The Pit, Port Pelagie, Fleet Territory

  Mid-Dry Season, Year 17

  She wasn’t kidding.

  The Pit, as it was called, was a big damn hole in the sand. I didn’t know how they kept the rest of the beach from falling into it, but it was supposedly an indefinite training area dedicated to the camp’s least liked and most problematic people.

  So, a prison but with less excuses.

  “Mind the step,” Otilia called from above. I looked up at her, a dark shadow with the sun behind her, and covered my eyes against the glare. “Once you learn to behave yourself and gain enough skill, you can get out and finish training with the rest.”

  And then she just…turned and wandered away.

  Didn’t exactly know what she meant by that but, well, this wasn’t my first time in a prison. Although even as far as prisons went, this one was unpleasantly…moist. The place stank of saltwater and iron, and the ring of sand that acted as the walls of the place was dark and rolled with fat beads of seawater. I could already feel my skin starting to itch from where I’d dropped onto the wet sandy floor.

  From the inside, the pit was a ring sixty or so paces across, littered with old damaged tents, cooking fires, and a few battered looking logs on cross-feeted stands that were serving as benches. Scattered between them all was a number of suspect looking individuals, eyeing me after my rapid arrival at the bottom. Luckily for me, the ground in here was a lot softer than up top so even after my less than friendly introduction to it, I was still ready for a fight if any of them were feeling froggy.

  “Another one?” someone chuckled, leaning against a thoroughly beaten looking tent: a thick broken shaft of wood, with a triangular sail wrapped over it. He was peeling an orange with a knife made from bone, pausing to bite off a strip every few words. “Weird to get ‘em so close together. This one almost looks as tender as the other one.”

  “Another smoothskin?” one of them asked. “Doesn’t smell like a landlubber.”

  “You got a problem?” I called out. The answer to that question was generally ‘yes’, so I pushed myself to my feet from where I’d fallen, keeping my eyes open for movement towards me. I looked up to the top of the pit some thirty feet above, way too high to try and haul my ass out of here. No way I was climbing out on wet sand.

  Nobody answered me, apparently happy to keep it a very public version of a private conversation.

  “Hair looks like the Captain’s,” the mutterer continued.

  “Captain ain’t got no damn hair,” someone called from the side, and I glanced over, finding nothing but a pair of raggedy, tossed together lean-tos where the voice came from.

  “Nah, he’s got that beard,” the mutterer said. “That’s hair. Like coral, but wavy. Kid’s got the same thing.”

  I glanced around, and started walking - slowly, deliberately, visibly relaxed - out of the center of the pit. From the amount of attention I’d gotten already this was a hot spot, but running out of it would make me a target. Still, nobody seemed to be overly interested in me beyond the usual “new thing, who dis” level of curiosity. A damn sight better than the last time I was in prison. A guy four times my size and at least five times my age had tried to slip into my cot and-

  “Watch it,” someone snarled, snapping their leg back from where I'd walked into it, and kicking at me.

  “You watch it,” I said, barely recovering from my stumble and grabbing their leg by the…very damp, slimy ankle. The scent of decay and seawater assailed me and I dropped the leg, stepping back with a frown. I hadn’t even seen anybody while I was walking, and even looking at them directly, they were hard to make out. Just a dark lump stretched out on the ground, leaning against a broken ship’s wheel. A vaguely man-shaped pile of rags and long strips of seaweed that was giving me a sour look through the soppy mess.

  “The seas are you looking at? You think you’re better than me?” They sounded bitter which…I guess I would be too, if I was reduced to that. I'd seen people with pretty bad Scabs but it never got this far unless you let it. Just gave up on trying to contain it. “This’ll be you one day, you smoothskin-having piece of shit.”

  “Doubt it,” I said, turning and walking away.

  “You can’t escape it!” They spat after me. “The seas touch everything! Your blood’s as brackish as mine!”

  I kept walking and watched them out the corner of my eye until I left them behind. Fortunately, the mess of debris that had been turned into furniture and space down here made it easy to get something between us.

  I moved slowly towards the outer edge of the pit, turning my head slightly to look to the sides and checking further away with the edges of my sight. It would be bad to look like I was completely unaware, but arguably just as bad to give away how aware I actually was. The Pit was dotted with dozens of people, some of them still paying attention to me, most of them having moved on - but nearly everybody with even worse deformities from the Scab than I usually saw.

  My arm itched where I’d landed on it on the wet sand, the salty damp just soaking through to my skin, and I did my best to ignore it.

  The most common Scab was the seaweed. Leafy strips of dark green mass, growing in patches and bunches. Sometimes thin, sometimes thick, sometimes long, sometimes short, but always heavy and wet and eyewateringly salty. The next was the coral, bands and ridges of textured stone that I knew could grow down to the bone. Tough, heavy, and constantly growing. That one I knew from personal experience, my hair starting to coralize since I was a kid. But the worst of it was the barnacles.

  I did my best not to think about the barnacles.

  I remember hearing it was the Sea’s Curse, or some shit like that. A generational evil placed on my head and the head of everyone else related to the Fleet for a crime I didn’t get to enjoy the planning, doing, or take of. Me? I didn’t really believe in curses, but I couldn’t pretend the effects weren’t real. Not when I’d seen it on the elderly, the homeless, and the crippled my whole life. Worse on fishermen and divers who spent most of their life at sea.

  Did seawater actually make it worse? No clue. Didn’t mean I wanted to take a dip in the waves to test it, though.

  “Hey!” someone said, like a loud whisper. I slowed my steps slightly and glanced around. “Over here!” I turned my head to a particularly wrecked looking tent, spotting a pale and delicate white face wreathed in black hair, with an arm out and waving me down. A girl flagging me down.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  I considered ignoring her - a lot of people made the stupid mistake of trusting a girl on their own, ignoring how often that was bait for the nine people with knives around the corner - then decided to give it a cautious approach. I kept walking, circling around the tent as I got closer, finding the surroundings empty of people. I gave her a glance as she came fully into view, raising an eyebrow. “Yeah?” I said.

  “The Ensign threw you down here too?” she said, looking at me a little nervously. “Looks like your entrance went over better than mine did. I think everybody saw me hit the ground.”

  I watched her for a moment, eyes flicking to the usual spots on reflex: eyes, hands, waistband for purse, face, before finally looking at her in full. She was...another one like Dennis. Soft hands, clean skin, no scars, and her hair was so glossy it was like the surface of water at night. She straightened as I got closer, fiddling with a lock of hair held together with a shell trinket. She had a lot of those, about half her head was bunched and decorated like that. I almost wrote her off - then remembered how my ‘captain’ had thrown my expectations off.

  She chuckled nervously, and I thought ‘fuck it’, blowing out some of my frustration. “Yeah. She says I’m a troublemaker.” I looked up at the top of the pit. “Whole thing seems like a big cock-up on somebody’s part. People keep saying I’m a Seaman, but I’m just a guy who beats people up for money. But what can you do?”

  “Er,” she said, looking awkward for a moment. She seemed unsure of what to say to that. “You...are one. It’s not super strong but I can definitely feel it…somewhere around Junior Seaman, it feels like? A few thousand hours at sea?”

  “First time I was out to sea was a couple days ago,” I said, frowning. “What the hell is a Junior Seaman? That some kind of slur?”

  “You- How do you not know what that is?” she asked, confused.

  “Nobody’s explained anything, they just walked into my house with an accusation and then shipped my ass somewhere else like a crate of guava,” I shrugged. “But if you’re saying there’s something to it, maybe I should start giving a damn.” I ran a hand through my hair, looking at her more closely now that she seemed a little less like the type to knife me in my kidney. She was short - not just shorter than me, but genuinely short, the top of her head just reaching my ribs - with peachy skin, midnight dark eyes, and built like goddamn- wait, can’t stare, but how the hell they’d stuff all that into one of these uniforms? Couldn’t get distracted by the outrageously shaped girl, this was serious business time. “Look, I know how this works. What do you want for it?”

  “Want for...what?” she said, frowning.

  “The information. You need a bodyguard down here? I can do that,” I gestured vaguely to the rest of the place. “Prison can get pretty nasty, and you don’t look like the type to have any experience with that.”

  “Um, sure? I can help you,” she said, looking around confused. “This...isn’t a prison, though. Just a training ground.”

  I looked at her with one eyebrow raised, and didn’t press her obvious lack of familiarity with prisons. “Alright. I cover you for one day if you tell me what a Junior Seaman is, and we go from there?”

  “Sure, but…” she paused. “Are you gonna want to know about the rest of First Rank? And the other ranks too?”

  I looked at her, completely lost, then nodded confidently. “Yeah. In fact, just tell me all the...things. I’ll keep a tally and we’ll work it out from there.”

  *

  Turns out I was completely ignorant. The girl - Seiwuai, she said her name was - didn’t exactly say that but...well, she was a real Seaman. In the ‘training for this since she was born’ kind of way so she knew all the words, what they meant, how things worked, and was willing to trade for them.

  “So, let me get this straight,” I said, poking the sand with a stick as I spoke. I was squatting between a pair of half-decent hovels with beaten canvas stretched over them, a spot I’d claimed beside Seiwuai’s, and trying to make sure I understood the basics. “First of all, you’re saying ‘Seaman’ isn’t the proper term. Like a nickname, instead of a government name.”

  “Government name…?” Seiwuai blinked then shook her head, sitting on a bench we’d dragged over earlier in the day. “I mean, yes. The proper term is Seekers of Transcendence; the exact origin of the term is debated but it generally refers to the way inner energy refines the body into something beyond mortal understanding.”

  I paused, waiting to see if she had anything else to add but she was just sitting quietly. She had a habit of going off on these little side-talks, explanations or history on whatever the hell we were talking about. “Uh huh,” I said, returning to my lines in the sand. “And us Seekers of Transcande- Trendesc- Transfo- us Seekers. Seaman is just the first level.”

  “Mostly correct,” she nodded. “It’s the early stage of the first Rank, the first of seven, but that’s only how we in the Fleet discuss it. Among legacy-”

  Depths, was it hard to have a straightforward conversation with this girl. I’d lost track of how many times I’d completely stopped paying attention when she started going on like this, listening with one ear for important words or phrases or things that demanded a response. That was a survival technique for any muscle worth his pay, and it was usually reserved for dudes with mean looks, lots of secrets, and even more money - not chatty girls half my size who played in their hair when they were nervous.

  Wait, was that- silence? Was she done? “Sure,” I nodded, picking one of the safest responses when zoned out. “And getting into the first level is just about learning to control your inner energy. Which is…real. We’re sure about that.”

  “Of course we’re sure,” she said, frowning slightly. “That’s the whole reason we’re here! As soon as you’ve gathered enough, you’re basically one of the Seamen.” That did get a snicker out of me. I wasn’t sorry about it. “Can you really not feel it? Or sense it?”

  “Not at all,” I shrugged.

  The thing about inner energy being real and not just some shit a guy trying to sell me religion made up to improve his pitch was…well, what it could do for me. I mean, it’s not like I hadn’t heard of what Seamen could do - one day that’ll stop being funny - but there’s a difference between back-alley rumours of magic demigods and being told “welcome to the demigod club, here’s orientation”.

  The reason we even had orientation was that Seamen weren’t magic demigods- well, alright, they weren’t just magic demigods, they were specialists. Like a guy who practices colliding with wagons all day until he’s the guy you go to for wagon accident scams, or a smuggler who grew up on a farm and knows when to stockpile wheat and when to flood the market.

  Except Seekers specialized in...depths, I didn’t even know. I kind of lost interest in that part and had stopped paying attention but, from the way Seiwuai told it, it had something to do with…discipline and mastering yourself and making the intentional automatic and blah blah blah. The point was in addition to making a bunch of trites and living in the lap of luxury, Seekers could hurl farm animals with one hand and break tiles with their dick.

  I heard that last one in a bar after a job once. Some guy said he saw a Seaman smash through a stack as tall as the table, and he was way too wasted to make a story that stupid up up. Which…I mean, now that I might get the chance to try...

  What was I talking about? Seekers, or whatever. I remember...when I was younger, when I was young enough that just begging for coins was still a reasonable plan to get by, I found Aun- I found Helena sitting in her room with her eyes closed, just...not moving. At the time I didn’t really get it, figured she was just sleeping in a weird pose, but the pieces finally clicked now. She was breathing - seeking. She was a Seeker. Not a real one, or she wouldn’t be an old woman running an orphanage in a town basically owned by some wealthy meatheads, but I watched her do that every week for years. Some of it must have taken, enough that she could manhandle me despite how thin she’d gotten over the years.

  Stupid old woman. Hope she’s got enough for food with the money she got from selling me out.

  ...I’m not even as bitter about that as I thought I’d be.

  Didn’t really explain me though. Helena tried to make me sit down and meditate, said it’d be good to learn to ‘control myself’, but that never did anything for either of us. The only thing I even remember about that was that for a while afterwards, it always made everything smell like seawater and rust.

  Huh. Alright, that’s a weird coincidence.

  Now, do I really believe in coincidences? No, that was usually what people blamed right before they got sucker-punched from the opposite direction-

  “Hey! Are you listening to me?” Seiwuai said, shaking me by the arm. “It’s your turn to get food.”