Free The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster

with coconut sauce hot enough to make your eyes bleed from three feet away, was enough to get Tazir licking her lips.
    “That’s a welcome sight,” Kodin said, pointing toward the horizon.
    “No shit,” Tazir replied. “You got a glass?” Though she had seen Shina spit the wind with her own eyes, she still didn’t quite believe that she was already looking at Moliki.
    “Here.” Kodin handed her the intricately carved spyglass he carried around his neck.
    “Thanks.” Tazir put the glass to her eye and turned the handle until the city came into—that couldn’t be right. She adjusted the lens again, but—she
had
been in focus.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing.” Tazir handed the spyglass back to Kodin. Her eyes were wide, and her lips were hanging open. “Or at least,” she murmured, “nothing that the kid needs to see just yet.”

Chapter 6
    Shina had first noticed the silence when she’d been stretching the wind out, past Moliki and northward toward the long banks. It wasn’t unusual, of course, for a small port to be a little quiet on a hot afternoon. Shina hadn’t believed that it was truly
silent—
she wasn’t so refined in wind-spitting that she never got a mistaken impression.
    As it turned out, silence was an understatement.
    “I think most everybody got to safety,” the Captain said, giving her a smile. “I’ve waited out a hurricane here myself—they have big, smooth roads and plenty of hills to shelter in.”
    Shina said nothing and kept staring out at what was left of Moliki.
    The storm must have hit them straight behind from the south, and suddenly. The wooden wreckage of ships made a tangled line on the shore of the harbor, dotted with bodies swelling in the sun. Although the stone foundations of some of the buildings still stood, nearly every wooden building had been smashed by a storm surge.
    And she’d done it all herself.
    A flash of motion on the beach caught her eye. An old woman was tearing apart a pile of broken timbers, her movements desperate and erratic. Now and then, she would pause in her work to clutch at her face, and her wails carried across the harbor.
    There were others, too, searching for evidence of hope in the wreckage of their homes. It was one thing to be hit by a natural storm, or a storm called up by somebody trained and stone-eyed. Those storms—they followed rules, or at least existed within the same limits as storms that followed rules.
    I did this,
she thought to herself. She’d hated wild Windspeakers in school—the ones who didn’t want to be there, who thought they had some kind of right to do as they pleased with the weather. Some of them just didn’t know what a storm could do if you spat it out and left it.
    Others didn’t
care
. They were worse—and now Shina might as well be among them.
Not my problem,
they’d say.
Build your houses a little stronger, and it won’t be yours either.
    “You saved our lives,” the Captain said softly. She put one of her big, rough hands on Shina’s shoulder and squeezed.
    Shina opened her mouth, but couldn’t think of a word that would hold her horror. How many lives had she taken? How many more livelihoods—livelihoods she had sworn to protect—had she dashed against the rocks without a single thought?
    She had to turn away. A sob rose in her chest, but she bit it back down. Who was
she
to cry over this city? Who was
she
to mourn people whose lives hadn’t even occurred to her when she’d spit that storm back in Kuhon?
    The Captain patted her gently on the back. Shina flinched at the touch, but said nothing. “It’s gonna be fine,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”
    Shina’s mouth hung open. “How?” she said, in a voice that squeaked and whined.
    “You did what you had to,” the Captain replied. “You didn’t—you didn’t mean to do all this.”
    “But I didn’t think to avoid it, either.” Shina swallowed, shook her head. “Same outcome. Same thing.”
    The Captain gave her a