Dark.
Not the dark of closed eyes. Not the dark of a room with the curtains drawn. This was the dark of being buried — total, solid, pressing against my skin like something alive.
For a terrible moment I didn't know where I was.
For a terrible moment I was somewhere else.
Smoke. Thick enough to chew. The sound of a world tearing itself apart — wood cracking, stone grinding, the deep structural groan of buildings that had stood for centuries folding inward like paper. And through all of it, layered under the destruction like a heartbeat under a scream:
Dereshishishi.
A laugh. Huge. Warm. Cracking at the seams — the laugh of a man who knew exactly what was coming and chose to fill whatever time remained with the sound of joy. I felt his hands again. Enormous. Gentle despite their size. Lifting me. The cold hit like a wall and then the sea was freezing around us, white lines racing across the surface, ice climbing his arms — his enormous arms — and the laugh kept going, kept going, even as the frost crept higher and the warmth bled out of the world —
Stop.
My real hands — small, shaking — hit wood.
Close. My breath bounced back against my face, warm and stale. My knees were jammed against my chest. My spine ached where the body had been folded too long into a shape it wasn't meant to hold.
The crate.
I was in the crate.
The memories fell back into place like broken tiles: the pier, the cargo ship, the nailer's hammer, the lid coming down. The ship's tremor through the wood. Sleep pulling me under.
The ship was still rocking. Long, slow rolls that shifted my weight against the side of the crate with each swell. Above me, the sealed lid. Around me, cloth and darkness. The air tasted recycled — cotton dust, old wood, and my own breath given back to me again and again.
I tried to move my legs.
My calves seized. Pain lanced from ankle to knee as the muscles, locked in the same position for hours, refused to cooperate. I bit the inside of my cheek and forced my right leg to extend — barely. The crate's wall stopped it. My knee popped, the sound too loud in the silence.
How long have I been in here?
No way to tell. No light. No sound from outside except the sea's slow rhythm and the occasional creak of wood settling around me. I'd been awake, then asleep, and now awake again — but whether I'd slept for an hour or ten, I couldn't say.
I closed my eyes. Open or shut, it made no difference. The dark was the same.
The Flower-Flower Fruit.
The thought rose slowly. I'd felt the ability once — back on the island, when hands had bloomed from nowhere to touch my shoulders. That had been reflex. The body's instinct, not mine.
But the ability lived in this body. And I was the one inside it now.
I focused. Or tried to. It was hard to describe what "focusing" meant for a power no one had taught me to use. There was no switch, no word, no gesture. It was more like — remembering how to flex a muscle I'd always had but never noticed. The body knew. Somewhere in its fibers, in whatever the Fruit had woven into its cells, there was a memory of how.
A hand bloomed on my forearm.
The sensation was strange — a doubling, like suddenly hearing an echo of my own heartbeat half a second late. The new hand was small (of course it was; everything about me was small) and its palm rested against the crate's inner wall. I felt the wood grain through its fingers. Cool. Rough. Distinct from the warmth of the cloth beneath me.
I made it move. The fingers curled. Uncurled. Tapped the wood twice. The sensation fed back to me — not quite the same as touching something with my real hand, but close. Slightly distant. Like remembering the texture of something rather than feeling it now.
Another hand. On the opposite wall. Then one on the lid above.
Three extra hands. My two plus three. Five hands in a box barely large enough for a child.
Each one could feel independently. The wall to my left was cooler — closer to the hull, closer to the ocean on the other side. The wall to my right held a faint warmth. The lid above had three nail heads I could trace with phantom fingertips.
But holding them was work.
Not physical exactly — more like trying to listen to three conversations at once while reading. My concentration frayed within minutes. A headache bloomed behind my eyes, dull at first, then insistent, and I felt something else too: a draining sensation, like sand running out through a crack I couldn't find. The body's reserves were already thin. Hunger and thirst had worn them down, and the Fruit was drawing from the same depleted well.
I let the hands go.
The doubling vanished. Just me again. One body. Two hands. A box.
Save it. Whatever it costs, it costs from a balance you can't afford to spend.
The dark pressed in.
Without the distraction of the Fruit, there was nothing left but the crate and my own thoughts, and my thoughts were not kind company. They circled the way trapped things circle — always returning to the same walls.
Where is this ship going?
How long until it stops?
What do I do when it does?
And beneath those, quieter, more dangerous:
Nobody is looking for me.
Nobody in this world knows I exist — except as a name on a bounty poster and the ghost of a burned island.
I pressed my fists against my eyes until colors bloomed in the dark.
Stop. You're spiraling. The body is dehydrated, the brain is making everything worse than it is. You know this. You studied this — stress responses, survival psychology, the way isolation degrades rational thinking. You know what's happening.
Knowing didn't fix it. But it gave me something to hold — a small, cold tool. The ability to name the spiral, even if I couldn't stop it.
The ship rocked. I rocked with it. Time became something I endured.
———
I slept again.
Not by choice. The body simply stopped — one moment I was staring into the dark, cataloguing my aches, and the next I was waking with a jolt, my heart hammering, the disorientation worse than before.
Something had changed.
The rocking was different. Shorter swells. The crate shifted more often, small jolting movements. And beneath the wood — beneath the sea's rhythm — I felt the ship itself changing. A heaviness in its motion. A drag.
Slowing.
The cloth beneath me was damp now, and not from sweat. The smell in the crate had sharpened — something animal, something I didn't want to acknowledge. My lips had cracked. When I ran my tongue over them I tasted blood, copper-thin. My throat was raw. The headache from the Fruit practice had faded, replaced by a different kind — deeper, slower, the kind that came from the body running dry.
Voices.
Muffled. Above. The thud of boots on deck planks. A shout pulled apart by distance. Then closer — footsteps in the hold, heavy, and the scrape of crates being moved.
They're unloading.
My heart kicked. I pressed myself flat against the bottom of the crate. The sounds built: scrape, lift, grunt, footsteps, silence, return. A rhythm. Methodical. Getting closer.
Crates shifted around me. Each removal changed the sound — the echoes widened, the voices sharpened. Someone was whistling. Someone else cursed about a splinter.
Then my crate tilted.
The world lurched. I slid against the cloth, caught myself with both palms, bit back the sound that tried to escape. My crate was being moved — lifted, carried, the motion uneven as two sets of hands adjusted their grip.
"Heavy one."
"They're all heavy."
"This one's different. Packed wrong, maybe."
A grunt. My crate swung, steadied, and began to move. I felt the transition — the echoes changed, opened, then tightened again. The crate was set down with a jolt that rattled my teeth. Then nothing for a while. Just the ambient noise of a port — distant voices, the creak of ropes, the cry of gulls, and the steady hiss of rain on a roof above.
I waited.
New footsteps. Lighter. Purposeful. Someone speaking — not to me, not about me. Something about inventory, quantities, a manifest that didn't match.
A crowbar bit into wood. The first nail squealed as it pulled free. Then the second. My muscles locked. Third nail. Fourth.
The lid lifted.
Light hit me like a fist. Not sunlight — gray, filtered through rain and a warehouse roof — but after two days of sealed dark, it burned. I squeezed my eyes shut, tears streaming instantly, the world nothing but white pain.
A voice. Directly above. Male. Rough.
"What the — who the hell are you? How'd you get in here?"
I forced my eyes open. Shapes swam — a face, broad and sun-darkened, bending over the crate. A crowbar in one hand. Behind him, the dim interior of a warehouse. Stacked crates. A second man further back, clipboard in hand, staring.
"Get out of there." The first man's confusion was already souring into anger. His free hand reached toward me. "Do you have any idea — this is company property — you little — "
My body moved before my thoughts caught up.
Hands bloomed.
Three of them — on his forearm, on his shoulder, on his chest. Small. Pale. Child's hands pushing out of his body like flowers breaking through soil. They shoved — all three, palms flat, a single coordinated push that caught him mid-reach.
The man staggered. His eyes went huge — not at the push, which was weak, barely enough to shift his balance — but at the wrongness of it. Hands growing from his own skin. Hands that shouldn't exist.
The crowbar clattered to the floor.
The hands dissolved. Pink petals scattered where they'd been — small, translucent, drifting down like something from a dream that had leaked into the wrong reality.
The man scrambled backward, slapping at his own chest where the hands had been. His mouth worked. The clipboard man behind him had gone pale, frozen mid-step.
I was already moving. My arms hooked over the crate's edge and I hauled myself up — pain singing through every joint, my vision a smear of gray and white, my legs folding the instant they tried to bear weight. I toppled out of the crate more than climbed, hit the warehouse floor with my shoulder, and rolled.
Get up.
My legs were dead. Not numb — worse than numb. They were there, I could feel them, but the signals from my brain arrived garbled and weak. I got to my hands and knees. The concrete was cold and damp. Around me: crates, barrels, coils of rope. A wide doorway ahead — open to the street, open to rain, open to out.
"Hey — HEY! Someone stop that kid!"
I stood. Swayed. Took a step. Another. My legs screamed and I let them scream and kept walking because walking was all I had.
Then the walking became something faster. Not running — my body didn't have running in it, not yet — but a desperate, lurching stride that ate ground in uneven bites. I hit the doorway and rain struck my face and for one disorienting second the world was too big, too bright, too much after the coffin of the crate.
The street was mud and cobblestone. Buildings pressed close on both sides, their walls dark with rain. I turned left — no reason, just instinct — and my bare feet slapped against wet stone. The mud sucked at my remaining shoe and I kicked it off without thinking, and then I was barefoot entirely and the cold bit but at least both feet moved the same.
Behind me, shouting. Fading already — the warehouse man had come to the door, but rain and distance were on my side, and a barefoot child in a muddy raincoat wasn't worth chasing in weather like this.
I turned again. And again. Alleys branching off alleys, narrow and crooked, the buildings leaning overhead until the rain softened to a drip. A gutter ran with rainwater. A cat watched me from a windowsill with the supreme indifference of something that had never been hunted.
I kept going until the shouts were gone and the only sounds were rain on stone and my own ragged breathing.
Then my legs quit.
Not gradually. All at once. One moment I was moving, the next I was sitting on wet cobblestone with my back against a wall, my chest heaving, my hands shaking against my thighs.
A narrow gap between two buildings. Shadow. Quiet. The rain a curtain across the alley's mouth.
I pressed my forehead against my drawn-up knees.
My body shook — not from cold, though I was cold. From everything. From the dark of the crate and the light of the warehouse and the hands that had bloomed from a stranger's skin and the look on his face when they did.
I made it off the ship.
I'm in a town I don't know.
I have nothing.
My stomach clenched — empty, past the point of growling. My throat burned. My eyes stung from the light. My feet were bare and cold and already beginning to ache on the wet stone.
But the air was real. The rain was real. The rough wall against my back was solid and not a wooden box.
Somewhere nearby, a door opened and closed. A woman's voice called a name I didn't catch. A cart rattled over cobblestones.
Normal sounds. Normal life. People with homes and meals and names that didn't appear on wanted posters.
I lifted my head.
The alley opened onto a side street. Through the rain I could see a sliver of the town — a shopfront, a stack of barrels, a man hurrying past with his collar pulled up. Ordinary. Unremarkable. Safe in the way only people who have never been hunted understand safety.
My hands had stopped shaking.
Not because the fear was gone. Because the body had run out of energy to sustain it.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand — rain and tears, indistinguishable — and took one breath. Then another.
Water first. Then food. Then figure out where I am.
One thing at a time.
I pulled my knees to my chest and sat in the shadow, watching the rain fall, waiting for my legs to remember how to carry me.
To be continued…