Free The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster Page B

you?” she asked.
    Shina kicked some debris off of a flat stone slab. “I’ll be fine,” she said through a mouthful of fruit.
    “You’ll be fine?” The Captain glared at her. “You’ll be—dammit, Shina, you passed out last time!”
    “This is my duty,” Shina replied.
    “That’s great!” Tazir said. “It’s
my
duty to make sure my—
you
don’t get killed trying to save us.”
    Shina met the Captain’s eyes. She was standing all puffed up with her fists balled and her shoulders drawn up on her neck. “Your what?” she said.
    “Never mind,” Tazir said. She gritted her teeth and turned to leave.
    “If you and Chaqal want to come back for me,” Shina called, “I won’t be able to stop you.”
    Tazir stopped, turned back. She flashed a smile at Shina before running off to find Chaqal and Kodin.
    The ships were close enough that Shina could hear the monstrous heartbeat of the oar drums thumping across the water. They were coming in slow—cautiously, even, judging by their formation.
    Shina stuffed half a banana in her mouth and forced herself to swallow, kneading at her throat and shutting her eyes. Her gut was roiling, burning, starting to swell with the pressure of the storm building inside it—but she couldn’t let it out. Not yet.
    She sat down with her legs crossed and shut her eyes. As her chest began to rise and fall in rhythm with the waves, she could start to feel the weather in her body. The harbor was bathed in the wind she’d called the day before—but here, the air was a little slacker. Spent. Shina frowned as it filled her lungs, and when she exhaled she cast her mind out as far as it would go along the filaments of herself that remained in the wind.
    Now, she could see clearer. Well, she couldn’t really
see,
but that was the best she could explain what she was doing. The wind wasn’t weak, she realized. It was slow, straining against something in its way.
    The storm in her belly grew. It wouldn’t be long, now; whoever had first designed it had made it more than capable of bursting out of her body the hard way.
    Shina could feel it more distinctly now—the huge, wet, dark mass struggling with her wind. It rumbled and groaned, weakened in the last few hours but still angry, ready to lash out with surging waves and stinging salt spray. When Shina reached out for it, the storm growled and tightened; several mammoth waves raced through the sea around it.
    She had not created this.
    Somewhere behind her, back on Moliki, a ripple of pain went through her body. Shina struggled to stay focused on her storm. It would take a huge, rapid wind to move a wild storm like this, and it would take a wild storm like this to dash the hollow hulls of the Dragon Ships against the rocks of Moliki Harbor.
    Come out,
she whispered to the storm inside her.
Come out here and make a friend.
    She could tell that her forehead had smacked against stone—and then her whole body smacked against something else. She kept her focus on the storm.
Come out,
she said.
    As a dark, foaming wind shook the sea around the wild storm, Shina was vaguely aware that her body was seizing up and thrashing. She hoped the Captain really had returned for her.
    Come back,
she whispered, stroking the storm that was now taking shape on the clear blue sea. It was swirling around with the wild storm, testing its boundaries, but not yet pushing it where she wanted it to go. She tugged on it, struggled with it, pleaded with it—
    But wouldn’t it be easier, she thought, if she just spat out the last storm she had in her stomach?
    All things considered, it wasn’t the wisest idea in the world. She had no way of knowing whether her body was safe or not, and there was a good chance she’d drown along with the raiders who came in the Dragon Ships. But what was one more corpse among the masses of innocent people she’d already drowned? What was her own safety compared to the safety of the thousands who lived under the threat of the