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The sky is tearing itself in half.
Black clouds convulse overhead, stitched through with veins of blue lightning, and the sea heaves below them like something alive. Salt spray lashes at their faces. Wind howls like a dying animal. But Esquie, massive and sure beneath them, surges forward through the waves—his broad back rising and falling with every mountainous swell.
Maelle doesn’t notice any of it.
Not the salt burning her nose. Not the wind clawing at her ears. Not the rain needling her skin.
All she can think about is the taste in her mouth.
Iron. Salt. Sour.
His blood.
It’s still on her tongue. In her teeth. Caught beneath her nails and streaked across her face.
She had felt it splatter. It happened so fast. One second Gustave was there, right in front of her, joking about the rock he found.
And then, the next second—
Splash.
Heat. Burning heat. All over her face. All over her.
Her nose. Her eyes. Her ears. Her mouth. It got everywhere. Every crack, every crevice of her being.
Painting her soul.
She looks down at her hands, gripping so tightly to Esquie’s back. They’re covered, too. Red. She keeps thinking, These aren’t my hands. They can’t be.
But they are.
Because she remembers how she had thrown herself down next to him and tried to stuff his insides back in, tried to hold him close with her stupid hands, like if she just pushed hard enough the hole in him would stop being a hole.
But his guts just kept trying to come out. They were poking through the gaping wound in his torso like earthworms peeking out from mud, glistening and pearlescent and a stark pinkish color against his dark uniform.
Those were hotter than the blood. Burning hot against her palms but also so soft. Squishy. Wet.
She wants to tear her skin off. She wants to pluck out the nerves in her hands one by one, like she’s pulling out loose threads on her favorite shirt, then unravel the flesh until there’s only bone because bone doesn’t feel. Not like how living tissue can feel.
And she wants to cut off her tongue. When her fingers are jagged daggers of bone, she wants to sink them into her tongue, reaching all the way to the back of her throat until she’s gagging on them, and rip it out. Wash away the taste of Gustave’s blood with a flood of her own.
But that’ll take too much time. Too much skin to unwrap and too many nerves to unwind.
She needs it out now, though. Now now now.
She gathers up some of the rainwater and saltwater that has accumulated on Esquie’s back, not really caring about how unhygenic it may be, and cups it to her mouth. It stings, salferious and hateful, and it burns a line of fire going down, but she laps it like a dog.
It doesn’t help.
She can still taste the blood.
She needs something more. Something stronger.
So, she lifts a hand and shoves her fingers into her mouth. Her nails scratch the back of her throat, but she doesn’t stop.
Her gag reflex is prodded hard. Her diaphragm lurches in her chest, and she lurches with it. Heat blooms in the bottom of her neck, and something boiling hot and acidic bubbles up around her reaching fingers before it erupts out. It pours free like lava, gushing from her nose, and lands in a messy splatter.
“Maelle?!” she hears someone, Sciel, she thinks, shout in alarm.
She doesn’t stop. She tries to press her hand deeper, further, and more vomit comes up. She keeps doing this until she can’t breathe, and even when she can’t breathe, she doesn’t actually cease this brutal action until she’s choking.
Her arm yanks back. One hand is covered in sickness. The other is covered in death.
She can still taste it.
Her eye twitches.
She can still taste it.
The scalding deluge of her vomit coats her mouth like oil paint, sharp and acidic and bitter…but beneath it, it’s still there. The taste of copper. The taste of rust. The taste of everything she’s ever loved leaving in a flash of white.
“It’s still there,” she rasps. The words are heavy and bile-thick. They drip in a pendulum from her lips.
“What?” she hears Sciel’s voice say. She’s kneeling at Maelle’s side, but Maelle doesn’t remember when she got there. She didn’t even realize that Sciel has had her hand on her back or her hair pulled out of her face this whole time. “What did you say, honey?”
“It’s still there,” Maelle repeats. Same inflection. Same tone.
“What is?” Sciel asks.
Something twinges in her chest.
And then cracks.
If rainwater doesn’t help, and saltwater doesn’t help, and bile doesn’t help, then she needs to try something else.
She needs to fight fire with fire.
“IT’S STILL THERE!”
The sound she produces is no different than a banshee shriek, high and shrill. Her whole body jerks with it, and her hands fly back up to her face, bile and blood mixing together as she claws at her tongue. Her fingernails rake against her teeth, her throat, trying to dig the taste out, to scratch it loose, like maybe if she rips enough skin away she’ll stop tasting it.
“Oh, god— Maelle, stop!” Sciel grabs her hands before she draws more blood from herself, but Maelle thrashes, screaming. “Shhh, stop, you’re okay, it’s okay, I’ve got you—”
“It’s still there!” she howls, but it comes out raw and cracked and half-malformed. “It’s still there! I need it out!” She doubles over and gags again. Her lungs heave against her ribs until they’re bruising, and her stomach convulses so violently it feels like it’s about to rip free from the peritoneum and splatter out of her skin.
Another torrent of vomit is expelled. When her eyes sting, she wonders, briefly, if it had someone managed to come out of there, too, but then she realizes those are tears.
Lune scrambles over, slips once on Esquie’s back. “Sciel—what’s wrong—?”
“She’s hurting herself,” Sciel says urgently. She’s holding Maelle steady, but Maelle is a caged animal, fighting against her grip. She jerks sideways, and Sciel struggles to keep them both from being flung into the unruly black ocean beneath them.
“I TASTED HIM!” Maelle shrieks. “I TASTED HIM, HE DIED ON ME!”
And then. she’s sobbing, all at once, ugly and loud and shaking so hard she nearly breaks her sternum. Sciel yanks her into her lap, cradling her like a child, like she’s small again, like maybe if she’s held tightly enough she’ll stop falling apart. Lune is behind her, one hand on Sciel’s shoulder, making sure she doesn’t slip.
“I didn’t save him,” Maelle wheezes. “I was right there— I was right there—”
“I know, sweetie,” Sciel says, rocking her. “I know, I know. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I could’ve— if I moved faster, I could’ve—”
“No.” Sciel grabs her chin, forces her to look. “Look at me, Maelle. You are not the reason he died.”
“I have his blood in my mouth,” Maelle whispers.
She starts shaking again. So much she can’t stop. Her eyes roll back for a second, and Lune curses, fingers on her pulse.
“She’s going into shock,” Lune snaps. “We need to— fuck, I don’t know! We need to calm her down, she needs to breathe—”
“I’m trying,” Sciel says, and Maelle hears a small tremor in her voice.
Maelle keeps repeating it.
“I have his blood in my mouth. I have his blood in my mouth. I have his blood in my mouth.”
Sciel wraps her up tighter in her arms, pulling Maelle close, pressing her lips to her hairline like it’ll keep the world from falling in. Lune swears again and starts rummaging through what little they have left in their supplies. The storm cracks overhead like a judgment.
And she can still taste it.
Eventually, numbness settles in. Maelle’s breathing evens out slightly. Not asleep—but not entirely conscious, either. That shaky, miserable in-between.
Her eyes lift. She looks at Sciel, who has yet to let her go, like she’s seeing her for the first time. Like she’s made of smoke.
“Where did he go?”
Sciel’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Her lip trembles.
Maelle turns to Lune. “Where did he go?”
Lune’s shoulders quake. She covers her mouth with one hand. The other reaches out, almost without thinking, and rests gently on Maelle’s knee.
“I don’t know,” she whispers. “I hope…somewhere kind.”
Maelle’s head lolls back against Sciel’s chest. Esquie dips slightly under a wave, rising again with the motion of a great, ancient whale.
The wind pulls at Maelle’s hair. The ocean glitters.
She can still taste Gustave’s blood in her mouth.
“I was kind.”