I woke to a gentle bobbing sensation. It was relaxing, I could hear the sound of water and waves. I turned over and closed my eyes again.

   A moment later they flew open and I rolled out of my bed, hitting the metal floor with a ‘thud’. I threw my clothes on and ran out into the hall and up the stairs.

“Your shirt is on backwards.” Thatch noticed as I came on deck.

Tallahassee was gone. A glimmer of reflected light in the distance. All around us was water. Deep, dark, and blue-green.

“We’re sailing. We’re on the ocean.” I said. Hawthorn and Thatch were the only people on the deck. I couldn’t read Thatch’s expression, it being a literal mask, but Hawthorn was smirking.

“We are indeed.” Thatch said, “We told you we would set sail today, did we not?”

“Yea. I guess, uh, I guess you did.”

I didn’t know why, but I felt like there should have been a little more ceremony to it. Not, like, a celebration or something, but I definitely hadn’t imagined myself sleeping through the beginning of my first journey into the ocean.

I was silent for a moment. I had the feeling Thatch and Hawthorn had been talking before my arrival, but they fell silent with me here.

“When does the strange start happening?” I asked eventually.

“In time. This is a relatively stable part of The Ocean. It’s also one of the largest. People call it The Deeps.”

“On account of it being really, really, really deep.” Hawthorn said,

“I’ve read about it.” I said, “Supposedly some places we still haven’t found the bottom, and enormous creatures live here. Bigger than any that live in a normal ocean.”

I looked into the dark water and felt my entire body give an involuntary shiver as I imagined what might lurk beneath us.

“Yep.” Hawthorn said,

“Do we have… defences?”

Hawthorn laughed aloud.

“Nothing we do could stop one of those creatures if it were to take offense to us.” Thatch explained, “We would need a bigger ship, military grade weapons, magic, a lot of planning and many more people than we currently have if we wanted to make a dent in one of them. Fortunately, we are so small that we are literally beneath their notice.”

“Sailors have died out here before.” I said,

“Because the creatures breached the surface or were hunting other prey and they were in the way. There is no record of any of these creatures ever attacking a ship. They’re just too big to care.”

“That’s… comforting.” I said,

“I’m comforted by it as well.” Thatch said, “Other things on The Ocean aren’t so kind as to ignore us. The Deeps are likely the safest part of our journey.”

And as far as I could tell, Thatch was right. Tallahassee faded away so that not even a glimmer of its high rises could be seen in the light of the sun. All around me was placid, deep green water. At one point I thought I saw a long, sinuous shadow maybe the length of a city bus, but Thatch assured me that the creatures were usually much bigger than that, so it was probably just a trick of the light. I looked up onto the bridge, a tall metal and glass box that rose in the middle of the The Befuddled to see Selimy leaning against the window, talking to someone inside, probably First Mate.

“What is Selimy?” I asked,

Hawthorn and Thatch just shrugged.

As the sun began to set on the first day, more people came up onto the deck. Elma first. She had, apparently, been slaving away in the kitchen all day. Nobody had been allowed inside.

“I always make a big meal the first night we’re on the water!” She said, grinning and lugging a heavy, foldable metal table up the stairs. I ran over to help her because I wasn’t racist, and we set it up in front of Hawthorn. 

“Do you mind me asking you again what’s wrong with you, Hawthorn?”

“Nah. I don’t mind---” Hawthorn said, but Elma slapped her webbed hand over his mouth.

“No way! It’s gotta be a surprise. You’ll do the thing tonight. At dinner as it gets dark! It’ll be great!” She turned her huge, pointy smile on me and repeated, “It’ll be great.”

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Melody came up next, helping Elma who had gone down again, with the chairs. She seemed infinitely more relaxed than she had last night, and was talking animatedly with Elma about tea or something.

First Mate, Lucas and Selimy came all together. I got the sense that the three of them were at the core of the ship. When decisions got made, those three were the ones who made them. Thatch was important, the quartermaster, but he seemed more like the level head in this group of mad people. Almost a baby sitter. Or their enforcer.

First Mate sat down at the head of the table, crowded by Selimy and Thatch as the table we sat at wasn’t terribly large. She sat at her spot, back straight, hands folded on the table, but she was smiling and talking, like a matron presiding over a family gathering.

Quiver came last, when the sun had finally gone down. My heart gave a jolt as I watched tendrils swarm up the steps like a flood, and then I relaxed when I remembered I was apparently friends with the horrible tentacle monster. The doorway was too small for all of Quiver at once, so they came up sideways. Everyone greeted Quiver with a cheer.

Quiver looked dubiously at the horizon where a few fingers of light lingered on the water, and then settled in on the other end of the table from First Mate, watching the horizon with grim satisfaction as the light died.

“Sam, look up.” First Mate said, hooking a thumb upwards. I followed her finger and took a sharp breath. I’d been too busy looking at the crew that I’d failed to notice the stars popping into existence.

I’d seen the night sky, devoid of light pollution before. Northern Caligon wasn’t terribly populated, and I’d used to go up to the North Cascades National Park every summer in that region. I’d seen the night sky in all of it’s glory. But this was different. I didn’t see any of the usual star formations. Nothing even similar. Stars peppered the night sky, not as thickly as they did back home, but with larger, stronger lights. Most of them shone with the same white light, but others were blue or green or even purple, the light heavy, and I could almost feel the colors pressing onto the boat in muted, softer tones, not so much banishing the dark as coloring it.

There was no singular white band in the sky, no lonely milky way. Instead there were two streaks of faintly glowing light, crossing one another in the night sky to form a sort of galactic X. Not in denial, but like a tired old man crossing his arms and shutting his eyes while sitting in front of a fireplace at home. Only it wasn’t one fire, it was thousands of tiny lights.

Most surprisingly of all, there was no moon. I knew it wasn’t simply a new moon, because the books I’d read all said the moon couldn’t be seen from the Ocean. I’d expected that to make the Ocean darker, but the bright, bulbous, off colored stars colored the dark in a way that let me see more easily than if a full moon had been hanging in the sky.

“Wow.” She agreed.

“Alright Hawthorn.” Elma said, slapping him on the shoulder, “Do the-the thing.”

Hawthorn sighed, and then suddenly began to…. Deflate. Little lights began to emerge from below the table. He put one of his gloved and sleeved hands on the table, and it began to roil, the same yellow-green lights emerging in a torrent from where the glove met the shirt. Soon the lights were everywhere, drifting into the air and away from the table, landing on the railings around the boat, on the walls of the bridge, some hanging above the table suspended in the air.

I adjusted my eyes and realized that they weren’t just lights. They were Fireflies. Thousands, tens of thousands of little insects.

“I’ve got the Changing Sickness.” Hawthorn said,

My eyes widened.

“What…? I’ve never heard of that.”

“It’s a sickness I picked up on the Ocean. Round the Empire of Clay.” Hawthorn shrugged. I had never heard of the Empire of Clay. “ I’m slowly turning into a swarm of fireflies. It’s gotten past my elbows and about a third up my thighs.”

I blinked, and instinctively turned to Melody, the doctor.

“No known cure, but it’s not contagious.” She said, recognizing the look I gave her.

“He’s an old man plying the Ocean.” Elma said, grinning her pointy grin. “And this thing is gonna take years to kill him, so don’t feel bad. It’s not like he had much time left to begin with! He can control the fireflies, he’s in their little brains! It’s more useful than anything!”

“Shut up you overgrown fish.” Hawthorn said, putting a cigarette to his lips with his remaining hand. “You want arms made out of bugs?”

“No. But I’m young and sexy, Hawthorn. This is an improvement if anything for you.”

“So that hand is made of fireflies too?” I asked,

“Yep. It’s a royal pain in the ass to get them to do this, though. If I squeeze too hard they squish, and fireflies are stupid as hell.”

“Damn.” I said, and that was all there really was to say.

“I’ll go check on dinner.” Elma said, glancing at a waterproof watch she wore on her wrist. “The last of it should be done in a minute. Lucas, Melody. Plates. Food. Help me.” And the three descended into the bowels of the ship again.

Quiver’s tendrils began to spread out and around the tables and chairs. Quiver seemed to be settling in to a more comfortable position. I pulled myself in tighter, not wanting to touch any of them and paralyze myself. The others didn’t seem to have this problem. One of the Tendrils wormed its way across the table and Selimy picked it up with her bare hands and dropped it onto the floor.

“Sorry.” Quiver said, “I wasn’t paying attention.” I glanced around at the tendrils nearest me, but they did seem to be paying attention to those, because not one of them came near me.

Not long later Elma Lucas and Melody came up the stairs with trays of food and drink. Lucas was carrying three bottles of wine, and put the one that I had picked out with Melody on the table in front of me. A nice red Zinfandel from southern Caligon.

The food was a pair of glazed hams, some sort of mushroom soup, and a tub of macaroni and cheese that was, thank goodness, not from one of the boxes we’d bought from Walmart. Not that I’d thought Elma, with her reputation as a cook, would have made Kraft.

When the food was set on the table, everyone had sat down, and Elma was dumping macaroni onto everyone's plate whether they wanted some or not, I blinked and shook myself. I looked around at the varied faces that surrounded me, not all of them human. The strange, unsettlingly colored stars in the sky, the black waters stretching out around me in every direction held back by the dim ship lights and a swarm of fireflies, all this strangeness contrasted by the food that looked and smelled both normal and delicious. I pinched myself. Everything suddenly felt so surreal. Like a very, very strange dream. Not unpleasant, but the sort that when you wake leaves you confused and a little… disappointed that it hadn’t been real.

“Sam! Snap out of it, you going crazy already? It’s a little early in the trip for that. Eat my goddamn food!” Elma said with a laugh, and a lump of baked macaroni and cheese slopped onto my plate. Everyone else was already shoveling food into their mouths.

  Thatch was sitting, his plate empty, conversing with Melody who was trying her best to respond through a mouthful of food. Selimy was intent on cutting the Ham with a large steak knife, a worried First Mate looking on, her hand fluttering in front of her, seeming anxious to intervene. Elma was fending off one of Quivers tendrils with a spatula as it playfully tried dragging one of the whole hams in it's owners direction, all the while Lucas was using the distraction to pile more macaroni onto his plate, winking at Quiver when he spilt his spoils and passed half to his accomplice.

I rubbed my mouth and hid a smile, not sure why I was smiling at all. Then I reached for the wine and poured myself a glass.

“Don’t mind if I do.”