ONCE STOLEN

CHAPTER ONE
ALL THE SHADES OF GREED

Banishment isn’t a curse if it means escaping all of you.

THE THRUMMING POWER OF the ignits calls to me. Five small variants of the round stones lie in the gambler’s pot, their slight glow barely visible beneath the cartel boat’s canopy. From the shade of the nearby mangroves, I grip the blue ignit on my wire necklace of precious stones. Blue for thunder, like two of those in the pot. But the gamblers have a yellow and a pair of small reds as well.

The ignit beneath my fingers pulses into my scales, primed to soothe whatever skull-shattering nonsense my body decides to throw at me today. But one lonely stone can be easily lost, easily taken. With one stone, the pain still stalks just behind me, waiting to strike. Besides, I want the gamblers’ ignits.

Tightening my serpentine tail around the roots of the half-submerged tree, I lift my head a little farther out of the water. I flick out my tongue. The boat humans smell of oil and gunpowder, of arrogance and cowardice and anger, and a touch of fear.

Three of them sit on the boat’s main deck, huddled around a table. The vibrations of their voices tingle across the patterned ridges along my scaly scalp. I feel the tug the nearest gives to their beard as they anxiously put down their cards, the slight splash of the lizard dipping into the river down-stream, and the landing of the parrot in the tree branches far above.

But the fishers don’t know I crouch so still that the murky water blends with the brown and black patterns along my half-snake body. The boat humans won’t notice me like this—won’t try to kill me. But if I stay here, those ignits will never thrum in my hands or hang from my wire mesh necklace.

My banishers said this desire would latch inside me like claws through flesh, like my spiny retractable teeth digging into a freshly caught capybara, like a viper’s toxin eating me from the inside out. And it has. Oh, it fucking has.

It’s just so hard to care now that it’s caught me.

The tallest human slams their cards down and strolls to the boat’s railing. Their dark skin gleams with a layer of sweat as they wave to a little vessel across the river. The fan at the back of this smaller boat thrums to life, powered by an ignit buried somewhere in its engine. It pulls alongside the larger boat.

“You already out?” the driver asks with a series of hand motions stolen from the swamp natives. I assume the boat humans use them to talk over the vicious whirr of the fans and roar of their motors, though most also sign whenever they use spoken language, which I have no ability to hear.

“Lay off,” the disgruntled human signs. They climb onto the smaller boat and speed down the river.

My gaze jumps to the remaining gamblers. Even with one human gone, these two still look like a challenge. The bearded player sports muscles as thick as my own, and their slighter opponent crouches in the shadows like a jaguar, hidden beneath a wispy cowl and shawl.

I guess we’re all gambling today.

Unfurling my tail from the roots, I take a deep breath and slip into the water. I undulate as I swim, though my humanlike torso moves with far less precision than my flexible tail, its bulk twice as powerful and three times as long as two legs combined. The fish withdraw around me, the flex of their muscles tingling along my head ridges. I keep to the dimly lit river bottom.

As I pass over a scattering of stones in the clay-heavy soil, I skim the silt with my fingers. A round grey rock that could almost be a clingstone or maybe a perfectly worn hematite tempts me, but the blotch of red on its back proves it to be just a normal river pebble. I leave it be, the vision of those glorious ignits still burning in my mind.

The image of a fang embellishes the front of the boat’s flat hull, and a large cabin sits at its back, a stairway leading up to its cargo-filled rooftop deck. Two fans swoop out from either side, their blades currently dormant. I surface beneath one. With the cabin shielding me from the human’s view, I climb the fan blades like a ladder, twisting my tail into their ridges to brace myself. Unlike the massive central fan at the back of the boat, these will only bruise me if turned on. Bruises fade. The scars I received learning that lesson won’t.

I near the cabin’s roof, but the rumbling vibration of a shout halts me. I peek around the corner. At the gambling table, the bearded human’s face shifts, their mouth and brows moving. These expressions mean little to me, but eagerness wafts from the human as potent as the sweet burst of an overripe mango on the jungle floor.

I pull myself onto the cabin’s rooftop deck and slide between the crates, just out of sight. A burst of new scents hits me—leather and wine and the sun. I spot the owner through the cracks between two crates: Rubem, the newly established head of the Fang Ignit Cartel, who slipped in like a rat in the wake of the last leader’s sudden death. When the crew talk about him, they keep their signs small and their mistrust big.

He crouches near the back of the boat, his mass of dark braids tied in a high bun. Three claw-like rings sprout from his right earlobe. A pistol glimmers at his belt, the sheen of the dark copper hilt matching his skin. Its embedded emeralds contrast the shock of scarlet hemming his loose brown clothing.

I try not to look at his hands, at the fishnet gloves I know I’ll find there, but when he flicks a vial of glowing green liquid between them, my gaze goes to his fingers anyway. My scales itch, a creeping pain that only diminishes when I focus on my ignit’s gentle pulsing.

Despite the vial’s impeding presence, Rubem signs with a contained sharpness, the motions fluid but precise. “You know where they are, you were her daughter. But you clearly aren’t using the damn things. Let them not go to waste.”

The person he speaks with looks delicate, the soft curves of her tan face placing her somewhere well beyond childhood but not quite worthy of anyone’s respect yet. About my age, then. Her brown curls spill down her back, and grey and green fabrics hang off her in layers, a scarf wrapped like an ana-conda around her neck. A chain on her ankle rattles when she hugs her legs closer. “I don’t care.” Her hands tremble as she makes the motions, her lips remaining closed. “The cartel can’t have them.”

“You realize that whatever you choose, I will find them.” He makes his claw-handed grabbing motion for the word will far stronger than the rest. “There are stakes here more important than you realize.”

But the prisoner only stares toward the front of the boat, tapping a steady rhythm against her leg. She jerks at the vibration of a laugh from downstairs.

Rubem flinches as well, glancing over his shoulder. When he looks back at the prisoner, his expression makes her curl tighter into herself. “If—when—she finds out you’re here, she’ll flay you alive and string your guts from the canopy to get ahold of your mother’s hoard. So, I would be quiet for a while if I were you.” He pockets his glowing flask with a sharp snap, bursting to his feet. “And we’ll have a longer conversation about this later. Giving up that hoard is for the best, you’ll see.”

Threats, kidnappings, torture—all usual cartel methods. But this sounds different. Bigger.

I duck as Rubem marches by my hiding place and de-scends the stairs, his footsteps remarkably silent for such fury. His shouting vibrates off my head ridges a moment later. It fades as he and the shadowy gambler walk into the cabin beneath me. The bearded human continues to watch their cards—and the ignits. I rub the ignit on my necklace and clench my jaw, unhinging and rehinging it.

Motion behind me flickers along my head ridges. I turn to find the prisoner poking her head around the crates. Her eyes widen, long black lashes drawing back to reveal hauntingly blue irises. A shiver runs through me. I coil the extensive loops of my tail, preparing to lunge at her.

She lifts her hands. “Stop, please—I don’t know if you understand this, but please—help me.”

I can’t smell her emotions, can’t tell whether she’s truly panicking or only trying to lure me in, but her words still make me pause. I have absolutely, positively no desire to talk to this scentless boat human. But being banished to a place where most people want to kill and eat you does weird things to a person. Things like making them hesitate.

“Please,” the prisoner repeats. “I just need your ignit and a transitioner from that box on your left.”

Clever boat human. If she puts the blue ignit into the lock in her ankle cuff and activates it with the transitioner, the energy it produces might rattle the mechanism free. With a glance at her too-blue eyes, I pop the stone from its necklace holder and dangle it between my fingers.

Her hand jerks toward it.

Before she can steal it, I shove it in my mouth, wedging it between two sets of my teeth.

Her face pinches and her chest gives a little hitch. “Don’t be such a shit.” She moves her hands faster now, more aggres-sive. “You’re the only one who can help me.”

I stare at her. “Help you, you say?” My signs come out huge, and a single slither of my tail carries me into her space. “Like your people have helped the swamp’s natives since they so graciously claimed all our big rivers and started killing anything that doesn’t look like them? No thanks, boat shit,” I snap, turning her own word back on her.

The prisoner’s shaking extends to her shoulders, but her lips bunch. “I’m just a dancer. I’d never hurt anyone.”

“Just a dancer. Then why does Rubem want you?” I sign the cartel leader’s name like a mix of ruby and enemy.

She skips right over my question. “When he comes back—when he brings that lady downstairs with him . . .” Her hands stutter. “Please, I’d only need the ignit for a moment.”

I grin at her, showing off my rows of hooked teeth. “Yeah? Why should I let you borrow it? There’s nothing in it for me.”

The tremble bursts from her, turning into a vibration in her throat, low and heavy like a growl. “Because it’s the right thing to do!”

Oh, muck, she’s one of those people. “The right thing is meaningless. It’s right for you maybe, but it’s inconvenient and useless for me.”

The prisoner’s face shifts, her thick brows lowering. “Are all snake people such rude scaly bottom dwellers?”

“Just this one. I’m special.” I widen my smile. “Now, I have ignits to steal. Unless . . .” The conversation between Rubem and the prisoner slots into place. An ignit cartel looking for a hoard of something? Little wonder what it might contain. “Unless the legends are true, and there really is a massive stash of ignits out there somewhere. And you know how to reach it.”

She avoids looking at me, her fingers tapping a rhythm into her leg.

Rubem’s lifted voice grates across my head ridges, rattling up from the cabin. I glance back at the stones in the gambler’s pot. It still sits under the bearded human’s watchful gaze. My fingers itch to hold them. If Rubem wants this person so badly, then it might distract them all if something happens to her—something like her dangling over the side of the boat. Should her chain reach that far.

No time like the present to test it.

“So, if you don’t have ignits, then I guess Rubem won’t care if I toss you overboard?” I lean toward her.

She tucks her legs in closer. “You—you blistering wet rag—you can’t do this!”

Grabbing her chain, I yank her ankle toward me, pulling apart her tight knees. I loop the links once around my wrist to keep the chain in place while I sign, “I can. I think I will.”

The prisoner strains against my hold, but with her back already against the boxes, she has nowhere to go. She closes her eyes, the too-blue vanishing. “It belonged to my mother.” Tiny signs, the simple pat for belong nearly eclipsed by the swoop of her fingers beneath her chin for mother. “The hoard, I mean.”

I let the chain go. “And you’d give it to me instead?”

Her throat bobs. “Help me get away from Rubem. Please.”

None of those words are a yes, but I can wring one out of her later. A single look from Rubem turned her into a curling mess. As long as the chain still keeps her from running, I could do the same. And worse. “Fine. I’ll get you free of the cartel, and then you give me your ignits.” One way or another.

“Thank you—”

I ignore her. Moving as fluidly as possible, I follow her chain to the clamp at the end. It encircles one of the wooden beams holding up the canopy. Stretching out my shoulders, I wrap my body around the beam, once, twice, then a third time. The prisoner waves her hands, but I ignore her. Bracing my arms on the top of the pole and the extra length of my tail on the deck’s railing, I snap the wood in two. My muscles twitch as I relax, slowly letting down the top end of the broken beam.

The prisoner’s eyes widen. “Hurry, that was loud!”

She barely finishes signing before the bearded human clambers up the stairs, machete drawn. I yank the clamp up and off the split end of the beam. It tightens a notch in my hands. Holding to it like a leash, I leap for the railing.

My tail hits the floor with a thud. The prisoner comes tumbling after me and lands on my back, knocking my head into the deck. A slew of nasty vibrations rattle through my skull.

By the time I can see through the throbbing in my brain, I find the bearded human halfway back down the stairs. Only the gambling table stands between us. The gambling table with its glorious ignits. I could have both them and this mysterious hoard. I could.

I take the clamp connecting me to the prisoner and shove it onto my arm to keep her from running off. But as I lunge for the table and its ignit bounty, she hauls on the chain. It tugs at the clamp. I strain against it, reaching for the ignits. The clamp pulls three notches tighter. For one terrible moment, I wonder if it will keep tightening until it severs off the limb, but then it hits the last notch.

I jerk forward, and my fingertips brush the ignits. My mouth twists into such a grin that my jaw almost dislocates. And here they said I wouldn’t thrive outside the Murk.

Before I can snatch the stones, Rubem storms out the door to the lower cabins, the other gambler in his wake. The world slows. My muscles go too taut, as though made of wood instead of flesh.

The other gambler is not of the cartel. Her few months of murder since arriving here have marked her as the best damned hunter in the group of poachers and meragi killers who call themselves the fisher’s guild. When her name is signed, it uses the motion for a lily, twisted upward like that for north, or sometimes skewed around the chest as the boat humans do when encountering an omen of evil: Lily of the North, the One Who’s Not to Be Fucked With. The face she covered in her cowl is pale but for a million freckles, and a strand of bright orange hair cuts down her harsh cheekbones.

Before I can flinch, Lily lifts her net launcher and yanks the trigger. The net barrels toward me. It opens at the last moment to engulf my torso, just missing my head. Its impact knocks the air from my lungs, dislodging the ignit fixed between my teeth in the process, and slams my body away from the gambling table.

My ignit shoots from my mouth, dragging its calming thrum with it, and the pain in my bones takes root. My scales burn every place the net touches, as though a thousand tiny catfish eat me alive. My lungs seize and my spine shatters. I rip out of the netting, crashing into the far railing. My chest heaves. Human shouts—Rubem’s, Lily’s, the bearded human’s, I don’t know—rattle around my head. The prisoner yanks on the clamp around my arm, and ignitless, we plunge into the water.

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