A Pirate's Life for Mei

Master Gunner and the Key

The slapping sound of bare footsteps came from the stairs a couple of rooms over.

A new spike of adrenalin shot through Mei's heart. She cast her gaze around, hardly seeing a thing in the dark of this tiny room but knowing that she was exposed. Frantically, she shuttered the lantern and plunged herself back into utter blackness. She quietly pushed Saxston's remains inside the cage by feel, placed the manacles and leg irons near his ankles and wrists, snatched up the water skin, and then closed the cage door. Then she darted over to the wall next to the room's only door and flattened herself against the wood.

Her heart pounded. Could she jump whoever came in? Could she, sick with heat stroke and exhaustion, actually overcome anyone in a fight? She didn't like the odds. Overcoming Saxston had been luck and the fact that he hadn't been that much stronger than her, being a small man. But she'd seen just how fit and muscled many of the other crew and marines were.

The footsteps came closer. Orange light from a lantern brightened the next room and stretched into hers. It reached further, further. Any farther and it would reveal the cage and the dead man inside of it.

Mei clenched her fist. They'd see it was Saxston in there for sure, and not her. She readied herself for a fight that she was probably going to lose.

The light halted just shy of the cage. Someone rustled in a crate or barrel for something. Then the light flickered and started moving away.

Mei breathed out in relief. Someone had simply come to the storage room to fetch something and was now leaving. She was safe, for the moment. And just like that, her body gave out on her. Her arms and legs trembled and she slid down until she sat with her back to the wall.

"Too much exhaustion and stress and excitement," she whispered, quietly laughing to herself. Breathing hard, she tried to recover herself, for she couldn't stay here for long lest she be discovered. But it was a slow process. She drank from the skin, savouring the warm water.

Mei wasn't a trained soldier. She was no fighter. Not in the military sense, anyway. She'd graduated from university with a degree in journalism, doing half of her years overseas in Vancouver, Canada. Not from a wealthy family at all, she'd paid tuition by working part-time as a fitness coach at the university gym, where her unusual height had been an advantage instead of something people mocked her about, as they had done in grade school. Well, they'd mocked her less. Or behind her back instead of to her face.

Like most tall women, she, of course, had a complex about her height. Other women looked up at her like she was a giant. Men shorter than her often felt inferior next to her and it frequently killed off any chance of becoming romantic partners. People of both genders had a tendency to look up to her as if they were children and her an adult, even when she was the younger one.

She loved to wear heels but rarely did because it made the issue even worse. People commented on her height constantly, as if it was the most important thing about her. And until she'd started into fitness, she'd developed really bad posture from constantly trying to shrink herself down to fit in as an awkward teen.

But years of consciously trying to rise above that complex, and the positive reception that she'd gotten from many fans of her coaching work, had given her a bit of confidence with which to battle her insecurities. Slowly, she'd come to accept her height and, instead of trying to fit in with anyone who came along, she'd sought out the company of others who were more accepting, not that it was easy to find them. She'd slowly gone from a highly insecure and depressed teen to a young woman who loved herself. She'd become stronger by working at it and she was kind of proud of that.

After graduation, she'd gone into a career in the dying field of journalism, struggling hard to get any kind of work at all in a society that demanded their news for free and wanted everything online at a moment's notice, truth and fact increasingly less important than being in an echo chamber where people just wanted to hear what they already thought. It was an era of fake news and instant righteous indignation and less and less one of academic insight and accountability.