“What are you destroying now?” Kip asked, joining the circle between muscle mountain Big Leo and Ben-hadad, who’d had to hop around on a crutch with one knee bound in a splint since his injury during their escape from the Lightguards at the Chromeria.
Ben-hadad said, “I’m destroying suddenly obsolete methods of shipbuilding. And maybe sailing, too. I’m destroying old strategies of naval combat.” Struggling to handle his crutch, he took off his yellow-and-blue hinged spectacles and alternated between gesturing with them and rubbing the lines they left above his ears from how tight he wore them.
“Breaker, he destroyed the skimmer,” Big Leo said. “Literally.”
“Wait? What?” Kip asked. “I thought it was—” He peered over the side into the water, where he’d expected to see the skimmer they’d been building for five days. There was nothing there.
“Look! Look!” Ben-hadad said, half-apologetic, half give-me-a-chance-to-explain. “It took me a few days to intuit the principles of hydrodynamics.”
“Hyd-what?” Ferkudi asked. Not quite an idiot, nor quite a savant, Ferkudi was the guy you could count on to snort fire pepper paste on a dare. He was the guy who’d be openly picking his nose for the next six weeks, happy to have the excuse. He was also the guy who’d throw his dopey bulk in the line of fire for you without a second thought. With an affable roundness only accentuated by his shaven head, he was their best grappler, a blue and green drafter, and solid in every sense of the word.
“The way water moves, Ferk,” Kip said.
“Duh, it moves downhill. You smart guys sometimes…” Ferkudi shook his head.
Ben-hadad ignored him. “It’s not an original design, it’s just I didn’t understand how—”
“It’s not a design at all!” Big Leo said. “You destroyed our skimmer!”
“I meant the next one. And that skimmer was garbage!” Ben-hadad said.
“You designed it! You said it was the best skimmer ever built. And I helped build it. Probably drafted two years off my life,” Big Leo said, pointing to the red rising like floodwaters a quarter of the way up his dark irises. “I worked my ass off on that thing!”
“Still got a way to go before you’re assless,” Winsen said quietly, giving a significant glance at Big Leo’s haunches. Whereas Big Leo was by far the biggest of the elite athletes, Winsen was by far the smallest. Slight and unremarkable except for the bars of yellow luxin staining his cold blue eyes, he was the only member of the Mighty one might not be afraid of if one met him in a dark alley.
And that would be precisely the wrong reaction. Not only was Winsen the slipperiest killer of them all, Winsen simply didn’t care. With his longbow, he took shots that none of them could make, and he took shots that none of them would make, because they’d be worried about the consequences of hitting civilians or friends. Winsen seemed incapable of worrying about consequences.
“True! And I was right,” Ben-hadad said, soothing Big Leo. “But skimmers are a new invention. Gavin Guile just discovered them. That’s what makes them—look, trust me! Look. I’ll do all the drafting myself.”
“No, I forbid it,” Cruxer said, speaking up. He usually let them sort things out themselves, so when he intervened they instantly shut up. “We trust you, Ben-hadad. But you’re not drafting it alone. You can’t burn yourself out. We share the burden of making the new one. But next time, you ask me before you destroy what belongs to the squad, understood?”
“It was my design—”
“And the squad’s work,” Cruxer interrupted. “We all throw all of what we have into the pot. For some of us, that may be just muscle—”
“That would be me,” Ferkudi volunteered. Unnecessarily.
“—on a particular project, but we all give our all. Right?”
A brief moment passed, and Kip wanted to rush in and try to make things better. Cruxer and Ben-hadad butted heads constantly. Cruxer saw everything in black and white, and Ben-hadad saw relentless shades of gray possibility.
For Ben-hadad, his life and honor were the Mighty’s, but his creations were his own. He valued himself for his brilliant inventions, and that—that one thing—he didn’t want to share, and he didn’t see keeping that little bit as being too much to ask of a squad he gave everything else.
For Cruxer, you were either in or out.
But Kip didn’t try to fix it. Later, maybe, each would be more receptive to reason, more flexible. Not in front of everyone, though.
Ben-hadad was trying to keep his temper, saying tightly, “I’ll make the best skimmer I can so the squad can be safe—”
“Cap’n! Captain! Sir!” the lookout cried out from above.
At the alarm in his voice, the squad reacted immediately. Low stances, spectacles flipped on, team fanning out, looking for threats, hands to weapons. That most of the calamities that might come upon them at sea would be impossible to oppose didn’t matter; this was instinct.
The galley had no proper crow’s nest, so the lookout merely stood atop the main yard, balancing himself with one hand on the rigging. Above the full-bellied sails, the man was pointing north.
“Fore!” Kip said.
They turned and looked but saw nothing.
“Go,” Cruxer ordered.
So they ran toward the prow, sliding or jumping down the steep stair-ladder from the rear castle, dodging cursing sailors, and dashing up onto the low forecastle as the captain bellowed at his sailors. The captain might be an ass, but he seemed a capable one. When they reached the prow, the Mighty spread out, each of them having drawn in his color, except Kip, who was slower. Kip was still swapping spectacles in and out of his hip case, stealing glances at the dirty white sails to soak up each color in turn.
“What is that?” Cruxer asked.
“Ben?” Ferkudi said.
“Uh-huh?” Ben-hadad said.
“We’re looking north, right?”
“North-northwest, technically, but—”
“Why is the sun rising in the north?”
Within moments, all of them saw it. At first, it looked like the sun on the horizon, but blinding yellow like the risen sun, not red as the sun on the horizon ought to. And as it rose, the orb deformed, elongated, like the longest finger of a great hand, then simply the first burgeoning cloud of a vast cloud bank rolling into view.
“Storm!” the lookout bellowed.
The sailors sprang into action. A storm they knew how to handle. Only the Mighty were frozen. They knew this was no normal storm.
This was a luxin storm, ravager of cities, slayer of armies, Orholam’s wrath, the gods’ lash. And it was coming straight for them.
As the luminous cloud bank filled the horizon, the sea reflected the sky with an unnatural clarity. Tiny bright needles flashed between sea and sky, as if knitting them together with light.
This was the consequence of the Seven Satrapies’ not having a Prism to balance the colors. Drafters inevitably caused imbalances, and these storms broke out spontaneously. No one understood yet why they happened where they did, what exactly sparked them, or why they ended.
“Breaker, Winsen,” Cruxer said. “How tight is that yellow?”
Winsen licked his lips. “Hard to tell from this distance, but uh… I think it’s better than I can do.”
Kip flipped on his yellow spectacles. “It’s all over the yellow spectrum. But some of it, yes, some of it’s solid.”
“Is it raining? Anyone?” Cruxer asked, though he had the best eyes of the Mighty.
They’d heard stories of a crystal storm in a little village in Atash. Blue luxin crystals the size of fists and sharp as razors had fallen from the sky and shredded everything within a day’s walk, but no farther. No one had known whether the tale was true. Solid yellow would be worse.
An odd wind started blowing at their backs, blowing them toward the storm front. It was like no wind Kip had ever felt. It was utterly constant. No gusts, no variation in its strength at all, just a simple constant hard push.
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The distant seas in front of the storm fell flat in an expanding circle. No chop, no whitecaps, no variation at all. The sea became a perfect mirror for the bright clouds above. The great luminous clouds running straight against the wind seemed to crash into it as if it were a wall, and then the clouds flipped over that wall in a mass like pancake batter spreading on a griddle in concentric rings.
But everywhere the clouds folded over, the bright needles flashed again. As they got closer, they were mere needles no more, but tree trunks, massive pillars from the sea to the heavens.
At each point, the flat sea pulsed, throbbed yellow, gathering like a vortex, then cratering downward before exploding into the sky. Yellow luxin shimmered into light, but each pillar was also wreathed in chasing fires, spiraling into the sky.
Each pillar pulsed light for several heartbeats, then blew apart, falling into water and light onto seas now crisscrossed with tremendous waves expanding in rings from the luxin-lightning strikes.
“Orholam have mercy,” someone said.
“This is impossible,” Ben-hadad said.
“It’s happening,” Ferkudi pointed out helpfully.
“No, this is impossible,” Ben-hadad said.
“You smart guys,” Ferkudi said.
The wind died, and the sea abruptly went still and flat as the front edge of the light-storm passed over them.
“What do we do?!” the captain bellowed at them.
Kip tore his eyes away from the storm. Everything that could be secured on the ship had been. The sailors had reefed the sails, trying to give the ship enough propulsion to quarter the waves, but not so much resistance to the wind that the masts broke.
Then Kip saw that everyone was looking at him. As if he had the answers.
“Turtle,” Cruxer said.
At first, Kip thought Cruxer was talking to him, the turtle-bear, the ridiculous beast that he’d come up with as his own avatar and that had ended up somehow tattooed on his forearm, invisible except when he drafted. But the rest of the squad understood. They drew together around Kip, and the green and blue drafters among them began putting luxin shields up around them to protect all of them from the scything rain.
Going below would have been safer, but Cruxer thought Kip was going to figure this out.
We’re facing a force of nature, and they expect me to fix it. Orholam’s balls.
“Why’s it impossible, Ben?” Kip asked.
“Because it’s yellow.” He stopped, as if that were enough to explain the dread on his face.
“And?!” Cruxer demanded.
“The storms come from imbalances. Yellow is the center of the spectrum. It’s the fulcrum. It shouldn’t be possible for the center to be out of balance. So if it is, we are truly—”
But the rest of whatever he said was lost as the sailors screamed out. The captain shouted, “Secure yourselves to—”
A few hundred paces directly ahead, the sea was cratering. Lightning bolts raced low on the water toward the crater, and were sucked in.
With a concussion that shook the galley and knocked down most everyone standing on deck, the sea exploded upward. Fire spiraled around the pillar of light, discharging into bright clouds above.
Discharging.
Kip clambered to his feet. Water and yellow luxin dropped on the ship in bucketsful, sweeping several sailors and half the Mighty off their feet. But it was liquid yellow, thank Orholam. It flashed into light as it hit the deck, blinding but not killing anyone. Whether they would be lucky enough to be hit only by liquid yellow or whether there were solid razors of yellow yet to come, Kip had no idea.
Discharging. Because it was out of balance.
Kip left the turtle, rushing to the prow just in time to feel it rise as the galley climbed a mountainous wave.
“Breaker, get back—” Cruxer shouted.
But the wave was too massive, too fast for the galley to climb. The prow dug into it instead, slowing the ship as suddenly as if it had hit a wall. Winsen was thrown off his feet. Kip snatched his wrist as he tumbled and was drafting before he knew it. He manacled one of his own wrists to a line connecting the prow and mainmast and the other to Winsen’s wrist.
Then water hit them like the slap of a sea demon’s tail.
Kip and Winsen were blasted back, and then up the line, into the air, halfway up to the mainmast. Blinded, and with lungs half-full of water, they were dropped, zipping down the line back to the deck as the wave crest passed and the prow suddenly dove, racing down the back side of the wave.
The rest of the Mighty were still crouched, clinging to the deck in a low, luxin-imbued circle like a tick burrowed into the ship’s skin.
As soon as Kip’s feet hit the deck, he was running. He threw Winsen toward the squad, not even aware of releasing the solid yellow luxin he’d drafted—solid yellow? That fast?
He leapt over the forecastle rail out onto the beakhead as the ship bottomed out between the waves, and lashed himself down with yellow luxin as the ship began its climb again.
A deep breath, and the beakhead plunged into the next wave, the waters pouring over him, scouring at him as if he were an offensive stain.
But then air. This second wave was smaller than the first had been.
Kip popped to his feet, reaching for the lens holster on his left hip. If yellow was out of balance, that meant… If the center of the spectrum was out of balance, it could be out of balance only with the ends of the spectrum. Kip’s lens holster had seven pairs of spectacles, ending at sub-red and superviolet, which balanced each other.
But there was one color beyond sub-red: Teia’s color, paryl. In legend, there was another in the opposite direction, beyond superviolet: chi. Kip had no idea how he’d draft chi. Hell, all he knew about drafting paryl was that Teia’s eyes went so wide open the black of her pupils took over the entire eye. Lashing one hand onto the line that held the foreyard to the figurehead, Kip moved forward as far as he could.
There was no third wave. A bit of luck, finally.
“Breaker! Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast!” Cruxer yelled.
The sea had gone still, again. An unnatural flatness that defied reason after the titanic waves that had just passed.
Lightning passed low over the waves to sizzle against the galley’s hull. For the first time Kip could recall, he saw fear in Cruxer’s eyes as they both realized that the next pillar of fire and light was going to spring up directly beneath the galley.
There was no way the ship or anyone in it would survive.
Kip turned to the waves. He stared straight down and widened his eyes, wider, despite the pain, despite the brightness. Into sub-red, and then beyond. It was like opening his mouth too wide, discomfort turned to pain, and the light stabbed daggers into his face.
And wider.
And wider still.
He almost gagged—and then paryl snapped into focus as if it had been waiting for him.
Paryl was racing below the waves, like clouds blowing through a storm-swept sky, and Kip’s awareness was pulled along with the gale to its center, where it swirled beneath the galley. A hard knot of paryl and something else—chi?—was forming, buzzing like the lightning-catcher atop each of the Chromeria’s seven towers. Kip could feel the charge building, building.
Oh hells.
The paryl and that other color were just touching, and slowly twisting together, like partners coming together to dance. Kip could feel the pressures massing behind each.
And they twisted together hard, spinning together, lightning crackling—
Kip flung them apart with all his will.
The seas exploded, and his paryl-wide eyes were blinded. Everything was lost in the twin roaring to his left and right, and great jets of water streaming skyward pressed in on him. He could feel the jets twining together in the sky above the ship like wire and discharging the imbalanced yellow.
The paryl and chi wanted to snap together, wanted to crush Kip in their embrace. Kip st
ood, hands extended, arms extended, shoulders knotted with effort, his screams lost in the cacophony. He wept in agony, tear water blending with seawater and brightwater, salt to salt, deep to deep, magic to magic.
Nothing but magic.
Kip barely dared blink, though the world was a wash of undifferentiated light stabbing him. He couldn’t lose the colors. His head lolled, chin down, arms out, shaking, exhausted, defiant. It didn’t matter where he looked with his blind eyes: the magic was everywhere. Magic was all.
And it was crushing him. It was like holding apart two rams who wanted to butt heads to show their dominance, each side lurching and twisting, ever lunging in.
Kip’s arms were stone. He dropped to his knees, still holding the paryl and chi streams apart.
His arms sagged, halfway to his sides, his will almost extinguished.
He wanted to drop dead, drop into the sea, and be no more.
But before his arms fell, he felt a presence behind him, embracing him, propping his arms up. “I’ve got you, Kip. Come on, Kip, we’re almost through!”
Kip? Everyone on the squad called him Breaker. Who…
“Help me!” Tisis shouted.
And Kip felt another pair of hands on him. “Breaker, you can do this!” Cruxer said, pulling him to his feet.
Kip was weeping. Oh, Orholam, it hurt. Stabs of pain shot through his eyes, down his spine. His arms were gelatinous. His will was dust.
“Another ten count, Breaker,” Cruxer said. “Give me just another ten.”
Mumbling through his tears, Kip counted with Cruxer.
“Captain, tell me when we’re through!” Cruxer shouted over his shoulder. “Eight, nine, and—keep going, Breaker, I know you, you’ve got five more—”
But Kip is gone.
“You’ve got five more, I know you, Andross Guile. Plans within plans,” the young woman says. Katalina’s the kind of awkward girl whose beauty has unfurled with a crack like a sail suddenly filling with wind: luminous dark skin, rare blue eyes, and a shy smile. It’s Andross’s luck that he’s the first suitor to come pluck this flower—it’s a good bit of luck, too, because he would have had to woo her regardless of her beauty or lack thereof: she has what he needs.