"Damn it. Who are you, kid? Why are you coming after me?" Varko screamed, blocking a kick to the gut before rounding on the others. "What the hell are you doing? Do you want everyone to know we got our ass handed to us by some kid? Jump on him."
"Why do you have to make this harder than it needs to be, Varko." It wasn't a question. "I only need you. The others don't pay. Think about it, gentlemen. I can break a few bones, leave you stranded out here in the middle of the sea, or you can step aside and let me take your boss and-"
He stepped left. A knife passed through the space where his throat had been.
"You should have the minimum decency to let a man finish his proposal." He turned, sword already moving, and caught the crewman across the torso with the flat. "Anyone else would have that sticking out the other side for how quiet you were."
Before he could say anything further, the rest of them came at once.
Lucien moved through all twelve with the kind of efficiency that didn't look like much until you counted the bodies. When he was done, they were spread across the deck in various arrangements, each one occupied with a different part of themselves that was bleeding. He looked them over for a moment.
Then he noticed Varko. The man was already in a rowboat, pulling hard at the oars, leaving every one of his crew without a backwards glance.
"See that?" Lucien said, to no one in particular. The groaning from the deck counted as an audience. "The man you were willing to be a human shield for. Saw you as exactly that and nothing else."
He sheathed his sword and jumped.
His own boat was moored close enough. Two rooms, a small motor fitted specifically for situations like this one, considerably larger than the vessel he had arrived in Lvneel with. He started the engine, got his burst of speed, and closed the gap on Varko within a minute. The man was still rowing. He had snake tattoos winding up both arms, the mark of the Viper Pirates, and he was breathing hard enough to hear from ten feet away.
"Hey, Varko." Lucien drew level, stood, and stepped across onto the rowboat in a single motion. Varko looked up. Lucien brought his fist down before the man could get a word out, let alone a bribe.
He looked at Varko sleeping at his feet, sighed, and pushed his hair back.
He was nearly six feet now, white hair grown out and tied back with a band, eyes half-open in the particular way that made people unsure whether he was bored or simply not yet bothered to be awake. It had been a little over six months since he left Lvneel Kingdom.
"I should reach Flevance before dark," he muttered, hauling Varko up and dropping him into his own boat like a dull piece of cargo. "Collect the bounty, get out. Then Germa for the refit. That mechanic said the best marine engineering in the four seas comes from there."
He glanced at Varko, then at the horizon.
"One problem at a time."
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"Did something happen here?"
Lucien said it to no one in particular as he stepped off the pier, Varko slung over one shoulder. The market was quiet in the way markets weren't supposed to be quiet. Stalls were open but the vendors weren't calling out. A few people moved between them with their heads down. Two years ago this street had noise to it, the particular noise of a city that believed in itself.
It had the same look. The white stone, the pale rooftops, the amber dust that settled on everything and gave the whole place its dreamy, snow-dusted quality that the rest of the world apparently found charming. The atmosphere was identical. The people inside it were not.
Most of them were downcast. Several were coughing. Not the casual kind. The kind that bent people at the waist and wouldn't let go.
He filed it away and kept walking toward the Marine headquarters.
The reception desk was staffed by someone he didn't recognise, a woman this time, slight, with a ledger open in front of her. She looked up when he came in, then looked at the unconscious man over his shoulder.
"Name and state of the bounty." She coughed twice into her sleeve before she could finish writing.
"Viper Varko. Alive."
She nodded and began filling in the paperwork between coughs. Her face, when he caught a proper look at it, was pale in a way that had nothing to do with the city's usual pallor. The skin around her eyes looked wrong.
"Please remain here. Someone will verify and bring your reward."
"If you don't mind." He leaned against the counter. "What's happening out there? Why does it look like half the city has gone to bed?"
She set her pen down and looked at him directly for the first time.
"There is a viral disease moving through Flevance. People are falling ill very quickly. We have already had deaths." She held his gaze. "I would suggest collecting your bounty and leaving before you catch it."
Lucien nodded and stepped outside to wait.
The white ash was still falling. It caught the light the same way it always had, drifting in slow diagonals, settling on windowsills and shoulders and the tops of moored boats. He watched it for a moment. Then he looked toward the far end of the street, where he knew the hospital was, in the same place it had been two years ago when he had filed the location away on arrival out of simple habit.
"Lucien Vosgrave. Please collect your bounty."
He walked back to the counter, took the bag, and listened to the berries click against each other. That sound never got old.
He pocketed it and headed for the hospital.
Whatever he had registered on the streets outside was a diluted version of what was happening inside. People were crying in the waiting area, not quietly. A man near the entrance was bent double, coughing as if it were pulling something loose.
Nurses moved fast between beds and doorways with the particular expression of people who had stopped being surprised and were now simply managing. Every surface was occupied. The air was dense with something medicinal and underneath it something else, something that didn't have a clean name.
Lucien stood in the entrance for a moment and took it in.
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