Tropical Paradise Saga
Arc XVII: The Siren Reef
Chapter XIX: Baby Sushi and Other Catastrophes
The warriors boarded the Bubbly at dawn, moving with the organized efficiency of people who had decided something and were not interested in debate.
Cherry Cherry Lady came first, her spear across her back, her expression communicating that she was doing this as a strategic necessity and had not, in any way, softened since the previous week. Baby Boo Boo followed, cheerful and carrying enough weapons for three people. Baby Honey after her, the heart-shaped battle-axe resting across her shoulder with the ease of long familiarity. Baby Sunshine last, a map already in her hands, eyes scanning the Bubbly's rigging with professional assessment.
Jesper, sitting on the deck with a cup of something warm, looked at all four of them, looked at the space they were taking up on his ship, and said:
"No."
Cherry Cherry Lady looked at him. "What?"
"Absolutely not."
"We're helping."
"Get off."
"We have knowledge of the Siren Reef. You don't. You'll be dead within a day without us."
"I'd prefer death," Jesper said.
"Jesper," Jens said, from behind him, with the specific tone he used when Jesper was being difficult in a way that was going to cause problems for everyone, "be nice."
"I am being extremely clear, which is its own form of kindness—"
Jens scooped him up.
Not gently, not with ceremony, simply gathered him off the deck with one arm around his back and one under his knees, stood up, and turned to Cherry Cherry Lady with the unruffled expression of a man who had resolved the more chaotic element of the equation.
"Welcome aboard," Jens said.
"PUT ME DOWN," Jesper said, from where he was being carried.
"No," Jens said, "you'll be rude to them."
"I AM ALWAYS RUDE—"
"More rude."
"JE—"
"Tell them about the reef," Jens said to Cherry Cherry Lady, entirely over Jesper's continued objections, and walked them both belowdecks, where the objections became muffled and then, after a few minutes, stopped.
The Love Island warriors settled onto the Bubbly with varying degrees of grace, and the voyage began.
I. Three Romances, in Order of Comedic Severity
Baby Honey and Milos — Least Aware
It started, as most things involving Milos started, with him simply being himself and having no idea what effect this was having on anyone.
Baby Honey had fought beside him during the Blacktide invasion and had formed, in the chaos, the specific kind of regard that developed when you watched someone throw themselves into danger with absolute, uncomplicated joy and come out the other side grinning. She had followed this regard onto the Bubbly without fully examining it, which was, in retrospect, a strategic error.
"Do you think I'm beautiful?" she asked him, on the second day, the question carrying the particular directness of someone who had decided that subtlety was inefficient.
"Obviously," Milos said, without looking up from the rope he was coiling.
She felt something very warm in her chest.
"Probably top ten," he added.
The warmth intensified.
"Anyway," Milos said, finished with the rope, and left.
She stared at the space where he'd been standing.
"Baby Sunshine," she said, when she found her later, "what does 'top ten' mean?"
"It means he thinks you're one of the ten most beautiful people he's encountered."
Baby Honey's expression went briefly, deeply complicated. "Is that a compliment?"
"It depends entirely on how many beautiful people he's met."
Over the following days, she tried every approach available to her — directness, proximity, complimenting his fighting, asking for his opinion on things, asking him to help with tasks that didn't require help, sitting near him at meals.
Milos, receiving all of this, felt warmly toward her.
"I enjoy spending time with you," she said, on day four, as clear as she could make it.
"Same bro," Milos said, and went to find something to hit.
She looked at Baby Boo Boo.
"'Bro,'" she said.
"Yes," Baby Boo Boo said.
"He said 'bro.'"
"Yes."
"To me."
"Yes."
"He's impossible," Baby Honey said.
"He's also watching you from the stern right now," Baby Boo Boo noted.
Baby Honey turned. Milos was, in fact, watching her, with the open, uncomplicated admiration he brought to beautiful sunsets and good weapons and things that were simply worth looking at.
Then he noticed her noticing and waved.
Like a friend.
She turned back, jaw tight. "I might actually kill him."
"That won't help," Baby Boo Boo said.
Baby Boo Boo and Sven — Simplest, Therefore Most Devastating
The problem with falling for Sven was that he treated you like a person, which turned out to be a uniquely destabilizing experience for someone who had spent their entire life being treated, primarily, as a warrior and an asset and a carrier of weapons.
"Why are you always helping people?" Baby Boo Boo asked him, on the third morning, watching him help a sailor from the Love Island contingent untangle a rope that had become unnecessarily complicated.
"Because they need help," Sven said, simply.
She stood with this for a moment.
"That's the whole reason?"
"Yes."
"You don't want anything in return?"
"No."
"That's not—" She stopped. "That's not how it usually works."
"Doesn't mean it can't," Sven said, with the uncomplicated warmth he extended to everyone, Bjarni arriving at his heel and sitting down with a thump, looking up at Baby Boo Boo with the same uncomplicated energy.
Baby Boo Boo looked at the dog.
"Oh no," she said, which was the moment she understood what was happening to her, without being able to do anything about it.
Sven noticed, gently and with no drama, that Baby Boo Boo seemed quieter than the others, that she moved with a carefulness that suggested she was more comfortable as backup than as the person others paid attention to, and he did what Sven did with everyone he noticed: he paid attention.
He asked about her specifically, not her rank or her fighting or her connection to Cherry Cherry Lady's force, but about her — what she liked, what she found difficult, what made the job worth doing.
She answered, each time, with slightly more than she'd intended.
"You're dangerous," she told him, one evening, Bjarni asleep across both their feet.
"I'm really not," Sven said.
"You make people feel like they matter," she said. "That's the most dangerous thing there is."
Sven looked at her for a moment with the straightforward, genuine kindness that was simply his factory setting.
"You matter," he said, because it was true and needed saying.
Baby Boo Boo looked out at the sea for a long time after that.
Bjarni, sensing emotional significance, licked her hand.
Baby Sunshine and Yuki — Most Catastrophic
The situation with Yuki began on day one and deteriorated from there with a consistency that would have been impressive under different circumstances.
"Hello," Baby Sunshine said, on the first morning, professional and pleasant, approaching the quiet figure she'd correctly identified as the one most worth understanding.
"Hello Baby Sushi," Yuki said.
She paused.
"...it's Sunshine."
"Yes," Yuki said.
A beat.
"Baby Sushi," he said again, with the serenity of a man who had processed this information and filed it correctly.
She had spent years cultivating an image — composed, elegant, the strategist, the general who planned military campaigns and emotional damage with equal precision. The plan had never included being called Baby Sushi by an inscrutable easterner who appeared entirely unaware of the effect he was having and would have been untroubled by it even if he had been aware.
"Good morning Baby Sushi," Yuki said, the next day.
"It's Sunshine."
"Yes."
"Say it. Sun-shine."
"Mm," Yuki said, which was agreement in some dimension that she couldn't locate.
"Baby. Sunshine," she enunciated.
"Yes," Yuki said. "Hello Baby Sushi."
She looked at him for a very long moment.
"Are you doing this on purpose?"
Yuki considered this with his usual careful attention.
"Not sure," he said, which was a more honest answer than most people would have offered, and which therefore made it impossible to be properly angry about.
Three weeks later, the situation had not improved.
"Beautiful weather today, Baby Sushi."
"It's Sunshine. I have told you every single day."
"Yes. The weather is nice, Baby Sushi."
"I hate you."
"Tea?" Yuki offered, producing a cup from somewhere, with the serene domesticity of someone who lived in a world where none of this was a problem.
She took the tea.
She drank the tea.
She was furious about how good the tea was.
II. Jens and the Carrying Problem
Jesper, three weeks into his recovery, was objectively, medically, demonstrably fine.
His fever had broken. The mouth sores had healed. His appetite had returned, which Jens had greeted with a relief so visible that it was frankly embarrassing for everyone present. He could walk without assistance. He could climb rigging. He had, on two separate occasions, demonstrated this by simply doing it before Jens could intervene.
None of this had materially changed anything.
The carrying had started during the illness as a practical necessity, and had then, through some process that operated entirely below conscious decision-making, simply... continued. Not in every moment — Jesper walked, ate, navigated, argued, did everything a healthy person did — but in the specific category of moments where the ship moved unexpectedly, or where something required crossing a distance quickly, or where Jens happened to be within arm's reach and Jesper happened to be within reach of being carried, the transition occurred with the natural inevitability of water finding the lowest point.
The ship trembled, slightly, crossing a wave. Jesper lost his balance, briefly, caught himself immediately on the rail.
Jens had him in the air before Jesper had finished catching himself.
"I'm fine," Jesper said, to the sky, which was his new primary conversational partner in these moments.
"You almost fell," Jens said.
"I caught myself."
"Before or after I got there?"
"We can't prove the timeline."
"You were listing."
"I was adjusting."
"Put your feet down if you want to be put down."
"I want to be put down."
"You're not putting your feet down."
"..."
"Jesper."
"The deck might be wet."
"It's not."
"It might become wet."
Jens walked them both belowdecks, Jesper in his arms, and Jesper did not actually put his feet down until they reached the table, at which point he sat with the studied composure of a man pretending the previous two minutes hadn't occurred.
Cherry Cherry Lady, who had witnessed the entire exchange from the stern, turned to Baby Boo Boo.
"Does he do that often?"
"Constantly," Baby Boo Boo confirmed.
"Can't he—"
"He could. He doesn't."
Cherry Cherry Lady frowned. "You can put him down," she said to Jens, later that afternoon, when she caught another instance.
"I know," Jens said.
"Then why don't you?"
Jens looked down at Jesper, who was tucked against his side being carried across the deck because the crossing was somewhat unsteady due to wind, and who had his arms loosely around Jens's neck in the way he did when he'd decided that fighting it was more effort than accepting it, his head tilted slightly toward Jens's shoulder, eyes half-closed, the sun on his newly-short hair, looking, despite everything — the rash now faded, the fever long gone, the color back in his face — still somehow a little fragile in the specific way that certain people who had been very sick recently sometimes looked in unguarded moments.
"Why would I," Jens said.
It was a genuine question. Not rhetorical. He genuinely didn't see the problem.
Cherry Cherry Lady made a sound that was not quite a gag and not quite a sigh and was somehow both simultaneously, and walked away.
"Marriage propaganda," she muttered, to nobody.
"You keep saying that," Baby Sunshine said, appearing beside her.
"I'll stop saying it when it stops being true."
"Does it bother you?"
Cherry Cherry Lady watched Jens adjust his grip on Jesper, who had apparently said something that made Jens laugh, the sound of it carrying across the deck, and Jesper's expression doing the particular thing it did when he was trying not to smile and was losing the argument with himself.
"No," she said, too fast.
"Oh," Baby Sunshine said.
"SHUT UP, BABY SUNSHINE."
"Yes commander."
III. The Fog
It came in late afternoon, three days before they expected the reef.
It should have been earlier warning. The ocean went calm first — not calm like good weather, calm like something had made a decision about what the water was allowed to do. No birds anywhere on the horizon, though there should have been, this close to reef waters. The color of the sea shifted, subtly, from the turquoise they'd been sailing through to something more muted, more uncertain, a grey-green that sat wrong.
Jesper noticed the birds first, or the absence of them. He stood at the prow, looking at the horizon, and said nothing, because he was still working out what was wrong.
Then the mist arrived.
Pink, soft, glowing faintly at its edges — not the cold grey of ordinary sea-fog, not the supernatural wrongness of Mordrek's mist or the Seven Desires cloud, but something in between, something that felt almost natural and wasn't, the distinction sitting in the back of the mind rather than the front.
"What's that," Sven said, looking at the pink haze spreading across the water ahead.
"Shallows Current," Cherry Cherry Lady said, from the stern, her voice flat and professional. "We're close. Get ready."
"Ready for what," Milos said, with genuine enthusiasm.
"Whatever it—"
Someone started humming.
It was barely audible, a single voice, thin and beautiful, coming from no direction anyone could pin precisely, the sound emerging from the fog itself as though the mist had decided to be musical.
Jesper looked around.
Sam was smiling.
Not the sharp, calculating smile Sam wore when a negotiation was going well, or the private, reluctant smile he wore when Tijjani said something genuinely funny. This was softer. Distant. The smile of a man listening to something good.
Tijjani had stopped doing whatever he was doing — tallying something, probably, he was always tallying something — and was staring at the horizon with both hands still, his expression the expression of a man being shown something he wanted very badly.
Sven's weapon — he'd been holding a rope, about to secure it — had simply been placed, carefully, on the deck. He was looking at nothing.
Milos had stopped talking.
This was, of all the warning signs, the most immediately alarming.
Milos did not stop talking. Milos stopped talking under approximately three circumstances: when he was unconscious, when he was in combat, and when something had gone seriously wrong in a way that required his specific kind of silence. He was not unconscious and there was not yet combat.
"Guys," Jesper said.
Nobody responded.
Yuki, always watchful, always the last to lose himself to anything — stood very still, his expression doing something Jesper had never seen on it before, something private and far away, his eyes fixed on a point that was not the fog, not the reef, something much further than any of that.
Jens had stopped rowing.
His hands were still on the oars, the grip unchanged, the position right, and yet the oars weren't moving, because he had stopped somewhere behind his eyes, the vast reliable engine of him simply stilling, and his expression was the expression Jesper had seen only once, by a dying fire in England, the stripped-honest one.
"Jens," Jesper said.
Nothing.
He looked over the rail.
Three of the male crew members were walking toward the ship's edge. Not hurriedly. Not dramatically. With the gentle, unhurried certainty of people following a direction they'd decided was correct.
Sven was three feet from the water.
Milos was two.
"MILOS," Jesper said, grabbing his arm.
Milos turned, the movement dreamy and slow, eyes unfocused. He looked at Jesper with the pleasant confusion of someone interrupted mid-dream.
Jesper, immediately, looked at Cherry Cherry Lady.
"Why are you not—" he started.
"Women are immune," she said, already moving, already catching Baby Boo Boo's eye, already organizing a response. "The song only affects men."
"I'm not—" Jesper began.
"Because you're—"
"Gay," Jesper said. "Yes. Apparently this is my superpower. Great. Excellent use of the gift."
He went to Jens first.
Because, despite everything, always Jens first, not out of preference exactly but out of the specific calculus that Jens, not moving, with that particular expression, in close proximity to a ship's edge, was the most immediate problem.
He put both hands on Jens's face.
Jens's eyes were open but not seeing, whatever the song was giving him somewhere very far inside that was not here, not the ship, not Jesper's hands on his face.
"Jens," Jesper said, firmly, and then, because firm wasn't working: "HEY."
He snapped his fingers directly in front of Jens's eyes.
Nothing.
Jesper grabbed his chin. Turned his head. "JENS ODGAARD."
Jens blinked.
Once.
Slowly.
The eyes cleared, the way eyes cleared when a fever broke or a sleep ended, the presence coming back into them in stages.
"What," Jens said, his voice strange.
"There's a song. It's making you walk into the sea. Don't."
Jens, recovering his full faculties, looked around at the crew — some being physically restrained by the Love Island warriors, some already being reoriented by Cherry Cherry Lady's excellent organizational instincts — and at the glowing pink mist, and said, with the flat certainty of a man who had looked at threats of many kinds: "Ears."
"We need to block—"
"Ears. Stuff them. Now."
He was already producing cloth from his kit, and Jesper, turning to help distribute it to the returning crew members, caught, just briefly, a glimpse of what Jens's face had looked like a moment ago, in the fog, listening to something nobody else could hear.
Not battle. Not glory.
He didn't ask.
He handed Jens the cloth and went to find more.
IV. What Each of Them Heard
The song wasn't one song. That was what made it terrible.
Sam heard a room where everyone listened to him — not the polite, calculating attention of people assessing him as an asset, but genuine, complete interest. Every idea immediately understood. Every strategy immediately valued. No Tijjani to finish his thoughts. No Jens to look past him. No father handing him a chest of silver at a dock because he couldn't understand that the silver wasn't the point. Just Sam, and people who understood why Sam mattered.
He had been six feet from the water's edge before the cloth went in his ears and the world came crashing back in its ordinary, unmanipulated form, and he sat down on the deck and breathed carefully for a long time after.
"It wasn't even a real thing," he said, to Tijjani, later.
"No," Tijjani said.
"It knew what I wanted."
"Yes."
"That's—"
"Terrifying," Tijjani agreed. "I heard certainty. No second-guessing. No moment where I almost trusted the wrong person. No hesitation in the council hall."
Sam looked at him. Tijjani looked back.
"It gave us the versions of ourselves we were afraid we couldn't be," Tijjani said, quietly.
"And we walked toward them like idiots."
"Yes. We did."
Sven heard everyone safe. Not just the crew — everyone. A world where nobody was suffering, nobody needed help, nobody was hungry or afraid or alone, and the specific weight he'd carried since leaving Frisia, the weight of knowing that somewhere, always, someone needed something he might be able to provide — was simply gone. Just gone. The world, complete and healed, and Sven in it, resting.
He didn't say what he'd heard, when the cloth went in and the dream fell apart. He just sat with Bjarni for a long time and breathed.
Milos heard no disappointment.
Not glory. Not endless battle. Not the berserker dream. Just — walking into a room and seeing nobody's eyes flicker toward the nearest breakable thing. Nobody stepping slightly sideways to put some valuable at a safer distance. Nobody's expression doing the small, involuntary preemptive sigh.
Just a room where he walked in and people were simply glad he'd arrived.
He was the angriest, afterward, when the cloth went in — not at the song, but at himself, at how fast and how completely he'd gone toward it.
Yuki heard home.
The Land of the Rising Sun. His family. His childhood. The place he never talked about, never named, never even hinted at, the origin that Vanilla had clocked as unidentifiable and that he himself, according to what he'd told the crew, perhaps could not entirely account for.
He was the last to come back, the furthest gone, and the look on his face when Jesper physically turned his body away from the water and pushed cloth into his ears was the most unguarded thing the crew had ever seen from him.
He was crying.
Just slightly. Very quietly. Completely, he thought, invisibly.
Jesper, who was in the business of not noticing things people wanted unnoticed, put a hand on his shoulder, briefly, and moved on without comment.
The song had shown Jens a future. Not battle. Not the Son of Odin, not the legend, not the enormous man breaking things accidentally in small spaces. A home, somewhere, the kind he had never quite been able to picture — the farm he'd outgrown at twelve, the city he'd never found, a place that fit him — and in it, Jesper. Not sick. Not recovered. Just there, ordinary, permanent, arguing about something, looking up when Jens came in.
He sat at the rudder after his ears were blocked, looking at the actual, present, recovered Jesper now directing the crew with brisk, authoritative gestures now that their hearing was gone, and thought about the song, and about what it had given him, and about whether wanting that thing made him weak or just human or possibly both simultaneously.
He didn't have a conclusion before the reef appeared.
V. The Siren Reef
With ears blocked, the world went strange in a different way — the roar of combat blunted, the crack of weapons muffled, everyone operating in the pressed-cotton quiet of people who couldn't hear each other and were managing on gesture, expression, and the particular shorthand of a crew that had spent enough time together to communicate without words.
The reef itself was enormous — a vast shallow expanse of luminous rock and water, glowing in the pink mist, beautiful in the specific way that dangerous things sometimes were, the way deep water was beautiful from above.
The Sirens emerged from it like something between sea-creatures and memory — beautiful, silver-voiced, their sound entirely lost now behind cloth and wax, their power reduced to the simple, manageable problem of physical threat and numbers.
Sam and Tijjani, operating side by side as they had since Frosty Whimsy — since before that, since the first moment they'd sat next to each other at a feast and talked until dawn without noticing — moved through the opening exchange of the battle with something they hadn't previously possessed in quite this form.
Sam had learned, in a mountain canyon in eternal winter, to hit things. He had not fully believed the lesson until this moment, when a Siren captain came at him and he caught the attack, redirected it, and punched the creature through a mast with the complete, stunned surprise of a man discovering, in real time, that he had actually become someone capable of punching things through masts.
He stood there for a moment afterward.
Sam: ...did I do that?
He had done that.
Tijjani, two seconds later, dismantled three separate opponents with a precision that moved through them like math — cold, efficient, inevitable, the way his mind had always worked applied now to a body that had, finally, the strength to execute what the mind designed. The Sirens nearest him adjusted their approach, and then adjusted it again, and then stopped underestimating him, which was the significant change.
They stopped underestimating him very quickly.
Jens, operating the way Jens always operated in serious combat — absolute, controlled, the Thunder Axe finding every significant threat and addressing it with the comprehensive finality of someone who was done being complicated about things — stayed within visual range of Jesper for the entirety of the engagement. Not hovering. Not interfering. Simply — close. Where he could see him. Where twenty feet of sea battle was not between them.
Jesper, who had been navigating this particular aspect of being loved for several months now, had stopped finding it annoying at some point he couldn't precisely identify and had started finding it something else, something closer to solid ground, and he did not mention this, and Jens did not mention it either, and between the two of them this represented considerable emotional progress.
Milos and Baby Honey fought together, which was, for Milos, excellent teamwork with a capable partner, and for Baby Honey, the best day she'd had since the Blacktide invasion, and the gap between these two interpretations of the same events was significant enough that even Sven noticed it.
"She's fighting beside him on purpose," Sven said to nobody, or possibly to Baby Boo Boo, who was fighting beside him on purpose.
Baby Boo Boo said nothing, being occupied with two Sirens simultaneously, and then, having addressed both: "Seems so."
"She has feelings for him."
"Yes."
"Does he know?"
Baby Boo Boo looked at Milos, who had just tackled a Siren the way you might tackle an exciting obstacle rather than a mortal threat, while Baby Honey watched with an expression she probably thought was professional appreciation.
"No," Baby Boo Boo said.
Sven sighed.
The Siren Queen arrived in the battle's third phase, surfacing from the reef's center with the terrible grandeur of something ancient and furious and exhausted by decades of the same conflict — enormous, silver, beautiful in a way that made the smaller Sirens look like sketches of the final version, and she looked at all of them: the Love Island warriors, the Bubbly Crew, the ongoing chaos of a battle she had been fighting for generations.
Jesper walked straight up to her.
"You," she said, looking down at this small, irritating, unaffected creature with a rash still fading from his forearms. "You heard nothing."
"Nothing," Jesper confirmed.
"Impossible. The song finds everyone's desire."
"It tried."
"What did it try to give you?"
"I genuinely don't know," Jesper said. "It didn't land. I just heard — music. Pretty music, aimed at someone else. I think the song needs something to grab onto and I'm just not interested in women."
The Siren Queen looked at him with the expression of a creature confronting something outside its entire operational model.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Three hundred years of perfecting that song—"
"And gay men are just — fine," Jesper said, with genuine sympathy. "That's unfortunate. I imagine that's annoying."
"You are insufferable," she said.
"Everybody says that," Jesper said.
"And you never reflect on it."
"Why would I? It's always true."
Behind them, the battle continued in full, noisy, complex, weapons-and-water chaos.
VI. Miss Brownie Arrives
It happened in the middle of the second wave of Sirens, when the crew was spread across the reef's shallows and the battle had become the specific kind of multi-directional chaos that was either very good tactical experience or going to kill several people, and the only way to tell which was surviving it.
A massive hammer fell out of the sky.
This was, as opening moves went, extremely confident.
It hit the water between two Siren groups with an impact that sent a column of spray twenty feet in either direction, and in the subsequent chaos, a figure swung down from above — theatrical, perfectly timed, landing on a coral outcrop with the ease of someone who had clearly rehearsed this entrance and also clearly enjoyed it.
Miss Brownie.
Her outfit was different from Frosty Whimsy — tropical-adapted, practical beneath the drama, the hammer already being retrieved from the water with one hand while she surveyed the battlefield with bright, assessing eyes.
"WHY ARE THEY TARGETING US SPECIFICALLY," Cherry Cherry Lady shouted, at nobody, gesturing at the suddenly-redirected Siren aggression that had, with Miss Brownie's arrival, pivoted toward the Bubbly with new, focused purpose.
"Because we're cursed," Jesper said, from nearby.
"There's a pattern—"
"The pattern is that someone keeps making us their problem—"
Yuki, who had been fighting with the quiet, economical efficiency he brought to everything, looked across the chaos toward the coral outcrop.
Looked at the figure on it.
His face did something.
Not a big something. Yuki's face very rarely did big things. But a something — the particular small shift of recognition encountering surprise encountering a third thing he hadn't expected, and he said, into the battle's noise, to nobody in particular:
"MISS BON BON."
Miss Brownie's head snapped toward him so fast it was almost audible.
"I SWEAR TO GOD—"
"Miss Bon Bon," Yuki said again, with the pure, uncomplicated pleasure of someone who had been waiting to see a familiar face. "No see you long time."
"IT'S BROWNIE," Miss Brownie said, the hammer coming up, the professionalism slamming back into place over something that had, just briefly, been less professional. "MISS BROWNIE. BROWNIE. AS IN THE DESSERT—"
"Miss Bon Bon friend," Yuki said to Jesper, beside him, conversationally.
"NO," Jesper said.
"Miss Bon Bon friend. We fight together in Frosty Whimsy. Very good fighter."
"YUKI SHE IS TRYING TO MURDER US."
"Hmm," Yuki said, considering this new information about his friend's current activities, apparently finding it not entirely incompatible with his characterization of her.
"YUKI—"
"Maybe she have bad day," Yuki offered.
Miss Brownie, whose bad day was now significantly worse for reasons she had not anticipated when she'd accepted this assignment, came off the coral outcrop with her hammer and a very focused expression and found herself, within thirty seconds, in a fight with the entire available portion of the Bubbly Crew that wasn't currently occupied with Sirens.
Which left Yuki.
Who was, despite everything, the person she'd redirected an entire Siren fleet to target, because of feelings she was absolutely not having, and who was now standing on a piece of reef looking at her with the specific expression he wore when he was watching something interesting.
The fight between them was nothing like the one in Frosty Whimsy's canyon. That had been exploratory, investigative, two unknown quantities taking each other's measure. This was something else — both of them at full capacity, both of them knowing more about the other than they had the first time, and the result was considerably faster and considerably more serious and considerably harder to watch from the outside because it was too fast to properly follow.
Baby Sunshine, fighting nearby, was following it.
Closely.
With an expression she would have denied was what it clearly was.
Miss Brownie, in a brief window between exchanges, pointed her hammer directly at Baby Sunshine, the gesture unambiguous.
Baby Sunshine raised her spear back.
Both women held this for a moment.
Yuki, standing between them, looked at Miss Brownie, then at Baby Sunshine, then at Miss Brownie again.
He waved.
At both of them.
With the same wave. The warm, friendly wave of a man who was glad to see people he knew.
Both women's expressions did something that had no polite name.
Milos, passing behind Jesper at a run: "WHAT'S HAPPENING WITH YUKI."
"I have no idea and I am afraid to find out," Jesper said.
VII. The Truth Surfaces
The Siren Queen, by the battle's end — exhausted, defeated, the Bubbly Crew and the Love Island warriors having managed, between them, to turn the reef's own geography against the Siren formations in ways Cherry Cherry Lady had clearly planned for before she'd even boarded the ship — was willing to talk, which was the condition Jesper had been working toward for the last phase of the fight with a specific patience that everyone else had been too busy to notice him applying.
She sat on a coral ledge, ancient and tired and looking, for the first time, like something that could be understood rather than simply feared.
"We didn't choose this," she said.
"I know," Jesper said.
"We never chose any of it. The experiments. The breeding. The song — it wasn't ours, originally. It was designed. We became what they made us."
"Who made you," Cherry Cherry Lady said, sharply, and Jesper held up one hand, which she ignored, and he held it up more firmly, which she — after a moment of visible, principled fury — respected.
"The Norwegian facility," the Siren Queen said. "Project Seasong. They wanted a weapon. Something that could control the sea lanes without ships. They found us and made us into something else. Into this."
Cherry Cherry Lady stood in complete silence for a very long moment.
"Our grandmothers were fighting them," she said, finally.
"For generations," the Siren Queen said. "Neither side understanding that the war itself was built. Designed. Set in motion by people who needed you occupied and needed us useful and needed nobody asking where the Sirens came from."
"Who was paying for the facility," Sam said, from somewhere, his voice doing the thing it did when a financial pattern had clicked into place.
"The funding was obscure," the Siren Queen said. "It always is, with these things. But the name that appeared on the oldest records we found, before we escaped — before we destroyed the facility and ran—"
"What name," Tijjani said.
She looked at them.
"We don't have the name," she said. "We only have the symbol."
She drew it in the air, a gesture her webbed hand made slowly and deliberately.
A cake slice.
The crew was quiet.
"Of course," Sam said, to his own boots, with the weary tone of a man encountering the same villain's fingerprints on the four-hundredth surface.
VIII. Aftermath
Miss Brownie had departed at some point during the Siren Queen's revelation — theatrically, via a rope she'd apparently prepared in advance, swinging back into the fog with her hammer and her excellent dramatic instincts and her complicated feelings about a certain quiet easterner, leaving nothing behind except a very specific kind of absence.
Baby Sunshine, watching the spot she'd been, lowered her spear.
Yuki appeared beside her.
"Miss Bon Bon go," he observed.
"Yes," Baby Sunshine said.
"She is very good fighter."
"Yes," Baby Sunshine said, with considerable less warmth.
"You also very good fighter, Baby Sushi."
Baby Sunshine turned to look at him with an expression assembled from approximately six conflicting things.
"Thank you," she said, finally.
"Yes," Yuki said, with the serene contentment of someone who was entirely satisfied with how this conversation had gone, and went to check on the ship.
Baby Sunshine looked at the space he'd occupied.
She said nothing.
She didn't need to. The expression did all the work.
IX. The Poster
The messenger bird found the Bubbly two days out from the reef, as they sailed back through clearing water toward the open sea, the Love Island warriors preparing to return to their home bearing the truth of a war they'd never chosen and hadn't needed to fight.
Cherry Cherry Lady stood at the Bubbly's stern, watching the horizon, holding one of the bounty scrolls the bird had dropped with the distracted grip of a woman who'd read it twice and was still thinking about it.
"Jesper," she said.
He looked up.
She handed him the scroll.
He unrolled it.
JESPER ERIKSSON KARLSSON. RUNAWAY PRINCE OF SVEALAND. WANTED: ALIVE. BY ORDER OF THE CROWN.
His face did nothing, immediately, which was the response of someone who had spent years learning not to let their face do things in response to information that required careful processing.
"They want you back," Cherry Cherry Lady said.
"Apparently."
"'Alive' suggests someone specific is doing the asking."
"Yes," Jesper said. "It does."
He looked at the poster for another moment. At his own face, rendered by someone who had presumably worked from a description, looking — ethereal, slightly, the way renderings of people often looked when the render tried to capture beauty by making it slightly more than real.
He folded it.
Put it in his pocket.
Went to find Jens, who was at the rudder, and sat beside him without saying anything, and Jens looked at him and then at the pocket where the poster was, and then back at his face, and said nothing either, but reached across and put a hand over his, which was its own kind of answer to every question neither of them was asking.
Far south, cutting through tropical water, a black longship with a storm-crown on its sail moved with the particular, unhurried purpose of something that had already calculated the destination and found it fixed.
Erik Solveigson stood at the prow, the bounty poster in his hand, reading a name he had not forgotten since the tournament, since a cliff in Hedeby, since a year and a half of watching a reputation build into something he'd known, from the beginning, was worth finding.
The poster's rendering was adequate.
He remembered better.
"They're coming north," his first mate said.
"They always come north eventually," Erik said. "Everyone does."
He folded the poster with the careful precision of someone who valued the object it represented.
"We go south first," he said. "Cut the route. We'll be in position before they know we're looking."
"And when we find them?"
Erik looked at the water ahead. At the horizon. At the specific latitude where their paths would eventually, inevitably, intersect.
"I just want to talk," he said, which was either entirely true or entirely false, and he was the only one who knew which.
"Found you," he said, to the poster, and the sea, and the boy on the cliff in Hedeby who had stood with his hair in the wind and looked out at the water with an expression that had always, even then, suggested someone who had already decided that whatever came next was going to be on his own terms.
The storm-crown sail filled with wind.
The longship moved south.