that dark immensity was far beneath the waves.
He also had lost track of what was happening with any of the rest of the Mighty. He could only keep himself alive now, and that took everything in him.
He was within forty paces of the first ships now, and though the teams were still reloading cannons and swivel guns, men on the galleons’ decks were firing muskets toward him.
Splashes pocked the water as he juked one way and then the next.
At the last moment before he crashed into a galleon’s hull, Kip veered his skimmer hard sideways and accelerated as quickly as he could.
The Mighty’s lack of training as a squad on the skimmers nearly got him killed. He veered directly into Winsen’s path, surprising the young man as much as the musketeers on the galley’s deck.
Winsen popped his skimmer up into the air, and Kip ducked, taking a faceful of water even as he blasted luxin skyward. Winsen’s skimmer was flung high into the air, and by the time Kip was able to clear his eyes, he heard a splash on the other side of the galleon.
Then he saw the stern of the next ship, looming directly before him, and he cut hard to port and inside the first circle of ships.
Kip glanced back just in time to see Big Leo follow his path, but this time a red wight was ready for him. The young woman with burn-scarred skin oozing pyrejelly set herself aflame and leapt through the air into Big Leo’s path.
His immense chain swung in a quick arc and batted her aside as if she were an overexcited puppy jumping toward her master with muddy paws. She plunged into the waves, hissing and sizzling, and he swung that flaming chain once more above his head to regain his balance, slapped it into the waves to extinguish the last red luxin-fed flames, and came after Kip as they darted inside the outer circle of ships.
The second circle was entirely slave-rowed galleys without sails, their decks lower to the waves and packed with warriors, most of them only lightly armored.
Kip saw Cruxer speeding past an entire ship broadside, his skimmer shearing through slaves’ oars while he himself needled the massed warriors on deck, shooting a storm of short blue luxin arrows from his hands, unguided and small but fiercely sharp. Whether hit themselves or just cowering before this terror, the warriors went down like sheaves of grain as a scythe passed across the deck. They folded in blood and screams.
Taking advantage of the chaos Cruxer was creating, Einin angled in to the ship and slapped a hullwrecker down near the waterline, then zipped away.
Winsen fought like a madman on a spring. He bounced his skimmer up to the height of a deck, loosed two arrows while he was in the air, put his hands back on the reeds, and bounced again as if the sea were made of boiled rubber. He killed the captain, the first mate at the wheel, he killed a bo’s’n, he killed every officer and fighting man who looked important—and then he turned back around and kept killing until someone panicked and shouted the order to fire a broadside.
The young archer heard the order, though, and instead of popping back up from the waves, angled his skimmer downward and stayed underwater.
The broadside of twenty cannons boomed with a fury—raking death across the decks of its allied galleon in the outer circle.
Winsen popped up out of the waves, water sluicing off the skimmer as he barely held on, blinded and cursing, and no longer holding his favorite bow—but alive. Three sailors, muskets now reloaded, ran to the rail and aimed down at the temporarily immobilized young man.
Kip threw blue spikes as hard as he could from his awkward angle far beyond the ship himself. The first wasn’t even close. The second shattered against the railing under the sailors’ hands, barely a miss. The third flew low but passed underneath the railing and blasted the nearest sailor’s legs out from under him.
Between the blue shrapnel exploding in their faces and their crew-mate going down, the two unharmed sailors panicked. One froze. The other stepped backward, tripped, and accidentally discharged his musket into the air.
Seeing Winsen regain his balance and his velocity, Kip cut under the beakhead of the next ship and in.
The directed explosion of the hullwrecker snapped out behind them, and Kip saw a billow of smoke and showers of wood from the ship behind them.
At the