Her new ship is smaller than the Wale and feels too weightless on the water, less sluggish but far more finicky, and learning it is an exercise is frustration and hasty hull repair.
The damn eye doesn't help, still showing her flickers and cracks into other worlds, other times, near every time she turns her head.
Back when Billie first left Dunwall and was first learning to steer the big steam and oil ships – slowly and painfully, from anyone willing to teach her – she thought maybe it would be easier if she still had the powers once shared with her, which had faded rapidly to nothing as she got farther and farther from Whaler territory. The extra endurance in her arms and legs, the quicker reflexes, heightened senses.
And maybe it would have been. But when she's spent more than a decade figuring it out on her own and forming her own instincts, it turns out anything extra is just a distraction.
"I don't suppose you can take all this shit back?" Billie asks suddenly, frustrated, half turning and gesturing in a way to encompass her whole right side.
The boy, sitting cross-legged on the deck and watching her efforts with no real apparent interest, slowly lifts an eyebrow, but otherwise his bored expression doesn't change. It might have been intimidating if he still had the gravitas the Void provided him, but now he looks like any other jaded youth dragged up out of the gutters, unimpressed with the world and everyone in it.
Billie wonders if she was ever that irritating to deal with.
"I doubt that I could even if I still had the power I once held," he says in time. "I passed those gifts on to you, but they never belonged to me."
Billie huffs and turns back to fight with the wheel once more. "Cryptic little asshole," she mutters. Then, raising her voice again, she says, "Make yourself useful and go make sure the engine isn't trying to burn out. If you don't earn your keep, I'm dropping you on the first habitable rock we find."
The boy pulls a face, making him look even younger and even less like a god, but gets to his feet and slouches off toward the stairs leading into the belly of the ship.
She closes the eye she can close and lets out a long breath. Maybe it's just her. Maybe she's just spent so long piloting that beloved scrapheap she called a ship that anything halfway functional feels wrong. Maybe she misses it, and everything and everyone she burned with it and let sink to the seafloor.
Billie adjusts her grip on the wheel and pushes it all back, all the other times, other worlds.
She is in this one now, for better or for worse. Nothing to do but move forward.