Ryland snapped, his hands dropping from where they were tucked into the crooks of his arms.
Zola ignored him, looking at the islet. The wind pulled his silver-and-black hair across his rough face as I tried to read it. He said he’d given the crew instructions to leave me alone, but he was giving them plenty of reasons to come after me.
“The fourth reef is picked clean, but there’s plenty of tourmaline, palladin, and bloodstone in the others. Probably an emerald or two.” Zola jumped back down to the deck, walking down the line of dredgers. “Your hauls will be checked when you surface. First dredger to hit twenty carats of gemstones gets a bonus of double their coin.”
Koy stood a little taller as Zola said the words. The other Jevali dredgers looked up at the helmsman with brows raised, and Wick tightened his grip on his belt, his mouth twisting up on one side.
“I need at least three hundred carats of stone. You have until sundown tomorrow.”
“What?” Koy stepped forward, his voice finding an edge.
“Ships run on schedules.” Zola looked down at him. “You have a problem with that?”
“He’s right,” I said. Koy looked surprised that I’d agreed with him, but it was true. “We would have to dive back-to-back while we had the daylight if we were going to dredge enough gems to meet that quota.”
Zola seemed to consider it before he pulled the watch from his vest. He flicked it open. “Then I think you’d better be quick about it.” He dropped the timepiece back into his pocket and looked up at me. “Now, what do you see?”
He moved over to give me a place at the rail beside him, but I didn’t move. Zola was playing a game, but I wasn’t sure if anyone on this ship knew what it was. I didn’t like that feeling. He was clearly entertained by it all, and that made me want to shove him over the side.
“What do you see?” he asked again.
I curled my hands into fists and hooked my thumbs into my belt as I looked out over the water. It was moving smoothly inside the crest of the islet, almost still enough in places to reflect the shapes of the clouds. “It looks good. No riptide that I can see, but we obviously won’t know that until we’re down there.” I eyed the water on the other side of the ridge. The shape of the crater was angled perfectly to protect the interior from the current.
He met my eyes before he stepped around me. “Then get them down there.”
The boy holding his jacket held it up for him to slide his arms back in, and then Zola was walking back across the deck without even a glance at us. The door slammed behind him, and in the next breath, the dredgers turned to me. Ryland’s face was painted red, his gaze tight.
On the other side of the main mast, Clove stood silent.
There were fourteen of us in all, so the only thing that made sense was to put four or five dredgers on each of the reefs. I took a step forward, studying the Jevalis. They were a range of sizes and length of limb, but I could tell by looking at them who were the fastest swimmers. I also would have to split up the Luna’s dredgers if I wanted to keep them from pulling anything underwater.
The smart thing to do would be to have Koy head one of the groups. Whether I liked him or not, he was one of the most skilled dredgers I’d ever seen. He knew gems, and he knew reefs. But I’d made the mistake of letting him out of my sight before and I wasn’t going to do it again.
I stopped before Ryland, lifting a chin to him and the Jevali at his side. “You two with me and Koy.”
Koy arched one eyebrow up at me, suspicious. I didn’t want to dive with him either, but as long as he was on this ship, I needed to know exactly where he was and what he was doing at all times.
I assigned the rest of them, putting together swimmers of varying body sizes in hopes that what one of them lacked, the others might make up for. When they were grouped together on the deck I turned back to the islet, unbuttoning the top of my shirt to pull it over my head. Koy’s arm brushed against mine as he came