Zarah Voss's Arc

Chapter 3 of 16

Zarah stood at the water's edge with her lattice sketch in one hand. The pearls waited far below, down where light stopped. She had no dive suit, no air tank, no rig of any kind. If she went down on one breath, she would drown before she reached the shells. She stared at the flat gray surface and did the math. The math said she would die. Sylvana came down the slope on her mechanical legs. She carried a woven bag of looping vine strands over one shoulder. Zarah had met her once before, in the workshop, the plant woman who now flew her rival's living ship. Sylvana had sent her here. Now she arrived to help, or to watch her fail. "You brought a basket," Zarah said. "I needed lungs." Sylvana reached into the bag. She drew out a strange root, round and knotted, with two long fern leaves that drooped from its top. "Lungs," she said. She held it out. "This one breathes the water. Hold it to your face. Bite here." She pressed a soft notch in the root. "The leaves drink air from the sea. They give it to you." Zarah turned the root over. It felt heavy and damp, like a wet fist. "You want me to trust a vegetable with my life." "Fish trust their gills," Sylvana said. "This is a gill you can carry." Zarah was an engineer. She did not trust things she had not tested. She waded in to her waist and pushed her face under. She bit the notch and breathed. The first pull gave her nothing, and her chest clenched. She almost quit. Then the fern leaves stirred against her cheeks, and cool air slid into her mouth. She breathed again. It worked. She went down. The light thinned, then died. She kept the root pressed tight and let the leaves feed her. Near the bottom she found the shells, layered and closed like fists. She pried three loose and dropped them into the vine bag on her hip. Her hands ached from the cold. But she breathed the whole way. She broke the surface and spat out the root. "It held," she said. She emptied the bag onto a flat rock. Three shells, and inside each a dense pearl, heavy the way a stone in a river is heavy. Sylvana looked at the pearls, then at Zarah, longer than before. "You did not panic," she said. "Most do." Zarah wiped her face. She had her conductor nodes now.