The smell of him filled the room and I pulled it in on a deep, relieved breath. He’d thawed, acting more like himself than he had since we were at Azimuth House. I didn’t know if it was being back at sea or if it was the long hours spent underwater in the quiet that had done it. I didn’t care.
“Sun will be up soon,” he said, pushing the hair back from my face.
The first day of the dive had been brutal, with shifting tides that slowed our progress over the reefs. And though we’d found cache after cache, none of them had been anything close to midnight. Worse, we didn’t have time to dredge what we did find. We’d have to leave all those stones where they were buried in the rock.
I curled up closer to him, not wanting to surrender to the rising sun. I took one of his hands and held it to the beam of light. His fingers were cut up and rubbed raw from the coral. “You never told me how you learned to dredge,” I whispered.
The first time I’d seen him put on a belt was when we dredged the Lark. It was unusual for a helmsman to have ever been a dredger because it was considered one of the lowest rungs on a crew.
“I learned when I was a kid.”
“But who taught you?”
He looked as if he was trying to decide how much of the story to tell me. “No one, really. I just started following the dredgers into the water on dives and watching them work. I figured it was better than staying on the ship and giving the helmsman a reason to notice me.”
I pressed his hand to my face. Imagining him like that, so young, and being afraid to stay on the ship made my stomach turn.
“And it gave me more than one skill when I went to the next crew.”
Saint’s crew. It probably wasn’t long after he’d left me on Jeval that my father took West on. While I was finding a way to survive on that island, West was finding a way to survive on that ship. I wondered how long it had taken Saint to ask West for his first favor.
I tensed when I felt the vibration of the cot ringing in tandem with a distant rumble. West, too, went rigid, listening.
I sat up onto my elbows, staring into the dark. A few seconds later, it moaned again. The roll of thunder.
“No.” I threw the quilts back, going to the window and unlatching the shutters.
West’s footsteps hit the floor behind me, and my heart sank as the wind tore through the cabin. Sweet, drenched in the smell of wet earth. The sky was almost completely black, the sparkle of stars still lit above the ship, but there was no mistaking the scent.
It was a storm.
West stared at the sky, listening. I pushed past him, plucking my belt from where it hung beside the door, and went out onto the deck barefoot.
Paj was standing at the helm, watching the water. “Figured that would get your asses out of bed.” He grunted, flinging a hand toward the east.
I leaned over the side, cursing when I spotted what he saw. A crest of white broke on the waves as they pressed diagonally toward us, the chop on the water visible even in the low light.
“Well?” Willa appeared at the top of the steps, thumbs hooked into her tool belt.
I raked both hands into my hair, holding it back from my face as West came out of the breezeway. “We don’t have time to wait it out. We can dredge before it hits.”
Paj lifted both eyebrows. “You’re going to dredge? In this?”
West watched the clouds, thinking. “Have you ever done a dive during a storm?”
I sighed. “Once or twice.”
“And the ship?” West asked, looking to Paj and Willa.
Willa was the one to answer. “We’ll see. The winds don’t look that bad. We’re in deep enough water and we’ve dropped sails. She should be fine.”
I didn’t like that she’d said should.
West thought for another moment, his eyes going back to the sky. The dive was mine, but he was still the helmsman. The call landed with him. “What about the current?”
“It’ll get stronger,” I admitted. “I’ll know when we need to get out of the water.”
“All right.” He tugged his shirt over his head. “Then let’s get down there.”
I took the steps belowdecks, knocking hard on the door of