Roger was on the deck of the ship, surrounded by water, at a standstill. The morning’s purple sunrise reflected off his aviators. He scanned around the deck on final time, spotting Sumire walking up to him.
“How’re you feeling?” He asked.
“Good—how long was I asleep?” Sumire asked in a sleepy, reedy voice.
“Four hours. Something happened, I can’t find any of the ship's crew.”
“Oh, you can’t find any of the ship's crew…” Sumire rubbed her eyes. “Wait, huh!”
“I smell sabotage,” Roger said. “And I’m not good at close quarters combat. Be on guard, stay by my side and try not to wander away.”
“When did you learn this?”
“I was only certain of it a minute ago.”
A heavy sort of silence hung in the air as Roger went to the driver's seat.
The controls were simple. Even I could figure them out with a little time, Sumire thought. There was a lever for speed, and a horizontal dial for direction. Various gauges and buttons filled the rest of the control panel.
Roger sat down at the controls and started heading directly east. “There’s no telling how far off course we are, but we can’t see the mainland. I’d say we’re at least 60 knots out.”
The ship tilted, and once it was facing due east Roger gave it full power.
“Hands where I can see them,” a gruff man’s voice, speaking in Japanese. Roger put up his hands, slowly turning in his seat. Sumire glanced behind her back long enough to see a rifle pointed at her. She put up her hands, not daring to turn around.
Sumire closed her eyes, feeling the unfamiliar feeling of frost surrounding her.
Just before she was hit over the head with the metal stock of the rifle, collapsing on the ground. Roger jumped up to try and catch her—
“Don’t move!” The Japanese man pointed a rifle at him, stopping him, and Sumire crashed to the ground unceremoniously.
In this little cabin there was nowhere to go, nowhere to jump out of the way.
He’d been had.
Roger cursed under his breath.
= = =
Sumire’s head was still ringing when she came to. The guy certainly hadn’t pulled his punch just because I’m a girl—she looked around. She was inside the ship, in some storage room surrounded by crates.
The first thing to do was obvious, summon her frost familiar. The problem was this: I have no way of controlling which one it is. If she summoned the mammoth, the game was over, the gig was up, and she was doomed to return to Faifer. And who knows what they’ll do to Roger…
She was panicking, she realized. It wasn’t helping her think, and right now she needed to think clearly.
“Sumire!” A muffled voice from the wall to her left, Rogers’ voice.
“Yes!”
“You’re a lunar user!”
Some gears turned in her head, but none of them clicked. She knew what that was, it was in her education surely, but not what that meant for right now.
“What do you mean!” Sumire yelled back.
“Think about it!”
Luna Magi, or practitioners, are the rarest of the five magic mutations, Sumire recited from her memory. If 30% of the world can use magic of any kind, three percent of that are Lunar users. They can control their emotions and that of unintelligent creatures, summon familiars, and use powerful shock spells.
That was what she knew, but even knowing that, it didn’t help. She had never been trained, and this was the first time hearing that she was one.
Roger's muffled yell from the other room: “Close your eyes and feel!”
Sumire knew what he meant, the threads. Whenever she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could see interconnected lines, threads, she called them. But how would seeing the threads help her now?
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As a matter of course, Sumire hated seeing the threads. She didn’t understand them, and they were always there. Living her sheltered life in the Imperial Court, nobody taught her about these things.
But she closed her eyes anyway, concentrating on the feeling, the feeling that allows her to see the threads. She felt herself calm down, the panic subsiding, slowly the weariness lifted off of her, and sooner rather than later the threads were floating as if in wind. One of them went to the other room to her right, two of them were tightly connected to the bonds on her wrists and feet.
She concentrated on an unseen one, that she knew was there, probing it with her mind's eye. It went from the front of her head to the back, and was scattered with multiple lines all over the place. She felt a coolness come over her as she concentrated on it, the sting in the back of her head subsiding to a dull ache as the lines came together into one.
It frightened her. That she didn’t understand this power or what it was doing, how it worked, it scared Sumire. But she pressed on, ignoring the anxiety swelling in her chest, and eventually even that floated away from her.
Sumire remembered going into the woods when she was a young teen and practicing summoning her familiars in secret. Now I’m doing it to save our lives.
“What now!” Sumire yelled, keeping her eyes closed.
She focused on the line going to the next room, and heard Roger much more clearly this time, yelling back, “Now focus on the feeling of summoning!”
Sumire whispered under her breath, “Easy for you to say…”
Frost began to seep off of her, as she focused on that feeling, and threads began to form to it. Three of them. She focused on one of them, when she knew what it was. It was the owl. Bingo. That was the one she wanted.
She began to feed Frost into it, channeling her focus on it. She opened her eyes. Perfect… A dense dark blue ball was forming, crystalizing into existence was the form of a large owl with wings as big as a crane’s.
She silently commanded the owl to cut the ropes.
The owl hopped over and bit the rope to shreds. She stretched her legs, kicking the rope away, gripping her left wrist where the rope had been. She jumped to her feet and surreptitiously opened the door a crack, peeking out.
As silently as she could, she opened it the rest of the way, the hinges making a barely audible creek as she did so. The coast is clear, JS must be operating the controls right about now.
She tiptoed to the room adjacent to hers and slowly opened the door, greeted by the sight of a hogtied Roger in the corner. “What the fuck,” she mumbled to herself. She ran over and undid the knot.
“Glad to see it worked,” Roger said, with some difficulty.
“How did you know that’d work?” Sumire asked as she freed him. The owl hopped into the room, following her.
“I worked at the Shrines as a kid,” Roger stood up, reaching into his pocket and taking out his dart gun. “But nevermind that now, right now we need to take out that guy, and fast.” He gestured for Sumire to come near, and she leaned in as Roger whispered something to her.
“Won't we be stuck at sea if we do that?” Sumire said, looking hesitant.
“I can control it, don’t worry. Just have that owl ready to attack. It can fly, right?”
“Right, it can.”
Roger unloaded his clip, loading in another from his pocket. “Then there’s nothing to worry about, eh?”
Sumire gulped salty, ocean air. I’ve got a bad feeling about this…
Roger walked out first, Sumire and her familiar of ice following closely behind up the stairs to the deck. He crouched down as he exited into the sunlight and found a crate to hide behind. Sumire did the same, ordering her owl to the sky, it took off with great flaps of its wings, circling around the boat.
He nodded to her, and she nodded back. It’s up to Roger now… Sumire thought, the plan is simple, but that’s probably the point.
Roger cupped his hands together, and as he pulled them apart in front of his chest a ball of fire formed in between them. He stood up, got in front of the crate—cupping a growing Inferno—and took aim at the cabin that held the captain's seat.
He pushed out with his hands, sending the fireball flying at an incredible speed. It crashed into the cabin a moment later with a crash, completely devastating and exploding the structure. At that same moment, as Sumire covered her ears, she sent her owl down to attack.
The nearly, but not entirely, silent shots of a railgun went off, as Roger jumped into a roll with his dart gun out, JS shot at Roger, then at the owl who gored him with sharp talons directly on the back of his head.
JS was now facing the other way, swinging wildly. On the floor Roger quickly took aim, firing three shots into the back of the man.
He went down.
“Call off your familiar!” Roger yelled. The thing was still attacking, peeking JS.
Sumire silently sent a command the owl to come back to her. She released a sigh of relief. It worked, it really worked. The owl, frost coming off it, landed next to her on top of the crate. It had blood all over its peak and feet.
Sumire looked it over, it was indeed quite a bit of blood… She ran back downstairs, to the medical room she had first woken up in and found a first aid kit, running back up to the deck and to the injured JS, kneeling down next to him.
He looked pale, and was twitching. She looked behind her, Roger stood behind her. “Why is he twitching so much? What exactly is in those darts?”
“A combination of toxins, this happens when someone gets a large dose.”
Sumire shook her head. She opened the first aid kit, taking out disinfectant and gauze and white wrapping, tearing open the disinfectant wipes.
“Hey,” Roger said in a deeper than usual voice, deeper than it already was. “Is anyone else following us, soldier?”
JS’s teeth were clenched so hard Sumire thought he’d chip a tooth. He said nothing, and Sumire began to turn the man on his side, with some difficulty.
“Don’t try to fool me, I know you can still talk. And you will talk, or I’ll throw you overboard just like you did with the boat's crew.”
Sumire stopped her work, cleaning the back of the man's gored head. “Roger! We will not!” Anger was in her eyes and she continued: “Leave this to me, alright?”
“You’re kind hearted, Sumire. I’m not. This man has already proven he’s dangerous, well, I’m dangerous too—”
“Leave. It.”
Sumire obviously won’t budge on this, Roger realized. He scoffed, saying, “Fine, but if you don’t get any answers it becomes my turn.”
Sumire threw the bloodied wipe to the side in frustration, applying gauze and asking in a low voice, “What’s your name?”
= = =