Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,52

going to take a little more to scare me off.”

She shakes her head slightly, gathering a bit of courage, and continues. “You know what frightened me the most about being held over the railing? It's wasn't being held out like that. That was terrifying, sure, but what really scared me was the look on your face.”

I pause, half a wide rice noodle hanging out of my mouth. “Like this?” I squint at her.

She smiles politely, but her fingers are still toying with the flesh of her throat. “No,” she says. “I saw it on the others too. That day, on the Cetacean Liberty, when the harpoon boats got into trouble…”

She's reticent to talk about it and I haven't pressed her so far, knowing she'd tell me when the time came.

“I tried to get onto the bridge after you came storming out, but the other one—Talus?—he ordered the crewmen to take me below deck. I nailed one of the pair in the groin, but the other one got his arms around me. They were more frightened of Talus than me—and I can't blame them—and they were only going to get rougher with me if I kept fighting them. So I let them take me, and just as we were going down the stairs, I heard the first of the gun shots. That was Phoebe, right? With some sort of sniper rifle?”

I nod, still eating, but listening intently to her story.

“I thought I had seen her, up in the prow,” Mere continues. “I didn't find out until later that she was clearing a path for you. You went out to one of the harpoon boats, didn't you? You and Nigel, both. You each took a boat.”

“Nigel went rogue,” I correct her. “He went off on his own and attacked the first boat. By the time Phoebe and I had gotten involved, it was already well underway.”

“Nigel? Rogue? Is that what you think happened?” She shook her head. “An hour before, I had run into him coming out of the cabin you all shared. He had that look on his face. He stopped when he saw me, and when I squeezed past him, I saw Talus standing in the room, watching me too. I'm pretty good at reading people, Silas. They had made a decision. I was terrified when I realized what it was, and I didn't know what to do. Who could I tell? You? I had no idea if you weren't part of it. Captain Morse would have shit himself with fear if I had gone to him, and then he would have jumped overboard and been happily eaten by a shark. I went down to the mess and sat with as many people as I could find. It wasn't a good solution, but all I could hope was that all those innocent kids would be enough of a deterrent to keep Nigel away from me. But I knew they wouldn't. If he had wanted to kill me, it wouldn't have mattered how many there were. He would have killed them all to get to me.”

She's not family. Remember your priorities.

I can't argue with anything she's said and so I don't try, keeping my attention on the food. There's a few slices of thin bread made from cassava flour on the tray, and I mop up the remaining bites on my plate. The tension in my muscles is easing and my skin is softening. I'm hydrating, but not quickly enough. I pour myself a glass of water from the pitcher and drain it quickly. The water is good too, untainted by too many cycles of filtering and chemical softening.

“But Nigel wasn't coming after you,” I say, prompting her to continue her story. Nigel was going over the railing to assault the first harpoon boat. And Talus knew. His orders on the bridge made an ugly sense in light of Mere's story. He knew I wouldn't have agreed with his decision to fight back, and so he had had to create a situation where I would be inclined to do what he wanted. Where I would volunteer. With me gone, there would only be Phoebe to protect the crew of the Cetacean Liberty.

“When the shooting started, I was locked in my cabin,” she continues, her frustration at being kept away from the action clear in her voice. “I made a racket for a while, more angry than anything else, and then I started to hear other people shouting and… screaming. And then