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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Patriarchy" data-source="post: 72519" data-attributes="member: 162"><h3 style="text-align: center">Chapter 4: Honeypot</h3>The storm did not announce itself so much as descend, a wall of black on the radar and then, instantly, in your teeth and down your throat and all around. It hit just past dusk, when the last of the battery-powered deck lights struggled to keep a circle of yellow on the trawler’s rust-slicked skin. One minute I was on my hands and knees scraping gobbets of something like cartilage from the scupper, the next I was being rag-dolled across the plates by a wind that tried to take my scalp with it.They say you can’t hear yourself scream in a hurricane, but you can. It’s just that you have to decide which sound is you and which is everything else—the thunder, the wail of the superstructure, the machinery shrieking for help. I never heard my own voice until I smashed shoulder-first into a winch post and felt the world snap into cold, surgical focus.The line was slipping, spinning spools the size of truck tires, and a tangle of polyrope slapped the deck like a pile of live eels. Somebody had fucked the tie-off on the net and now the whole last catch, tons of it, was about to go back into the sea along with any idiot dumb enough to try and fix it. Which, by process of elimination and the fact that I was already out here, meant me.My hands were not hands anymore but a sketch of hands, mashed and reborn daily under the weight of the line. The scars ran like a subway map from my knuckles to the base of my thumb, every scab a different flavor of infection. When I gripped the cable to slow its slide, I felt a tendon pop under my ring finger, followed by a warm flood that turned to ice in the wind.I didn’t slow it. The net, sodden with water and bycatch, was more muscle than matter. It jerked, slammed my body into the guardrail, and for a moment I was over open water, feet skidding for purchase on nothing but oil and rain. The only thing that kept me from going all the way was a steel cleat to the crotch, which rang my bell hard enough to see stars, or maybe it was just the floodlights going out one by one as the generator finally surrendered.When my vision cleared, I was still here. The storm tried to erase me, but it couldn’t make up its mind—every gust came from a new angle, every wave bounced off the hull and returned as spray in the eyes. I groped for the winch, found the manual brake, and jammed it in place with my boot, which felt heroic until the lever punched me in the knee and dropped me face-first onto the deck.I lay there, cheek mashed against wet grit, and wondered how many bones you could lose before you just dissolved. The wind dropped for a second and I heard a voice—faint, then closer, then yelling directly into my ear:“Sinclair! Up, up, up! Move or die!”It was cosmicx16, his silhouette blocked out by the floodlights behind him, making him look twice as wide and twice as cruel. He grabbed my vest by the collar, yanked me to my feet, and then pointed at the winch line, which was already fraying at the edges.“You fix. You tie! If net lost, you go over with it!” He slapped the side of my head for punctuation, then staggered back to the wheelhouse, already soaked to the skin and loving every second.I tried to tie the line, but my fingers would not do anything I told them. I could see them move, but it was like watching a video of someone else’s suffering—slow, uncoordinated, shivering so bad I kept missing the loop. The saltwater and blood blurred together. I could not feel my face. I could not remember if this was the first storm or just the one I’d die in.The lights flickered again and the deck became a strobe: white, then black, then white again, every flash freezing the world in a new arrangement. Sometimes the net was there, sometimes not. Sometimes the ocean looked close enough to kiss, sometimes it was gone. I had no sense of time except that my hands kept failing and the line kept pulling and I was the only thing between the Black Dragon’s last haul and nothing at all.Then, as if the universe wanted to make a joke of my effort, the wind dropped and the deck went silent, except for the rattle of the loose chain on the railing. I looked up and saw him: Captain Magonia, standing on the starboard steps, arms folded, eyes black and flat and shining even in the darkness. His coat whipped around his body like it was trying to leave without him. He took the stairs three at a time, boots clanging, and was beside me before I could even remember to hate him.He didn’t say anything at first. Just looked down, watched me try and fail to tie the knot, watched the blood drip from my wrist onto the deck. Then he bent down, not to help, but to put his lips directly to my ear.“You see?” he said, voice so calm it barely counted as a whisper. “You see how easy it is to die?”I shook my head, because I didn’t see, and because I wanted to say anything that would make him leave.He laughed, a low, unhappy sound, and reached into his coat. I thought he was going to hit me, or maybe pull a knife, but instead he produced a rectangle of plastic and glass—glowing blue, flickering, utterly alien against the storm. It took me a second to recognize it as a tablet, wrapped in a thick condom of rubber and tape. The light hurt my eyes, but he forced it into my face, pressing the screen until it left an afterimage.“Look,” he said. “Is for you.”I tried to focus. The rain hit the screen in tiny electric sparks, but through the blur I saw what he wanted me to see: a face, pale and sharp, framed by black hair. The video was live—Sun Yuxin, in her own apartment, warm and dry, her lips forming my name.“New,” she said, her voice clean and crisp even through the gale, “I want you to see this.”She smiled, and the smile was pure venom.Behind her, a man appeared—tall, brutal, the kind of body that made mine look like it was made from leftovers. He put his hands on her hips, kissed her neck, and she closed her eyes in a way she never did with me.I tried to look away, but Magonia’s grip was iron. He tilted my chin, held it steady, forced my eyes to the screen.“You watch,” he commanded, as the man in the video spun Sun Yuxin around and lifted her into his lap. Her belly, huge now, strained the fabric of her shirt. She laughed—really laughed, the way she used to on the best days, and then she looked into the camera again.“You’re very brave,” she said, “but you’re not so special.” Then, in Mandarin, a phrase I only half understood, but the meaning was clear: “You are just another fish on the line.”I felt myself shaking, not from cold but from the shame, the way it made my guts churn and my bones shrivel.Magonia let go of my face, but the tablet stayed, pinned to my chest by the strap of my vest. “You work better when you see,” he said, and then walked away, boots steady even as the deck rolled under us.I stared at the screen. The man and Sun Yuxin were kissing now, slow and messy, and I could see her hands trace the scars on his arms, scars just like mine, but thicker, darker, real. He whispered something to her, and she giggled, the sound soft as air.The netline jerked behind me, and I remembered where I was. I looped the knot, once, twice, then cinched it tight. The pain was nothing compared to the shame. I wanted to smash the tablet, throw it into the sea, but I didn’t. I left it there, pressed to my chest, the blue light reflecting in the puddles at my feet.The storm came back, harder than before, and the deck became chaos. I kept to my station, hands bleeding, eyes locked on the knot, refusing to look at the screen even as it played out the rest of my humiliation in perfect, high-definition clarity.I lasted another hour. Maybe two. When the wind finally broke and the sky went white with dawn, I was still at the rail, still alive, still watching the tablet as it looped the video over and over.In the end, all I could do was laugh, a sound so cracked it barely counted as human.I had survived.But I had not escaped.<h3></h3>The video ran on a loop, but it was never the same twice. Every time I looked, the angle shifted—sometimes wide, sometimes tight on her face, sometimes at a tilt like a camera being jostled by laughter. It took a minute for my eyes to stop rattling in their sockets, to even process what I was seeing. The world was colorless out here, washed in gunmetal and storm, but the feed from her apartment was all color, a riot of gold and red, every surface soft and too clean, like someone had told an algorithm to design the opposite of a trawler hold and this was the result.Sun Yuxin sat at the center of it all, perched cross-legged on a velvet couch that probably cost more than my parents’ car. She wore a silk robe, navy, loose over her belly. The baby—our baby—made a smooth, almost perfect curve under the fabric, like a basketball tucked between her thighs. There were throw pillows behind her. One of them was shaped like a cartoon shrimp. I remembered buying it for her, off AliExpress, as a joke. She’d said it was too ugly to display, but here it was, in full view, front and center.She didn’t look at the camera at first. She looked to her left, at the man beside her. He was taller than her by a head, built like he worked out for a living, skin smooth and tan and unscarred. His arms, draped around her shoulders, were the first thing I noticed—thick, hairless, veins roped across the forearms. I’d seen him before, in glimpses, the way you see an intruder’s face in a nightmare and then remember it forever.His free hand slid down, landed on the dome of her belly, and rested there, fingers splayed and proprietary.She giggled, sharp and bright, and finally turned to the lens.“New,” she said, like it was a punchline. “Are you still there?”She reached up, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She looked so awake, so healthy, it made my own reflection in the tablet screen look like a before photo from a terminal illness fundraiser.“Maybe you think this is cruel,” she said, “but really, it’s just funny.”She put her feet up on the table. The toenails were painted black.“Honestly, I wasn’t going to do the stream tonight. I wanted to let you rest, but then Ma messaged. He said you needed extra encouragement.” She winked at her lover. “Did you get hurt again? Did you cry?”I tasted blood in my mouth. I must have bitten my tongue when the winch hit me, or maybe just now. I tried to close the window, but Magonia had set the tablet to admin lock. All I could do was watch.The man beside her reached over, thumbed the corner of her lip, and smiled. He didn’t speak. I realized, then, that I recognized him not from dreams, but from real life. He was one of Ma’s old crew, the ones who rotated in to supervise the new catchers every few weeks. We’d shaken hands, once. He’d nearly broken my knuckles, then laughed about it. Now he was here, in my apartment, with my Sun.She kissed his thumb, then looked back to me.“I guess I should say thank you,” she said. “If you hadn’t worked so hard, we couldn’t afford this place.” She swept her hand, Vanna White, and for a second the camera panned the living room. The apartment was unrecognizable. Every stick of my furniture had been replaced. The whiteboard above the kitchen counter was gone; in its place was a huge, hand-painted scroll, the kind you see in movies about warlords. I couldn’t read the calligraphy, but I knew it wasn’t one of her poems. Probably a proverb about winning.Her voice dropped, softer. “You want to know why, right? You want to know if I ever loved you, if the baby is yours, if all of this was just for fun?”She waited, like she wanted me to answer.I tried. I really did. The words lined up in my throat but never made it past my teeth.She took pity on me.“Here is the truth, New,” she said, and the smile slid off her face, replaced by something flat, surgical. “They send me to America because I am very good at finding men who need to believe in things. At first, I thought it was a boring job, but then I found you. I watched your posts, your silly love letters, your way of talking about pain like it was romantic. I thought: perfect. He will do anything for me. He will go anywhere, no matter how stupid, if I just say I need it.”She glanced at the man, who nodded, and then looked back to the camera.“They told me: if you get pregnant, it’s easier to control him. So I did. I picked the best donor, the one with the right genes.” She squeezed the man’s hand, hard, enough to make the knuckles go white. “He will be a good father. Not like you.”I felt something crack inside, a little pop, the sound of a rib breaking under the strain.“I told Ma everything,” she said. “Every message, every call, every time you begged to come home. He thought it was funny. He said: let him work. Let him suffer. Let him be proud.”She giggled again, and it was a different sound now—mean, high-pitched, a child mocking a bug before pulling off its legs.The lover leaned in, said something in Mandarin, and Yuxin laughed, then translated for me: “He says, even now, you watch us. Even now, you love me.”She bit her lip, eyes huge.“Do you want to see what love looks like?” she asked. The man nodded, already moving. He slid his hand inside her robe and palmed her breast, pinching the nipple until she gasped. Her head fell back on his shoulder, mouth open, and she writhed against him, slow and wet. She looked back at the camera, at me, and whispered, “Is this what you want, New? Is this what makes you happy?”The screen went blurry for a second, my own breath fogging the glass. I tried to wipe it with my palm but just left a smear of rain and salt. The tablet slipped from my lap and bounced off my thigh, then clattered to the deck, screen still bright, the video skipping but not stopping.I wanted to smash it, to stomp it under my boot, but my hands would not close into fists. I grabbed the edge of the rail instead and squeezed, the cold biting into my bones, until I felt something pop again, this time in my wrist.She wasn’t finished.The next part of the video was her, on her knees in front of him, belly resting on her thighs, mouth open, taking him slow and deep, never breaking eye contact with the lens. Every time she came up for air, she said my name, a little softer, a little sadder. “New, New, New.” As if chanting it would make me real again.I watched. I watched the whole thing. I watched as he bent her over the couch and fucked her, slow and easy, like it was a massage, his hands all over her back, her sides, her belly. She moaned for him, and sometimes for me. She said, “I want him to see. I want him to know it’s better this way.” She said, “Don’t be sad, New.” She said, “This is what love is.”When it ended, she wiped her mouth, smiled at the camera, and said, “You will always be my number one fan.”The screen froze on her face, perfect and evil.I slumped to the deck, knees folded, breath hitching. The rain came down in sheets, but it couldn’t wash the taste of bile from my tongue. I hugged my arms to my chest, squeezed my ribs until it hurt more than the memory. I tried to remember anything good about her, but all I could see was the video, on endless repeat, and my own stupid, broken face reflected in the corner of the screen.The wind picked up, tossing spray across the bow. I leaned forward, forehead to metal, and let the world tilt. My whole body shook, not from cold, but from the sudden, absolute loss of anything to believe in.Somewhere above deck, I heard laughter—maybe cosmicx16, maybe Magonia, maybe just the wind. It didn’t matter. I was alone.For a while, I watched the video in silence. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Maybe I wanted to see how much I could take before I quit.When the tablet finally died, the storm was over. The sky was flat and gray, the sea a mirror.I closed my eyes and wished for a world where none of this had ever happened.But I knew I would wake up in the same place, and that she would be there, smiling, waiting for me to watch.<h3></h3>The quiet after a storm is always more dangerous than the storm. That’s when your hands start to shake, when your teeth start to hurt, when your brain runs all the numbers and comes up with a single, shattering answer: you survived, but you weren’t supposed to. You belong to the aftermath now.They called it trawl time, and it came every few hours, but this one felt different. The sea had gone glassy, the clouds blown off but the memory of them still hanging heavy on the air. There was a taste to it, like the air after an electrical fire, or the inside of a mouth when all the teeth are gone.From the rail I watched the net come up. First just a shadow, then a presence, then finally a boiling, pulsing shape under the surface, hundreds of feet long and fifty wide, straining the steel of the boom as it crested the water. The hydraulic motors groaned, struggling, and then the first ropes snapped taut, spattering the deck with foam and scales and bits of jelly that popped when they hit the paint.The net didn’t want to leave the sea. It fought, rippling and rolling, but the winch never got tired. As it rose, I saw what we’d caught: sharks, small and huge, crushed together, their skin torn off in patches, some still biting at the mesh in blind rage. There were turtles, green and olive, their shells scored white from scraping the net. There were rays and squid and eels, each fighting for air and getting only the last dregs of the Gulf.When the net cleared the water, the boom swung it over the deck, and for a second, the whole world paused—gravity waiting to see who would blink first. Then the release, a wet explosion as the catch hit the grates, a rain of flesh and shit and seawater that splattered up to my knees. The sound was thunder, but the smell was worse: rot, brine, the panic of dying things.I stumbled back, hands to my face, retching but not able to puke. I couldn’t even look at the pile at first, but the other crew were already in it, hacking the heads off the sharks, slitting the turtles, scooping the rays aside with shovels and boots. The bycatch—the real haul, the reason we were out here at all—was packed into crates at the far end of the deck, yellowtail and snapper and grouper, so clean and bright they looked painted on.The rest was trash. It would be ground up, tossed over, or just left to die on the plates.I heard a laugh, sudden and close. Turned, and there was cosmicx16, grinning with blood-slick lips, a knife already in his hand. “You see, Bait? You see what we do to the world?”He grabbed a shark by the tail, swung it so its head smacked the deck, then drew the blade across its snout, opening the skin to the cartilage. “We are gods here,” he said, voice gone flat and hungry.The other crew closed in, all around me, working in pairs or alone, some talking, some silent, all moving with the weird, perfect efficiency of men who’ve done this their whole lives. I watched a turtle gasp, its eyes huge, its legs kicking in slow motion as a boot pressed its neck to the metal and a cleaver split the shell. Another man, his hair gone white from bleach or shock, stacked eels in a blue bucket, then poured bleach over them until they writhed in a froth of agony.The rain had stopped, but the deck was never dry. I knelt, just for a second, just to rest, and felt my knees sink into the guts and bile that pooled there. My hands still shook from the tablet, from the video, from the knowledge that I would never be anything but an object, a thing to be used and discarded like the rest of this catch.It hurt, not in my bones, but somewhere deeper, a pain that made my body want to fold up and disappear. I tried to stand, but cosmicx16 was there again, faster than I remembered he could move. He grabbed my shoulder and squeezed until my collarbone squealed.“Ma says you need to be honored,” he said, words oily. “Ma says we do the ceremony.”I tried to resist, but there was nothing left in me. He hoisted me up and dragged me, not to the rail, but to the middle of the deck, right where the catch had just spilled. The rest of the crew stopped what they were doing and formed a ring, boots splashing in the ichor. The storm had stripped the sky clean, so every man’s face was visible, eyes lit by the halogens overhead.Cosmic brought the chain. I’d seen him do it before, when a new guy fucked up or when someone needed to be reminded of their place. It was always the same: chain them to the bollard, tie the arms behind, sometimes gag the mouth if they screamed too much.Today, it was for me.They wrapped the chain around my waist, cinched it with a padlock. My arms were yanked behind my back, hands pulled tight until my wrists went numb. Cosmicx16 bent down, mouth to my ear.“You watch now,” he said. “You watch and you remember.”Zhao turned the tablet back on, set it on a crate at eye level, propped it up so I couldn’t look away. Sun Yuxin’s face was still frozen there, smiling, a screenshot from the last frame of the video.Then cosmicx16 went to work.He started with the obvious: he unzipped my coveralls, yanked them down to my knees, exposing my skin to the cold and to the eyes of the crew. Someone whistled, but nobody laughed—not yet. He fisted his hand around my dick and squeezed, hard enough to make me gasp, then let go and watched it shrivel. “Not so strong now,” he said, and the others echoed him, “Not so strong, not so strong.”He spat in his palm, did it again, this time twisting, and the pain shot through me like an electric shock. I tried to twist away, but the chain was too tight. I couldn’t even turn my head to look away from the tablet.The crew circled closer, forming a wall of bodies, some smoking, some recording on phones. I heard a bet being placed—how long before I cried, how long before I came, whether I would piss myself first.Cosmicx16 kept going, the rhythm brutal and expert. He slapped my face, twice, three times, then pushed the tablet closer so Sun’s face was all I could see. “She wants you to watch,” he said. “She wants you to learn.”I felt the pressure build, blood rising, not from lust but from humiliation, from the need to get this over with, to end the show as fast as possible. My body was not mine anymore; it belonged to the men, to the deck, to the spectacle.When I came, it was not a relief. It was a final, absolute defeat. The hot spurt landed on the deck, then washed away instantly by a bucket of seawater. The crew howled, slapping each other on the back, some flicking the last drops at my face.Cosmicx16 leaned in, eyes so close I could see the red around his irises.“You love her, yes?” he said. “You love her more than you hate yourself?”I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.He took my jaw in his hand, squeezed until it popped. “Say it,” he ordered.I looked at the tablet. At Sun’s face, still smiling, still perfect.“Honestly,” I whispered, voice a ruin, “I still love her.”He nodded, satisfied, and let go. The crew started to disperse, back to work, back to their own little worlds of cruelty and routine.I slumped in the chains, knees folded under me, rain beginning again in tiny, stinging needles. The cold bit every part of me that was still alive.But I didn’t let go. Not even then.The ocean would take me someday, but it would have to fight for every piece.(End chapter 4)[ATTACH=full]14259[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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