Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

Milo woke first, the way he always did — some old, disciplined habit that had never once let him sleep in properly, not in a cell, not in a classroom, not even here, with sand still in his hair and the tide creeping slow and patient toward his boots.

He went through the motions quietly, careful not to wake the sprawled, snoring shapes still scattered across the beach around the dead fires — stretched the stiffness out of muscles that had earned it fair and square the night before, checked The Overdue at her mooring, ate a cold breakfast of leftover roast without much ceremony. The cove, in the pale early light, looked considerably less like a battlefield-turned-festival and considerably more like the aftermath of one — bottles scattered in the sand, a burnt-out barrel still smoking faintly, someone’s boot lodged inexplicably in the branches of a low tree.

Hollow Tide didn’t stir until the sun had climbed well past what most reasonable people would consider morning.

She sat up all at once, hair a wild, salt-crusted mess, blinking at the world with the specific, blank confusion of someone whose brain hadn’t yet caught up with the rest of her, and turned to find Milo sitting a few feet away, patiently waiting.

"...Who are you again?"

Milo laughed — real, surprised, the sound coming easier than it had any right to this early in the day.

"Just a simple fool," he said, "with a name that would bore someone like you. You already told me as much last night."

"Sounds like me," she agreed, entirely unbothered by her own memory lapse, stretching both arms over her head with a groan before flopping back down into the sand like sitting up had simply been too much effort to sustain. "Fine. Fool it is. I like that better than whatever you actually told me anyway."

Milo studied her for a moment — the easy, unguarded sprawl of her, the total absence of any performance in it — and found himself asking the question that had been sitting quietly under his ribs since the moment she’d first crossed the beach toward him.

"Can I ask you something," he said, careful to keep the words light, curious rather than probing. "You’re strange. Genuinely strange, in a way I haven’t managed to place yet. I don’t mean that unkindly. I mean it the way you’d notice a book written in a script you’ve never seen before — I just want to understand the shape of it."

He half-expected her to laugh it off, or deflect, the way most people did when a stranger asked them something real. She didn’t.

"I’m not from here," she said instead, simply, staring up at the sky rather than at him. "Not from any world you’ve heard of. I came from somewhere called Earth."

"I don’t know it."

"Nobody here does." She said it without bitterness, the specific, worn flatness of someone who had explained this exact fact enough times to stop expecting a different reaction. "It’s a strange place. Everything there is a little bit poison. The food. The air, sometimes, if you live in the wrong part of it. You have to eat anyway, because your body needs it to keep running, and then you have to take medicine on top of that, because the food itself is slowly hurting you the whole time it’s keeping you alive. I never understood why nobody just built the two things into one. Food that helps you instead of food you have to apologize for with a pill afterward. Seemed obvious to me. Nobody ever explained why it worked the way it did. Maybe nobody actually knew."

Milo said nothing, letting the silence hold space for whatever came next.

"I had a brother," she said, quieter now. "Good one. The kind who never once made you feel like a burden, even when you were being exactly that." Her jaw tightened, just slightly. "I stopped taking my medicine, near the end. I told myself I felt like a bother to him — all the appointments, all the worry, all the nights he couldn’t sleep properly because he was listening for whether I was breathing wrong down the hall. I thought stopping would free him. Give him his life back." She laughed, short and humorless. "I didn’t free him. I just watched his face the day I told him what I’d done, and it wasn’t relief on it at all. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen a person’s eyes do. I understood, right then, too late to fix it, that I hadn’t given him anything back. I’d just taken the last thing he had left to hold onto and broken it in front of him."

"That’s not freedom," Milo said, quiet, understanding arriving with a weight he hadn’t expected. "That’s just a different kind of loss, wearing freedom’s name."

"Yeah," Hollow Tide said. "Took me a while to work that part out too." She finally turned her head to look at him properly, and something raw and honest sat behind her eyes, entirely without the performance she’d worn all through the previous night’s chaos. "I ended up here not long after. Don’t ask me how, I don’t actually know. It’s got its good parts. Freedom’s real here, the kind that doesn’t cost anyone else something to hold. But I still miss him. Every day, a little. He wanted me happy, though. Told me so, near the end, plain as anything. So that’s what I’m doing. Being happy, for as long as I’ve got, because it’s the one thing he actually asked me for."

Milo sat with that for a long moment, feeling something in his own chest ache in quiet, unexpected sympathy.

"Your turn," Hollow Tide said, before he could offer anything back. "What’s your story, Fool. Why does a man who fought a book-golem end up dressed like a pirate for no better reason than a rumor he half-believed?"

So Milo told her. All of it, or nearly — Kira’s hand turning slowly to glass, a King who burned libraries, a Vault that stripped him bare and rebuilt him into someone considerably more dangerous, a rumor about a woman who might hold the one skill that could carry an impossible cure across the seam between two different worlds. He found himself telling it plainly, without the careful editing he usually applied even to people he trusted — the specific, honest bluntness that had always belonged more to Loof’s own reflexes than to any habit Milo had built for himself, bleeding through the same way it always did when he let his guard down long enough to stop managing it.

Hollow Tide laughed hardest at the pirate part, doubling over in the sand, delighted and disbelieving in equal measure. "You became a pirate," she wheezed, "because someone told you I only respect free captains? That’s the dumbest reason I’ve ever heard for buying a ship."

"It worked," Milo said, mock-offended. "I’m sitting here, aren’t I."

"Fair," she admitted, still grinning, and something in her expression settled into a quieter, more considering shape. "You want to know something? I’ve heard every story people tell about me. Monster. Cold-blooded killer. Woman who’ll burn a harbor down over a fish market bill." She shrugged, easy, unbothered. "Some of it’s even true, technically. But every single person I’ve ever actually hurt had it coming, one way or another. I don’t care what flag they fly or what title sits in front of their name. I care whether they hurt someone who didn’t deserve it. That’s the only label that’s ever mattered to me."

"The pirate act," Milo said, carefully. "Is that real, or is that a role too?"

"Bit of both," she said, grinning again. "There was a show, back home. A character in it — most free, most happy man I ever saw in any story, anywhere. Chased his own dream across an entire ocean and never once let anyone talk him out of it. I liked him so much I started living like him, once I got here and realized nobody could stop me. Some habits you keep on purpose, even after the world that made them is gone."

She rose, brushing sand off her legs, and disappeared toward her own ship without further explanation, returning a few minutes later with a slim, unassuming book clutched in one hand.

"Here," she said, tossing it to him. "Inventory. Rare as anything, I know, but I’ve got two copies and only one soul, so consider it a gift for the best story I’ve heard all season."

Milo caught it, and felt his whole chest go tight with something too large to properly name, and pressed his palm flat against the cover before he’d even finished thanking her, watching the knowledge pour into him whole and complete and his.

I can save her now, he thought, and had to close his eyes for a moment against the sheer, overwhelming relief of it. I can actually take it home.

"So," Hollow Tide said, once his eyes opened again, watching him with a bright, expectant grin, "where do you live? I’ll want the address."

Milo blinked. "Why."

"What do you mean, why?" She looked at him like he’d asked something genuinely baffling. "Your King’s evil, and he’s bothered one of my friends. He needs to pay for that. That’s what my hero would do."

"...Who’s the friend," Milo asked, slowly, a cold, disbelieving suspicion already beginning to form.

Hollow Tide smiled — wide, warm, and entirely, devastatingly sincere.

"You, silly." She tilted her head, glancing past him toward the cove’s mouth with open, cheerful concern. "Also, your ship’s barely floating. How exactly were you planning on sailing home?"

Milo turned, slow, and found The Overdue riding lower in the water than she had any business doing, and had absolutely no idea, standing there in the morning light with a rare skill book still humming warm in his chest, which of the two revelations had actually managed to leave him speechless.

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