Iseult

What-

My horizon heaves once to the left, then to the right, and then completely vertically. It takes me a moment to realise that this is because I am lying sideways on the deck of the Village Idiot, salted planking grating my cheeks and eyelashes.

I can't move. I'm trying to, of course, trying to roll, or push myself upright. My body flops, like it’s crushed under sand, and after thrashing madly I manage only the barest twitch of my eyelids. I feel nothing from the neck down.

What did they do?

I wonder, momentarily, if I'm dead. Or dreaming. For a moment, all I am aware of is the pressure of the deck on my face and the gentle swaying of the ship. Ships. My thoughts are clogged with splinters. I can’t be dead. Being dead shouldn’t taste like wood.

Nearest to me lies a sailor, face up, his eyes open but unfocused and unblinking. At the corner of my vision I can see Sean, curled into a foetal position, similarly still. Of Íde, there is no sign, and for whatever reason that is the thought that crashes me back into proper consciousness, like snapping yourself out of a knotwork meditation. I scream and scream, and no words come out. Agonising paralysation. My soul has been severed from my body.

I bite down my panic, and empty myself. I try visualising a sigil. Anything. It doesn’t matter. Anything to sharpen me back in control. If I could steady my breathing, I would try to do so. All that I am is condensed into an edge: my focus and the thundering in my ears.

What did they do to my knotwork?

As I am struggling to empty my thoughts, to flush my panic and control my quivering body, I notice a huge, dark shape looming over Sean. It's familiar.

Tumble.

He's standing. The rest of us were stricken by the shockwave, and he alone is standing. He stoops down over Sean, mutters something to his prone form before prodding him in the back with a smart black shoe. Sean doesn’t move when Evin reaches down and shakes Sean's shoulders, before returning to his full height. I pause my futile attempts at mental knotwork as he makes his way over to me.

His face is warped to the very limit of recognisability. Lust. Contempt. Impatience. When he bends over he just mercilessly stares into my eyes, searching for something. He says something to me, and it is only then that I realise that I am completely deaf.

Evin frowns, and his lips move again. I struggle to spit out a rebuttal, but all I can manage is a croaking exhale and a facial twitch. He rolls his eyes and stands up, but not after patting me condescendingly on the cheek. My churning fury grants me only the faintest flutter of my fingers as he steps over me and disappears.

Time is slippery. I try counting my heartbeats, but abruptly remember that I’ve just tried that, and immediately forgot the count. Eventually, my anger gives me control of my arms. They move, bloodless and clumsy, and I drag myself upright, just in time for the second wave of violet to overtake the armada, disconnecting me again from my body.

A perversion has been woven into my knotwork. The aftermath of the second shot takes the deck, but I’m better prepared for it this time. I’m better prepared, this time. It takes only two hundred heartbeats for me to sit up, and I fight every second to stoke the rage in my heart.

I turn to find Íde a few paces behind me, her eyes tear-rimmed and quivering. Her mouth is moving, so quickly that only its articulation makes me think it’s anything other than a seizure or brain damage. The deafening ringing in my ears prevents me from actually hearing what she’s saying. A few moments later, I realise she’s mouthing a repetition- and a brief one, at that. Two syllables. She has landed awkwardly, her shoulder wrenched awkwardly, and I drag myself over to her and attempt to shift her to a recovery position. I cannot tell if her eyes flicker to me with gratitude or from reflex.

The deck is a stage of immense, terrible carnage. Colt & Tumble's work has felled sailors and guests alike, and I am the only stirring figure in this field of stricken bodies. It’s horrible, like the mound of the dead and the dying after our battle against the War Hosts. Bodies, some leaking blood into the holystoned boards of the ship's deck, are strewn everywhere.

Of Evin Tumble himself, there is no sign. I crawl over to Sean, elbows dragging painfully across the wood, and I notice for the first time the feeling from my knees and shins as I scrape them over the splintered deck of the Village Idiot. A good sign.

By the time I reach him, Sean is stirring too, and I pray that he still has his senses. I do not know how Tumble has cut down the people aboard the ship- some hidden knotwork below the decks of the ship? Ridiculous. The targeting apparatus should produce some waste magic, yes, but it should not have made whatever it was that overtook the raft. The by-product curdles around us, still a diffuse fog, and I can taste a sweet static when I lick my lips. But no matter what modifications the Wine Party or Colt & Tumble or whomever made to my designs, I know that they couldn’t have been able to alter the gun or the bullet to paralyse an audience like this.

When I roll Sean onto his back, his eyes lock with mine, and he sighs out a tiny double-gasp that could be my name, or a grunt of pain. Pinpricks fill my limbs as the life returns to them, nerves sparkling painfully courtesy of my surging hatred.

Evin. Tumble. My hands ache. I want my gun.

I'm resting my head on Sean's chest, and I start when I feel his hand grope clumsily to my back, then to the back of my hair. I feel another vibration, and for a split second wonder if the Inskoet gun has fired yet again. Sean is speaking.

I lean back and stare at his beleaguered face. He mouths the words, and I try to follow along. The ringing in my ears dies, a little bit. When he repeats himself a third time, I hear it, accompanied by the tortured creaking of the ships and the lapping of the waves.

"...you're okay?"

The feeling in my knees returns at the same time as my lungs, and I hack up a brief and bitter laugh. Am I okay. What an arsehole.

When Sean taught me several years ago how to carry a wounded soldier, I never thought I'd actually have to do it. Especially not to him. My legs aren’t fully recovered, but I don’t have much of a choice. I struggle with his bulk, try to configure his prone weight and his cofferdam-chest across my shoulders. I realise, then, that although it's theoretically possible to carry a man almost twice the size of me across my back, actually getting him off the planking is going to be impossible.

I am the only thing moving on the deck of the ship. Sean taps me on the back just as I am about to try something more acrobatic to get him upright. He speaks again, his voice hoarse.

"Where’s Íde?"

I pause my attempts to muscle him upright. I point to where I last saw her, and we take a long moment to focus on her. Me, squatting beside Sean, and him, propped up in my arms, legs still useless and folded. Íde is where I left her, eyes closed, muttering. I can see a few other shapes starting to stir amongst the deathly stillness of the bodies.

When Sean finally gets to his feet, woozily, we cling to each other as if either of us has the strength to save the other. I begin to stagger back towards Íde, but stop as he pauses for a moment, bends almost double, then jerks upright. He stabilises with a grim expression, and gestures with an inarticulate hand towards the sky. I squint, but cannot see whatever he is pointing at. I wonder if there’s something wrong with my vision.

"Front platform... Óengus..."

I realise what he means. The front platform of the Gundog Walking, halfway up the mast, should have had a sailor on it. But now the entirety of the ship’s webwork rigging is empty.

I wonder if Óengus had been on his sighting platform when the cloud engulfed us. I wonder if he had fallen from it, either to snap his bones on the deck of the ship or to sink, waterlogged, into the ocean below. I shudder and pray he was not fully awake when either of those happened.

Evin. Tumble.

By the time we stagger to Íde, she’s breathing. Wheezing, yes, but has at least she’s recovering. She’s whispering something, and I drop my ear to her mouth. Incomprehensible glossolalia. Two short syllables, both of which make me shudder involuntarily. Her teeth are bloody. Sean and I drop to either side of her- Sean to his knees, me to a splayed slump as my legs give out under me. We wrap Íde in our arms and haul her to standing, most of her weight resting on Sean's chest. He holds her and talks in her ear, and it is a minor miracle that she remains standing when we pull her to her feet. The syllables stop draining from her mouth, replaced with bloody spittle.

She looks confused when we begin talking to her. I pantomime deafness, and a look of horror washes over her. I backtrack hastily, trying to reassure her with flailing hand gestures that her deafness would pass. Hopefully.

We sway in time with the waves, each standing only by the support of the others.

For whatever reason, when Captain Holofernes speaks from behind me, I can hear her with almost perfect clarity.

"Where. The fuck. Is he."

Her swagger is somehow still intact, like it's such a fundamental part of her that it returned with her breathing and her heartbeat. Blood leaks from a wound behind her eyepatch, and she's resorted to leaning heavily and somehow imperiously on a gunwhale.

Íde speaks, shockingly quiet. She can barely raise her voice above the groans of the wood and the wounded.

"He must've gone to find the moon. His ship is gone."

She’s right. The Feist and Calico has vanished.

The captain nods, closes her one good eye, and grimaces. Her grip tightens around the railing, and her face turns as white as her knuckles. For a moment, I expect her to collapse, and Sean and I make stutter-steps steps towards her simultaneously. Her eye snaps open, and she tries her best to nail both of us to the deck with her stare.

"We'll take hers."

Sean nods, but I don’t understand. "Who's?"

Bless her, the captain grins.

"Wynne Colt's. Time to see what those dogfucking airship rings can do.”

*

It makes sense. Íde, at some point, had memorised the coordinates of the nearest vortex to us from little chats she’s had on Inskoet with Colt & Tumble’s gaggle of engineers and alchemists. A side effect of her general anxiety, which she abated through quietly studying anything she could. Captain Holofernes knows the location, and confirms the name of the whirlpool: Corr Vreackan. She’s able to scrape together enough of her crew from the wreckage of the raft to man this tiny vessel, leaving the Gundog Walking and the rest of the sailors in the hands of her barely-mobile first mate. By her approximations, made with a hunch and a pair of shattered clocks, she reckons that approximately twenty minutes to half an hour have passed since the moonfall.

The captain’s trademark venom has disappeared, now that we have a concrete task to accomplish. I am unable to explain what happened to the armada in greater detail, but I am in no rush to incriminate myself with my actual theory. The longer I think about it, the more sense it makes- Evin Tumble, somehow, made modifications to the targeting array that I supplied his company. It is nonsensical, because there is no sigil on Calacar that can paralyse hundreds of people and leave one man untouched. But it is the best guess I have. My work, my work, was intentionally perverted and altered to make the cloud that felled the raft.

Íde offers her own interpretations, when I am unable to answer the captain. Her story grows in strength as it continues, like hearing it is growing her own confidence. She posits that the sigil that she made with Moira O’Tierney in the Violet Manor had been combined with another hostile glyph, inserted afterwards to supplement the magic that the two of them had developed. I must admit, that this is not an outrageous suggestion: several elements of the grand glyph that they wrote had elements and configurations that were optimised and specialised by the professor beyond degrees that I could untease. When she finishes, she offers a follow-up supposition: that Colt & Tumble have cracked the Wine Party’s monopoly on engine halos, and have written and now field tested new, exotic knotworks. But the counterargument to both points is simple: the colouration of the aftermath. Violets so potent that you stopped seeing them. Narrative harnessing.

As he has no academic contributions, Sean busies himself by scrounging a cavalry sabre from a prone aristocrat and hacking off the mooring ropes that attach Wynne Colt’s yacht to the rest of the raft. I stumble to the Gundog Walking and retrieve my jezail, which I had wrapped in oilcloth and secreted aboard the captain’s ship yesterday just in case. I hurriedly check its body for damage, satisfied that it has survived whatever just happened to us. It’s unloaded, of course. I feel naked, with only twelve bullets on me.

Colt has named the yacht the Oxenfree, and Captain Holofernes gives us all roughly ten seconds to familiarise ourselves with whatever we could before walking with a rooster’s strut to the pilot’s cabin. She slaps the top of the cabin’s engraved doorway with a look of utmost glee. Although the captain is no aeronaut, and has no practise with engine halos, she is not deterred in the slightest as she seizes the controls of the yacht.

The wide, fiery crown that floats several feet above the ship's mast sparks into life, and everyone on deck either jumps or fails to conceal their apprehension, or both. For the entire time the Oxenfree was docked with the armada, the halo had been a dead thing, a six-foot wide ring of solid crimson that, perhaps once an hour, flared a tiny peal of smoke or sparks. Pressure release. The complex sigilwork of the halo, a Wine Party special, thrums into life.

I have no idea how the rings work, because as with every airship engine, the sigils responsible for powering the halos and the forces they summon in the air above the ships are welded into armoured steel crates somewhere inaccessible within the hold. All I know is that everyone’s hair, save those sailors who served on airships and have kept their own hairstyles trimmed, has started drifting gently upward. I draw my headscarf from around my neck and secure it around my head.

Whatever interface exists in the cabin is no match for the captain’s fervour. The ring is now entirely wreathed in fire, and the ship has begun a brutal, chopping drive through the sea. Íde is with her, in that little pilot’s cabin, along with a navigator from the Gundog Walking. Together, they work rapidly to confirm the Oxenfree’s bearing and destination with a bevy of tools and charts.

Her acceleration is monstrous, but expected. What comes as a surprise is that once we reach a pace that is somewhat faster than anything we accomplished abord the Gundog Walking, we do not seem to stop accelerating. The Oxenfree blasts over waves, pitching forwards and backwards as she crosses the ocean. Her entire hull vibrates as she crushes forward, stern now clearly raised, and the noise of the steam and the fire and the constant slamming pulse of the water trying to break the ship in half is almost unbearable. The pull of the distortion generated by the airship ring is undeniable, and I feel lighter than I should, pulled regularly upwards, like a compass needle to an unseen pole. We aren’t riding with the ocean. We’re ploughing through it.

By the time Captain Holofernes stops accelerating, we must be crossing thirty five knots or more. The ship barrels over waves, uncaring, bucking us about the deck in the tumult. Sean’s face is a mask of glee and terror, matching the expressions of the sailors still outside of the yacht’s cabin. Steam roils before us, the Oxenfree slams through the water, pulled forward by inexplicable gravity of the engine ring. Anyone with an uncovered head has their hair pulled at a forty-five degree angle towards the boiling bow of the ship. Sean and I retreat to the railings beside the pilot’s cabin, as if proximity to the control panels will shield us from whatever catastrophe will be unleashed if the ring explodes. Or implodes. Or fires off at unspeakable velocity into the horizon. I’m not sure what happens to a sea ship with a catastrophic ring failure. For all I know it’ll spin straight down through the ship and crucible us all.

The captain continues working whatever delicate touch she has on the baroque machinery within the pilot’s cabin. She calls out loudly to another sailor, who has roped herself to the mast directly beneath the roaring halo. I know her face, but we have never spoken. The two women speak in clipped, unfamiliar sentences that might as well be another language, and I can feel the captain’s adjustments through the ship’s hull underfoot. It’s all I can do to keep my composure as the Oxenfree flexes and groans under the strain. The heat belching from the blazing engine ring is close to unbearable.

If I grip this railing any harder I will break either it or my hands.

Eventually, I retreat inside to the small navigator’s room behind the pilot's cabin. I hope that this confined space will inoculate me against the tremendous, horrible rocking of the ship as it cannons through the waves. It does not. Nauseous and wide-eyed, I peer out through the enormous plated windows at the head of the pilot’s cabin. The bowsprit of the Oxenfree is pointing down at a sharp angle, almost daggering into the water. One other sailor in the cramped room shares my look of alarm, and the others on deck never seem to stray far from a railing or the quivering trunk of the mast. Sean is still on deck, but has made his way forward and is almost hugging the mast, laughing like a madman.

Behind me, calculating the route, stand Íde and one of the crew. They have recovered a navigator’s chart from the ship's scroll cases, and have set it out carefully on the table inside of the cabin, weighing it down with whatever detritus they could scavenge. Occasionally, one of their hands darts out to stabilise the map as the ship ricochets off of an aggressive wave. The sailor barks some esoteric question to the captain, and the two banter rapidly in a blend of colloquialisms, technical terms, and, from Captain Holofernes, extreme pejoratives. Satisfied, the captain moves her grip to a bank of small brass levers, and adjusts two of them.

Thus it is that Sean, Íde and I, along with a skeleton crew of the Gundog Walking, have stolen a yacht to chase Evin Tumble across the northern sea. This close to the Torment, we'd normally be ready to don sealskins or furs, though Captain Holofernes' aggressive treatment of the ship's halo has bathed the entire deck in a dry, shocking heat.

Forty minutes, comes the call from the sailor beside Íde, who has just finished double checking a quick series of calculations. At this speed, forty minutes until we sight Corr Vreackan, and the moon, and our prey.

*

The Oxenfree thrashes madly, pushed to breaking as it pursues the man who killed the moon.

Every sailor has fled the swamped bow, and the few that remain outside the cramped cabin, Sean included, have fixed themselves to railings via loops of loose rope. We are, all of us, welded to the same thirst.

The Oxenfree is travelling at just over an estimated thirty three knots, running the ship to limits that we only discovered as the captain alternately experimented and wrestled with the knotworked controls. At one point, the mast had actually cracked as the captain attuned the ring just past some inscrutable threshold. Sean had thrown himself backwards, virtually stumbling uphill against the ship’s tilt. The halo howled with a tempest-peal, spewing uncontrolled fire and a single crackling thunderbolt. A deep fissure instantly split the mast from deck to crown. It miraculously stayed in one piece. The entire cabin had fallen silent, watching with terror, waiting for the ship to bisect or explode or some horrible other alternative. It, fortunately, had not.

The captain had grumbled about “cack-handed academic engineers”, made a handful of adjustments, and is now paying extremely close attention to various pressure dials and charm-readings. One of the crew asks a neutral question, and the captain viciously insults him. After spending enough time with her, I recognise this venom as good-natured.

Our ship's captive halo still burns enormously, as Captain Holofernes has reduced only the barest required fraction of its potential power. She’s gripped by an infectious madness that has now spread to all of us. Her dream of vengeance is mine, as well. I watch a particularly large wave overwhelm the front quarter of the Oxenfree, only to be swept, steaming, from the deck by our absurd velocity. I had stored my weapon with the drawer that contains all of our nautical charts, and wonder if it’s secured against the bucking of the ship.

Sean joins us, inside. His eyes are wide, his clothing damped by repeated sprays of quickly-evaporating seawater. But he’s loving this. If I am fuelling myself with rage, and Íde with a sort of hyper focused terror, Sean has decided to embrace an insane, desperate glee. None of us say anything, choosing instead to stare at the slate-grey sea as it struggles to contain the Oxenfree. A minute later, the captain swears, fiddling with a handle that by the knotwork surrounding it must in some way interact with the major charms either summoning or binding the halo. As one, the rest of us turn to her, wondering why we’re slowing down. Even the sailors on deck notice, and begin peering back at the foggy windows of the pilot’s cabin. I run a cursory, ignorant eye over the control instruments, searching for damage. I wonder once again if we've pushed the Oxenfree too hard.

A few seconds after the captain had sighted it, we all notice the darkness on the horizon.

It's one thing to see it, in the sky. It was perverse enough to see it falling. But now that it's here, outlined against the pewter sea, I am lost for words.

It looks far, far larger than when it was in the sky. Only a fraction of its bulk is above the water- insanely, improbably, it must've landed precisely where Colt & Tumble wanted it, directly over the whirlpool. A fragment from heaven. The moon that we helped Tumble shoot.

Less than fifteen minutes later it towers over us, and we are lost in its presence.

Most crews, the captain mutters, would never be so idiotic as to sail close to a known vortex. They're mapped, of course, but a sudden expansion or contraction of a whirlpool’s throat is not unknown. And what might be a minor spasm for a whirlpool a mile across can easily destroy any ship idiotic enough to test its luck. But that is in a normal situation, not one where the vortex has been plugged by the corpse of a murdered mountain.

So we sail closer, at a fraction of our initial speed, the Oxenfree's fiery crown winding down from its hellish maximal output to something more like the gentle red halo it was wearing when it was still roped to Colt & Tumble's armada. The moon, grey-faced and impassive, lurches into alarming focus as we draw nearer.

Seeing the mountain swim in a spyglass does not prepare me for actually being in its presence. It's big. It's horrifically big. About half a mile from end to end, though it’s shaped more like a potato than a sphere so its actual dimensions are difficult to discern. Either way, it's titanic. The weight of the thing, the understanding that it came from the sky, slaughters Sean’s glee. Its great marble flanks are leaking into the sea, surrounding the entire moon with a ring of alabaster mud that mixes with the seawater only reluctantly.

Through the spyglass lens, we glean disquieting details. The entire skin of the moon is patterned in a series of breath-taking fractals that remind me of the delicate geometries of Al Khazraj. Some swell higher than cathedrals, eddies that could have been drawn using the Inskoet gun as a stylus. Yet the closer we get, the more we can see, until we are barely a hundred feet away and still more patterns become visible on the rock. Sean says they remind him of charms, and, astonishingly, he’s right. Not the sigils of Yvreathe or Khazraj. Narrative harnesses. Where the snowy grey dust that covers the moon has sloughed away, either from the waves or from the impact of the thing against the ocean, spirals and familiar knotwork patterns are exposed in utterly alien configurations.

We draw closer and closer to the hunted thing, and again the patterns evolve further and further into exhausting complexity. Even now, when we are almost near enough that I could throw a stone and strike its great grey skin, I cannot make out the full details of these fractal growths.

“Salt and maggots,” a sailor swears, making the handsign of Saint Gramarye.

Only Íde shares my wonder at the sigilry. Sean and the rest of the crew are busy scrutinising the shattered skin for a potential harbour. I suppose the captain is as well, but the way her hands dart up and down the control panel leads me to believe that controlling the Oxenfree, even at these speeds, is no simple task.

The thermometer set into the wood beside the doorway starts dropping, noticeably.

*

There are deep places in the Wraithwild. Many have been carved by centuries of patient Bani Yathrib hands. Brixa Thalaam and her satellite towns tend to hug the coasts, stopping short of the intangible miles-deep perimeter around the Shorn Peak. Other major settlements lie on main roads, and rarely expand too far into the wilderness, wary of the weather and the things that make their home in the stranger corners of the Wraithwild. The land is untamed by Thalaami hands.

It hasn’t been tamed by the Bani Yathrib either, but marks have been left by generations of stonecutters and architects. Temples, observatories, not hewn from stone but cut in stone. Villages for communities fleeing the sun, the cold, the creatures of the Wraithwild, each other. Neat, carved tunnels that stretch for miles, never exposed to daylight. You can feel the patient history of the tribes in those old strata.

For outsiders, who are shown these quiet places only rarely, the effect is humbling. Bani Yathrib internalise that understanding of uncaring aeons long before adulthood. This is why we spend so long familiarising ourselves with the inevitability of death, and the endless oblivion before and after life.

Thus I find the new moon foreign, yet familiar. I itch with a cloying, skin-tight tension. I have to force myself to exhale, for the air is cold and drained.

We hadn’t completed a full encircling of the outside of the moon, when Captain Holofernes and Íde had spotted something, simultaneously. I could barely make it out, even with their pointing fingers- a ghost of a wake, etched in the white slurry surrounding a small rent in the moon’s surface. An impression of a passing- a route into the moon.

The Oxenfree prowled slowly through this chasm. Evin Tumble is in this place, somewhere.

Salt fills my heart, salt and cold. All around us, the ocean beats at the flesh of this great rock. We passed through the marble slurry that was bleeding off the moon’s surface, but now that we are inside, now that we are drifting down this jarringly regular canal, regular salt water laps thirstily at broken places. After our initial thirty seconds in this cavernous darkness, Captain Holofernes swore and began to tug at her eyepatch. A moment later and the thing peeled off her face with a faint puff of violet dust, revealing a surprisingly normal eyeball underneath. She saw me staring, and turned to face me. Even in the darkness and the charnel lighting of the engine ring, I noticed what the patch was hiding- an eye, off-white and glossy, carved from a single Crowmere pearl. She had frowned at my staring, then looked back at the canal ahead. With her entire face revealed, the captain seems older than I expected. That sudden sense of weariness is much more worrying than her unfamiliar eyeball.

Huge cracks, spilling writhing growths that look for all the world like chemical pipes, are flooded with sloshing waves. Every time I try to put a coherent image of this place together, I’m thwarted by the water, and by the rocking of the ship, and by the hellish red glow of the barely-engaged engine ring. In this confined space, the roar of the halo at anything above the barest throttle is unbearable. Everything is bathed in flickers of crimson, every angle interrupted by the sway of the ocean. Secrets lie just beyond sight, unscrutinised. Tunnels skitter away at dizzying angles.

We’ve lit lanterns, but the Oxenfree isn’t exactly designed for this sort of thing. There’s hardly enough room to squeeze the hull through the moon’s rocky guts. The Gundog Walking would not fit at all in here, and it would be impossible to use sails even on a yacht as small as ours. We’re blessed by the choice to steal Wynne Colt’s ship, but all the same I find myself startled by the haunting crimson shadows that her engine paints on the fractal rock around us. Water laps against the hull and against the walls, dripping in the echoing darkness.

Fifteen slow minutes in the dreadful canal, fifteen minutes of praying that the engine ring doesn’t bump against the walls, or that we ourselves don’t scrape the hull on one of the crazed metal outgrowths that seem to sprout randomly from the moon-hall, we spot his black-clad craft. It’s stomach-wrenchingly close, a suddenly lurching phantom that appears from behind a sharp tangle of wreckage. The oaths from the captain are mirrored a second later by her attendant sailors, one of whom is scant yards from the stern of the other yacht’s transom. She leaps back, but her pointing finger and yelp of alarm are redundant. A moment’s blaze from the engine halo, a sense of being pulled gently backwards, and we grind to a sloshing halt. Echoes from the ring and the blast of the ensuing steam reverberate through the claustrophobic dark.

If he didn’t know we were coming before, he knows now.

Tumble’s ship is unmanned. We discover this as, less than a minute later, Sean and another sailor greet us from its deck. I didn’t see them leap from the Oxenfree, but it’s certainly Sean’s style. No cheeky grins or waves though, just the pair of them, grim faced, gripping weapons. Tumble’s yacht, the Feist and Calico, is equipped with the same engine ring that crowns our own ship. He must’ve been here for quite some time, as the halo has already run itself down to nothing more than a thin crimson circle. Now that we’re beside his boat, midships-to-midships, I can spy a patch of unmoving darkness on the far side of the other vessel. No watery reflection. Solid land.

Sean is gone already, possibly sweeping the craft a second time for any stowaways. Tumble’s vessel, like ours, is a small cutting yacht, and after whatever happened after the gun was fired, it’s unlikely he came with a significant crew. He might have piloted the boat entirely by himself- after all, captain Holofernes managed to do just that. I seize Íde by the hand and pull her over the railing onto the deck of the Feist and Calico. Only two sailors from Captain Holoferne’s skeleton crew join us. One passes a wicked cutlass to me. I shake my head, and gesture to the oilskin jezail in my hands. Nobody else thought to hide a weapon in case something like this happened. The sailor nods, then steps back, respectfully, as we turn to stare down the yacht’s gangplank, into the bowels of the moon.

Captain Holofernes is behind us. She doesn’t try to get our attention, but starts talking, quietly, assuming we’re paying attention.

“I don’t know what happened, back on Inskoet. It must have been him. Or he must have known that would happen. What I do know is that he’s here. He did this for a reason. Fuck that fanciful story about shooting this thing down just to mine it. There’s something wrong with him. We’re all part of this, and we’re going to stop him.”

The sailors behind her are nodding, solemnly. So is Íde. The captain speaks again, her voice low and solid, cutting through the quiet lapping of the ocean against the walls of the moon.

“Flush out this rat. Or burn him to cinders. I do not care. He fooled me. Kill him or bring him back, so we can throw him in a coffin and weld it shut. We will be here, to protect the ship and prevent his escape. You must be knives,” she passes over all three of us with that intense stare, her strange eye gleaming under the red glow of the engine halo. “For everyone has a throat to cut.”

We nod, blessed. I walk down to the moon’s surface, and turn to speak to Íde.