Psychic

14. Sea

For the majority of their first day at sea, everyone was in the first floor of the hold. They spent the time choosing their beds and covering them in the thick, heavy blankets and furs stored under the hold.

"Try and finish before the sun goes down," Debra suggested standing in the middle of all the beds. "Once that happens, we'll barely be able to see in here. A lot of the hold lights are out." She poked a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It flickered weakly but never turned on. "I never thought I was going to need them."

Ken walked up to the open hold door, providing the room with the most light, which he was now blocking. He spoke to Debra first, "I think I got that tech shit figured out but you should go check. Make sure I didn't set us to self-destruct or something."

"Okay."

After Debra left, Ken sat on the nearest unclaimed bed and laid back with his hands under his head. "Hey, where were you during the fight?" Lestat asked him.

"Well, I would've helped but you looked like you were doing okay," Ken shrugged.

"Does this look okay to you?" Lestat pointed at his burning red eyes. "I'm still pulling that sticky ass shit out of my hair. Him too." Lestat gestured to Kiyo.

"I'm fine," Kiyo shrugged.

"We didn't pay you in advance so you could stand around and do nothing," Lestat scoffed.

"I wasn't hired to fight," Ken started, "I'm here if you need to get in and out of places. That I can do but don't count on me for backup in a fight. I'm not the one here who moves things with my mind. Anyway, what I came in here to say. That note Kiyo found is in a language called Morrisukan. Naturally, it's from Morrisuke. Should take about a week to get there. The old language is confined to the temples. There'll be a priest who knows it. It's how all their religious text was originally written."

From then on, there was not much of anything for anyone to do. Ken stood in the bridge alone, which he seemed to enjoy, trying to learn the function of all the buttons in the bridge. There was a cabin specifically for the captain, which he and Debra argued over. They came to the conclusion that he would normally sleep in the bridge and only occasionally in the captain's cabin. Kiyo and Lestat were usually at the bow of the ship talking about nothing specifically interesting. They simply enjoyed each other's company. Marlene spent her time in the hold, writing when she could see, in her leather bound journal that she brought with her. Jericho was always standing at the rails of the ship.

Rai seemed consistently uncomfortable. She avoided the railing on the deck and stuck close to the walls, usually keeping a hand pressed against them. She closed her eyes each time the ship moved a little too much for her taste. If Jericho went out to the railing, Rai would bring him back with her telekinesis. Occasionally, Rai would pull some water up from the sea and stare at it in her hands in an effort to desensitize herself to it.

* * *

One night, after they were all in their beds, Rai was laying on her back with Jericho's head resting on her stomach. She was staring straight up at what she assumed was the roof but could just as well have been the floor in the blackness of the hold. She had been in bed for what felt like an hour unable to fall asleep. She turned her head to the side where she knew Debra was. "Hey, Debra..." Rai called her. "Are you asleep?"

"I was," she groaned, turning over. "What?"

"How did you meet Ken?"

Debra groaned loudly, "why?"

"You seem close but at the same time... not."

"We were. Once. I was a stowaway on this ship. I had escaped prison. He found me, took me to his captain, who was Cliff and when I told him I had been in prison for robbing from this famous composer, he made me part of the crew. Ken was my only friend. Everyone else was too old. We did everything together. I helped him plan break-ins and sometimes I was a distraction to help him get into places. We had a plan and person suitable for everything. Nothing could ever go wrong because we had already thought of it. We were good together and when Cliff retired, I convinced the crew to make Ken the new captain even if he was younger than them."

"So, why did you separate when Ken retired?"

"We were already separate by then. He retired because of me. I wanted a home. Anywhere. I didn't care but he was adamant that we didn't need one. I thought that if he loved me, he would want me to be happy. We had the money. We could've done it and he didn't want to. He said that he couldn't understand why I wasn't happy just to be with him. Everything else we spoke about, we were fine. One of us would always compromise somewhere but a house was the only thing we deviated on. I couldn't just be with him. I didn't feel complete like that. One day we were at a port and he just said couldn't do it anymore and he left."

"You were married?"

"I thought it was obvious," Debra scoffed. "Bitchy girl pushing around some easygoing guy and he just takes it. He rarely argues with me but sometimes it's the only way to know your man's a man."

"But you guys seem to get along even though you argue the way you do," Lestat spoke suddenly in the darkness.

"We want different things and neither of us is willing to compromise."

"Why?" Marlene wondered.

"God, is everyone listening? People are who they are. They want what they want. I want a normal life and Ken thinks that's too much to ask. Maybe he just doesn't want to feel stuck with me. Maybe he's just afraid of something different. Either way, I won't be with someone who doesn't care about what I want. I want to have normal marriage problems. I want to argue over irrelevant shit like what school our kids are going to go to."

"It's not like you can't live a normal life on a ship," Kiyo added. "Some of the cargo ships at Port Diadem are like mansions."

"I don't think I even know Ken anymore. I can't speak for him and assume he would want to live with me in any way."

"Things don't seem awkward between you two," Rai mentioned.

"That's only because we're in front of you. If we were alone, I think things would be weird. Did I answer all questions? Can we not talk about that again? It makes me... wonder."