Excerpt: How A Pirate Captain Mostly Saved The World Without Entirely Meaning To (working title)

Anders laughed. "Now, now, sir. You said you wanted to split the clockwork girl up before we docked?"

Des swallowed. "Oh. Right."

"We can always get Ollie to do it himself, you know."

She waved this suggestion away with one hand. "No, no, that's silly. He only cares about the scrap metal part, there's no guarantee he'll get the gears and the circuits out undamaged. Besides, he'll charge us for it. We'll make a lot more off of it if we take it apart ourselves and just sell the plating to Ollie instead."

Anders conceded the chain of reasoning with a tip of his head. "As you say, sir."

Des narrowed her eyes at him, taking in the smirk that was angling the corners of his mouth, the practically gleeful expression. "You're going to enjoy this, aren't you, you horrible man?"

"I certainly intend to, sir."

It took Des a little while to round up a prybar. As she complained to Anders once or twice, all the places she looked in failed to contain a prybar; she simply neglected to mention that this was by design, not by accident.

After the first half-hour, though, she went back to her cabin and gave herself a short talking-to, which is to say she looked at herself in the slightly foggy, lopsided mirror propped up on the shelf and said, "Stop being such a wuss, for the gods' sake," very firmly.

There was a prybar in part of the stern section of the hold, lying between a couple of crates. Des picked it up, feeling sort of like she'd just taken a big, hairy spider by the leg, or something, and turned and climbed the stairs.

They were keeping the clockwork girl in a room up the ship's corridor a bit, with a few other crates of overflow cargo that wouldn't fit in the hold. Des shifted the prybar from one hand to the other a couple times, and then told herself to stop being an idiot, and went in.

"Are you sure you don't want me to do it, sir?" Anders asked. Des glanced over at him - he was crouched next to the c-work girl, with his arms crossed. He had enjoyed her little prybar diversion in his usual mocking fashion, but now he was wearing an expression that was a combination of amusement and vague but genuine concern. He knew clockwork gave her the willies, but he knew that if he looked really concerned she'd yell at him and send him away - which was the reason for the vagueness, and also the amusement.

"No, no, I've got it," Des said. She could have yelled and sent him away anyway, but. Clockwork gave her the willies.

Maram, from where he - as he was manifesting in the form of a boy today - was leaning against the doorframe, snorted. "Don't hurt yourself," he said, and then belatedly added "Captain", when she glared at him.

"I hate you all," Des said, and set the prybar against the nearly invisible gap between the c-work's shoulder plate and the join of her arm.

"M-E," said the broken, and as far as Des knew, completely unwound clockwork girl, a shower of sparks flying out of the hole in her head.

"Aauaugh," said Des, and dropped the prybar on her foot.