“I think you are,” she said.

“Do you? What do you have to recommend you?” Tassos folded his arms across his chest. The move was calculated to make him bigger and more imposing. “You stood against Aric, but it wasn’t you who defeated him, was it? Not really. Lir did that for you.”

“We both benefited from what Lir did,” she answered. “You got the Net, after all.”

“And you got—or I should say had—Cloudbreak. Lir tried to come for me and he failed. He’ll try again, but I suspect you’ll take priority now that you’ve emerged from hiding. So, tell me again, what do I possibly have to gain from allying with Lir’s next target?”

As he spoke, Caledonia could feel Oran bristling at her side. Behind her, her crew watched with a kind of intensity that pressed against her back like many hands holding her up. Tassos wanted her to feel small, but Caledonia wouldn’t do what any Fiveson wanted.

Taking a measured step forward, Caledonia dropped her voice, forcing Tassos to pay attention and cutting their crews out of the conversation. “I know what you need most in the world right now.”

Tassos narrowed his eyes. “And what is that?”

Caledonia leaned in, the first taste of blood on the tip of her tongue as she said a single word: “Silt.”

Doubt sliced Tassos’s eyes while want curled his fingers into fists. He wanted what she offered to be real, she could see that plainly. But more than that, he needed it to be.

“You have Silt?” His eyes tripped from her to the deck of her ship, skating over her crew as if one of them would reveal the truth. “You don’t have Silt.”

“No, I don’t have Silt,” she admitted. “But I can help you get it.”

“I don’t need your help.” Tassos pulled back. “We can fight this war without you, and when we’re done, I’ll crush your fleet without a second thought.”

There was no denying that Tassos outnumbered and outgunned her, but he was still here, standing suspended over the ocean between their ships. And that meant he thought there was something she could give him.