The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [72]
“Jez! Um … I … you see, I picked this up in Tarlock Cove and I … er …”
“I don’t think I want to know,” said Jez.
“Right. Hmm. Yes. Probably best.”
She went down to the cargo hold and outside. The Ketty Jay sat in a grassy mountain dell, high up in the Splinters. A broken, bald peak thrust up ahead of her. Frey and Crake were somewhere on the other side, with Grist and his bosun, scouting out the location that Crake’s daemon had identified as the place where Grist’s mysterious sphere was being kept. Nearby was the Storm Dog. A few of Grist’s crew lounged about, enjoying the bright, cool morning. Jez walked past them, toward the trees that fringed the dell.
She still had deep misgivings about this whole affair, but she was loyal to her Cap’n. He’d given her a home, and she had a ways to go before she paid him back for that, even if she’d already saved his life more than once. She felt included here and needed.
Just as she’d felt when that Mane was trying to turn her, on that snowy night in Yortland. The moment when she’d seen into their world and felt the connections between them.
She understood why that crew on the crashed Mane craft had lain down and died. She’d only had a taste of what could have been. Having that, living with it, and then giving it up would have been unthinkably terrible. A mutilation of the senses.
And yet they did it anyway. They made that choice. So maybe they’re individuals, rather than slaves to a collective mind. Maybe I wouldn’t lose myself if I joined them.
Dangerous thinking. A temptation like that would be too easy to give in to. It was no easy thing to resist the call, day after day, night after night. The need to belong had always been a part of her. And no one belonged like a Mane did.
Jez had spent her whole life looking for her place. For as long as she could remember, she’d been unable to fit in. She’d always had friends, but somehow they never seemed like the friendships she read about in books. She liked them, and they liked her, and it went no deeper. If she never saw them again, she wouldn’t have shed a tear. Nobody said so, but she knew they felt the same about her.
Her childhood was spent watching her companions with secret envy. She was always the last to be involved. The cog in the gears that didn’t quite mesh.
When she was older, she began to blame her father—him and his obsession with trying to improve her position in life. He was a craftbuilder, an artisan, more respected than the peasantry but still a world away from the scholars, officials, and aristocrats.
Once he’d been content with his lot; but after the sickness took her mother, he changed. Suddenly a craftbuilder’s life wasn’t good enough for his daughter anymore. He forced her to study when she wasn’t helping him in the workshop. He saved up for a tutor who’d knock the common edges off her accent. By the time Jez reached the age where she just wanted to be the same as everyone else, she was already different in a thousand little ways.
Her apologetic displays of knowledge intimidated her friends. She found herself frustrated by their lack of ambition. Her horizons had been expanded through literature, but theirs hadn’t, and she couldn’t understand how they could think so small. They were still friends, as they’d always been; but no matter how she tried, she was faintly alien to them now.
There was no help among the educated either. They spotted her immediately and despised her as a try-hard attempting to rise above her station. A few small friendships blossomed, but they could only survive in isolation, and circumstances eventually put an end to them.
She hardened herself to rejection. She embarked on adolescent romances and found them as unsatisfying as her friendships had been. She always broke them off before her partner could.
Her father talked of university, but it was his dream and not hers. Someone like her didn’t get into places like that. And even if she did, she’d never escape her birth. It would be just another round of being on the outside. So when the time