Private Dreaming of an Absent Word

[Fray]

Fray watched Mak struggling to focus his eyes and thought to herself that they might well and truly be doomed. A drunk dreamer and murderer for hire trying to solve…a double murder. In the dark. On open seas. In under three hours. Was that the set up or the punchline of a terrible joke?

And now, as icing on the shit cake they had accidentally stumbled into, a scale of most unnatural origins was held up before them. It was leaf thin yet sturdy, slightly translucent and glowing under the moonlight, with edges rough enough to feel like rows of teeny tiny teeth. No harm to a casual touch, but if used to saw back and forth on a pliant surface…or, worse, to punch through a man’s chest…

Well, that would explain the bloody mess.

The mercenary noted how Mak refused to touch the thing. Must be hard, to be so delicate of constitution. Guess that’s why he hired her in the first place.

Fray sighed and felt around the scale. “Slippery from the blood, maybe,” she supplied once she had turned the thing in her hand a few times, rubbing calloused fingers against its alien surface. “But if you mean like fish guts, then…no. Not slimy enough.”

Hit with a sudden spurt of inspiration, she cleaned the scale off on the pant leg of one of the corpses. “Hmm. Feels kind of rough, actually, without all the blood. More like the outside of an oyster, just more flat.”

It was, in a strange, foreign way, kind of beautiful. There was an opalescence to it, like the inside of a shell, and paired with the way it glowed, gave the thing a rather ethereal look. But it also was likely responsible for skewering two able bodied men. Which made it infinitely less appealing as a keepsake.

Fray pocketed it anyway, switching her attention to the floorboards beneath them. Water…that was a good suggestion. She scanned the room from one end to the other, spinning slowly from a squatted position. She could see splatters and puddles of blood, but no footprints from her or Mak, as they had been very careful not to leave any behind, and no dramatic signs of struggle. Whatever happened here had happened fast. Likely caught both men off guard. There was a slight arc of blood near the bodies. Perhaps when one man spun to watch the other die first.

She relayed all of this to Mak, her voice low and matter-of-fact. But then she paused abruptly. There was an odd shine to one of the floorboards, though it was near the middle of the room and not close to either the porthole or singular entrance.

“Over there,” Fray whispered, pointing at the spot. “Something’s off about that section. It looks wet, not blood, and water would have mostly dried by now.”

 

[Mako]

If he was asked, and by the eight's grace he was not, Mako would have babbled on about how surreal the situation felt. Sure, he could accept the captain's murder—man was a prick, hardly liked even by his own crew if the chatter from the mess was to be believed—and the circumstances surrounding it. The closed cabin, bloodstained rugs, untouched chest all of passing interest, believable. What he struggled to understand, not helped in the least by the drunken stupor that befell him, was how he managed to get caught up in it.

He shivered, rubbing absently at gooseflesh that puckered along his arms. Fortune rarely favored him. Omens, that shaman told him back on the shores of Aetochi, omens and prophecy. He was starting to believe her. Taken in that lens, each portent was a price. One paid in the present in search of future reward.

He wondered at that. What reward could the trickster moon bequeath him to make up for these trials? A kingdom sounded grand when it came from a woman's lips, a crown of swords stained red in the blood spilled in its forging. Not nearly so pleasant now, lamenting the knife of suspicion. His mind raced, painfully slow, and he struggled to condense thoughts past the thrum of his heartbeat.

Fray spirited him from his reverie. He could kiss her for that, if he fancied another broken jaw. Not likely tonight. Might make the whole thinking thing more difficult.

He moved at her direction, kneeling by the puddle of something. It pooled, silver in hue, glistering in the low light that filtered through the dark that occluded his eyes. Some of it hung in rivulets, caught in the seams of the cabin floorboards, viscous and thick. He scowled at it, leaning closer to sniff before making any judgment.

Nothing. It tickled the back of his nose but gave off no discernable scent.

"The fuck is this?" he asked. Dumbly, he dipped a finger in it, swirled the liquid around at the back of a nail. He staggered back, stifling a noise. The liquid climbed up his finger, clinging to skin in a refusal to shake off.

"Mercury? Silver? What the fuck?"

 

[Fray]

For one excruciatingly harrowing moment, Fray was convinced Mak was about to stick the weird slime in his mouth for a taste. Bad enough that he had even touched it. She was seconds away from wrestling his hand away, figuring she could break the finger before he ate mystery goo, when he suddenly flinched back.

“What? What is it?!” she whisper-shouted as he shook his hand frantically.

She felt sure that something vile would happen next. Like his skin melting away, or a mind controlling infection. But all that she could see was the liquid’s strange ability to cling to Mak’s finger.

Suspicion flooded her mind. Without a word, she grabbed Mak’s wrist and told him to hold still. In her free hand, she fished out a small knife from her belt, one she’d used many times to spear chunks of potatoes or whittle offensive images into the ship when no one was looking. She held her breath and brought the knife point right up to the silvery glob stuck to his finger.

Fray’s eyes widened in the semi dark when the glob shied away. She drove the blade tip closer, and in response the glob rolled like a bead of water around Mak’s finger, all while refusing to drop away. Absurd. This was absurd. How was this even happening?

“Wait,” she hissed, feeling panic through the spasming muscles of Mak’s arm. “I have an idea.”

Quickly, she reached behind and dipped the blade in some of the cooling blood. This time, when she held it near the glob, it had the opposite reaction. It actually reached toward the knife, going so far as to leave Mak’s finger and transfer to the blade. And then it…absorbed the blood somehow, until it was no longer silver, but a milky shade of salmon.

That was when the rest of the silver puddle started undulating, moving as if it were alive. Faster than Fray could react, it lurched up, suctioned the salmon colored droplet, and then shimmied itself through the planks until there was nothing left.

Without hesitance, she stuck the knife in one of the planks, which turned out to be quite loose, and pried it open to reveal a gaping hole leading to absolutely nowhere good. She made quick work of two more planks, as they had clearly been removed often, no doubt by the captain himself. Beneath them lay a man sized hole, large enough for even the burly captain to fit through, and a very questionable looking flight of stairs.

Fray stared at the hole in silence before muttering, “Mak, have I ever told you that you somehow always find the worst fucking jobs?”