipped close and steeled himself. Readied the knife and leaned in, holding his breath.

Her eyes opened.

Panicked, Nailer rammed the knife into her throat, but Blue Eyes moved too fast. She rolled away, bouncing to her feet. She swept up her machete. She didn’t say anything. Didn’t shout or beg or yell in anger. Her shadow blurred. Nailer leaped back as her machete whistled past his face. She lunged after him again. Nailer raised his knife, but instead of coming at him again with her blade, Blue Eyes simply swept a leg under him. Nailer crashed to the ground. Blue Eyes landed on top of him, driving the air from his lungs. She slapped his knife away, leaving his fingers numb and stinging.

He lay panting, pinned under her weight. Blue Eyes pressed the machete to his neck.

“You poor dumb kid,” she muttered.

Nailer’s breath rasped out of him. He was shaking with fear. Blue Eyes smiled and hefted her machete. She gently touched his right eye with the blade. “I grew up with men sneaking up on me in the middle of the night.” The blade moved and tapped lightly on his left eye. “Little licebiter like you doesn’t stand a chance.” She grinned and moved the machete back to his right eye.

“Pick,” she said.

Nailer was too frightened to understand. “W-what?”

Blue Eyes touched each of his eyes significantly with her blade.

“Pick,” she said again. “Right or left?”

“My dad-”

“Lopez would take both.” She smiled. “And I will too, if you don’t choose.” Again the blade caressed his eyeballs. “Right or left?”

Nailer steeled himself. “Left.”

Blue Eyes grinned. “Right it is.”

She flipped the machete and drove it toward his eye.

A whirl of shadow crashed into Blue Eyes. The machete stabbed past his head, leaving a burn on his cheek, and Blue Eyes’s weight came off him. She rolled, locked in struggle with another form. Shouts rose all around in the darkness. Steel clashed, accompanied by the screams and whimpers and grunts of people fighting. There were people all around.

Blue Eyes and her opponent rolled, tangled limbs flashing, a furious scuffle. In the moonlight, Nailer could make out his savior: Pima’s mother, grappling with Blue Eyes for the machete. Sadna slammed a fist into Blue Eyes’s face. Bone crunched. Blue Eyes bucked and tore free of Sadna’s grasp. She rolled and came up with her machete. The two women circled.

“Break off, Blue Eyes,” Sadna said. “It’s not your fight.”

Blue Eyes shook her head. “Boy owes me, Sadna. Thought he could take my blood. Can’t let that go.”

And then she swept forward, faking high with the machete before slashing low. Sadna leaped back over a mossy log and scrambled for footing. Blue Eyes plunged after her, seeking an opening. The blade whirled. Blood sprayed from Sadna’s hands where she tried to ward off a blow. Sadna cried out but didn’t falter, dodged out from under Blue Eyes’s follow-up cut.

Blue Eyes lunged again, testing. “Run, Sadna,” she said. “Run.” Blood ran from her nose where Sadna had crushed it, but she didn’t seem to care. When she smiled, her teeth were black with it.

Nailer scrambled to find his knife. All around, other bodies grunted and fought, a tangle of forms that had to be Sadna’s heavy crew. He fumbled through the grasses, seeking the gleam of his blade.

Sadna slipped behind a tree, using it for a shield. Blue Eyes circled, chasing her, then stopped and smiled. “I’m not playing chase,” she muttered. “You want the boy alive or not?” She turned and lunged for Nailer. He scrambled away, but it was enough to bring Sadna out from behind the tree. Blue Eyes reversed from her feint and surged toward Sadna in a flash of steel.