Yatpan had won.

  He’d drawn the longest stick of their stunted stack. None of them had wanted to be there of course, but their Despoina had demanded her spoils. For the health of the fleet — for the survival of their crew — in both meanings of the word. Yatpan shuddered. With failure to contribute, she’d offer only one response.

  “This is a mercy,” he could imagine her saying to the remaining fleet, a dripping head dangling from her fist. “Better than starving to death.”

  The Leviathan would not be the reason there was not enough to go around the fleet. Not again.

  Their quarry was before them. A ship by the name of the Chance bobbed below, a white lotus in the starlit ocean of space. Her petal-like wings glimmering in the sunlight. The Inner Ring had laden her with its riches, making her travel slow and easy to track. Captain Yammu had said he’d caught the scent of riches beyond understanding — mysterious waters that could sing across space, gold piled high enough to touch an artificial sky, and a dining table so glorious it was worth more than the lives of the six men it took to make it.

  Yatpan would have to miss it. Unlike the pitiful suicidal, or those bastard Argonauts, Yatpan rather liked keeping his soul stuffed inside of his body. What chance did his patchy self hold against an Inner Ring — the Inner Ring — ship?

  Captain Yammu had sure talked a big game.

  Rich folks and their scenic routes, Yammu had said. Ambush the ship as it glides above an asteroid belt. Drive the target into the belt. The target will scare and stall as asteroids get close. But we know the route. We can map the trajectories. Hit the ship hard and fast. Hope for early surrender.

  Hope, Yatpan had thought, turning the word over in his head with doubt. What had hope bought them, except the end of a quarter without a single successful raid?

  And so he had drawn the longest branch and stayed behind to watch the Leviathan. She was an old, sleek beauty, hewn with blackened wood and an obfuscating, smoky atmosphere that only her crew could peer through. The snarling sea-beast at their bow gave Yatpan some security, some bravado. The Chance would see their ship and her teeth, but would not see him.

  The quiet felt unusual but fitting for the occasion. Yatpan liked it. He wished it was this way more often. And as he watched his crewmates descend upon the Chance like vultures, he chose to savor these last few moments before the helpless anxiety that came with watching the battle from above ate through his blood.

  Yatpan closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Filtered air, thick smoke, and then —

  Something sharp, acrid, doused onto a handkerchief smothered against his face. Yatpan’s eyes snapped open. But the quiet took him first.

  Eos resettled the little metal tin on her hip and looped the ties tight. “Poor thing,” she said, lowering the unconscious man down to the floor. “You looked like you need a rest.”

  The entirety of the Leviathan looked the same, down to the beast carved into her mast — tired, vicious, and hungry. They’d been prowling for weeks now, aimless and treasureless. It was only a week ago that they’d suddenly changed course to barrel down towards what Eos thought was the most beautiful ship she’d ever seen.

  It had looked like a flower, spinning its marble petals languidly in space while the Leviathan’s crew swarmed over it like so many flies. Lights flashed. Eos took a moment to gaze upon the clamour as her fingers knotted a tie over her victim’s arms.

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  “Sorry, my friend,” Eos said to the man, folding the edge of his cloak in a bundle and resting it under his head. At the very least, he wouldn’t wake up with an aching neck. “Your friends left you all alone to sate their hunger, and here I am, about to sate my own at your expense.”

  To steal from a thief was little honor. But Eos preferred her little honor to starving to death.

  The storerooms of the Leviathan were dark. Unkempt as unbrushed hair and just as matted, full of dust and debris. Shackled treasures, spilt booze. Between the smoke-soaked walls and the careless scraps, the whole thing reeked of rot. Eos resisted the urge to gag.

  “What kind of despoina,” Eos muttered to herself as she drew her cloak over her nose. “I ought to…”

  But there in the back — joy of joys — the most essential of treasures: food. Food! Real food, too, pressed up against and squashed mercilessly behind a set of crates and barrels. Eos freed a knife from her silver bracer and slid the tip under the crate.

  “Please be edible,” she muttered to it, jiggling the handle around. But Anesidora’s impossibly perfect handiwork had never failed her before. Soon, the knife had sprung the wood from its resting place. Soft hay inside; packages wrapped in cloth. Eos eagerly unfolded the fabrics, felt soft bread — stale bread, but soft bread — and imagined what delights each bread must hold, to be cradled so carefully in the crate. A bit of cheese, a pack of unspoiled eggs, a sheaf of disgusting dry noodles only residents or veteran visitors to Tamnjl would know how to make tolerable. Treasure, treasure, treasure.

  Doubtless, it was stolen. Doubtless, they’d planned to scarf them down after their escapade on the white ship.

  “Oh, your celebrations will just have to be rationed,” she murmured gleefully as she inspected the precious buns. Too much to carry, especially when she had such little time. There was more to attend to after her thieving, after all.

  She began shoving them into a little knapsack right as the ship collapsed into chaos.

  The quiet of the Leviathan was giving way to action. Her black floorboards quaked with cannonfire, now, and the muffled shouts of the men beyond the walls traveled well enough for Eos to hear. Dust dribbled down onto her shoulder as rushing boots shook the ceiling. Eos counted to herself: the reserves of men above, the moments between the Leviathan’s cannon fire rocking the belly of the ship. The lily-white ship must have had excellent defenses to hold up against this kind of fire.

  Eos’s hand was halfway to her next sheaf of food when the light hit the portholes. It might have been sunlight, but sunlight didn’t pierce through the Leviathan’s cloud of snarling smoke — and sunlight didn’t burn so pure white, so searing. Eos threw her hands over her eyes, squeezed them shut, but a searing halo burned behind her eyelids all the same.

  And then there was the sound.

  Something reverberated through her body. It passed straight through the ship walls, sunk into her bones and slithered into her hair. Eos felt it rend her limbs to jelly and shake her lungs, and when she opened her eyes she was on the floor.

  Rumors had long been sung of the Inner Ring’s billowing knowledge. Humans on every moon, for thousands of years, had endeavored to understand the small reserves of magic in nature. Before epithets — perhaps before even names themselves — it was the land and the sky and the untamed daimons that held all the magic.

  But from land and sky, the scientists of the Inner Ring had started to harness magic. They’d learn to make some new power reveal itself, draw some esoteric magic from a new alloy, or crystal, or gas, from some unnamed planet. Water that could spin visions. Music trapped within lightning.

  And cannons that shot nothing but sunlight, making the most unnatural of sounds warp the atmosphere.

  Another jarring flash of light. Another cannon keened. Eos’s mind couldn’t wrap itself around the noise, fumbling it into some shuddering back-corner of her brain.

  I know this, she thought, breathing through it. Her body shuddered, but stayed upright. Like the first storms of her childhood. Lightning, then thunder. This is just like home.

  The worst parts of home. Her last day on Naguya Tan, where the sky and the streets were thick with artificial smoke. Invaders in the night, and rocketing away in an unsafe sky. Flying away to ignobly eating off someone else’s plate; going to interfere in squabbles she shouldn’t have anything to do with. Home was bobbing out among the stars, waiting her. Naguya Tan was waiting for her. She should be there, not here. A bitter taste ate the back of her throat. It was a useless feeling. But how could she not feel that, knowing home was lost in a single night and she was ten thousand nights away from regaining it?

  Oh stars, how Eos missed home.

  One day they’d win it back so utterly and completely, they’d be able to rest. And for once, the respite wouldn’t feel like swallowing poison.

  Eos’ hands restarted their thieving. A useless feeling, she told herself. What would Captain say? Right. Train the mind. Focus on the shape of the sounds around you — the cannon sounded. The ship creaked.

  And then one careless footstep out of place finally registered in Eos’ buzzing mind, and she ducked.

  The aftershock of a haymaker clipped her ear. Eos dropped to the floor and flipped around to face a swaying, wiry man. Eos felt the volume soar in her pulsing blood.

  Good, was the thought in her very nerves, and the entire world righted itself. Struggle!

  The fight didn’t even feel real until Eos’s fist met teeth, felt the jagged edges slip wetly across her knuckles. It brought her properly down to reality long enough to give a disgusted shudder and a scowl at the man slumped against the railing.

  “You don’t take very good care of your teeth-” she slipped under the swinging end of his empty pistol being used as a cudgel, “-do you?”

  He couldn’t respond. His lips were already swelling with blood. But of course he didn’t. How could he? Even as Eos swung around to face the man, she could not stop thinking about his face and his teeth. Not when her knife cut the belt of her opponent’s satchel, nor when it crossed the vein in their arm, and even with the hot tang of fresh blood in the air, Eos was thinking, No, no, of course he couldn’t have nice teeth. Pirates didn’t have good teeth, because people who could afford good teeth didn’t become pirates. For a moment, she was sorry to have contributed to the grievous offense to the universe that was his mouth.

  And then the wall exploded.