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So eager that several of their possessions lay in heaps all around us… including the telescope I’d just made clang to the deck, its lens shattering on impact.
“I’m sorry,” I said with a wince, hating myself.
It wasn’t just that Object Summoning itself was hard. It was that my other magics seemed to be clamoring and crawling all over each other within my blood, making it hard to focus. My Mind Manipulating blockade kept coming down on accident, letting a wave of thoughts from Sasha, Sylvie, Coen, and even several crew members beyond the walls of the cabin crash into my head. At the same time, my Wild Whispering couldn’t tune out the rasping hiss of cockroaches crawling within the baseboards, or the rats having arguments somewhere within the bulkheads around us.
Even my shapeless innate power grumbled within my chest until pressure swelled within my ribcage, wanting out, out, out.
“That’s okay.” Sylvie waved a hand at the shattered telescope. “We never really used it anyway, not with Barberro and his eyesight on board. Let’s try again.”
“Wait.” Sasha held up a palm, lounging on the lip of her hammock. They’d lit a lantern and made it levitate above our heads, so her lithe form flickered with shadows in the dim light. Coen himself was merely a silhouette in the dark, leaning against the wall in a corner. “What did you say your magic feels like again, Rayna?”
“Strings. Like I’m a puppet, and when I try to tug on one of them…”
I’d barely said the words when one of their pillows zipped into the air, slammed into the overhead, and fell back down like a dead lump of fluff.
“Well, that’s your problem!” Sylvie said. “You’re not a puppet, Rayna, you’re a puppet master. And do masters tug on their strings?”
“Um… yes?”
“No! They gently guide.”
Sasha cackled from behind her. “By the lockpick and the lyre, Syl, I don’t think metaphors are going to help her.” She pivoted her gaze to me. “Forget all that nonsense, Rayna. You shouldn’t be thinking about your magic strings at all. You should be focusing on the objects themselves.”
“What do you mean?”
“Take Coen, for example,” Sasha said, nodding over at him.
For the first time since I’d set foot on this ship, I glanced his way. Every time I remembered how close he was, how our lips had met, how my skin had reacted to his, all of my focus seemed to disintegrate. Surely, looking at him wasn’t going to help.
I looked anyway. A stray lock of dark brown hair had fallen over his forehead, and his eyes gleamed in the near-dark, homing in on me like a predator who’d resisted the chase for far too long. I kept expecting to find his outline wavering slightly, almost indiscernibly soft around the edges as if we were meeting mind-to-mind like usual. But his outline stayed solid. Steady. So real that my skin buzzed.
“Now grab him,” Sasha said, “without moving.”
My fingers twitched, aching to trace his jawline—not here, under the sly, watchful gazes of the twins, but in a room where we could finally be alone. Without thinking, I imagined myself reaching out, and…
Coen lurched forward, bracing both hands against the walls to catch himself. His eyebrows shot up, mischief lighting up the smoky quartz of his eyes now that we were a pace closer, our breaths mingling.
“You did it!” Sylvie said with a clap of her hands together. “You summoned something without breaking it!”
I wasn’t sure Coen was breakable like all the shattered objects at our feet, but I exhaled in relief at the realization that I’d managed to grab him without throwing him into a tree. Not that there were any trees onboard, but still. Coen grinned and brushed the collar of his shirt, as if he could still feel my phantom touch.
“Does your magic still feel like strings?” Sasha asked with a curious head tilt.
“No.” I lifted my arms, uncurled my fingers, and stared at the lines of my palms. Just like my other limbs, the new magic shooting out from me and connecting me with every person and object in the vicinity suddenly felt like any other part of my body. “They feel like hands.”
The twins beamed.
“Welcome,” Sylvie said, “to the Object Summoning sector.”
After hours of practicing with more pillows, cups, pieces of jewelry, and other personal items of Sasha and Sylvie’s that I managed to refrain from mutilating, Coen and I finally bade the twins goodnight.
When he held out his hand, I grabbed it with a questioning tilt of my head. Darkness whipped around us, and soon we landed in another cabin that I recognized instantly despite never having seen it.
Rich Sorronian clothing—crimson with golden lapels—draped over chairs, right next to piles of distinctly pirate items: tattered, sun-bleached shirts, faded boots, and canvas trousers. Old Veracious glittered in the corner past a bed nestled against the bulkhead. And beyond the eternal smell of sweet rot and metallic rust that seemed to permeate this entire ship, the faintest scent of black bamboo clung to the air.
Coen’s private quarters.
My legs wobbling—from the swaying of the deck, of course, not the closeness of his body heat—I wandered to the edge of his bed and slumped down. Despite the exhaustion tugging on my eyelids, that kiss seemed to spring back to life in my mind, a frantic buzz in the space between us.
