The next six minutes of my life were nasty, brutal, and chaotic. The memories were recorded through my comm, but a perfect-fidelity recording of unparsable confusion doesn’t make the events any clearer on a rewatch.

I was swept around like a balloon with its air leaking out, except the ocean kept smacking the balloon into various painful objects and, on at least four occasions, the ground. You can tell it’s the ground because the sand feels like an angry cheese grater with a grudge against unflayed skin.

If I was a normal person, I would died before the one-minute mark. Ironically, the fact that I was wearing kinetic mesh meant those collisions messed with my momentum enough that I could frantically leap for the surface. But the mesh didn’t cover all of me. I covered my head with my arms when I could, but my muscles were nothing compared to the violence of the tsunami.

One scrape with ground took the skin off the back of my left hand, which hurt like a motherfucker—remember, it was salt water that was trying to murder me. But the one that really hurt came later. I’d been pummeled, battered, bruised, lacerated, and sandblasted for endless minutes at that point, when suddenly a rogue current ripped my arms away from my head at just the right angle that a jagged chunk of something ripped half my face off. I couldn’t help but scream, expelling irrecoverable air from my lungs.

I have no idea how I survived after that. Maybe it was Kives’s fault, but I wasn’t going to thank her for it. Keeping me alive was worse than just letting me flash to a body with two working eyes.

I wound up on the side of a small hill, curled up on my side, insensate with pain. My right eyelid was gone, and by rights the right eye should have gone with it, but Eifni Org made its augments well. The impact that had stripped my face almost to the bone had merely scratched up the protective enamel and jammed it into the back of my eye socket, fracturing it or bruising it or something. I don’t know, it hurt a lot. It took every last scrap of self-control not to use my cloak. I knew if I started down that path, I’d never come back. In retrospect, I’m proud of myself for holding out for so long.

I don’t know how long I lay there in agony. The eternity of suffering—shallow breathing bubbling through the blood on my ruined lips—was interrupted once by a blinding flash of light as the Face Sponge annihilated the temple. The storm dissipated after that, presumably because the angel chased them off-island. The next thing I knew, sand-crusted boots, flanked by a floor-length sea coat, crunched up to me.

“Well, well,” said a familiar voice.

Erid kicked me, then nearly lost her balance as my kinetic mesh robbed her of an impact. I heard her grunt with frustration. She tried again, gently applying pressure with her foot. Her caution meant the forces involved weren’t sudden enough to trigger the mesh, and this time she succeeded. I stared blearily up at her.

“There’s always a price,” Erid growled. “Especially where your little adventures are concerned. Long past time you were the one who paid it.”

I tried to claw my way back to full consciousness. Don’t cloak, Lilith. Other one. The… something about this body.

Erid had her sword out now. “I hope the next world is as shit to you as you’ve been to me.”

Pain blockers. That was it. I could turn off pain now. I told my comm to do that.

Endorphins make you feel good, but they’re also a pain blocker. My body had been swamping me with them after I got wrecked. The effect of suddenly removing all that pain left me with a head full of happy chemicals so quickly that it make me giggle—which came out as a deranged-sounding choking noise. On the plus side, it was unexpected enough that Erid put off stabbing me another few moments.

“What is it, sea slime? What’s so fucking funny?”

Ragnar was out of tunneling range. I hadn’t switched my destination to the Face Sponge yet. Shit, how did I do that? I had to keep her talking.

“You think, this is, my fault?” I choked out.

“Theological consultant,” Erid spat. “That storm was from Horcutio.”

“Angel,” I grunted.

“You opened that temple,” Erid said. “You pushed us into the goddesses’ war. “

“What’s, your problem.” The scratches on my right eye were giving me a headache. I shut it off. “Your goddesses. Not mine.”

“Goddesses can do what they want. I can’t stop them. You, with your mysterious agenda treating everyone as disposable? It was always going to end like this.”

It seemed like Erid was done talking. Face Sponge, please respond. Casting my attention out for anything that could help, I heard footsteps approaching and seized the opportunity.

“Behind, you.”

Erid checked over her shoulder. “Well! Look what the tide washed up!”

“Captain,” Dal Salim said respectfully. “Well that you found her.”

My shadow had survived the storm without visible damage beyond a damp tunic and pants. Salt and pepper stubble fuzzed all over his jaw and scalp. He gazed calmly at Erid as he approached.

“And here’s my second headache,” Erid drawled. “I’ll deal with you in a moment.”

“Mm,” he said. “Justice is ever dispensed in secret.”

“Justice,” Erid chuckled darkly. “I’m no Oathkeeper, pirate. This is a debt.”

“She was above,” Dal Salim. “She went to warn you. This seems poor repayment.”

I groaned to indicate agreement.

“You don’t get the insurance if you scuttled the boat yourself,” Erid said. “This one might have paid your debt, but it don’t erase what you’ve done. Soon as she reaches the Shadowlands, you’re next.”

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“If,” I said, “you kill, him. Settle your affairs.”

“That does it,” Erid said, and stabbed me in the heart. The kinetic mesh ate the blow. She snarled and moved the sword to my throat.

“One last caution, captain,” Dal Salim said, serene as ever. “If nothing else will sway you.”

“Pick carefully,” said Erid with deadly chill.

“How often has she joked to you that death does not hold her?”

Erid did not open my throat.

Dal Salim pressed on. “Great powers are moving. Of all my enemies, I would choose a deathless enemy last.”

“Hey,” I rasped.

Erid met my eyes. Her face was blank, but I could detect uncertainty behind her mask. In that moment, I got the confirmation that my comm was synced with the Face Sponge. My shredded lips curled into a twisted approximation of a smile.

“Chill, the fuck, out.”

*

When I woke up, I was lying in my cabin. The way I’d gotten there was easy to infer; Dal Salim was asleep on the floor next to my bed, and my blood was all over his tunic. More to the point, no one else on this ship cared enough about me to haul me off the island.

There were two other people in the room, or I should say one person and a body. Dal Salim’s bed was occupied by a sailor, and there was a body on the floor next to him. The dead man had done what all dead men do, which is loosening his sphincter and letting everything leak out. The cabin smelled like shit.

I moaned. It felt like I had a fever.

Wait, I had a comm. I didn’t need to bother with feelings.

I fired off the command and let my comm socket scrape my neural data for physiological feedback. Moments later, it diagnosed me with bacterial infection: lethal. Great.

I moaned again. Please, Dal Salim. Wake up. After all that, it would be embarrassing to die to germs.

He stirred a few minutes later, sitting up and stretching.

“Sun’s greetings to you,” he said, his voice rough from sleep. “How are the seas?”

“Stone,” I murmured. “Black stone in bag.”

Dal Salim smiled at me, then went to retrieve the requested item from my belongings. He retrieved an obsidian tablet about the size of a paperback. It was carved with vicious-looking runes. The runes had no intrinsic meaning, but they were mathematically optimized to produce a sense of dread and unease. Above them, Val had printed a neat script in Estheni characters warning the bearer not to mess with the tablet.

Inside the stone casing, a quick mental command activated my medical translator. I had Dal Salim drop it on me, then had it scan my body for problems.

Generally speaking, the more narrow the translation process, the smaller and more efficient your catalyst device could be. Fortunately for medical paraphysicists, most of the stuff that affects the human body tends to be tiny and connected to strong, culturally reinforced concepts like “wellness.” It took mere moments to identify all the little gribblies in my body and translate them out into the concept of disease, which it released into the ether. An observer like Dal Salim would briefly feel like the tablet was making me sicker.

The next part would be more problematic. I was missing a decent amount of biomass, and this tool was designed for precision work. It wasn’t stocked with deep reserves.

I sat up painfully.

“This part’s gonna be weird,” I said. “You might wanna leave the room.”

Dal Salim gave me a bemused look.

“Your funeral,” I said with a shrug. “Don’t touch.”

I tossed the medical translator on the corpse and set it to collect. Conduit theory said the dead flesh could substitute for living flesh with an efficiency penalty, but the ratio here was like a hundred to one. I had enough material.

As we watched, the tablet sunk into the dead man’s chest. A wet crater bloomed outward from the point of contact, the corpse almost seeming to dissolve. Even his limbs and face deflated as fluids leaked out into the translator’s collection area. Eventually, his clothes were all that was left. Even the bloodstains had been translated out.

I shut down collection, picked up the tablet, and told it to start repairing my face. I tore off the cloth that was serving as a bandage for my face, wincing at the sensation of tearing flesh. The wince was purely on reflex; my comm was still blocking all my pain signals.

“Fearsome,” Dal Salim commented.

“Not much fazes you, does it,” I said.

“Many and strange are the blessings of the sea,” Dal Salim replied. “The blessings of the sky are equally wondrous.”

“You wanna tell me about that?” I asked. “Horcutio’s had a lot more demigods than anyone else around here.”

“Later, I think.” Dal Salim nodded, satisfied with some private conclusion. “You have other concerns for the now.”

I followed his gaze to the bed, where the last occupant of the cabin was awake and staring at me in petrified horror.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

“What have you done!?” shrieked Enochletes.

*

“Look,” I started.

“I am looking!” Enochletes was hysterical. “What did you do to Laobades?!”

“He was dead and I needed my face back,” I snapped.

“Was he dead?” Enochletes shot back. “I’m starting to think you aren’t very nice at all, Danou!”

I was ready for righteous indignation. I was ready to be condemned out of superstition. But to be accused of not being nice in such an aggrieved tone just broke me. I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing.

Enochletes looked like he wasn’t totally sure how to respond to me, either, but there were tears in his eyes. I did feel a little bad for the guy, so I reigned myself in.

“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting that. I just… my dude, we’ve both killed people. Who cares about being nice?”

“It was one of my sea shells,” he said sadly. “Kindness keeps people together.”

“Of course it was,” I muttered.

“Laobades was the one who taught me that,” he said, looking at the empty clothes on the floor.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said, sitting down. Dal Salim stood unobtrusively in the corner, observing.

“The Great Mother taught me about loss,” he said dejectedly. “Or at least, I thought she did.”

“She taught you whatever she needed you to believe,” I said. “There’s all kinds of life lessons you can learn, and she makes sure you learn the useful ones. Kives is a bitch like that.”

The dejected zealot looked up sharply at me.

“Don’t say that!” Enochletes insisted. “It was real. It was important!”

“My dude,” I said. “We’re out here to kill people. Learning life lessons is categorically less important than finishing the mission.”

“I’m not your man,” Enochletes snapped. “I swore myself to this vessel and its mission.”

“How’s that working out for you?” I asked idly. Enochletes crumpled.

The medical translator had smoothed out the scratches on my right eye. I blinked a couple times to get the weirdness out. I directed it to replace the missing skin on my hands.

“I thought I knew,” he said softly. “I thought I had a destiny. Now it turns out I didn’t. At least not the one I wanted. I had friends on the Perseverance and all of them are dead. Laobades won’t even have a body to take to the Shadowlands. What’s the point of all this?”

I used my newly refreshed face to give him a sympathetic smile.

“You gotta decide what you’re fighting for,” I said, echoing Markus’s advice. “There’s gonna be damage. You can’t avoid that in life. You just have to make sure what you’re fighting for is worth it.”

“The Varasites always say that,” Enochletes said. “There’s always a price. I’m not… cold, like that.”

“Sorry, bud,” I said, standing up. “If you want to change the world, you gotta accept the tradeoffs. Again, we’re here to kill people. It’s kinda stupid to cry because they killed some of us back.”

“They’re pirates. They chose this life.”

“Sure,” I said. “They’re still people. Doesn’t mean you can’t kill them. It just means it needs to be worth it.“

I stood up. “Come on, Dal Salim. Let’s go chat with the captain.”

I tucked the translator into my hakmir and went to open the door.

“Danou,” Enochletes interrupted me.

I turned back to look at him. “Yeah?”

“You’re not a good person, are you?”

I stared levelly at him. He held my gaze for a few moments, then looked away. I kept staring.

“That’s what I thought,” I said, and left.