“My turn,” Swift declares, wrenching the board out of Code’s hands. There it is again—that little note of authority, like she might actually be cut out for leadership. The rest of the lackeys get her suited up in seconds flat, and something else strikes me. From the way Swift talked before, it seems like they shouldn’t trust each other with this. Anything could go wrong. Something should go wrong. But the five of them ignore the fact that they’re supposed to be cutthroats in competition.

They’re just here to have a good time.

Swift leaps off the deck, and when she lands on her feet, that stupid hair whipping in the wind as the bungee lines snap tight, it’s really no surprise.

11

11

Weeks pass. I become practiced in the art of quick naps, stealing sleep whenever Bao will let me. I forget what the rest of the Minnow looks like. All I know is the trainer deck, every inch of it. Bao eats voraciously, and it’s not long until he’s the size of the leatherback turtles that make up part of his genetics. He’s finally big enough to swim alongside the ship.

Santa Elena claps me on the back when I tell her.

We flush him in the morning, just after the sun rises. Two pirates haul down the partitions separating Bao’s tank from the channel that washes out into the sea, and out with the bathwater goes a seven-hundred-pound, monstrous baby, squalling almost as loudly as the day he came into the world. He plunges into the NeoPacific and bobs up immediately, his blowholes flaring as he takes in his new environment.

I toss a fish at him, hitting him in the side of the head. Bao blinks, snaps it up, then looks to see where it came from as I scoop another one out of the bucket at my side. When he spots me, fish in hand, he gives an impatient thrash of his tail. At his current size, a single fish is enough to get his attention, but that will soon change.

“Give it to him,” Swift mutters from behind me, but Swift doesn’t know shit. Now that the trainer deck is vacant, she’s been assigned to full-time guard duty, and she’s probably pissed because tonight she’ll have to share her bed with me again.

Santa Elena’s somehow furnished a working beacon for me to train her beast on—no surprises there. It takes some fiddling to get its signals off the factory defaults and on to something unique. There’s one signal set I know by heart, one that no other beast on the NeoPacific is going to respond to, so I futz with the dials until the device communicates in those low tones and pulsing blues that make my heart ache with loss.