Thistle in the Sky | #NONC2022 | ✔

Chapter Eight

The morning's argument left the ship's crew tense and largely unwilling to speak to one another. Fully aware that she'd helped start the tension, Farah took the moment to bask in the quiet that being on the crew's good side for once brought her. Kaz found her in the mess hall, stretched out sideways over an armchair with a book on her lap. Baskoro always kept a few on the shelves. He brushed it off as being for the crew's entertainment, but it was more of a strategic move, to ease the anxieties of quieter bookworms and give others something to pick up when they were restless, bored, and looking for trouble.

The book Farah had now was an atlas: a compilation of maps of all shapes and scales, printed on paper that made them look hand-drawn even though they were probably printed. She could spend hours flipping back and forth between them, comparing, contrasting, and looking for overlaps. Sometimes she would delve into one and try to read the labels. Most made no sense. They were almost all names, written in innumerable languages, and Farah had never properly learned to read. Few people in the outer city did. Now and again, though, her rudimentary skills and the familiarity of a name would align to identify a location. Just weeks before, she had found the tiny corner of the outer city where she and Kaz had been born. She visited it every time she pulled out the atlas now.

This time was no exception. Farah found the page and traced a finger down it to the spot she now knew by heart. It lay between self-declared townships, nestled in the curve of the outer city's outer wall like she and her brother had been in the curve of the temple steps where they'd been found. On the map, it was only a pinky finger's width from the coastline. Farah had never been able to calculate that distance. She and Kaz had moved around the ring of the outer city when Farah's ability manifested, and she had never come back to visit. Not that she wanted to. It was safer on a map.

"Find anything new?"

Farah snapped the book shut on reflex. Kaz was leaning over the back of her chair, eyes inquisitive and hair ruffled from standing somewhere the wind blew. He patted Farah's knees, which were draped over the chair's left arm. Farah withdrew them reluctantly. Kaz hopped over the chair-back and plopped down beside her. Neither of them fit comfortably, but he compensated by sitting properly instead of sideways, letting Farah stretch her legs out over top of his again.

Kaz hooked a finger into the atlas page Farah had bookmarked and tugged it open again. His mouth parted in a small "Oh!" at the complexity of the map. Farah passed it to him with a sigh. Kaz could read better than she could. She had many memories of him hunched under any light he could find late into the night, with any piece of writing, poring over it until the letters and words began to make sense. For all her scolding about how much they spent on candles, Farah had collected written materials for him whenever she scrounged for food in the streets and alleys. She'd come home with faded job ads, paper signs swiped from shopfront windows, and the occasional grand prize: a newspaper. Rare in a part of the city where the rich turned up their noses and few people saw survival value in learning to read.

Kaz tapped the page furiously. "Fafa, that's the old fish market! Black Squall square. Do you remember it?"

How could she forget? Farah leaned over to see. She immediately recognized the not-square shape of the square, a sprawling octopus of widened roads and open spaces packed with vendors on blankets or squashed into stalls. She'd spent whole days there. Carrying goods for pay, scrounging and bartering for scraps, collecting information. It took scarcely a memory to bring back the intense odor of the marketplace: a smell so strong, it hit her like a wall in the face when she first arrived. By the end of the day, she had always acclimatized, but by then, her clothes reeked of it. Even with a wash in the river wouldn't disperse the smell for days.

"And there's the marble temple." Kaz had found in moments what she'd taken weeks to track down. His eyes were alight as he shifted in his seat, completely engrossed in the map. Farah watched him instead. Kaz was easy to please, but it still wasn't often that she saw him this enthralled. She wanted to hold onto it. He deserved this far more than what life dealt them both.