Archive of Our Own ^omega

            Before the press-gang and everything that came after, James sat in his cottage and made himself a cup of tea. It was a small cottage, conveniently located close to the mines. In theory, this was so that if anything went wrong with the steam engine, James could be quickly fetched. In practice, if something went wrong with the steam engine, the best and only thing he could do was pray no one had been caught in the explosion or drowned in the mineshaft.

            Outside, just audible through the closed window, the sea whispered against the cliffs. A fog coasted across the green land in smoky swirls, pressing against James’s windows. It made the world velvety and blank. Once in a while, the beacon from the lighthouse shone straight through his windows, turning the bare whitewashed walls to molten silver and making the shadows stretch from his mismatched chairs.

            There were two chairs, rather pointlessly, because James couldn’t remember the last time a second person had been in the cottage. If he really stretched his memory, it must have been when he first rented it, and the landlord had come in to explain where the pump for water was (outside) and lie about the leaks in the roof.

            According to local legend, one of the cottage’s previous owners had been a woman whose lover had been lost at sea. She had waited patiently there for his return for twenty years, sitting on the cliff-facing doorstep, before finally losing hope and throwing herself into the sea.

            He finished his tea and wished vaguely for something stronger. The air was chilly enough to make him cough. It was November. Every morning, cold came in through the crack under the door, but coal was expensive. He couldn’t bring himself to use too much.

            The tavern would have a fire going, and he could sit by the window, wait for the fog to clear, and watch for a ship. These days, his life was spent mostly in waiting for a ship. He tucked a book into his pocket and took care to lock the cottage door behind him.

            The fog was uneven. There were hollows in it, and each carried the smell of salt. He could just see the steeple of the church against the swirls of blankness, black against the dark sea.

            At some point, when his parents were alive, James had harbored ambitions of creating a better life for them. Now he had a better salary, but his parents had been laid down side by side in the churchyard, so there didn’t really seem a point. Shamefully, the thing he looked forward to now was the paper-wrapped package that sometimes waited for him at the tavern when a ship had just come in.

            James’s worst—and only—bad habit was spending too much money at the town’s only used bookstore, a dark, close environment that smelled of leather and paper. The books themselves held the ghosts of other people’s perfume and tobacco, some foxed with age, others ringed with spilled coffee.

            Someone else also had a bad habit, and it was writing notes in the margins of books and then selling them back to the bookstore. They had precisely the same taste in poetry. James spent several months murderously irritated at them without ever knowing their name. Then, just once, a volume of translated sonnets had fallen into his hands first.

            See how it feels, James wrote on the first page, annotating it at will and then vengefully selling it back to the bookstore. Not his best moment, perhaps, but it had been going on for months, and always precisely the books he wanted to read.

            When he came to the bookstore again, the elderly proprietor looked up from his desk full of candle-drippings and ledgers and said, “James Callahan?”

            James jumped. The owner, along with an equally elderly cat, was a fixture of the bookstore, like the rickety moth-eaten chair wedged into the eastern corner. James would have been less surprised if the chair had known his name.

            “Yes, sir?”

            “Your reservation came in.”

            “Pardon?”

            “The book you reserved, Mr. Callahan, the book reserved in your name. The fee has already been paid. Surely your mind isn’t going. You’re, what, a young lad of eighteen?”

            James tried to work out a polite way of saying that if anything, it was more likely to be the other way around. Mentioning that he was really one and thirty seemed counterproductive. The bookseller shook a bent, gnarled finger at him.

            “Don’t go getting any insulting ideas. I have it written down right here in this ledger. Do you want the book or not?”

            After a short pause, in which motes of dust glinted in the candlelight and the cat—looking like a miniature storm cloud with eyebrows—sneezed violently, James admitted that he did want the book.

            “Here you are, then. As I said, it’s all paid for.”

            It smelled like ink and new leather and, just faintly, someone else’s soap, bright and lemony. When he opened it, the threads in the spine creaked. It was a different collection of sonnets. On the first page, in a familiar angular hand, someone had written:

I look forward to reading your thoughts.

C.S.

            James started to laugh. From that day on, a strange sort of correspondence had started: James would visit the bookstore or the tavern, and there would be a book waiting for him, usually wrapped in oilcloth, usually annotated. He would write in it and sell it to the bookstore, where—after a few months—it would eventually disappear. After a few years, James connected the arrival of books to the arrival of a ship in the harbor. C.S. seemed to travel frequently.

            Sometimes, on nights when the cottage felt particularly hollow, or in the mines where the roar of the engine pumping out water drowned all other sound, James thought about what it would be like to meet them.

            He imagined opening the door to the tavern and finding—rather than a book—a person there waiting for him. In his imagination, the person was weary and salt-stained, with a foggy blur in place of a face. There you are, he would say, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I’m leaving this place for the last time. You’ll come with me, won’t you?

James had never married, less out of a particular desire to be alone and more because there had never been the right opportunity. He had never really wanted to live out the last dragging decades of his life alone in a two-room cottage by the sea, caring for nothing but an engine with the eternal task of carrying seawater out of the dark iron mines.

            His mysterious correspondent, he gathered, was probably not a woman: he traveled more, and more widely, than the average woman would. C.S. might be anyone. As far as James was concerned, though, when it came to someone to spend his life with, a friend was also quite good.

            He pushed open the tavern door. Although he hadn’t gotten his hopes up, his heart still twinged. Everyone there was a local: fishermen and miners, laughing and chatting over their drinks.

“Anything?” he said hopefully, approaching the bar.

            The barmaid Martha shook her head. “Sorry. Sail spotted to the north, though. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

            He thanked her and ordered a beer, then took it to his favorite spot in the corner of the room. It was near the only window in the entire building that was stained glass, salvaged from a demolished church. When the beam of the lighthouse swung their way, all the colors leapt out from the dark, like a freshly illuminated manuscript. The window depicted Saint Christopher, looking serenely kind, with Christ as a child on his shoulders.

            The door opened again, spilling in a group of marines. “Hell of a night,” one said, apparently about the fog, which reached pale tendrils in after them until they shut the door on it.

            “Thicker than pea soup.”

            The ship Martha had spotted must have been a battleship. James watched them over the rim of his mug. Their uniforms were crisp and their attitudes bright and confident, down to a man.

            A few sailors spilled in after them, followed by a pair of officers in blue. Martha beamed and shouted for her little sister to crack open another barrel. The tavern would do good business that night.

            Like compass needles, the heads of the officers swiveled around and landed firmly on James. He wondered, just once, if it would be better to leave his drink and run, but he stayed rooted to his seat. Saint Christopher watched dispassionately through half-lidded eyes.

            One of them rapped on the table to get his attention. “Are you James Callahan?”

            “Yes?” James said.

            “Carpenter?”

            “Engineer. I design and repair machines to pump water out of mines,” James said, fiddling with the clothbound corner of the book in his pocket.

            “Right. You’re coming with us.”

            “What? No, I’m not.”

            Fifteen minutes later, James walked in the center of a formation of marines. Someone had smashed a chair over his head. A little line of blood slipped down the back of his neck, suffusing patchily into his poorly-starched collar. He wanted to scratch at it, but raising his hands suddenly seemed ill-advised. He could sense the point of a bayonet at his back as an unsettling tingle in his spine.

            The skeleton of the ship loomed in the distance, black against the blank sky. Through the lens of the fog, it looked burned, incomplete: a wrecked chassis rather than a functional vessel. Someone prodded James in the back, and his stomach gave a sick swoop, but it was a finger, not a blade.

            He hadn’t had time to fetch a change of clothes, or anything from his cottage, but they would (he hoped) give him a uniform or something. A dull, familiar sense of despair settled over him, but really, little had changed. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt like he had made a real choice.

            With every step, his head ached a little more.

            The marines bundled him into a rowboat and took him out to the main ship, where he climbed hand over hand up a rope ladder and onto the deck. The figurehead was a painted statue of King George, nearly vampiric, with white cheeks and red lips. With his feet planted firmly on the ground, James had not often thought of ships or how they worked, but it turned out they were all mechanical moving parts, singing with a thousand different creaks and swaying to the heartbeat of the sea.

            The marines brought him before a man in a slightly nicer coat, with hair the color of wheat. The fog washed him out, faded him like dye, and gave him the look of a man coated in flour. It was nearly a shame. He was the sort of man who gave the impression of a large bird of prey, all sharp, glaring attention.

            “That’s our carpenter?” he said.

            “Yes, captain.”

            “Family?”

            “All dead, captain.”

            “Good. Take him to see the doctor. That looks like a nasty crack on the head. I don’t want him dying on the job.”

            “Wait,” James said. “Why does it matter that my family is dead?”

            To his surprise, the captain sized him up instead of waving him away and telling the marines to get on with it. “We are about to embark on a journey that can be known to no one except the men who ordered it. We are fully equipped, and this vessel shall not stop until it reaches its destination. No port calls, no letters home. You will not have the opportunity to tell anyone about this mission, and if you attempt to signal to another vessel on the way, you will be shot.”

            James gaped at him. His head throbbed dully. Not everyone on the crew could be an orphan like him. The ship had two gun decks, so the crew must have numbered in the hundreds. He was to be let in on a secret, then, that not everyone on the ship would know.

            “Congratulations, Mr. Callahan,” the captain said. His sea-colored eyes had taken on a slightly crazed, nearly ironic cast. “You have the opportunity to do a great service for king and country. If this mission succeeds, France will be stricken from the map.”

            He tried to work out something to say to this. James didn’t have a problem with most sailors, who hated the enemy in the ordinary way and told stories about narrow scrapes and daring escapades over beer when they came ashore. This man was a fanatic.

            “Take him away,” the captain said to the marines, waving an imperious hand.

            The marines promptly handed him off to a carrot-headed midshipman, who grabbed his elbow to keep him from tipping over as the cant of the deck changed. He kept up a constant, slow, gentle chatter, like a man speaking to a nervous horse.

            “Rotten luck,” he said, not unkindly. “You’re not alone, though. Plenty of men on this ship were pressed.”

            “Charming,” James murmured.

            Underneath the deck, the walls were close. The air was humid with saltwater. Nothing seemed to move in the direction he expected it to go. It took all of James’s concentration to descend the ladder. The midshipman slipped down it, hardly holding on, in his element.

            “I’m Clarke. I’ll just hand you off to the doctor to get that cut looked at. He’ll set you to rights. He’s a decent sort. Always reading, which I suppose is how you know he knows his stuff. And they say that he can amputate a limb in under three minutes, so there’s that.”

            “Mmm,” James said, managing to avoid being sick through a supreme effort of will.

            “You don’t look very reassured,” Clarke said.

            “Really? Strange.”

            “Anyways, he’s a good doctor. Especially if you need a limb amputated.”

            “Does that happen often?”

            Clarke hesitated just a millisecond too long. “Hardly at all.”

            “I see.”

            They entered the sickbay, and James felt his heart hitch. He couldn’t trace the source of the feeling. The man sitting on the end of one of the beds reading was a complete stranger: small, dark, and sleek. There was something distinctly un-English about him.

            Before anyone spoke, he looked up from his book and met James’s eyes with a look of complete devastation. James had the impression of watching the last ember of hope in his eyes extinguish, like a man who had just been told his wife had died. With a visible effort, he pulled himself together, and forced his expression into something more like mild interest.

            “New victim for you, Doctor Starling.”

            “Thank you, Mr. Clarke.” Starling’s accent was unplaceable, in a voice that was quiet and peculiarly clipped.

            He looked like a stained-glass saint, his face oval-shaped and nearly the color of milk. He had heavy-lidded black eyes and an expression of infinite patience. If he hadn’t just seen beneath it, James would never have taken it for a mask. He found himself staring, first at the doctor himself, and then at his book, which was open in his lap to a poem that read, Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee, / Before I knew thy face or name; / So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame / Angels affect us oft, and worshipp’d be. The first two lines were underlined twice. Starling saw him looking and shut the book with a gentle snap.

            “We’d like him back in fighting shape, captain’s orders. He’s to be our carpenter.”

            “Understood. Take a seat, please, Mr. Callahan.”

            James sat, just as Starling slipped off the wooden bed. Clarke smiled at them both. There was something odd in the atmosphere, but after all, James had just been kidnapped into His Majesty’s navy. Clarke seemed determined to cheerfully paper it over.

            “Since you two are getting along so nicely, I’ll leave you to it. Let me know if you need anything.”

            James could think of several things he needed, starting with an immediate trip back to shore and ending in a decent explanation, but none of it was Clarke’s fault. “Yes, sir,” he said.

            He left them. Quiet spread out from the center of the room like a stain. James let it. He could find out more from simply looking at the room than trying to initiate a conversation.

            There were wooden sluices, shut now, where water could pour in to wash away the blood. He was sitting on an operating table, but the room—like its occupant—was scrupulously neat, with all the medical instruments tucked out of sight in lashed-down cabinets. Every surface was polished to a soft shine. Lamplight glimmered in the dark wood, and in Starling’s hair, which was straight and very black, arranged into a queue and tied with a charcoal-colored ribbon. One corner of the room was set up like a miniature office, with a built-in shelf of books and an inkwell set into the desk.

            Still with the same clinical patience on his face, Starling tipped James’s chin to the side in order to look at the wound on his scalp. His fingertips were pleasantly cool, firm but gentle. For such a mild-looking person, the force of his attention was startling, just like the sudden impact of his wrecked expression at the moment they met.

            The sense of familiarity intensified. Suddenly, James realized it was a smell—the lemon soap that clung to the doctor’s hands.

            “That was John Donne, wasn’t it?” he said. “That poem.”

            Starling raised a candle to his face and stared him down impassively, watching the sizes of his pupils change. “Has no one ever told you it’s rude to read over people’s shoulders?”

            “Has no one ever told you it’s rude to write in books when you’re going to sell them back to a used bookstore?”

            A smile flickered over Starling’s pale face. “Yes. Once. I understand he was quite incensed about it.”

            “And yet you still haven’t learned.”

            “I’m not the quick study everyone thinks I am. I prefer to have things explained to me repeatedly and at length.” He put the candle down. “It’s only a shallow cut on the scalp. You should be fine.”

            As he made to turn away, James seized his arm. Under his perfectly starched sleeve, his wrist was thin and bony.

            “You’re C. S., aren’t you? You recognized me as I came in.”

            Starling gave him a thin, stiff smile. “Mr. Callahan…”

            “I don’t recall ever telling you my name.”

            “I learned it from Mr. Clarke.”

            “I don’t recall hearing Mr. Clarke tell you, either. Don’t deny it. I’ll know if I look through your bookshelf.”

            Starling laughed hollowly, an I-should-have-known laugh. “True.”

            “Please don’t look like that, this is fantastic. I’ve wanted to meet you for years,” James said. “I’m happier than I’ve been for ages.”

            “Mr. Callahan.” Starling detached James’s hand from his sleeve and stood holding it, just with his cold fingertips, with a sort of sad gentleness that James had never seen directed at himself before. “I cannot be the person you expect me to be.”

            “I don’t expect you to be anyone, just yourself.”

            “You don’t know who I am.”

            James had to admit that this was true. But still, he was bursting with happiness. He had been so desperate for someone to talk to, he would have been content with Starling’s shadow.

            “But can I come here when I’m free?” he said.

            The tension in Starling’s shoulders eased a little. “I…”

            “Please? I’ll sweep your floors.”

            “That’s really not necessary.”

            “But I can come? I won’t be bothering you?”

            Starling’s expression lightened by degrees, a little bit of gentleness bleeding through. He had an expressive face behind the mask of mild disinterest. It was like watching a candle behind a muslin handkerchief.

            “If you want to bother me,” he said, “you’ll have to try a lot harder than that.”

            “What we need you to build,” the captain said, pacing like a caged wolf, “is a box.”

            James sat at the table in a room full of officers, all staring at him with various degrees of blankness. Clarke gave him a reassuring smile, as violently redheaded as ever.

            “A box,” James repeated slowly.

            “About yea high and yea wide,” the captain said. With his hands, he sketched out a shape that was about large enough to hold a child of four or five, curled up in the fetal position. “Sturdy enough that nothing could possibly get in. Or out.”

            “I see,” James said. “Out of what materials, pray tell?”

            “Oh, that won’t be an issue. We have everything you’ll need on board,” Clarke spoke up. “Wood, tar, nails, even the right apparatus for steaming boards.”

            “The other consideration,” said the captain, “is that seawater must be continually pumped in and out of the box.”

            “May I ask why?” James said.

            “You may not.”

            James waited, but no further information was forthcoming.

            “Your area of expertise, we understand, pertains to pumping water in and out of enclosed spaces.”

            “Really only out. And generally with the use of a steam engine, which is far too heavy and large to put on a ship.”

            “Even so, Mr. Callahan. You will complete your duty to the crown, or you will be shot.”

            James looked at Clarke. His friendly expression hadn’t even twitched.

            “Then this ship will be missing a carpenter, I think,” James said.

            “You will not be shot immediately. First, you will be given twenty lashes, then fifty, and if you survive that and still refuse to cooperate… You’re an intelligent man, I hope, Mr. Callahan.”

            “I can follow a simple chain of logic to its end,” James said. “I do like a job that’s clear about the occupational hazards.”

            “Then we understand each other.”

            “I believe we do,” James said.

            James spent the first few days of the journey feeling horribly sick. Clarke took him to the infirmary, meaning well, when all James wanted to do was hang over the side of the ship and be as alone as possible to vomit.

            “Look, I’m sorry about this,” he said to Starling. “I can tell what you’re going to say. It’s seasickness, it’s as old as time, there’s nothing you can do but suffer through it, so go off and leave the infirmary to patients who really need it.”

            Starling arranged his face into what was clearly a James impression. “It’s seasickness. It’s as old as time. There’s nothing you can do except suffer through it, so go off and leave the infirmary to patients who really need it. As you can see, all our beds are full of dismembered sailors screaming in agony, which is why I’m sitting here calmly and reading a book.”

            “Oh, please. I don’t sound like that,” James said.

            “You do.”

            “I’m not that dramatic.”

            “I’m James Callahan and I’ve decided to bravely suffer in silence,” Starling said. “I’ll be the first good Christian martyred by the ungodly evil called seasickness.”

            “You’re such a bastard.”

            Starling smiled at him, a real smile. “Sit. I’ll get you a bucket.”

            James folded in on himself as the ship gave another strange lurch. Starling disappeared for a minute and came back with a bucket, as spotlessly neat as everything else in the room.

            “Seasickness is caused by demons, you know. Little tiny ones that get in your stomach.”

            “Liar.”

            “It’s really just that you’re not accustomed to the motion of the ship, but demons are more exciting.”

            “Has anyone ever told you you’ve got the world’s worst bedside manner?”

            “Oh, constantly. Hold out your hand.”

            James did, reluctantly. Starling placed a packet wrapped in wax paper in it and closed his fingers around it with both hands.

            “Candied ginger. It’ll help,” he said. “If you’d like, I can lie to Captain Bates and say that you’ve caught something horrible and you need to rest.”

            “Won’t he have you punished?”

            “He could try.” A little ironic twist of a smile. “I’m a better liar than I seem.”

            “I think I’ll feel better if I do something. Thank you, though.”

            “My pleasure. Oh, and don’t tell anyone I gave you those.”

            “Am I not supposed to have one?” James said with some apprehension.

            “I don’t give them out to everyone.” The smile turned sly. “Just people who are particularly determined to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in noble silence.”

            “Haven’t you better things to do than quote Shakespeare at me?”

            “I’m practicing. One day I’ll be talking to the captain and I’ll find a line of iambic pentameter that’s so beautiful, so appropriate to the situation, that his rigid, obsessive mind will finally appreciate the value of good literature and maybe even experience a normal emotion. It’ll be too much for him. His brain will dissolve and leak out his ears, and then I’ll get the ship.”

            “Going to charge at the French all by yourself?”

            “What on earth would I have against the French?”

            “You’re going to get yourself flogged for insubordination.”

            “Ah, but now I’ve dragged you into it, so you can’t snitch on me without incriminating yourself. All part of the plan, you see.”

            “The plan to make the captain’s brain leak out his ears,” James said, grinning.

            “If he has one. Jury’s still out.”

            James snorted. He was feeling better, or at least more cheerful, which—catching a glimpse of Starling watching him out of the corner of his eye—had probably been the plan.

            “It’ll be alright, I think,” Starling said, almost to himself.

            In the end, it was the sluices to let water into the infirmary that gave him the idea. There was no way the ship could support a steam engine, and due to the secrecy of the project, having people constantly pump water in and out of the box was also out of the question. Water constantly moved past the hull, though, in some places leaking in to join the foul pool of bilge water in the belly of the vessel, and it was possible to take advantage of that fact. Existing holes could be widened and augmented with pipes. The box could be built into the ship.

            The captain peered at it, stroking his flax-colored beard. He wasn’t smiling, but he seemed satisfied. The intense blue stare had softened somewhat.

            “Yes,” he said, more to himself than to James. “I see. Yet another impressive example of human ingenuity.”

            “I don’t know the period after which the seawater ought to be refreshed,” James said. “So I built this latch. With it open, the water will constantly flow in and out, but it will also run the risk of introducing some air to the system, particularly in rough seas when this part of the hull is exposed.”

            “Fifteen minutes will do nicely. Yes.”

            “Would you like to assign someone to check on the box every fifteen minutes?” James said politely.

            Captain Bates twitched. “No, no, certainly not. I can trust no one. They change their skins like suits of clothing.”

            James was suddenly acutely aware that he and the captain were alone, hedged in by barrels. Each one sweated moisture. He yearned for the clean, dry infirmary, with his occupant who—if odd—was at least kind, mostly, with decent taste in literature. If Starling started to fall into an eerie reverie, one could snap him instantly out of it by misquoting King Lear.

            “No,” the captain said. “I will do it myself.”

            “Of course, sir.”

            The captain jumped again, as if he had forgotten James was there. “Leave this place, Mr. Callahan.”

            Feeling vaguely relieved to be out of there, James left.

            They reached their destination soon after.

            It was a small, nameless cove, hidden by hills and sparse black trees. There was a ship aground there in the shallows, half-wrecked. Cannon-fire had raked across the deck, snapping two masts and caving in the hull like a brittle skull. Huge streaks of wood were scorched black. The entire ship listed wearily to one side, minutes away from laying its head down in the sea.

            The captain assembled a party that included himself, the midshipman Clarke, the first and second mates, Starling, and James. They took a rowboat out. None of them bothered to hail the dying ship, and as soon as they boarded, James saw why.

            It was completely empty. The crew had evacuated in a hurry, leaving the deck as it was after the battle. The wood was burned, splintered, and sticky with old blood.

            Captain Bates led the way into the dark, iron-scented interior, and into the captain’s cabin. The only living person on the entire ship sat at the desk, still in his burnt and bloody uniform. At his feet there was a box the size of a small child.

            “Welcome,” he said wearily. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

            “Do you have it?” Bates said.

            He nudged the box with his foot. It sloshed. “Right here.”

            “How long has it been in that water?”

            “Since we landed here.”

            Bates swore viciously. “Get it out of here,” he said.

            Clarke and the two mates together managed to pick the box up and, sweating, carry it away.

            “It’ll be alright, won’t it?” the other captain said, almost dreamily. He was looking through them. “They’ll kill those bastards. Everything will be back in its place. England on top of the world…”

            “Who else in your crew knows about this?” Bates said.

            “Just me, now. Everyone else is dead.”

            “Good. We would hate for the French to get wind of this.”

            “Is it a weapon?” James said.

            Everyone turned to look at him. Starling’s face was the mild unreadable mask. James hadn’t thought he had known about whatever was going on, but it was becoming increasingly clear that he did. James looked beseechingly at him. He looked away.

            “If it’s treated properly,” Bates said.

            “What—”

            There was the crack of a pistol, ear-splittingly loud because it was so close. James’s hands came up involuntarily to cover his ears.

            The other captain’s head lolled. A wound had appeared in the center of his forehead, as neat as a gunshot wound to the head could be. He crumpled out of his chair, quite dead. Starling lowered the smoking muzzle of his pistol, as serene as ever.

            “He was reaching for a weapon,” he said.

            “Our business here is concluded, then,” Bates said, as though nothing had happened. “Come along.”

            James stumbled after them. The echo of the gunshot was still echoing in his ears. He was shaking.

            Starling caught his wrist as they walked and held it out to see the tremor. “The tremor is natural. It’ll pass. You’ll be alright. Ever seen someone die before?”

            “Mining accidents,” James managed to say.

            Starling nodded. “Then you know.”

            “Starling,” James said, looking down into his face. He needed some sign that he wasn’t losing his mind, that something horrible had just happened.

            Starling squeezed his wrist hard and met his eyes. The serene expression on his face cracked. Underneath, he was more than upset. He was terrified. Dread burned in his eyes like anger or acid.

            Captain Bates briefly turned around to make sure they were following. By the time his eyes landed on them, Starling’s hand was nowhere near James’s wrist, and the calm expression was back on.

            Bates turned back around. Horribly, he started to whistle.

            Afterwards, life went back to normal, more or less. The ship aimed its nose towards London, although it was still weeks away. Captain Bates was grotesquely cheerful. Starling was more subdued.

            James ate in the mess hall with Clarke. He didn’t seem to know what had happened to the ruined ship’s captain after he left. James didn’t want to be the one to tell him, but it added an uneasy edge to the conversation.

            It was nearly Christmas. In an uncharacteristic fit of holiday cheer, or more likely just satisfaction with the upcoming completion of his mission, Bates had ordered an extra ration of sugar for everyone. The cook turned it into bread pudding.

            “Have you heard the infirmary’s got a ghost?” Clarke said, cheerful.

            “No. What?”

            “I was nearly certain you’d have encountered it. You spend so much time in there,” Clarke said.

            The sugar did make things better, if only a little. James felt his mood lift. “Tell me more about it then.”

            “You know Wickham fell from the rigging and hit his head—”

            “I do.”

            “And the doctor kept him overnight to make sure he didn’t have a bleed in the brain,” Clarke said. “Well, he was awake in the dead of night due to the pain in his head, and bored stiff. So, seeing as it’s nearly Christmas, he starts singing. Adeste fideles…”

            “Laeti triumphantes,” James said.

            “Right. And it’s the middle of the night, so he sings it soft and slow. At first, he thinks it’s only his imagination. There are all sorts of odd noises on a ship at night, it’s never quiet. There’s always someone on watch. He chalks it up to the creaking of the boards or the sighing of the wind. But as soon as his voice tapers off, he hears it. A second voice, clumsily singing along.”

            “Sounds like someone playing a prank,” James said, spooning bread pudding into his mouth.

            “It wasn’t the voice of a man. Not a natural voice, one could say.”

            “What did it sound like, then?”

            “He wouldn’t say. Looked right terrified.” Clarke patted James on the back. “Enjoy the infirmary, Callahan. No one’ll think any less of you if you start to avoid the place.”

            James did not start to avoid the place.

            It wasn’t that he particularly enjoyed the edge of bile under the smell of soap, but that he couldn’t resist the lure of encountering Starling and hearing his dryly expressed opinions on Voltaire or what the officers were up to. After years of returning home to an empty house for so many years, the pull of someone who had his schedule memorized and noticed when he was unhappy was magnetic. Even breathing was easier.

            When he was alone there, he tried singing Christmas carols, half to keep himself company and half to see if the ghost would appear. One-third of the way into The Holly and the Ivy, it did.

            It was very quiet, breathy and barely perceptible, but there was a second voice singing along, stumbling, as if it wasn’t confident of the words. Wickham was right: it wasn’t the voice of a man. It was the voice of a very young girl.

            “God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,” James sang, reorganizing Starling’s medicine cabinet, and the voice followed, half a step behind.

            It was a little girl’s voice, and yet it wasn’t. Something about it sounded old, ancient even. It creaked as though the singer hadn’t spoken for a very long time. The pronunciation was crisp and careful, even when it made her sing slower.

            “And tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. And tidings of comfort and joy,” James finished.

            The small voice tripped along after him: comfort and joy, comfort and joy.

            James was aware that the infirmary was directly over the room where he had built the captain’s box. He was also aware that the voice wasn’t doing anything worse than singing, and anyway, it sounded like a child. James found it very difficult to hate something that sounded so like a child.

            When Starling came back in, James and the voice were most of the way through ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing.’ Rather than stopping, he let the vibrato resonate in his voice. The ghost squeaked a little as it tried to match.

            “What do you think you’re doing?” Starling said.

            “Duetting,” James said.

            “What exactly do you think you’re duetting?”

            “Someone with a lovely singing voice.”

            Starling put down his coat and stared. His gaze was heated, but not angry. It looked more like he was losing some vicious internal argument, or trying to convince himself of something and failing. His fingers twitched, and he slowly tucked them away in his pocket.

            “You know what’s going on, don’t you?” James said.

            His lips thinned. “Yes.”

            “Care to enlighten me?”

            “No, you’ll know soon enough.”

            “Why not just tell me, then?”

            “Simple. I’m a coward, Mr. Callahan.” Starling smiled self-mockingly. “I don’t want to see the look on your face.”

            Over the next few days, whenever he was off work, James got into the habit of talking to the ghost. He had so little to do now that its box was complete.

            At first he asked it for answers. This was met with complete silence. It occurred to him that if the ghost really was young, it might not know what was going on, either. He followed the thread of that thought to imagine what it must have been like, confined to a very small box in the dark, incredibly alone.

            He stopped asking questions and started to tell it about his day. He passed on Starling’s gossip about the officers and expressed his opinions on the food in the mess hall. (“I take what I can get. Not like I’m a fantastic cook, either.”) He even shared his opinions on Starling. (“I asked him if he ever wrote poetry himself, and he gave me a look like a startled deer and told me if I was any sharper, I’d cut myself. I wish… no, never mind, that’s stupid, don’t worry about it.”)

            The ghost wasn’t very responsive, except sometimes it would giggle in the simple, artless way of someone very young. He retold jokes Starling had made, and it giggled more. It seemed to like mentions of Starling much more than it liked mentions of Captain Bates, which must have also been one of its acquaintances. Admittedly, James felt much the same way.

            After three days of this, James had had enough. The curiosity had accumulated into something he could no longer brush aside. If it hadn’t sung with him and laughed at jokes, he might have been able to leave the box alone. If Starling hadn’t been involved. If it hadn’t sounded like a child.

            A storm was brewing magnificently overhead. The ocean cracked into great craggy rifts, so deep and tall that they were more like walls than waves, and nearly black in the half-light. The horizon was a distant strip of gold. The prow of the ship smashed down into the water, throwing up meters of spray. Snow fell down in wet sheets and melted as soon as it touched the deck.

            Bates was shouting to the sailors, blue eyes flashing. The people James ate lunch with hauled miserably at ropes. Even the doggedly cheerful Clarke looked strained. It was Christmas, Christmas Day, but it hardly felt like it. Celebratory moods crumbled like pressed sugar in front of Bates.

            It was then or never. James steeled his nerves and crept belowdecks.

            Water streamed down the ladder and filtered through the boards in a thousand little beaded strands. James hadn’t been properly warm in weeks, and it was starting to wear on him, like not having enough to eat.

            The box was exactly where he left it, below the infirmary. Water sloshed inside, but that was normal; the latch must have been open. He had designed it with a hinge and a lock. Bates didn’t know he had his own copy of the key.

            “Sorry to disturb you,” he said, and opened the box.

            It was an egg. More like a fish’s egg than a bird’s, it was transparent and tinted slightly amber, like stained glass. Curled up inside it, there was a little girl, who looked to be around four or five, with golden-brown hair that flowed around her face. She seemed deeply asleep.

            The sudden influx of light and heat from his lantern must have disturbed her. She yawned herself awake, frowning very seriously. Her expression opened up when she saw him with a mix of wonder and relief.

            “The-intrepid-Mister-Callahan,” she said, not at all like she understood what intrepid meant. Starling had called him that once.

            Her eyes had the exact same shape as James’s mother’s. There was something intensely familiar about the shade of her hair. He realized abruptly that he saw it in the mirror every day. She looked very much like him.

            “Are you alright?” James said, leaning over the box.

            The girl closed her eyes again, sleepily.

            “It’s not too cold? The water is, uh, fresh?”

            She hummed slightly to herself—tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy—and turned over, sleeping quite heavily. James was more convinced than ever that whatever else she was, she really was a child.

            He shut the box as gently as he could and went to find Starling, who was the most likely person to explain if he asked.

            Starling was not in the infirmary. He wasn’t in his cabin, where all of his belongings had been packed neatly away. He wasn’t in the mess hall either, or the kitchen.

            James clambered up onto the deck. The storm had evolved into a spitting mixture of rain and snow. Little ridges of icy slush accumulated on deck. In the distance, flashes of lightning illuminated waves like jagged mountain peaks, black against black.

            Bates stood at the helm, wind whipping his hair out of its queue in long ash-blond strings. Throwing self-preservation to the wind, James grabbed his elbow.

            “Where’s Starling?” he shouted, over the roar of the water crashing over the deck.

            “Don’t know,” Bates said.

            “I saw what was in the box. What the hell’s going on?”

            “That’s not for the likes of you to know,” Bates said. “It’s for your betters. For the country.”

            “For fuck’s sake, it’s a child! She knows my name.”

            Bates was no longer listening. He was still looking at James, though, with a gaze that was both hollow and calculating. James knew with a sudden, horrible certainty that the calculation Bates was running behind the dead blue of those eyes was whether James was enough of a nuisance to be worth killing. It was perfect weather for it, too—if James fell overboard and drowned, no one would think twice about it. No one would notice for hours.

            He saw the decision crystallize in his eyes. Bates grabbed his collar and wrenched him off his feet, dragging him towards the railing. James’s feet scrabbled for purchase on the slick deck.

            Bates dangled him over the edge. He wouldn’t get the dignity of choosing his last words. There was no time. Then, suddenly, Bates’s eyes widened.

            “No,” he said, gazing out into the storm. “I was so close. How did they find out?”

            He let go of James, so that he could reach the pistol at his belt. James fell.

            From that height, the sea hit like a wall. James fought to the surface, flailing and gasping and spluttering, beating at the sea to buy himself a few more seconds of life. The water was so cold it registered as pain, not a difference in temperature.

            Bates was a little flaxen-haired figure, far above. His gun sparked. There was a half-hearted report.

            Tentacles shot out of the water, dozens of them, black and slick. Each one was massive, easily as thick as a man. Bates shot at them, but it had little effect—there were just too many. They rose up into the air, nearly as tall as the mast. James just had time to think the word: kraken.

            There was a brief moment in which the ship was enclosed in a little bubble of stillness. The storm held its breath. The tentacles came down.

            It was almost beautiful. The ship buckled immediately, splintering, caving in like an empty eggshell. The tentacles tore it in half. James had never seen such a demonstration of the principles of physics, a thousand different instances of fracture mechanics, and he admired it even as he knew they were all going to die.

            Serves Bates right, he thought. I wish I had seen Starling again. And that girl…

            He thought of the girl in her fish-like egg. Possibly, this was her going home. He hoped so, at least.

            James was getting tired. His sodden clothes weighed him down. Something wound around his waist, as gently as a lover, and pulled him inexorably down into the dark.

            He kept his eyes open as long as he could. Below the water, illuminated by the lightning-flashes that filtered down, there was a shape like a squid, dark and graceful, and one massive eye. Hints of bioluminescence glimmered on the tentacles like strings of pearls. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, and yet somehow familiar, like hearing a well-loved voice speak in another language for the first time.

            Beautiful, he thought fuzzily, and then everything went dark.

            When he woke up, it was blissfully warm, in a way that it had never been on board the ship. It was seeping into his bones. A warm hand pushed his sodden hair back from his forehead.

            He coughed a little and spat water. The room was very bright, and tears—a reflex from choking—made everything melt and blur. A figure helped turn him onto his side, very gently. James blinked rapidly. On his left, a man was receiving an injection from a glass syringe held by a set of pitch-black tentacles. Another, slightly paler set helped one of the sailors sit up.

            “Am I dead?” he said hoarsely. He was trying to remember his theology. The pleasant warmth suggested one thing. The apparent wealth of tentacles suggested another.

            “Yes,” someone said, deadpan. “Welcome to hell. I’d tell you to enjoy your stay, but that sort of defeats the purpose.”

            “What’d I do?” James said, mostly to himself.

            “Well,” said the figure, and resolved itself into Starling. “You were occasionally very rude to a certain doctor acquaintance of yours, as I recall.”

            “Starling! You’re alive?”

            “Yes, we both are. Hush,” he said, catching James’s hand and pressing it back against his chest. His palm was hot, or James’s fingers were so clammy that it was hot by comparison. “You’re mildly hypothermic. Endure it for just a moment.”

            He stood up and started to walk away. James tried not to feel bereft. Another set of tentacles appeared behind him with a blanket, midnight-black and smelling slightly odd, like ink. They wrapped him in it. It sent prickles of warmth deep into his ribs.

            “Thank you,” he said.

            The tentacles paused, and then skated off across the floor to deal with someone else. They were attached to a creature, he saw: one of several massive octopus-like beings, each with a single massive eye and hundreds of tentacles. Each eye had a round pupil as black as an inkwell. They sprawled across the floor, but when they moved, they did it blindingly fast, in a cascade of limbs.

            The room itself was made of thin marble. One wall glowed from deep within, rays scattering warmly inside the stone like sunlight in skin. One half of the room was a pool of black water—where they had just come from, James guessed. The octopus-creatures slid in and out at will, sometimes clutching supplies in their tentacles, graceful both in and out of the water.

            Most of the crew had been rescued. James heard scattered whimpers and little snatches of prayer. They had been a skeleton crew anyway, probably due to the secrecy of the mission, and now there were only about three hundred people.

            Starling stood at the front of the room, folded his hands behind his back, and said, “I think you all are owed an explanation.”

            This got everyone’s attention. Heads snapped around.

            “Welcome to the Abyssal Kingdom,” he said. “You are all at the bottom of the sea, and the creatures you see around you are what you know as krakens. As am I.”

            Somehow, this was less of a surprise than the way he was speaking. Suddenly, the small and quiet doctor from deep inside the ship was holding himself like an officer.

            “The safety of the Kingdom and the human world as you know it are maintained because the Kingdom’s existence is absolutely secret. As such, none of you will be allowed back to the world above the waves.”

            This caused a stir. “So we’re prisoners?”

            “You still have one choice left to you.” Starling gestured at the dark pool of water. “But I wouldn’t recommend it. In many ways, the Abyssal Kingdom is nothing like the world you’ve known. In others, it’s exactly like it. You can build a life for yourself here if you make yourself useful.”

            “You killed Captain Bates,” Clarke said suddenly.

            Starling tilted his head. Backlit by the strange light glowing through the marble, he was alien and beautiful. His eyes were very dark.

            “I suppose I did,” he said. “I don’t see him here, after all. The loss doesn’t grieve me overmuch.”

            Whether out of duty, disgust, or some real sentiment of revenge, Clarke drew his pistol and pulled the trigger. It clicked. The powder was wet. He whipped out his sword and charged at Starling.

            Starling lifted a hand languidly. The fingers lengthened, blackened as if dipped in ink, and became tentacles, flowing smoothly out of the sleeve of his coat. He lifted Clarke by the neck with no more effort than he expended on lifting a scalpel.

            Clarke snarled, beyond all human rationality, and swung the sword. Another tentacle shot out and wrapped around his wrist. Inexorably, Starling plunged him into the dark pool of water and held him there.

            A flurry of bubbles emerged as he thrashed, red hair muted to a tarnished copper in the water. Starling’s face had the saintlike mask on it, heavy-lidded and impassive. He might have been examining his fingernails.

            Clarke stopped struggling sooner than James expected. Starling lifted him out and used the tentacles to arrange him, as if in an attempt to give him some dignity. His neck hung at the wrong angle. He was quite dead.

            “Anyone else?” Starling said, deadly quiet.

            There was a ringing silence, broken only by a wet cough. Starling nodded as if he had expected it.

            “Then my colleagues will surely find work for all of you. There are more humans in this place than you might think.”

            A few women had appeared behind him, matronly and bureaucratic. At a guess, they weren’t human either. They moved the same way Starling did, with a peculiar delicacy. At first James had thought it a personal quirk. He recognized it now as the delicacy of something that is usually very large, which must be gentle and precise in its movements to avoid causing property damage.

            They were sectioning the men off into groups. James started to go too, but Starling appeared at his elbow.

            “Not you, Mr. Callahan,” he said. “I’ve been asked to make special arrangements.”

            “Am I going to die?” James tried to sound businesslike about it. It came out horribly jovial instead.

            “Not immediately. Of old age, I hope.”

            “How rude.”

            “Oh, well then, I hope you go out tomorrow in a blaze of glory and honor, is that any better?” Starling snipped. Then he remembered himself and said, “You’re not in danger. Particularly—” A bitter, self-deprecating laugh. “Particularly not from me. I’ve been ordered to put your expertise to good use.”

            “I take it you don’t mean my singing voice.”

            “No. As you might imagine, this place involves quite a lot of pumping water out of places.”

            “Steam engines,” James said sadly. “No one seems to remember that I work with steam engines.”

            “Do you think I’ve forgotten? Follow me, please.” He set off at a fast pace, away from the high-ceilinged room where one of the sailors had started to cry. “The Abyssal Kingdom is home to the largest steam engine in the world.”

            “You’re lying. Here? Really? At the bottom of the sea?”

            Starling only smiled. The white corridor opened up on one side into a vast hall. It could have fit three ships-of-the-line, masts and all, and still nearly had room for a fourth. It was etched from that same ivory marble, shot through with veins of gold and stormy black, and intricately carved into flowing, organic patterns.

            The entire thing was as bright as daylight. Golden light was shining up through the floor, glowing through the slightly translucent stone like sunlight through paper. Everything shone. A few mosaics set into the wall were made of little chipped pieces of abalone, like soap bubbles. They were nearly too bright to look at.

            James ran to the railing and stared at it. It was honeycombed with corridors, each dripping a winding little staircase. Half the floor opened up into a deep, narrow canal, the water aquamarine with light and casting glowing lacy patterns on the wall.

            “Say what you like about me, but don’t underestimate kraken engineering,” Starling said.

            He hadn’t been thinking about all the calculations that would have to go into a place like this. Now that he was, it had an achingly beautiful weight. He turned back towards Starling, too happy for words.

            “Yes, yes, it’s very impressive. Anyways. Upper brass wants to send you into the engine rooms. Our engineers have been agitating to know whether the English have figured out any interesting mathematics lately. They’re a bit fanatical about it. It’s that, or pick up odd jobs cleaning fish or washing dishes in the human quarter, and I’d thought you’d prefer...”

            “Yes,” James said, scarcely aware of what he was saying. “Thank you.”

            “The human quarter is nearly three miles from the engines. I live much closer, and my house already has human furniture, so if you’d like, you could stay with me. For the time being. Until you find other accommodation.”

            “Yes, thank you,” James said, watching a kraken unspool itself from one of the small corridors. It used one of its tentacles to scratch under its eye and flowed away into the water. He had registered the words, but not processed them. “Do you really live around here?”

            “Just down the hall.”

Starling was looking fragile, although not at all as though he would like to hear that pointed out. He couldn’t possibly have been worried James would think badly of his home, not when it was like this. He had just killed someone, though, someone who had never been unkind to him in any way larger than the accidental abrasiveness of someone who was both ordinary and lucky to someone who was neither. The show of strength had probably cost him more than anyone realized.

“Starling, are you rich?” James said.

“I’m a poet,” Starling said, as if this explained everything.

            “I was beginning to assume you were a spy.”

            “That too, although it pays a lot less.”

            “I honestly can’t tell whether or not you’re joking. Is this like the seasickness demons?”

            “Sometimes I forget you… it’s not a joke, the Poet’s Division is a branch of our government. I’m a third-stream member, with four parliamentary shares.”

            “My God. You sit on the Kraken House of Lords.”

            “Not because of my birth,” said Starling, which wasn’t exactly a denial.

            “Because of your poetry?”

            “Yes.”

            “And they let you gallivant about on the surface, sinking ships—”

            “I don’t gallivant,” Starling said, profoundly tired. “I monitor. Parliament voted on the sinking of the HMS Illustrious. It wasn’t my decision, I just happened to be well-positioned for the job. Is there anything else?”

            “Sorry,” James said.

            Starling shrugged. “It’s not a job I enjoy. I would have rather stayed here in the Pearl Quarter, writing my poems and advising the King, if it weren’t for—”

            He bit his tongue, looking away.

            “If it weren’t for?” James prompted.

            “I’m very tired,” Starling said. James would have complained about the non sequitur, except it was obviously true. The serene mask was chipping off him in little flakes. “I’m talking nonsense. Please don’t listen to me, Mr. Callahan.”

            “Alright,” James said. It came out very soft. “Can I just ask one more question?”

            He nodded.

            “What was the reason?” When Starling tilted his head, he added, “Why did the Illustrious have to sink?”

            “You’ll see her again tomorrow. I think she’ll be happy to see you.”

            Starling’s house was up a narrow, capillary-like staircase. Inside, it was shockingly ordinary. A human woman with curls of salt-and-pepper hair fussed over Starling, peeling him out of his wet coat and complaining that he’d lost weight.

            “I don’t know what they’re feeding you up there,” she said.

            “Mmgh,” Starling said, which was what really gave away that they knew each other well.

            “You’ve not even introduced me to your friend.”

            “James Callahan,” Starling said. “He’ll be staying with us. This is Mrs. Addison, the other reason I keep my house furnished for human proportions.”

            “Oh, how lovely.”

            With a horrible shock, James realized he had no idea how old Starling was. “Are you his…”

            “Housekeeper? No, dear, just a friend. I look after this place while he’s away. I owe him a terrible favor.”

            “What favor would that be?” James said.

            “I killed her husband,” Starling said.

            Mrs. Addison beamed. “Yes. It was a long time ago now, though. There’s soup if you two want it.”

            “I think I’ll go straight to bed,” Starling said.

            “There’s soup if you want it, Mr. Callahan,” she said, in the same tone. “Mr. Starling is going to sit there and eat it no matter what.”

            Starling let her take his arm and lead him to the table. The interior of the house was very like a ship: hardly surprising, since that was probably where the wood had come from. More of the white marble glowed through porthole windows, casting a gentle light over the floorboards, like the soft film that lies over memories. His kitchen was full of cabinets, half kitchen and half apothecary.

            They all three ate a light sardine soup together, and Starling visibly tried not to fall asleep into it. It was delicious, but more importantly, it was hot. James felt like he hadn’t been so warm in years. It was undoing the knots in his shoulders, slowly and painfully, in a way that was nevertheless the greatest relief he had ever felt. It was like being stitched back together.

            “Starling,” he said slowly.

            “Yes?”

            “Starling’s not your real name, is it?”

            “You can’t pronounce my real name.”

            “Try me.”

            Starling huffed out a laugh, and then made a series of rhythmic clicking noises. His pupils lit up brightly from within, blushing from red and gold and back again, like a cat’s.

            “Oh. I can’t do that,” James said, feeling foolish.

            “I would be very surprised if you could.”

            “At least tell me your given name,” he said. “The English one.” He wasn’t sure why he was pushing, only that it was suddenly very important.

            “It’s Kit,” Starling said.

            James laughed, delighted. “Like the playwright?”

            “Yes, like Kit Marlowe. You’re the only person to ever get that.”

            James grinned. Starling had his face turned determinedly away, but after a moment, he caught James’s eye and smiled, just faintly.

            Afterwards, James slipped into a borrowed nightshirt and fell heavily into sleep. He dreamt, vaguely, of a warm, bright place, full of shifting pearl-colored shadows and water.

            The image sharpened like a charcoal rubbing. He was underwater, and all around him the walls were honeycombed. In each honeycomb, there was a small bright flame. They were sealed away, not behind glass, but behind something clouded and translucent, with a much higher melting point. Some kind of crystal: quartz, or diamond.

            “What are they?” James said, looking at the little fires. His voice came out very young.

            “Oh, these?”

            When he looked over, there was a boy sitting next to him, dressed in clothes that belonged wholly to two centuries prior. He had a vague, unfinished look to him, more like a charcoal sketch than a person, with features so generic that they slipped immediately from the memory.

            “Dead sailors’ souls,” he said. His voice was soft and oddly clipped, with an unplaceable accent. “When someone drowns, we catch the soul in a net and bring it here.”

            “Then they can’t get to heaven,” James said plaintively.

            “No, nor hell. Some souls prefer not to roll the dice.”

            James, who still thought in clearly delineated lines and had a tendency to absorb Sunday morning mass without thinking about it, was confused and a little upset. Seeing this, the other boy’s tone turned kinder.

            “In any case, most souls are battered, ragged things when they die. Life will do that to you. Isn’t it better to stop and rest somewhere warm, and move on composed and healthy and in your Sunday best?”

            He woke by degrees. All the tension of the last few weeks was still unspooling in the warmth of the room. From somewhere down the stairs, there came a rich, dark smell of coffee.

            Once, when he was about eleven, James had fallen into deep water and nearly drowned. He washed back up babbling a strange story about souls and heaven and underwater fires. Just as the vicar had started to take an interest in this, he’d grown enough good sense to shut up about it, because—yes, that was right, it was because the strange boy might have turned out to be a devil, and if he was, James didn’t want to know.

            The details were already slipping out of place. James stretched. The heat was a miracle, like having sunlight injected directly into his bones. A porthole spilled an oval of soft light across the bed, the color of a sunrise filtered through a layer of fog.

            He went downstairs in his borrowed nightshirt. The smell of coffee increased, as well as the cozy sound of something sizzling. Standing at the stove was Starling, fully dressed, making an omelet in a cast-iron pan. One of his arms had split into tentacles, so that he could crack eggs, shape them with a wooden spoon, and hold the handle of the pan all at once.

            “How on earth do you get chickens down here?” James said.

            Starling didn’t turn. “Very carefully, I imagine. Did you sleep well?”

            “Incredibly. I hope I didn’t deprive you of your bed.”

            “No, you’re in a guest room. There’s coffee.”

            James poured himself a tin mug of it and breathed in the richness of the steam. Little bubbles congregated in a ring around the coffee, reflecting the light in peacock colors.

            “You didn’t have to do that.”

            “You’re a guest,” Starling said, sliding an omelet onto a plate.

            “Of the compulsory variety.” It was joking, not accusatory. In James’s mind, he had only been transferred from one impressment to a rather more comfortable other.

            “Like I said,” Starling said. “There’s always a choice.”

            “Most of the crew of the Illustrious didn’t seem to see it that way.”

            “Half of them will rebel within the next three weeks. They just didn’t know what to do with me in the moment.”

            “If they’re going to rebel,” James said, taking the omelet, “why did you let them go?”

            “Kraken honor,” Starling said, dousing his coffee in cream. James had a sudden vision of a kraken tiptoeing up onto shore, grabbing a cow, and then slipping back below the waves. “You might not see it as a choice, but we do. Some people feel the ability to choose the manner of their own death is important.” His posture lightened a little. “In your case, the choice is to stay here and deal with me or go and brave the commute to and from the human quarter.”

            “No contest,” James said easily. “Thank you for the food.” He hesitated. “What about…”

            Miraculously, Starling seemed to intuit who he was talking about. “We’ll go and see her after breakfast.”

            The street outside was occupied by two massive krakens, one sprawling lazily across the stairs and the other swirling about in the canal. They were deep in conversation, or at least James assumed they were. The high ceiling echoed with rhythmic clicks, and the very tips of their tentacles glowed, cycling through colors, reflected choppily in the rippling jade water.

            Starling clicked and glowed back at them, just with the pupils of his eyes, like it was something he did every day. It probably was. Guiltily, the one on the stairs splashed off into the water and out of the way.

            A short walk later, they stood in front of a small circular door. Starling rapped on it with his knuckles. It was opened by one of the matronly women James had seen the day before. Starling clicked at her, eyes glowing blue-green, and she bobbed a curtsy and clicked back.

            She led them into a room that was like a strange hasty parody of a nursery, all oddly-shaped objects that must have been toys, in pastel colors like a pastoral watercolor. Half of the room was submerged in salt water, flowing in and out through a set of copper pipes.

            The egg bobbed in the middle of it, still faintly amber, as transparent as glass. Its occupant was awake, twisting around restlessly. As soon as she saw them, she stopped.

            “Mister Callahan,” she said, in her creaky small voice, completely flat of intonation.

            “You see?” said Starling, sounding—although he had nearly succeeded in flattening it out of his voice—a bit jealous. “She’s pleased to see you.”

            Feeling an absurd rush of fondness, James knelt down on the floor so that he was closer to her eye level. She was very, very focused on the smooth surface of the egg, frowning and scratching determinedly at it with a tiny fingernail, until a rip appeared. The smooth sphere of the egg crumpled. She fought her way out delicately and fastidiously, frowning all the while.

            The child stood, wobbling, and tried to take a few steps towards James. On the second step, she slipped and splatted to the floor in the form of a rather large black octopus. She shrunk back into a human shape, facedown on the floor.

            “Oh dear,” James said, reaching out to help her back up.

            Starling’s fingers tugged on his sleeve and pulled him back. “She needs to learn to balance by herself, or else she never will.” He said something else, in the click-and-color language of krakens, apparently to the girl.

            She scrunched up her face. Then, with immense concentration, she toddled over to James and stretched out her hand. James held up his own so that they could touch palms, comparing sizes. Her hand fit entirely in the circle of his palm.

            Her eyes widened slightly at this new discovery. Then she melted back into octopus form and clambered up his arm, all legs, to sit on his shoulder. Delicately, not unlike a human child, she used her tentacles to touch his collar, then his hair, then his nose, jerking back in surprise at every new development and then carefully coming back to explore.

            “Oh, darling, don’t—” Starling burst out. He himself meticulously avoided touching James except in human form, and often even then.

            “She’s fine,” James said. “Unless she’s about to poison me or something.”

            “No, that’s not possible.”

            He was hovering over them both, with an expression that was one half parental concern—there was always a worry, when someone else picked up a child with which one had something to do, that they would drop it—and one half terrible yearning. Starling was easier to read now that he had one less thing to hide.

            “Go and see Starling,” James suggested to the creature on his arm, hovering a finger near her head. She wrapped a tentacle around it.

            “No, she’s comfortable.” His expression had smoothed over into a sort of sad affection. It struck James, with a sudden, irrational conviction, that he would be a very good parent, loving and humorous but sort of wryly stern. He had the gift of making up absurd explanations on the spot. He would tell the world’s best bedtime stories. “Come along, then, we’ll walk Mr. Callahan to work.”

            “Is that where we’re going?” One of the tentacles wrapped twice around his head, like a crown.

            “Yes. They’re waiting for you.”

            Out in the street, with the child perched on his shoulder like a parrot, James finally remembered to ask, “What makes the streets glow? Some sort of bioluminescent algae?”

            “No. It’s the same thing that powers the steam engines.”

            James waited. Starling took a breath, and explained, heavily:

            “You know it as Greek fire, fire that burns even underwater. The formula has been long since lost to you, but we’ve refined it. It’s a lot more powerful now.”

            “It’s really just a chemical formula?”

            “Yes. We refine the materials from hydrothermal vents.”

            James thought about this and said, “Oh. That’s why your civilization musn’t be known to ours.”

            “Yes, it’s one of the reasons for the isolationist policy. The other is that even just one kraken is a weapon in its own right. If nothing else, I’ve demonstrated that. If that child had fallen into the hands of a human navy, been raised to obey their whims…”

            James reached a hand up to his shoulder. She wrapped two of her tentacles around his fingers. “Carol wouldn’t like that.”

            Starling only raised his eyebrows at the name. “No one would, but it would be hard not to give in. I think this isolationism is a pipe dream, really, it’s not going to last forever. I would be happy if it could just outlast this war in Europe.”

            “Good point. I don’t like the thought of the French with krakens and perpetually burning fire.”

            “Or the English,” Starling said, and James was abruptly reminded that he was neither English nor human. “We are still legendary monsters in the eyes of the Admiralty, I think. I would rather be a legendary monster than a threat to naval supremacy.”

            James thought of Carol, alone and singing snatches of parroted songs back to herself in the dark. He thought of himself, pressed into naval service. “Indeed.”

            Starling led him down a hatch and into a place where the brightness was nearly blinding. The temperature rose nearly twenty degrees. Starling was unaffected, as cool and crisply dressed as always, but sweat started to gather on James’s upper lip.

            James would later learn that the firebox was enclosed in crystal and then protected by layers of thin ceramic. Metal would have melted. It gave off light like a captured star, refracting all through the layers of semi-transparent stone that made up the Abyssal Kingdom. Above it, there was a boiler—improperly named, because the fire was hot enough that the seawater didn’t boil. It sublimated.

            From there, the steam came up to turn a massive turbine, the rotational motion to be carried by elaborate subsystems of gears and transformed by pistons. The power would be used to keep some parts of the Kingdom dry and others submerged, to keep fresh seawater flowing through the canals.

            In the maelstrom of gears and pipes and mechanisms surrounding the main turbines, a few krakens lounged, carrying tools or making notes on slates with wax pencils. One of them was busy soldering. Two of its tentacles had been wrapped in thick sleeves, to prevent it from being hurt if it accidentally dripped molten lead on itself.

            The entire room had a smell, familiar and industrial, of heated metal and oil and seawater. Underneath it, there was something sweet, burned, and chemical, which must have been the fuel for the Greek fire.

            Starling clicked loudly, with the tone of someone hitting a champagne glass for attention. Suddenly, there were a lot more krakens, squeezing out of impossibly small spaces between machinery, carefully tucking tools away. Eyes roughly the same height as James peered at him, blinking.

            “Come along, love,” Starling said, removing Carol from James’s shoulder and transferring her carefully to his own arms. Then he addressed the assembly of krakens, eyes glowing.

            There was a sense of renewed interest in James. A few tentacles crept closer, and tugged tentatively at his clothes. One kraken poked him lightly on the forehead, experimentally, and then very confidently stuck a tentacle into his mouth.

            James coughed and spluttered. Starling smacked the tentacle and snapped something vicious and short. The kraken retracted the tentacle and rubbed it lightly, looking sheepish and aggrieved. James found it both funny and a little pitiful, if one could feel sorry for a creature roughly the size of several houses stacked together.

            “They’re not exactly knowledgeable about human etiquette,” Starling said, scowling darkly, which was also funny in its own way. “Also, one or two of them understand a few words of English, but none of them speak it, so if you have pressing or complicated questions, ask them now while I’m here to interpret.” He then translated this for the other krakens, who were beginning to shift and coil restlessly, wanting to know what he had said.

            “Yes, actually,” James said, and addressed the closest kraken, the one that had tried to stick its tentacle down his throat. “Greek fire burns even underwater, so it doesn’t need air to burn, right?”

            After a brief exchange with the other kraken, Starling said, “Yes.”

            “How do you control the temperature of the boiler? In human-made engines, the temperature is controlled by the influx of air to the firebox, but—”

            The kraken picked him up in one tentacle and grabbed a slate in the other, and started to draw. He saw the firebox as a star enclosed in several layers, with the boiler nearby and the turbines drawn out in perfect detail. For such a large creature, its coordination was incredible. The lines were all ruler-straight.

            “Technically, air can make Greek fire burn hotter,” Starling narrated, looking a little out of his depth. “We don’t have an endless supply of air here like you do on the surface, so the temperature is largely controlled by seawater. This line here comes directly in from outside, where the water is quite cold. It enters the system through this line, warming gradually as it approaches the engine, which helps to… to prevent stress fractures due to the change in temperature. It enters this layer and cools the engine. The… flue? The flue is controlled by… I’m sorry, I’ve got no idea what that word means.”

            “A flyball governor,” said James, who recognized the component.

            “If you say so.”

            “What do you do with the heated wastewater?” James said. “Do you just release it back into the ocean?”

            The kraken holding him clicked and added a few more lines to the diagram. It was all annotated in a careful, precise hand, with little boxed labels. James hadn’t realized they had a written language. Somewhere to his left, the glowing tentacle it was using to talk to Starling trembled, just slightly. The room was so bright that it must have been doing the equivalent of shouting over the noise.

            “It says the heated water goes into pipes that run all through the Kingdom,” Starling said. “That’s why it’s so warm.”

            “Do krakens mind cold? I thought, since you all lived at the bottom of the ocean—”

            “It doesn’t hurt us, but warmth is more comfortable,” Starling said.

            “How clever,” James said, inordinately pleased.

            Starling translated this for the other krakens, which shifted about on coiling limbs. The one holding him ruffled his hair.

            “I’ve got to go,” Starling said, hoisting Carol in his arms. “Believe it or not, members of Parliament occasionally do things other than sit on their tentacles and snore. I’ve got to give a report on what happened to the Illustrious and it’s got to be in perfect poetic form—don’t laugh, it’s a cultural thing and you’re being very rude. If someone tried to give a speech in prose, they’d be laughed out of the government. It’d be like doing it in pig Latin.”

            “I see. Sorry. What about Carol?”

            “Mrs. Addison has expressed a desire to teach her how to wear human clothes.”

            “I see.” He patted the tentacle that was wrapped around his waist.

            It let him down obligingly, and he put a hand on Starling’s shoulder and kissed the blobby part of Carol that was probably her head. She tugged lightly on his hair in response.

            Starling’s shoulder tensed under his hand. James’s fingers were near enough to his neck that he could feel his pulse leap to a mile a minute. When he looked back up, though, his face gave nothing away. The kraken who had picked James up flashed and clicked.

            “They want to give you a tour,” Starling said, even more clipped than usual. “Are you sure you’ll be alright? You barely have two words of a shared language to rub together, Parliament and its harebrained ideas—”

            “I’ll be fine,” James said.

            “If you say so. Then, goodbye.”

            He said his farewells to the krakens, then hoisted Carol and started to walk away. Framed by the doorway, just when he was nearly out of sight, James saw him lift a hand and place it on his own shoulder, as if to rub the memory of the touch away.

            James spent a very pleasant day with the kraken engineers, following them around like a shadow and sometimes being held up to look at the machinery. People tended to think that having no shared language was a death sentence for friendly relations, but that wasn’t the case at all: one just got very good at charades, very quickly.

            He couldn’t speak the bioluminescent kraken language, but he could learn to write it and understand it. The effort was already underway. He was rapidly gaining vocabulary like engine, phase, fuel formula, and adjustable wrench, but more ordinary words still eluded him.

            When he climbed back up through the hatch into the street, it seemed surprisingly dim, all twilight pearl colors. He expected to have to fumble his way through the corridors, trying to find his way back to Starling’s house, but he found Starling sitting on the edge of the canal, eating fried fish off a skewer. He held out a second skewer as James approached, silently.

            James took it and tried to think of a way to say sorry for making it look like I was about to kiss you this morning that wasn’t unfairly resentful or embarrassingly miserable. It didn’t seem to exist.

            “How is Carol responding to the concept of clothing?” he said instead.

            “Grudging acceptance for about the first fifteen minutes, then she tears it off and runs naked through the house, to Mrs. Addison’s lasting dismay.”

            “Sounds about right.”

            There was a kraken slithering along the balcony a few stories above, at a blistering pace that suggested something was wrong. Starling’s eyes tracked it, worried. It spilled down the wall like a rivulet of ink and started to cross the canal.

            “Do you think—”

            Starling held up a hand to shut him up. The kraken in the canal was speaking, a quick cannon-fire burst of clicks and a golden glow on the tip of a tentacle. The color drained from Starling’s already-pale face until it was the color of paper. He clicked back, quickly.

            “What’s happening?” James said.

            “I…” Starling was trying to hold two conversations at once. “I’m being arrested.”

            “What? What for?”

            “Hush.” He traded a few more clattering phrases with the other kraken, and then stood, face set and resolute. “Look, Mr. Callahan, you should go back and find Mrs. Addison. Don’t try to get involved. This is my business.”

            “Bullshi—”

            Starling flowed out of his clothes and splashed in his canal in his true form, which unspooled like thread, tentacle after tentacle. The conversation was over, at least on his part.

            James felt an itch on the back of his neck, like someone was watching him, and whipped around to find a human man, watching from an alley. He had an impression of dark hair and stony blue eyes, a sense of nasty satisfaction, and then the man hurried away.

            Meanwhile, Starling and the other kraken slunk off through the water without so much as a backward glance. Suppressing a rising sense of fury and helplessness, James went to find Mrs. Addison.

            “Oh dear,” Mrs. Addison said, wrapping her hands around a cup of tea. “Oh dear, oh dear.”

            “Oh dear,” Carol said back, solemnly. “Oh dear, oh dear.”

            The woman sitting across from Mrs. Addison at the table patted her hand reassuringly. She was, he realized, the matronly woman who had handed Carol off to them.

            “What’s going on?” James said, a little too loudly. Carol, frightened, toddled over and hid behind his leg.

            “Oh, there you are.” Mrs. Addison sniffled. “This is Agnes. She’s a colleague of Mr. Starling’s in Foreign Affairs.”

            “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he did it,” Agnes said.

            “Did what? What was he arrested for?”

            “Didn’t he tell you?” she said. “One of his political rivals is missing, he’s been accused of murdering it. The... Second Minister of the Interior, as I suppose you’d say in English.”

            “Starling wouldn’t kill someone for such a petty reason. And anyway, he’s only been back for two days, and he’s been with me for most of that time. When did the Second Minister die?” James said.

            “He’s been missing for months, since before Starling left to join the Illustrious, Agnes said bitterly. “His faction has only started making a fuss about it now.”

            “Why?”

            “So they can pin it on Starling, presumably.”

            A few nebulous, half-formed suspicions started to link together in James’s mind. He remembered, in a flash, the hard, satisfied blue stare. The hair color was all wrong…

            “This Minister. Since he’s Starling’s political rival, he wouldn’t happen to be against the isolationist policy, would he?”

            “Oh, he is, famously. He wants to take a side in the war against Napoleon. He has a point, actually.” When they all looked at her, including Carol, who wasn’t really following the conversation, she shrugged. “It’s hard to continually be salvaging goods from shipwrecks. There are some things that could be far more easily obtained by trade, like sugar and grain, that would greatly improve the quality of life for human citizens of the Abyss.”

            “But Starling didn’t kill him,” James said.

            “No, I don’t think so either.”

            “I want to see him,” James said, pacing. “I want his opinion on something.”

            Agnes put her chin in her palm thoughtfully. “None of us have been able to get in to see him. I might be able to get you an audience, though.”

            “Why is that?”

            “They don’t see you as a political player,” Agnes said. “You’re too new. And Starling argued fairly extensively in favor of your capabilities as an engineer, they probably see you as his dependent.”

            “Is Mrs. Addison not?” James said.

            She sniffled again. “I have my own job that has nothing to do with Mr. Starling.”

            Not his housekeeper. Right. “If you think you can get me an audience with him,” he said, squaring his shoulders, “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

            In the end, it didn’t take very much. Agnes reverted to her true form, very large and tinted rainbow like oil, and carried him to a small, plain building on the outskirts of the Abyss. It was slightly colder here, further from the engines.

            He didn’t need to do any talking. Agnes clicked and glowed at a kraken who could have been either a guard or a receptionist, and after a long pause, it seemed to give in.

            Agnes set him down, cleverly slipping back into her clothes as she transformed, and giving the impression of a mass of tentacles cramming themselves into a day dress and resolving into a plain middle-aged woman. “You’ll have to go on alone.”

            “Thank you for everything.”

            “Tell Starling not to be such a stubborn idiot in the future,” she said.

            The guard beckoned him with one tentacle and motioned for him to follow. It condensed itself impossibly small in order to burrow through the corridors, like an octopus slipping through a ripped net. He followed it through a maze of gray-white halls, branching and twisting, until they finally came to a small circular hatch.

            Moving carefully, the guard turned three keys in it at once. It opened silently. One of the guard’s tentacles lifted James up by his collar, placed him inside, and then slammed the door behind him.

            The cell was actually quite spacious. Like a lot of spaces in the Abyssal Kingdom, it was half submerged, featuring a deep rectangular pool. The air was warm and humid. Curls of steam chased each other across its dark surface.

            Sensing an intruder, Starling suddenly surged out of the water, shrinking as he did so, until he was standing on the edge in human form. He didn’t use Agnes’s trick of slipping into his clothes as he went. He was completely naked. Even his hair was out of its usual neat queue, curling down his collarbones, starkly black against his pale skin.

            James made a strangled noise in the back of his throat and turned to face the wall. Behind him, he heard Starling sigh.

            “I forget how prudish the English are.” A pause. “My clothes are in front of you.”

            He was right: they were neatly folded into a dark stack by James’s feet. He was frozen, trying to figure out a way that he could pass them back without turning around. Somehow, he hadn’t expected the sharp, strange, bird-boned loveliness of Starling’s face and hands to continue all through the rest of his body, but of course it did. His hair curled slightly when it was wet. James could have gone the rest of his life without knowing that.

            “Never mind,” Starling said. A tentacle snaked into James’s peripheral vision, grabbed his clothes, and then slithered out. There was a pitter-patter of Starling wringing out his hair, and then the rasp of clothing against skin. “You can turn around now, I’m decent. Well, probably not morally.”

            He turned around to see Starling tying his cravat, entirely himself again except for the wet hair. He had hoped, vaguely, that the electric knowledge of how Starling looked would be softened a little now that he had clothes on again, but it had only intensified, like light through a narrow lens.

            “I know you didn’t do it,” James said, giving his brain a good hard shake.

            “Well, unless you can prove it, that’s not of much use, is it? How did you get in here, anyway? I thought I gave you very clear and specific instructions to stay out of it.”

            “Agnes got me in.”

            “Ah. She would insist on sticking her beak where it doesn’t belong.”

            “Shut up a minute and answer questions. I’m trying to help you.”

            Obligingly, Starling shut his mouth and sat cross-legged on the gray stone floor. When James gave him an odd look, he said, “The floor is heated.”

            James sat next to him and said, “Do you remember Captain Bates?”

            Starling laughed darkly. “How could I forget?”

            “What makes you think he’s dead?” James said.

            “No one could have survived that wreck. You were unconscious by then, but the ship was gone completely, and there was the storm.”

            “What would have happened if Carol’s egg had been left in stagnant water?”

            “She wouldn’t have died, but she wouldn’t have developed properly, either. It would have left her with chronic health issues late into life. That’s common knowledge.”

            “Common knowledge in the Abyss, or on the surface?”

            Starling raised his eyebrows. “You think Bates was a kraken?”

            “I think he’s the Second Minister you’re meant to have killed.” Starling opened his mouth, and James got to his feet and said, “No, listen to me. A human being couldn’t have survived the wreck of the Illustrious by himself, but a kraken could. The cold doesn’t bother you. He could have turned back into his true form and waited in the dark until the fuss died down, and then slipped quietly back into the Abyssal Kingdom.”

            “He’d have to be in hiding,” Starling said. “If he tried to go out in kraken form, one of us would recognize him, and if he tried to go out in human form, the remaining crew of the Illustrious would.”

            “Not necessarily. What if he changed his appearance?”

            “You wouldn’t know this,” Starling said, “but we can’t really do that. We have one kraken form and one human form, which usually solidifies in late adolescence based on the faces we see. It’s why Carol’s human form looks like you. Bates—the Second Minister is an adult. He wouldn’t be able to change his appearance at all.”

            “Kraken can’t change their appearances, but human beings can.”

            James was gambling on the theory that—to a people who could change from gigantic tentacled creatures to small humanoid ones—small changes of the sort affected by dye and cosmetics would barely register. Starling raised an eyebrow at him, and he felt more sure of it than ever.

            “You’ve read Shakespeare and Marlowe. What do actors do in order to look more like their characters?”

            “Cosmetics and costumes,” Starling said slowly.

            “I saw a man with very blue eyes hurrying away as you got arrested.”

            Starling fell silent, and for a minute, James was afraid that he was about to tell him that he was being ridiculous. The theory was a little absurd, and earlier, Starling had made it very clear that he didn’t need or want help.

            “That fucking whoreson bastard piece of shit,” Starling said instead, quite conversationally. “If I see him again, I really will kill him, consequences be damned.”

            James let out a massive laugh of pure relief.

            “Treating a child like that to further his political agenda. Faking his own death just to frame me. Christ, what’s the government coming to?”

            “I don’t think he wanted to fake his death to frame you,” James said thoughtfully. “I think he wanted to escape to Britain to join the war against Napoleon, and win against you politically. This is his contingency plan, because he can’t admit he took human form and deliberately tried to violate the isolationist policy now that he’s failed.”

            “Fucking hell,” Starling said with feeling.

            “I’ll just go and try to winkle him out of the human quarter, then. He wasn’t well-liked aboard the Illustrious, it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

            James knocked loudly on the hatch and waited. There was no response.

            “The guard is probably planning to come back and check on us after a certain period of time,” Starling said. “You might as well come sit.”

            James sat back down, leaving a careful six-inch gap between their shoulders. “You’re alright, though? No one’s hurt you?”

            “I’m a bit more durable than that. Anyway, it’s a very nice jail cell. Even the water is heated.” He flicked a few drops of it at James to prove it. They were as hot as bathwater.

            “That’s good.” There was another, much more comfortable pause. “I have a few questions about kraken culture.”

            “I would be disappointed if you didn’t.”

            “How do you tell if a kraken is a man or a woman?”

            Starling stretched his legs out comfortably. “You don’t, because they’re not. There are no sex differences between krakens. We’re all capable of both bearing and fathering children.”

            “But you’re a man,” James said, rather stupidly.

            “I am, yes. But that’s a human concept. We don’t even have a word for it. Krakens are also capable of mimicking other mammals, like whales and certain types of seal, and the ones who do that might have some idea of sex. But if you told them it meant they had to dress and act a certain way, they’d be very confused.”

            “Huh,” James said.

            Starling smiled at him. “Is that all you have to say about it?”

            “It seems a much more reasonable system.”

            “Lacks style, though, sometimes. I enjoy being a man, it’s like having a very serious hobby.”

            James snorted. “How old are you, Starling?”

            “Forty-five. Only a few years older than you. We mature faster, but we rarely live longer than a century.”

            Only a few years older than you plucked at the strings of a half-forgotten memory. “Starling.”

            “Hm?”

            “Did we know each other?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “When I was little, I fell off the cliffs into deep water and nearly drowned. I remember seeing things that didn’t make sense to me at the time. And a boy, living under the water. That was you, wasn’t it?”

            Next to him, he felt rather than saw Starling go still. “I didn’t think you remembered.”

            “You looked different.”

            “My human form hadn’t settled yet.”

            “I can’t imagine what I was like back then,” James said.

            Starling smiled. “Very much like you are now. Clever. A little lonely. Far too observant, with no one who really expects much from you. It’s a dangerous combination.” He coughed and looked away. “Except back then I think you were a lot more disappointed I wasn’t a dragon, which was your preferred type of mythological creature. To be fair, I am also a little disappointed that I’m not a dragon.”

            “You saved my life,” James said. “Thank you.”

            Starling waved this languidly away. “You can repay me by clearing my name and getting me out of prison.”

            “Will do. Starling—”

            Starling saw the look on his face and said, “What ridiculously fraught and emotional topic have you come up with now?”

            “Should I not?”

            “No, out with it, we’re speeding through them. What?”

            James said, “Why don’t you touch me?”

            The expression on Starling’s face was suspended between blankness and devastation, just as it was on that first day aboard the Illustrious, when he realized he would have to sink it with James on board. James wished he could take it back immediately, but he couldn’t, so he thought in for a penny, in for a pound and plowed on.

            “Every time you try, you look frightened. You have to force yourself to do it. At first I thought it was a kraken thing, but the engineers don’t have an issue with it, they mess up my hair and dangle me upside-down by the ankles in a friendly manner. Carol and Agnes don’t have a problem either. It’s only you.”

            In a voice dripping with scorn, Starling said, “I’m not frightened.”

            “Prove it, then.”

            “Do you want to be dangled by the ankles?”

            “Not particularly. It makes me seasick.”

            Starling paused, not looking at him. Then, in the soft, grudgingly open voice that belonged to confessionals, he said, “Do you want to be touched?”

            “Yes,” James said. It was out of his mouth, raw and too telling, before he could tell himself not to say it.

            “Prove it, then,” Starling said, doing his best James impression.

            James closed his eyes and opened his arms. There was a soft intake of breath somewhere to his left, and then a rustle of clothing, and then Starling stepped between his legs and settled into his arms, pinning him to the wall.

            He smelled clean, like fresh laundry and lemon soap. He was both heavier and warmer than James had expected; he was leaning on James with his full weight, pushing him against the warm stone wall. James couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. The pressure came with an incredible feeling of security, wiping away all the anxiety that the guard could come back any minute and he could be wrong about Bates. He hadn’t felt so safe in his life.

            Starling pressed his face into the place where James’s neck met his shoulders and said, muffled, “You’ve seen what I really look like. I thought you were repulsed.”

            “I thought you were beautiful.”

            Starling actually flinched. Pleasure went through him in the exact same way as dismay. James wondered how many times he had seen him react to something and thought he was upset, or disgusted, when really he was just happily shocked. He opened his eyes. What he could see of Starling’s face was luminously red. He didn’t blush often, but when he did, it showed quite dark.

            A tentacle came up and pushed insistently at James’s cheek until he laid it down across Starling’s hair. He reached up and caught it in his fingers. Like Carol, it wasn’t slimy or wet, just soft and smoother than ordinary skin, like touching fine silk.

            “You’re warm,” he said wonderingly.

            “It’s the heated water.”

            James wound the tentacle between his fingers. Starling made an inarticulate sound against his neck.

            “Am I winning the argument?” he said. The tentacle curled lightly around James’s finger.

            “I forgot what the argument was,” James admitted. “We can say you won it.”

            “Thank you. That’ll help repair my injured dignity.”

            James smiled. “Your dignity which was injured over the course of one emotional conversation?”

            “No, my dignity which was injured because I got wrongly accused of murder. Surely you remember.”

            “Oh, right.”

            Starling laughed. It was curiously intimate, to feel him shake pressed up against James’s chest. James wondered if he would have laughed at that coming from anyone else, if he would even be in this situation with anyone else, how nice it would be if the answer was no. He also wondered if he could edge his hips away without Starling noticing, to which the answer was probably not.

            Starling took a deep breath and said, “You know I—”

            There was a sound of a key touching the door. In a flash, Starling was sitting demurely about a foot away, straightening the cuffs on his shirt. James cleared his throat, ready to say something that started with we were just, and then realized that the guard couldn’t understand him and probably didn’t care. He clambered out the hatch.

            “Good luck,” Starling said. Framed by the door, he was a circular portrait of himself. “Even if you don’t—”

            The door shut heavily on him. Like someone carrying a spider out of their house, the guard escorted James outside.

            Without losing a moment, James headed towards the human quarter. The stones below him were dimming slowly into simulated night, as shades inched fractionally over the engines. The buildings in the human quarter were wooden, smaller, and shabbier, although that could have just been in comparison to the lofty halls built to a krakenish scale.

            He went into the first building he saw that bore a resemblance to a fisherman’s pub. Inside, it was lit with lanterns, nearly homely and wholly human. There was a warm smell of rum coming up from the floorboards, and someone had set up quite comfortably with a fiddle in the corner. The music stopped as he walked in, except the creaking of the floor.

            “Callahan!” someone shouted from the back. “Thought you were dead.”

            “I’m not, but neither is Captain Bates. Has anyone seen him?”

            There was a pause, and then someone else said, “Never liked him much anyway. A little too handy with the whip,” and then cheerfully ratted him out.

            No one had seen Bates, exactly, but everyone had seen a man of his build, with the same eyes and different hair. No one, however, had seen him recently, or not recently enough to give decent directions.

            The person who had shouted at him from the back of the room and said, “Oh, that fellow? I ran into him. Nasty looking. Said he was off towards the Pearl Quarter,” which was the neighborhood where Starling lived.

            Yes, James thought, of course, he had gotten wind of Starling’s arrest, and he wanted to watch and gloat. But, a small voice said, what if there was something else?

            If James were a single-minded old kraken politician, scheming and obsessive, and his plans had been mostly smashed, what would he do? Go to watch the downfall of the man who had caused it, that much was for certain. And then… what? Get drunk? That was probably what James would do, but he had never seen Starling or Bates touch a drop of alcohol. Starling would hate the comparison, but there was a certain similarity to them, a fierce motivating intensity, but in Starling it was warm, careful, and worldly, and in Bates it was careless and cruel.

            No, if James were Bates, he would probably cling to the last shreds of the plan, even as it dissolved around him. What were those shreds? The Illustrious was so much driftwood, Bates’s human disguise no longer convenient. That left…

            James felt his stomach drop. That left Carol.

            He turned without saying goodbye to anyone from the Illustrious and ran for the Pearl Quarter.

            When he got to Starling’s house, Carol was throwing her first-ever tantrum. She was ordinarily so quiet, James thought she didn’t get them, but it seemed as though she had only been saving them up.

            Red-faced and screaming like her heart was broken, she clung to the stairs with her small fingernails, kicking violently at anyone who tried to pick her up. Whenever someone came close, she flattened herself onto the ground in cephalopod form, tentacles splayed and clinging, like a black starburst, before changing back again to wail more effectively.

            Mrs. Addison fluttered around her ineffectually, saying things like, “My dear, you must go with the man, Mr. Starling sent him. He’ll take you to your real parent.”

            Meanwhile Carol sobbed, beyond songs, beyond words, beyond the dolphin-like clicking of the kraken language. Snot streamed from her nose.

            “Mr. Callahan! You’ll tell her, won’t you, that she has to go with him?” Mrs. Addison said.

            “I certainly will not. Come on, Bates, the jig’s up. Let the girl go.”

            Carol looked up at the sound of his voice, hiccupping, and then curled up into a shaking black ball of tentacles behind his leg. He picked her up, shushing her like he would a human baby, and held her in his arms.

            Bates slowly lowered the hood of his jacket. He looked very different with the beard shaved and the hair dyed. Especially to a species to whom humans generally all looked the same, it was a shockingly effective disguise. The eyes were the same, glacial blue, with the same intensity, pinning him in place like a needle through the wing of an insect.

            “Or should I say Second Minister?” James added. Carol reached out a tentacle and pulled on his hair, spitefully hard, as a punishment for coming so late. He held her close to his chest and wished she were small enough to tuck into his coat pocket, away from everything.

            Bates looked as though a dust mote had suddenly accused him of murder. “How could you possibly know that?”

            “I pay attention and listen when people talk. I’d like you to turn yourself in and get them to let Starling go, but I see that’s too much to ask. At the very least, leave this child alone.”

            He spoke with a courage he didn’t feel. He had the impression, in going against Bates, of making a choice for himself for the first time in a long time, and it felt like stepping off a precipice. He was acutely aware of his surroundings: the water in the canal, darkening from a jadelike teal to a mirrored twilight gray, the water condensing on the white stone and running slowly down in small rivulets, the uneven ancient marble beneath his feet and all its strange hollows.

            At the same time, going to see Starling in prison had been a choice. Saying that he wanted to be touched was a choice. Singing with Carol had been a choice. Writing back to Starling through the pages of that book of Petrarch’s sonnets had been a choice. All the small choices ran together and made the big impossible choice an inevitability.

            “Whose daughter do you think that is?” Bates said, staring through him. “Who do you think bore her, brought her into this world? I did, and I have a right to do want I want with her.”

            James felt a sudden stab of longing for Starling, who had the same intensity in his eyes. On him, it looked less hollow.

            “No, you don’t,” he said.

            Bates pulled a pistol from within his belt and pointed it at them, shaking. He was running out of options—no, he had been out of them for a while. Behind James, Mrs. Addison squeaked.

            James didn’t move. It had the same filigreed handle as the gun he had carried aboard the Illustrious, which of course meant…

            He pulled the trigger. It clicked.

            …that the powder had gotten wet.

            For Bates, it seemed, this was the last straw. At first James thought he was shaking from anger, and then the seams of his coat burst as his kraken form expanded into the sky. It was bigger and bulkier than Starling’s, pulsating furiously, lit from beneath by the twilight engine-light. James had time to think: this is really it, there won’t be any wet-powder coincidences to save us now. He clutched Carol tighter to his chest. She wound her tentacles around his wrist. Sorry, Carol. …Kit.

            “And there we have it,” came a cool voice from behind him. “Enter Second Minister, man and child exit stage left. Thank you, Mr. Callahan, you’ve done very well.”

            It was Agnes. She stared up at the Second Minister, almost violently ordinary in her plain dress and practical, motherly face. Then she surged up into her own kraken form, which was even larger, and smashed the Second Minister into the canal. He chattered furiously at her, and she clicked calmly back.

            There was a brief, if violent, struggle, in which the Second Minister thrashed wildly, and was gradually subdued. In the end, he shrank back down to his human size, and so did she, with her knee planted firmly on his back and a knife to his throat.

            “A gun is a damned stupid weapon for a kraken to carry,” she observed. “Ah well. Dot, be a dear and run along to Foreign Affairs for me.”

            James wondered briefly who she was talking about, and then Mrs. Addison scurried away. Down on the ground, Bates snarled.

            “This isn’t Foreign Affairs business.”

            “It is,” Agnes said implacably. Without moving the knife, she had gotten out a pipe and managed to get some tobacco into it one-handed. “You were going straight to Whitehall, weren’t you? Not Foreign Affairs business, honestly. You were going to hand them your daughter on a silver platter.”

            James fished a match out of the waterproof tin in his pocket and lit her pipe for her. “Oh, thank you,” she said vaguely, puffing out a cloud of blue smoke.

            “She was my daughter,” Bates said miserably. “My daughter, mine, not that two-bit hack—” He clicked something, eyes glowing, and James tried to memorize the rhythm and the colors, because it was probably Starling’s real name. “War is coming, even to the Abyss, and you shortsighted fools can’t even pick the winning side.”

            “Yes, yes,” Agnes said vaguely—not in the way of someone who wasn’t listening, but in the way of someone who was locking every word up in a steel-trap mind for use in court later.

            After some time, in which Carol calmed down enough to regain human form and accept the clean, soft dress James plied her with, Starling reappeared. He looked none the worse for wear, and he had collected an entourage of three other krakens. They kept clicking and glowing and trying to get his attention. Judging by Starling’s faintly uncomfortable expression, and the way he kept waving them away, they were profusely apologizing.

            He smiled, brilliant with relief, at seeing that James and Carol were unharmed. Carol jumped down from James’s arms and ran up to him immediately.

            “I heard what happened from Mrs. Addison,” Starling said, ruffling her hair. “Good show. You were very brave.”

            James nearly glowed, but this last was directed at Carol, who had—to give credit where credit was due—been very brave.

            She looked up at him solemnly and said, “Foreign affairs business?”

            “Yes, love, that’s right. Very good. And now I think it’s bedtime for Carols.”

            James followed them into the house and into Carol’s small room, which included a pool of water. Starling pulled her into pajamas, which was pointless, because she would inevitably wriggle out of them in the night. James sang her a lullaby, the same one his mother had sung to him when he was young, which she duetted until she inevitably fell asleep mid-word.

            They snuck away together, and Starling gently tugged him out of the house and into the street.

            “I’d like a walk,” he said by way of explanation.

            “Enjoying your newfound freedom?”

            “Yes, thanks to you. I’m sorry. Our politics are usually not so…”

            “Violent?” James suggested. “Terrifying?”

            Starling smiled at him. “I was going to say obtrusive.”

            They climbed a staircase together, then slipped through a half-hidden door into a maintenance hallway. The light from the engine was quiet, a sleeping heartbeat. The kingdom was blanketed in a midnight hush.

            Starling led him out onto a wide ledge, overlooking the streets, and the vista opened up: spires, stone cathedral-like buildings and wooden ones, a ship someone had brought into the depths intact, with its mast rising clean and straight. Here and there, there were little pinpricks of light, evidence of oil lamps or late-night conversations.

            James was surprised to find he recognized some of the buildings. There was the human quarter, with the sailor’s pub where he had searched for Bates, and the Pearl Quarter on the opposite side. Starling’s house was invisible, hiding its face in the way Starling himself sometimes did. Then there was the ornate sprawl of Parliament, and the neat and cozy streets where the engineers often lived.

            When he first saw it, the Abyssal Kingdom had been beautiful. Now there was a tiny, imperceptible shift in his vision, and it became a place he could love. He saw, in the strange opal-colored streets and their soft internal light, a way he could have lived there for the rest of his life.

            Starling saw the look on his face and caught the shape of his thoughts while completely missing the direction. “If you wanted to go back to the surface,” he said gravely, “I would help you.”

            James startled. “What?”

            “It wouldn’t be strictly legal, and we’d have to be very careful about it, but it could be done.” He swallowed. “Carol would miss you. But she’s still young.”

            “You would do that?”

            “If you asked it of me,” Starling said, staring out over the sleeping city, “yes, I would.”

            James was reminded suddenly of the story of the mouse and the lion, where the mouse removes a thorn from the lion’s paw. It was that sort of fairy-tale gratitude: the unknowable power, indebted by some ancient law of honor to the kind little creature. Out of a long litany of impossible things, it was probably the last thing he wanted from Starling.

            “I had hoped I’d made myself useful to you,” James said.

            “What?” Starling said irritably.

            “I’d hoped I—you said, on the first day, that anyone might have a place here who made himself useful. I hoped I’d made myself useful to you.”

            “You are the last person in the world who needs to make himself useful to me.”

            James looked over at him. He had his face turned away. It was, he realized, an endearingly childish gesture in someone whose language was mostly visual, as if he had put his hands over his ears.

            “What do you mean?” James said.

            “Everything I’ve done has been because of you.” It wasn’t accusatory or resentful. It had the tone of a thought flensed down to its simplest, truest form. “I became a spy on the surface because I hoped to see you again. Then you started leaving books for me, and I wrote back because I had never been happier.”

            “I thought you were just bored and passing the time.”

            A self-deprecating laugh. “Not quite.”

            “And when you signed on to the Illustrious…”

            “That was just the mission. I didn’t know you would be on board. I am actually a decent doctor, in theory at least, that part wasn’t a lie.” He was still turned half-away, as though if he didn’t look, James’s response wouldn’t exist. “I didn’t mean to drag you into it, I promise. But I really was glad to see you.”

            “I want to stay,” James said.

            “If you’re only saying that out of pity for me…”

            “For one thing, do you really think I would do that to Carol?”

            “No, I suppose not.” Starling sounded brisk, much more like himself, but it had a horrible heartiness that belied how much effort it was taking him. James realized with a dawning incredulous horror that he was about to pretend the whole conversation had never happened. “In that case, we had better head back. I’ll help you start looking for a new place to live—”

            He broke off, because James had grabbed his shoulder and swung him around so that he could see his face. It had a jumbled mix of emotions written on it. His eyes settled on James with a sort of helpless, tender warmth. Someone else would have been crying, but he wasn’t. It was all happening internally, like a storm in a bottle.

            “Kit, please, I don’t think you understand,” he said.

            Starling tilted his head, waiting for him to explain it. James leaned in and kissed him.

            His mouth was cool and soft, roughly the temperature of the air. He went so still that for an instant James was certain he had misinterpreted something badly. He pulled away slightly. Starling didn’t seem to be breathing.

            Then he inhaled sharply and said, “James,” and kissed him back, much harder.

            After some time, James pushed him away and said, “Not that—I’m very happy, but, ah. I don’t think we should be doing this on—” He had forgotten where they were and had to look around. “The stone slope above the Pearl Quarter.”

            “Really? It’s a time-honored kraken tradition,” Starling said. He was playing with a strand of James’s hair.

            James snorted, and then dissolved into helpless laughter. “You really took me to, what, a famous romantic spot for discreet trysts to tell me you were willing to commit terrible crimes in order to never see me again?”

            “I beg your pardon, I was being considerate of your feelings—” Starling was laughing too. “Apparently my subconscious knew something I didn’t. And anyway, I stand by it, it has a good view.”

            “Right, because that’s what you want when you’re saying goodbye to someone forever, a good view…”

            Starling poked him. “Bastard.”

            “No, no, thank you for thinking of my aesthetic sensibilities.”

            “It turned out well, didn’t it? It’ll be a really fantastic story to tell Carol someday when she gets older.”

            James wasn’t aware that they would be able to tell Carol. “Will it?”

            “It will,” Starling said firmly. Then, more hesitantly, “Shall we go home?”

            “Please.”

            Starling helped him up, brushed him off, and delicately fixed his collar. He was surprisingly strong. He tucked himself under James’s arm, leaning hard against his side.

            “I really think everything will work out,” James said, with a sort of delighted wonder.

            “Oh?”

            “Well, maybe not everything. But I’ll do the dishes if you cook.”

            “Carol will learn English first, I think. She’ll be frustrated in school, but when she’s older and fluent in both, she’ll thank us.”

            “I’ll learn to recognize words that have nothing to do with engineering eventually,” James said. “I’ll translate your poetry.”

            “You do realize some of it is about you,” Starling said.

            He hadn’t. “Really?”

            “In a way, you helped build my career.”

            James laughed, bright and easy. “I hope you’re properly grateful.”

            They had reached the door. A sense of home spilled out from inside, new and somehow still familiar.

            “Come inside,” Starling said, “and I’ll show you.”