Asunder: A Gathering of Chaos by Cameron Hopkin (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

bright as that. Her thoughts were scrambled, and her guts swayed crazily inside her. She would have vomited, but she’d brought back up every single scrap inside her a while ago. All she managed was to choke and cough, the sour taste of bile flooding her nose. She heard an earth-rending CRACK louder than thunder, and the wayward ship gave a mighty jerk, shuddering to a stop. There was a moment of silence, and Nira felt her body swing freely, head down, her vision still a whorl of color and noise. Her ribs burned with pain. Strangely, so did her ankle. Then the shouting began again.

She couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. Her head was swimming and the pressure was building in her temples. Abruptly, her senses cleared, and she realized she was looking at the pocked-chitin hull of the ship. The brown, weathered surface of the liveship’s armored hide was pocked with the purple stars of shipgut seaspines, little crustaceans that Seafarer shipwrights used to seal leaks and cracks in their boats. She reached out to steady herself against the hull, careful not to cut herself on the seaspine shells, and was alarmed to feel herself swinging free, the ship first retreating from her touch and then coming close. She was hanging upside down on the outside of the ship! How…?

She tucked her chin to her chest and looked up toward her feet, spinning as she went. A thick coil of hempen rope was knotted and twined about her left ankle and had caught on one of the gunwale spars. That explained the fierce ache in her foot, at least. She wouldn’t be walking well for a while. Blind luck. The one time I don’t want luck on my side, and I have more than any ten fools playing cards. If she didn’t know better, she’d blame some trickster god. If it were happening to anyone else, she’d think it was hilarious. Instead, anger boiled up through her pain, and her fatalism evaporated. I look like an idiot, and everybody’s yelling at me. Gaia’s tits, if I have to be alive, I’m going to do it right side up.

It was easier said than done. She had nothing to grab on to, and no leverage besides. She reached for the barnacle-like growths on the hull, thinking to pull herself up on them, cut hands be damned – but any movement set her spinning, and the curve of the hull made everything down near her hands impossible to reach. Abandoning that approach, she bent at the waist, using her last reserves of strength to reach up for the rope that held her foot. A sharp stab under her left arm stole her breath, and she slumped back out to full length, her free leg and both arms akimbo, her face to the water. Broken rib. I could really hurt myself doing this.

Looking beneath her, she could see that the ship had sheared all the way through the Weaver dock and impaled itself on the jagged remainder. The water beneath her churned as the crazed ship-thing kept trying to push forward even after it had taken its death blow. A huge gap in the armor of the hull gushed a pink fluid that mixed with the seawater rushing into the exposed hold. The size of the breach meant that the liveship would be lying on the floor of the harbor within a handful of minutes.

Mentally bracing herself, she tried again, tightening her muscles against the pain as she drew her arms up toward her feet. Something shifted inside her and hurt abominably, but she pushed the sensation away with a grunt and a curse. Her fingers reached to her ankle, then crept up her boot. Just a little further! For once she was glad of her slight frame and relative lack of curves. She was even gladder for the stretching and gymnastic exercises she’d been doing with Fi for hours every day in their berth as they dreamed of joining the Bone Army. If not for all that practice, she’d never have had the strength or flexibility to reach past her foot and grab onto the rope holding her fast with one hand. The rope had been woven by a blind old grandmother on one of the nameless humps of rock the Seafarers called home out in the ocean, though she couldn’t have said how she suddenly knew that.

Contorting herself with a gasping cry, she reached up and out with the other hand, swinging herself until she could reach the holding spar with scrabbling fingers. She latched on, and tears sprang to her eyes as she tried to haul her body back up onto the deck. Her ribs blazed in protest, her shoulders screamed, and so did her mouth. Light above, it hurts! She drank in the pain, she reveled in it. This was a pain that made sense, the pain of the flesh. She knew how to deal with that. She’d been doing it for years.

And then she was on the deck, crying, gasping, laughing. Alive. Her limbs unknotted, and the relative lack of pain felt like a bliss in the clouds. She fumbled at the knots holding her foot and was able to extract herself. She couldn’t feel her foot, but it hardly seemed to matter. She drew her knees under herself, grasped the railing, and made as if to stand. Then she saw it. Her. Fiolamir.

The once-pretty girl had been thrown free along with everything else when the ship rammed itself onto the dock that would soon sink it, and her limp corpse had fetched up against the prow less than two meters from where Nira now crouched. She laid face-up, her legs dangling off the gunwale to port, and by chance one hand stretched out toward her friend, her head tilted as if to look right at the woman that had killed her. Except there were no eyes to look with. There was no face at all, just