The sour reek of vomit clings to the tangle of salt-and-spew-crusted hair dangling in my face. I flick it over my shoulder with a blood-slathered hand and thread a band of torn sail beneath Gage’s upper thigh. It must hurt when I twist the tails into a knot and pull them tight, but he doesn’t flinch.
Doesn’t make a sound.
He just silently watches me work, eyes as flat as the tattooed buttons on his shaved skull while the high-hanging sun beats us with its relentless heat—starving pockets of shade until they’re nothing but frail slivers.
The air refuses to stir, leaving the sea unnaturally still, clogging our lungs with hot, dense breaths thick with the smell of baking death.
It happened moments after Zane was taken below deck to be checked over by the medis. The wind stopped snapping at the torn sails and nipping at our sodden skin. The ocean lost its lively beat and glossed over like a mirror.
Just …stopped.
The men watched and murmured about an omen from the Gods—that perhaps the creature was important to them, and by slaying it, the rest of us are doomed to float until we die of thirst as punishment. But the moment the Captain charged back onto the main deck, they all snipped their words and got to work.
Now, people are barking orders, pushing things into place, littering the deck with bloody boot prints. There’s a line of tattered men weaving up the stairs from below, passing full buckets of sea water from hand to hand and tipping them overboard.
Apparently, there’s a hole in the side of the ship. Nothing major, but when you tally it with the snapped foremast and the lack of wind to fill it anyway, we won’t be sailing free of this watery graveyard anytime soon.
I tighten the bind around Gage’s thigh, the material squelching with my desperate attempt to stem the blood oozing from a gruesome, fleshy wound slashed to the bone. But the tourniquet isn’t enough to keep him from slipping away.
I can see it in his eyes—the vacant look of a man waiting to die.
“Hey ...” I shove lumps of cheesecloth into the wound, his life puddling around my fingers. “You still with me?”
He heaves a low grunt, and I peer up to see him looking toward the sky. “I used to be a captain, you know. One of the other ships.”
His voice sounds clogged.
“You did?”
He gives the slightest nod. “Gave it up so I could work the aftermast.”
I pull out a wad of sodden cheesecloth from his wound and slop it on the deck, swiftly replacing it with a fresh bit. “Yeah? Why’s that?”
“I prefer to look backward … rather than forward.”
My hands pause, gaze lifting to his face. I follow his stare up the aftermast, landing on the underside of the crow’s nest.
“I liked your drawings,” he croaks, and I take in his wrought features. “Searching for the new ones every morning gave me something to live for again.”
I clear my throat, noting the pool of warm blood swelling beneath me, stretching further down the floorboards ...
I’m sitting in so much of him, I’m surprised there’s anything left for his heart to pump.
A warm, swollen ache claws up my throat.
“Do you … have family in the capital?”
“Dead. Blight took ‘em four years ago. Parents, brother, mywoman.” He winces, eyes screwed shut as he chokes out, “Our daughter. She … she used to draw for me.” The last words come out cracked, and I feel the shards pierce my heart.
The backs of my eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Gage ...”
“Don’t. Today, I meet them in Mala.” A single tear escapes him, catching in the stubble dusting the tattoos stitched across his skull. “Long overdue.”
I try to swallow the lump in my throat while I study his smooth face. It occurs to me that the wound through his heart is just as fresh as the one through his leg—and far more painful.
He opens his eyes, gaze cast up to the underside of our nest. “Do me a favor, would you?” His gruff voice wobbles with the question.
