he might breathe, and exhaling black smoke and shot, with the hurried walking of the crews and the shouted orders of a familiar voice. Gunner. And from the lack of distress in those somehow-distant voices of his crew, these were mere practice volleys with the many cannons.
Father, where are you?
“I feel him lying on the deck of the forecastle,” Kip said, eyes closed. His senses were limited; it wasn’t like standing on the ship himself, but more an awareness of things within a certain bubble of the ship. “He’s skinny. Wearing an eye patch? Talking with someone, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Now he’s talking to Gunner. I recognize him, somehow. They’ve got a man strapped over the mouth of a cannon. A huge cannon mounted on the forecastle. Um . . . lost it.” As Gavin stood up, his body no longer touching the deck, but only his feet doing so, he became harder to hold.
“There was some kind of luxin storm,” Kip said. “But he slept through it, maybe?” Kip had sharpened his focus to his father at the wrong time, it seemed. He would have liked to know what an orange-luxin storm looked like—but he wasn’t going to try to go back now. “And now it’s a new day. We’re circling something for a while. An island and—whoa. There’s a battle now. Maybe, maybe a battle. Lots of men running. Gavin’s climbed up into the crow’s nest. He’s shouting.” His mouth moved as he shouted, and Kip tried to read his lips. “I think he just shouted, ‘Sea demon.’ There’s something terrible happening. They’re firing my guns. They dropped my starboard anchor.”
Kip grunted as the anchor tore free of his decks like someone tearing off a fingernail. Then the cannons boomed, his decks strained, the oars rattled out. “ Something—” And then Kip felt the bony hammer of the sea demon’s head crush him against the anvil of coral. Gavin was flung away. Decks tore like paper. Men were smashed, rigging tore, and bits of Kip’s consciousness were flung into the seas: a shotgun blast of wood and rope and blood and metal.
He tore his fingers away from the card and found himself in the room once more. “He’s gone.”
“Gone? Dead?”
“I think so. He was flung from the crow’s nest. The ship was crushed against a reef by a sea demon.”
“Go back. Be certain!”
Kip didn’t argue. He wasn’t going to give up on his father, not while there was still a chance.
He found the time again and replayed it once more—though it felt like rubbing an open wound. He went beyond it, tried to search the seas.
He could feel the presence of sharks before his awareness faded from those scattered, dead bits of himself. “The bay is full of sharks,” he heard himself saying. “With several sea demons outside it. But I can’t feel him anywhere now. There’s . . . there’s a bit of the forecastle left, perched on the coral.”
And that was it. Nothing for a time, and then the awareness of a single soul clambering up onto the forecastle.
But it wasn’t Gavin Guile. It was Gunner.
Kip stayed with him for days, but Gavin never came, and Gunner only seemed to get more and more desperate.
He pulled his hand away once more and told what he’d seen. “Maybe . . . maybe he made it ashore?”
“Several sea demons, you said?” Andross asked.
Kip nodded. He wished suddenly that he could have seen Andross’s face when he’d first given him the news that his last surviving son was now almost certainly dead. Maybe there would have been a flicker of humanity in it then, but now he spoke with the merciless focus of a captain steering his ship straight through a sandbar, scraping off the barnacles of wife and sons and grandsons and throwing into disarray everything in his life not bolted down, but always, always winning through the sand to victory and position and pride.
“He might have lived,” Kip said. “A reef means there’s an island close, right?” If he survived the initial collision. If he were flung into the bay rather than the open sea. If he weren’t knocked unconscious by the fall. If he made it past the sharks.
If, if, if.
“Was there a wall of mist? At the reef?”
“Not . . . not that I was aware of?” Kip said. “But . . . awareness isn’t so good in the cards. Why?”
Andross hmphed. “There are stories that the sea demons circle White