Offshore
Episode 4: Sparkling Reef
As the Cloudlander flew back into port between the two marks, ten seconds of clear sea lay wide open behind them. Though no visible line was drawn in the water, they could feel as they hit it, a whistle shrilling and a cheer surging across the bay, spectators pressing against the rails to watch.
They depowered as they crossed the line, luffing the sails until the wind began to drop around them. Anqien brought down the spinnaker as Jinai hauled in the mainsail.
In their ears, the relays were alive with activity. "How's that for a decisive qualifier?" said Telaki. “There’s my stars! I’m the proudest coach in the world!”
Jinai looked over at Anqien as they steered the boat in a victory arc around the bay, staring starry-eyed into the crowd. They always did, even at the smallest of wins. She roamed over, laying a hand on their shoulder. “Don’t know why I ever doubted,” she said.
“I love you so much,” they answered, turning from the helm and lunging for a hug that she was almost too stunned to return. Around her, she thought she heard cheers and aw’s. She wrapped her arms around the small of their back and leaned into the embrace.
A twinge shot through her heart with a memory of Josa holding her like this. His short brown hair, his soft eyes behind glasses—she saw him in her doorway, saying goodbye as he squeezed her close.
She jolted backward, half expecting to see him, but it was just Liu Anqien—long teal-tipped hair matted over their brow and cheek by seawater and sweat. Seemingly oblivious to the sudden lapse in her mental presence, they nodded once with a grin, taking the helm again to steer the boat into the marina.
The boat with the wheel on its sail, which they now knew from their crew’s relays to be the Kani-do Catcher, drew into the port twenty seconds behind them, a spinnaker with a crab high and proud in front of the boat. But Jinai’s mind was afloat on the afterglow of the win, and she only watched it over her shoulder long enough to register the sailors helming it: both beaming, holding their joined hands up over their heads with a Niro-hei cheer.
All along the blue-carpet runway to the Sparkling Reef hotel, Anqien and Jinai were called and beckoned from the other side of the barricade by every kind of person who had any interest in their race. Reporters. Fans. Naysayers. Other sailors, even. They heard as many shouts of congratulations as they received tympanum bells in their faces, to which all Jinai ever had to say was thank you.
Fellow competitors on the runway were the only ones she paid any heed to, and Anqien did their best to take her lead. It was somewhere halfway down to the changing rooms that one young Astran team flew in from behind and halted them with a nervous request—in their best Helfi-yu—for filogram autographs. Without missing a beat, Jinai took the taller’s illuminated filograph and scrawled her signature on the screen.
Anqien hovered behind her, waving with a little “hi” but little else—attention from the crowd they could take, but the admiration of other competitors?
“Will we see you in the finals?” Jinai asked in Belan.
Their eyes met, widening. The one in front answered in Belan, “Yeah, we were fourth! You were both amazing, by the way.”
“In the chasing pack! Congratulations—you did a great job too,” Jinai replied, handing the filograph back. Anqien stared as the exchange unfolded. Then the young sailor cast a glance in their direction and inched towards them, holding the filograph out. “Would you also sign—”
At the very words they blushed to the roots of their hair, at which the two Astran sailors stared and Jinai chuckled. Inching towards the sailor eagerly proffering her filograph, they did their best to smile without looking completely dumbstruck and took it gingerly.
With their fingertip, they scribbled the least intelligible version of their name that they had ever written. The second sailor, taking the first’s lead, handed hers over as well—Jinai signed and passed it to Anqien.
This signature came out looking a bit better than the last.
As these two bowed in thanks and scurried off giggling, Jinai turned to Anqien with an inquiring sort of look. “It’s cute that you’re nervous, but you’re gonna have to get used to it,” she said, grabbing their shoulder and steering them down the path.
That took the cake. Their face was hot all the way to the changing rooms, and they spent half of that walk staring down at their feet.
“How are my stars? Come, come, I’ve gotta parade you!”
Finding them amidst cool-down stretches on the green by the changing rooms, Telaki snatched them both by the arms and dragged them right across the blue carpet to the nearest stairs.
All the control crews were headquartered in the Sparkling Reef, as they always were for the NHR qualifiers: a beautiful, velvety hotel adjoining a function space, with corridors paved with black carpets embroidered in gold filigree—the kind of place where the upper crust might convene to talk business over wine.
When Jinai and Anqien hurried after Telaki into the red terrazzo lobby, the receptionists’ heads darted up in concert. Their coach waved them towards the left side of the counter, styled out of polished red granite in the shape of a ship’s bow.
“Say hello to my little stars,” she announced, a little prouder than Jinai would have liked—but the receptionists ate it up, the one seated farther away flying across the booth to gawp.
“Oh my goodness, what an honour!” “Legendary work on the racecourse!”
“All in a day’s work,” Jinai answered with a wave. “Been a busy one for you?”
Through the conversation, Anqien was acutely aware of how often they hesitated on every sentence, trying to come up with something worth saying and then chickening out of it. By the time Telaki finally waved them off to the Cloudlanders’ HQ— “take the first right, and it’s the first door on your port side, I mean left”—they were just about ready to shove themself in a closet.
“What’s up?” she said as they went, their feet making barely a sound on the carpet. “We won our qual today, people are gonna want to hear from you.”
They clutched their face. “Yeah, I know, it’s just, all the praise from people we’re meant to be professional with, I don’t know how to deal!”
Jinai chortled. “Oh, Anqien, say you’ll share your greatness with the world someday.”
“I’m, uh, I’m gonna do my best.”
Telaki’s directions proved extraneous, on account of the Cloudlander control crew placard on the door. As they pushed that door open, Iki shot out of his chair, sweeping them a bow. “Welcome to our home for the day!” he declared, waving once around at the room. “We had a nice view of you destroying the competition.”
“What was our time?” asked Jinai
“An hour and fifty-six minutes, almost on the dot. Which is kind of wild.”
“It was a good wind.”
Indeed, the balcony looked out over the ocean, and the promenade roads that girt the coastline, presently utterly impassable for all those lined up to watch the races.
“Well, lucky you, having a view like this,” Jinai answered. “Those people down there aren’t seeing any more than the backs of people’s heads.” Four ray screens were mounted on the right wall of the room—three in a row that each bore ranking charts, graphs, weather visualisations, and the like, and one above them streaming live coverage of the event from Sports Three.
The three had their work terminals whirring away on trolleys, ready to be carted out and around on the briefest notice. Iki and Lujang tapped and scribbled away on their gesture pads, the latter’s station cluttered with Thread relay headsets and transmitters in hanging sleeves.
In one corner, Janda reclined in the sole armchair, reading a book.
While Jinai briefly pulled Iki and Lujang from their work for a chit-chat, Anqien wandered to the wall-height sliding doors and pushed one ajar, sticking their head outside. The roar of the crowded docks hit the ears of everyone in the room.
“Wait a second, that’s a lot of sailboats, is—”
The foghorn for the second race sounded out across the bay. Anqien scurried back into the room and all eyes flew to the broadcast screen overhead.
The hovercraft camera swept across the advancing field, focusing on one boat to another. There, among the masts, was the blue-green mainsail of the reigning champions, the AmaShiru Mirage, which shot into a comfortable second place out of the gate. Even at such a distance, the bearing of Xye and Zera was palpable—the former swift and flourishing, the latter efficiently forceful in her manner.
This race was more open in front, although that meant the rankings from third onwards were shuffling constantly. Even so, the Mirage held its chasing position steady for the next ten minutes, and the yacht in first place, wearing a horse on its red sail, held them off admirably.
That all changed at the first tack. Easy as one, two, three, the chasing vessel honed close as the leader hesitated on the tack, and just like that, the green hull slotted itself in front of the red.
“Whoa!” “No way!” “Boom, there it is,” Janda said, peeking at the screen over the edge of her novel. “What, did you think they wouldn’t?”
“I mean, yeah, but we were all hoping.” Iki looked around. “No?”
Janda shook her head. “They’re reliable, you’ve gotta give them that.”
Jinai knew better than to hope the crew of the Mirage would make some sort of freak mistake—though in truth, she had no desire for that to befall their biggest rivals. It wouldn’t feel fair.
Over the better part of the next hour, the Mirage continued to widen that gap between themselves and their closest chasers. They rounded the mark ten seconds ahead and pulled ahead to fifteen on their way south to Canlan.
Lujang whistled. “That’s a hell of a run right there. They might even make it in under your time.”
“You’re getting this on tape, right?” Anqien asked, one palm on the glass door.
“You know us,” answered Iki. “We’ll go through it with you when the dust settles around the press conferences and all that.”
Press. Jinai sighed. It was part of the grind—particularly here in Helfi, where sailing held the hearts of millions. “Yeah, cool.”
“Oh yes!” At her terminal, Lujang opened her document explorer and swiped an image open. It was a digital poster bearing the Akido Sailing Federation icon at the top and a neon pink headline on black: Big Bad Beachfront Afterparty. 9 November 621. “The bigwigs are throwing the usual bash tomorrow evening—this was in the team mailbox. This year it’s down in some Niro restaurant north of the market.”
Anqien perked up. “Oh, Nakano? I’m down to check it out.”
The Sail Fed afterparties—a mainstay of the Niro-Helfi Race’s suite of side events—had never been Jinai’s thing, always too crowded and wild. But Anqien, whom she had initially thought too mild to enjoy them, had turned out to be a bit of a party fiend. They already looked completely sold on the event and intent on ignoring glaring problems of last year’s. She cast them a wry smile. “Guess we’ll be going.”
“As your local weather expert,” said Iki, “There’s about a ninety percent chance that those two—” he pointed at the screen, where the hovering camera was following the Mirage with their sail on the home stretch— “will be there as well.”
Jinai smirked. “Good.”
A cheer went up just a second later, cleaving the conversation in two. It came through the screen speakers, but it was also loud enough to resound through the gap in the glass where Anqien had pushed open the door.
Iki shook his head. “Oof, missed out on your time by like a minute.”
“Like you always say, could be the wind conditions,” Jinai replied, stretching her arms up. “There’s no point in counting the raw seconds until we’re on the same course at the same time.”
“I know, I know,” Iki answered. “But you know the fans care about the numbers. And so does the news.”
The screen door thudded as Anqien shut it, then wove back between the terminals and gesture pads. “When’s the press conference?”
“Five, or after the last race ends, whichever’s later,” Janda said.
Jinai looked at Anqien, who returned the look a second later. They nodded simultaneously. There it was, like she had felt a thousand times—that tug of what felt like an invisible thread connecting them together.
“It was great catching up,” they piped up, already halfway to the door. “But I feel like touring the hotel for a bit.”
“Oooh, if you go, definitely check out the cafe,” Janda added. “The coffees are to die for.”
It was much clearer how tall the corridors were now that they had been inside the office. The ceiling vaulted like a temple’s, far too ornate next to the plain room they had just exited. Anqien and Jinai walked level with each other down the corridor, looking out for any signage that might point them to the café of interest.
But eventually, it was the scent of baking and the portended coffee that pointed their way there, out into what must have been the other end of the building from the lobby. The café porch overlooked a courtyard where hibiscus bushes were starting to put out buds, none of them quite in bloom just yet.
The current clientele numbered one—a man in a business suit tucked into a corner of the indoor section, behind a wooden screen wall. Anqien led the charge to the barista’s counter, where someone perked up to peer over the cherry red machine and drip filters.
“Oh! Hi!” their voice lilted. They swooped over behind the counter and beamed. They were about Jinai's height, with all their dark wavy hair in a tidy bun on their head. “Didn’t expect to see you here so soon after your run. Great race earlier, by the way—congrats!” They gestured diagonally across the café at the old, circular filographic screen mounted on the wall, crackly grey footage of the third qual race glowing through.
Anqien’s eyes had followed the gesture. “It went quite decently for a qual,” they replied.
“Yeah, I’d say so!” The barista beamed brightly. “Love your hair, by the way, I like that shade of blue-green.”
“Oh—thanks!” Their gaze whipped back to they counter and they brushed a lock of said hair behind their ear, laughing haltingly. Jinai found her attention reeled in by that interaction and was taken, momentarily, by an impulse to drag her teammate’s gaze away from them. She ignored it soundly. Noticing nothing, the barista nodded. “What can I get you?”
A selection of pies was on display under the counter. She ordered her usual coffee—white with skimmed milk—and Anqien went for a hazelnut syrup ochre coffee with cinnamon powder. The wait wasn’t five minutes, the drinks coming in turquoise teacups.
“You seem to be in a good mood,” Jinai said, pulling herself a chair at a two-seater table on the veranda. It didn’t fully register how she had come to that conclusion until Anqien put down their coffee opposite her. Hazelnut-and-cinnamon-powder was always a reward.
“It was a good race, don’t you think?” they replied, rolling their aching shoulders. “I’m almost looking forward to press later.”
“I’ve never heard of looking forward to press,” she answered. Lifting her cup to her lips, she sipped gently, feeling out its temperature—looking straight at her companion.
They propped their chin up on their elbow. Birds chittered from the budding hibiscus bushes. “Just like how you didn’t believe I could enjoy parties?”
Jinai snorted, lowering her coffee. “I didn’t buy it till last year’s Sail Fed party,” she answered. She forced down a grin as the image of Anqien singing over the ship’s bulwark, halfway to blackout drunk, floated into her thoughts. “Too bad it’s not on a cruise this time.”
“Yeah, but a restaurant. Imagine the fancy food.”
Chances were that the actual restaurant would be repurposed as a glorified function space that they’d fill with spinning lights (it wasn’t a Sail Fed party without them) and floor-thumping music. “I guess the catering has gotta be reasonable,” she replied.
Their little coffee date became prolonged by virtue of the place being beautiful and cosy enough to make leaving difficult. It wasn’t till their filographs simultaneously let out a ring that they finally pushed their cups away and rose, jogging back to the headquarters.