Water will follow him forever, he thinks. When he slept, if he slept, the dreams used to be about Jordie, of course. Melting skin, frozen fingers, puss and shit and rot everywhere. Jordie with his corpse face and his corpse hands, Jordie with his floating body, Jordie with his own rasping voice from the fires and the taunts that never quite shaped his mouth right. This isn’t what we wanted, Kazzie. This isn’t what I wanted for you. And there was always the godawful gurgling of his lungs when he spoke and the death - flat of his eyes unseeing. It was almost always the same dream.
These days, it’s still water haunting him. But it isn’t Jordie floating down the canals of the city and it isn’t Jordie clinging to Kaz until he can do nothing but swallow water and wake gasping for breath. These days, it’s a warship split in two down the middle. It’s a dozen knives spinning through the depths and sinking with the wreckage, the whispers of saints blooming like bubbles on the way down. It’s sea kelp caught in one long braid and fingers reaching for the surface and Kaz is in Ketterdam, Kaz is in Ketterdam, Kaz is in Ketterdam. He still wakes gasping for breath, but there's a name on his lips now, too.
Tonight it’s neither dream. Tonight Fifth Harbour is silent. There is no ship, only empty docks and low tide, and not a single pigeon in sight. Not even his harbour runner, the boy called Lip who brings news of who comes and goes from this port, stalks the shadows and there are many of those. The moon is high in the sky and fat with light but obscured by clouds that hold no rain. Kaz stands at the end of Berth 22. A mirror stands beside him.
❝ . . . ❞ Awareness dampens his palms and the back of his neck. Nothing and everything hurts, but Kaz cannot tell where the pain ends and begins. His double looks perfectly at ease, as though he already knows who holds all the cards. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, if they are the same, but something about it grates on his nerves. Always his own enemy. ❝ I suppose yours is filled with decency, morality, and sweetness. In which case you’ve disembarked at the wrong port. ❞
he never made it into the water. the gravediggers took jordie’s body from his desperate little hands, and kaz ran for blocks on bare feet, screaming and screaming and screaming until he lost his voice, trying to catch up with the reaper’s barge. there’s been some kind of mistake, he told himself. if i make it around the corner fast enough, jordie will stand up, and wave, and then they’ll let him off the boat, and we can go home. but there was no home. no jordie. and no mistake.
once, as children, they were loved the same. then, somehow, when they slipped from the teat of love, only one of them starved. ( kaz always thought his life had been hard. )
now, kaz counts three steps to the edge of the berth, provokes a wailing, creaking sound of sea-salt-infused wood. he knows himself well enough to understand it’s better not to show his face, the pity coalescing on it. he did not come to weep for the bastard of the barrel ‒‒ for himself, or the boy they used to be, frightened and vulnerable. neither would he argue for the toughness of his own heart. skin flashes like bright, distant lightning as kaz takes empty hands from empty pockets and folds them before himself, calloused fingertip to calloused fingertip. ❛❛ but i came to the right place. ❜❜
the quiet rasp of his own voice grates at him like death. slowly, carefully, the way you’d move at a funeral, kaz puts a hand on his breast, inside his patchwork coat, and feels for the blood saturating his clothes. finds it cold. the other him seethes to ghosts about goodness, and he delivers messages to boys who’ve had it worse. turning, kaz looks at him, at himself, raises his fist between them as though through honey. ❛❛ if our hearts are so different, ❜❜ i can buy your ear. i know the price. ❛❛ could you even die for love? ❜❜ and, like a magic trick, an apparition, he drops the chain of bells, letting it hang between their reflections.
