Shadow Road: Book 1 of the Shadows Rising Trilogy

25. The First Step

26th of Uirra, Continued

I dozed – also known as "drifting into sleep only to jerk awake because a hellish nightmare has come snaking up from the darkness to drag me under" – while Arramy and NaVarre mutually picked each-others' brains.

My memories of the next few hours were warped, with a lot of them run together and hazy, but I gathered enough from the bits and pieces of their conversations (arguments, mostly) to understand that there were three binders like the one in my father's satchel. I had one, NaVarre had another, but apparently my father hid a third, and NaVarre needed that one. Badly.

There was also a bit about it being one matter to have enough information to trace these shipments, and another to know where they were coming from and where they were going. Without that knowledge, NaVarre would only be 'cutting the tail off the starkaelle while leaving the head alive,' as he put it.

I must have missed the beginning of that metaphor because he started talking about having tails grow back somewhere else, and how cutting off a tail would only alert the head to the fact that someone knows about the tails. Which, in turn, would only make it that much harder to find the head.

I got lost again in the middle and began dreaming about monsters with lots of long, curling scorpion tails.

There was one little flicker that I seemed to remember clearly: NaVarre sitting on the end of the table, holding a tumbler of brandy to his forehead as if to ease a headache with the chill of cut-crystal and ice. He looked angry. Or frustrated. Afraid. Sad, even, as he growled, "Blast that man. How am I supposed to find any of this if he's not alive to tell me where to look?"

I wanted to answer.

In my head I did.

I stood up and faced him. Told him my father couldn't have known the Galvania would sink. That he hadn't died on purpose. That my father might not even be dead, so he could just keep his awful comments to himself.

NaVarre walked out and I laughed.

I tried to make Arramy look at me, but he kept turning around to face the other way.

Then there was blood creeping over the floor in mirror-slick puddles, and I looked up to find that we were crouching in the galley on the Angpixen. There were severed limbs piling up on the floor, and the Captain was lying there on the table, watching the ship's surgeon saw off his arm while they discussed it like they were going to eat it, and the blood was still gathering, pooling beneath my feet, reaching for everyone around me, and whenever it touched anyone they melted into it, and then I was in it too, swimming, swimming, suffocating, and a man with a blurry face and white hair drifted by, dragged downward by a huge, tangled mass of metal as it sank into a bottomless pit, and I swam after him, following him even when he disappeared in the wreckage.

Then the blood-sea wasn't blood anymore, it was burning oil, and I couldn't find that man anywhere, even though I was killing myself searching —

I woke to the sound of my own sobs, and a deep, lilting voice telling me I wasn't on fire, repeating those words over and over as I swatted at my throat and hair – and anything in the way – clawing at flames that weren't real, my heart pounding, the nightmare still swirling in my head.

"Brenorra! You're safe. Come on, kid. Come back."

I gasped, dragging in air instead of oily smoke, and with it the subtle scent of a man's soap. That was what broke the stranglehold of my dream and dropped me roughly into the present. Not the words, not the voice, the soap.

I wasn't caught in the wreckage of the Galvania, choking on hot seawater. I was wrapped in a blanket, my face pressed against a wall covered in the heavy wool of a winter coat. There were arms around me, strong, unrelenting, holding me close even while I fought against them.