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Silco hadn’t known where to put her, struggling with the notion of creating a little girl’s room in the midst of a vast underwater criminal base. It turned out that Jinx was not particular, having spent most of her memorable childhood years on a sagging mattress in the basement of an undercity bar, but he resolved to do better for her.
Eventually. Somehow. In the short term he kicked Domino out and gave her quarters to the girl.
Jinx wasn’t unappreciative, just… overwhelmed. She wasn’t used to having so much space, leastwise that she didn’t have to share with anyone else. The room lacked for windows, and the constant churning of hydraulics and the sluicing of bilge through the conduits that criss-crossed the ceiling made it difficult to think, never mind rest.
After too many failed attempts to sleep Jinx threw off her covers and padded barefoot to the chamber door. The corridor outside was empty and nearly black, pocketed with filmy submarine lights every six feet in either direction. She listened for a moment, straining to hear anything behind the heartbeat rhythm of distant pumps, then slipped out into the dark.
Labyrinthine though Silco’s base could be, she’d already learned her way around. Twenty yards down the hall were Sevika’s quarters, the door open and spilling a rectangle of light onto the diamond plate. Jinx curled her fingers around the jamb to peek in, immediately meeting the woman’s steel gray eyes.
Sevika sat stooped at a workbench, a crude mechanical arm splayed on top as she poked and prodded and screwed a multi-tool into the elbow joint.
She took the cigar from her mouth with her other hand long enough to grunt, “What.”
“I can’t sleep,” Jinx said.
Pinching the cigar back between her teeth she returned her attention to the tool.
“Not my fucking problem.”
She stood a moment longer before creeping into the threshold, a pigeon-toed scarecrow with mopped blue hair.
“Where did you get that?”
Click. Whirr. Grind . In a sudden rage she jammed the multi-tool into the elbow joint and slammed it with a fist, causing the articulated hand to fly open with a ratcheting spasm. She stubbed her cigar out furiously.
“ Does it matter ? Why do you always have so many questions? I’m working here.”
Jinx scuffed a bare heel to the floor, hands tucked neatly behind her back.
“I was just going to say… I bet I could build you a better one.”
Sevika immediately regretted her burst of anger toward the cigar and picked it up to check its integrity.
“Go bother Silco,” she muttered.
“Okay.” Jinx backed out a step. “Where is he?”
WIth the crushed cigar tucked back into the corner of her mouth she sat back, groping for her cutter. The ravaged tip flew off with a neat metallic snip .
“If you’re so smart, you find him.”
Another soft “okay,” and JInx backslid into the hall by one more step. The whisper of her bare foot on metal made Sevika look up again, glaring from beneath the shelf of her brow.
“Hey,” she grouched. When the girl froze, wide-eyed, she demanded, “Could you really build a better one?”
Jinx’s head bobbled with an agreeable nod, though she dare not smile. Sevika rolled the cigar from one corner of her mouth to the other, debating, then bent again to her work.
“...yeah, well. Get out of here. I’m too busy to babysit brats.”
Jinx had hoped for a guide to Silco’s quarters, not because she didn’t know how to find them but because they were patently terrifying. While some feared the man himself, she found the creatures that he chose to dwell amongst far more unsettling.
Nevertheless she went, past the rowdy sounds of his henchmen drinking themselves into their nightly torpor, up through the intestinal maintenance pipework and along the catwalks so precariou that only she could walk them. In a few minutes she was at Silco’s door, pushing it open with timid fingertips and peering inside.
The room was dark as deep water, vast and tall as a cathedral. The entirety of the room’s far wall was lined with high window-like portholes, the water beyond them diffused by thin, shifting indigo light from the world above. The shadows of black kelp waved in the current like lost souls, phantom Leviathans undulating in the distance, back and forth, restless and hungry.
But they couldn’t get her. Silco had said so when she’d asked. And when she’d asked a second time, and a third. The glass was too thick for them to break through, even if they were inclined.
His room was larger than one man needed, and sparsely furnished besides. He kept a sitting area to one side with plush, high-backed chairs arranged around an ornate furnace outlet reminiscent of a wood stove. There was a dressing area with three-piece mirror, a wall of neatly-shelved books, and then his actual bed, concealed from view behind an ornate room divider.
Jinx stood in the threshold for long minutes, fingertips nervously twisting together as her eyes moved restlessly from corner to corner and back again. Behind every piece of furniture, in every high rafter, something seemed to lurk. The water’s mercurial light imparted uneasy life to the shadows.
“Silco,” she whispered, then held her breath for a reply.
A few steps further in, her elbows tight to her ribs, breath fast. Be brave, be brave , she willed herself. “ Silco .”
Still nothing.
With a deep breath trapped in her chest Jinx steeled her resolve and bolted across the room, lunging for the perceived safety on the divider’s far side.
Here was Silco’s bedroom proper, a four-poster monstrosity with a tall canopy and a single, comparatively minimalist nightstand. Larger-than-life as he seemed when awake, the enormity of the bed dwarfed him to little more than a lean, lounging shape beneath the heavy brocade duvet. The covers shifted as he breathed.
Jinx whispered his name again but he slumbered soundly on.
She crept closer, step by dragging step, first around the broad foot of the bed and then to one side, hands knotting together. The unscathed half of his face was pressed into the pillow, a few dark strands of hair loose across his brow, and the perpetually open state of his scarred eye gave the impression of catatonic, staring wakefulness.
“Silco,” she hissed again. Still nothing.
Jinx took one bold step closer, resting her knees on the bed’s edge., the tip of her nose inches from his.
“ Silco! ”
Jinx’s moonish face filled the entirety of his vision as he suddenly gained consciousness, her eyes whole and owlishly round. He managed heroically to contain his alarm to a single, violent inhale of surprise, lifting his head from the pillow just enough to focus on her.
“Jinx,” he crackled, then heaved out a breath. “What are y--”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she whispered urgently. Sensing this might not be enough to justify terrifying him awake with her whole face, she added hastily, “I had a nightmare.”
Ah. So this was fatherhood.
His head dropped heavily back into place, displacing the pillow down with a puff of air, and he corrected the disarray of his hair with the backwards pass of one hand.
What was protocol here, exactly? Did he ask her for details or would rehashing it make the situation worse? Did he offer to inspect the space under her bed for malignancy? Give her a weapon? Was she too young for a weapon? Surely some kind of large dagger wasn’t inappropriate?
He realized too late that he was just laying there, staring at her as she stared back, and that it was obvious to them both he had not yet advanced to this level of parenting.
“To be very honest with you,” he said. “I don’t know how to respond to that.”
Jinx blinked at him. She gave the man credit, at least he was honest.
“Can I sleep with you?”
More staring. Everything out of her mouth was more and more alien to him, but he supposed he could see a kind of sense in it.
“Is that what you want ?”
Her head bobbled with the same urgent agreement as she’d earlier given Sevika regarding her arm. Rather than rebuff her Silco gestured to the enormity of the empty bed behind him.
Jinx monkeyed up the side of the bed, over his stretched form and took over the other three quarters of the unoccupied mattress. Silco lay still, listening in baffled silence as she lifted up the thick layers of duvet, blanket and topsheet, squirmed deep underneath, then wiggled up against his back like a small, bony space heater. Her cheek pressed flat to the back of his neck, small hands knotted up between his shoulder blades.
He stared wide-eyed into the dark, having no idea what to do, how to proceed, or if breathing or shifting would disturb her. This was by far the most confounding undertaking of his life. How had someone not yet issued an operational manual for small girl-children?
When Jinx just lay there, unmoving and apparently content, he slowly let his own eye close as well.
A few minutes later, a whisper: “Silco.”
His eye reopened. Oh right. He should have seen this coming.
“Yes, Jinx.”
“Do you ever have nightmares?”
“Yes, frequently.”
Her body went rigid against him, suggesting he’d gotten the answer wrong. When she lay too long that way he turned his head, not quite enough to see her from the corner of his bad eye but enough to indicate he was listening.
“Why?”
“Well… what are they about?”
He faced away again, breathing in and out slowly as he assembled the many jigsawed pieces of his nightly terrors, trying to clarify and articulate them in a way a child would understand. A brilliant child, but still.
“Drowning, mostly. I dream of being held under the water by a force I can’t resist. I struggle, I claw at it, I open my mouth to scream but that… just makes it worse. The water rushes in, fills my lungs, my nose. It’s an alien thing inside me, I can’t push it out like air, it’s heavy, it doesn’t leave room for anything else. I feel the darkness start to creep in from the corners like shadows and I think… well. Perhaps this isn’t terrible. Perhaps I can go peacefully, like this. There are worse ways to die. And then I remember that, no, I want to live. Need to live. And a kind of panic overtakes me, a primal urgency. Then I wake up.”
Utter silence. Utter stillness. Jinx’s heart pounded like a rock hammer against his back.
Well, he fucked that one right up. He turned his head again slightly.
“Jinx… I’m a very damaged man.”
“I’m getting that.”
“Why don’t you tell me what your nightmares are about and maybe I’ll have an easier time being reassuring.”
She waited until he’d faced away again, chewing her lip and breathing in the faint, metallic scent of cologne that lingered on his skin, his pillow. Vander had always smelled of sweat and spilled beer and engine oil, it was there in her memory if she tried hard enough to recall, but there was something more reassuring about this. More calculated, more mindful, less circumstantial.
Now she was the one dragging things out.
“It’s not a story, like yours is. There isn’t a beginning, middle and end. It’s mostly just… images. Flashes.”
“I see.”
“Did you ever stand in a dark room when somebody flicks a light switch on and off? As fast as they can, on and off. And the room is dark except for those split seconds when the lights are on, and that’s the only time you can see. And it’s scary, because you want to see everything, but when it goes dark you can’t see anything at all.”
“Alright…”
“It’s like that. Except… it’s the lit-up parts that are scary.”
His head angled back again by a fraction.
“Scary how?”
He felt her sigh against his neck, her muscles relaxing but not in relief.
“It wouldn’t be scary if I described it. It would just sound dumb.”
“Try anyhow.”
“Everything I see, it wobbles. It screams. I see… I see faces, and they’re dead faces. It’s not them screaming, though. They don’t make any sound. The screams come from somewhere else. Somewhere… inside . And they hate me.” She was getting to the crux of it now, past the childish parts that sounded absurd in the light of day, down to the marrow of what made her wake up heaving for breath, the sheets clenched in her white-knuckled fists. Jinx’s breath panted faster against his neck, her eyes darting across the width of his shoulders.
“They tell me that I’m stupid. I’m crazy. I’m too slow, too little, too weak. They tell me I do everything wrong, I hurt everyone I love, I ruin everything , th-that at I--that I’m a--”
“ Jinx .”
She didn’t remember him rolling to face her, but there he was, half-upright, hands bracketing her shoulders. She heaved for breath, heart flailing like a sparrow in a net.
For the first time Silco realized that the cracks in her psyche might run more than surface deep. It was more than just nightmares and childish insecurities. She needed a hand gentler than any that had been offered to her thus far, and one she could trust not to backhand her. For some reason still humbling to him, she’d chosen his.
She whispered, “Sometimes I think there’s something really wrong with me.”
Here he was again, faced with those looking-glass eyes, with his own fractured reflection. Here she was again with an admission he had no idea what to do with, but clearly yearning for him to say something, to do something, to make it better.
Silco’s eyes skirted away, then back to her, and he let her go. Slowly he lowered back to the pillows, adjusting them enough beneath him that he could open an arm to her. She wormed back against his side, fists under her chin, head relaxed in the hollow between his shoulder and chest. He drew the blankets over her, one arm closing her into place, and little by little the rigidity left her. The hammer of her heart subsided as she listened to his.
He was not a man who craved or even particularly cared for physical contact, but clearly this was meaningful to her. This was the language her heart spoke. He would try to learn it as well.
“I’ll tell you what I do when I dream of drowning,” he said. He offered her his other hand and she uncurled a fist to take it, distracting herself with the novelty of their difference in size, the challenge of fitting all her fingertips to his at the same time.
“Okay.”
“I let myself drown.” When Jinx paused, eyes upturning doubtfully, he added, “Let me finish.”
“O… kay …”
“I know it’s futile to struggle. I know because… I was there. I’ve been there before. The force holding me down is stronger than I am, and it always will be. The water will always fill my lungs, it will always suffuse me. I will always be overtaken, and I will always feel that moment of peace before the panic sets in. It’s that moment, Jinx… that moment of terrible, heart-wrenching terror, that reminds me to fight . I let the fear overtake me, because ultimately fear is the only thing that will save me.”
Her gaze drifted back to their hands, fingertip to fingertip. When she splayed her hand he splayed his as well, two reflections on either side of a strange mirror.
“You let yourself drown,” she echoed, thinking it over.
“The voices that speak to you, the ones saying these terrible things. Have you ever spoken back?”
Jinx visibly shocked, trying to wrap her head around the concept.
“Can I do that?”
“Why not? It’s your nightmare. They’re in your head. And so… make them work for the space they occupy.”
“What would I say to them?”
Silco had a moment of terrible uncertainty when he couldn’t decide if it was appropriate to instruct her to use the words fuck off . His instinct said yes, which definitely meant no.
“Defy them,” he said instead. “I use the fear of drowning to propel myself free. Whatever emotions they give you, free yourself with them. Use them, like your tools. Build with them. Create. Be everything they insist you cannot.”
Brilliant or not, it was a lot for her to process, and the longer she lay there listening to his heart, smelling the faint remains of his cologne, lulled by the sound of his voice, the harder it was to concentrate. Her head nodded and she realized she’d drifted off for just a second.
Silco closed his fingers around hers, curling them gently back into a fist. She squirmed into the warm spot beneath his arm and gazed, drowsy and slit-eyed into the darkness.
“Sleep,” he urged, letting his head rest back as well.
“Silco…”
A sigh, patient and comfortable. “Hm?”
“Are you really sure those big things in the water can’t hurt us?”
He tossed against her with the smallest snort of amusement, unsure if she would even remember his answer in the morning.
“Trust me this, child. Any monster you can lay hands on need not be feared.”