The first explosion tore through the engine room with a sound like the world splitting open. A column of fire and steam erupted from the hatch, hurling Adrian backward across the deck. He landed hard, his shoulder blade cracking against the steel, the breath driven from his lungs. For a long moment, he lay still, the stars wheeling above him, the ship groaning beneath him like a dying beast.
Then the second explosion came, deeper this time, somewhere near the fuel tanks. The deck buckled. A section of the superstructure collapsed inward, raining glass and twisted metal onto the processing equipment below. The lights flickered once, twice, and went out. The ship was plunged into darkness except for the orange glow of the fires spreading through the lower decks.
Adrian dragged himself to his feet. His body was a catalog of pain—his hands, his shoulder, his ribs where the stun baton had caught him days ago. But the pain was distant now, a problem to be solved later. Right now, he needed to find Isak. He needed to find Finn. He needed to get as many men off the ship as possible before the Misericordia dragged them all down with it.
"Kane!" The voice came from the direction of the bridge. It was Dara, the communications officer, her face blackened with soot, her eyes wide with terror. "The distress signal—someone answered. A Veridian naval vessel. They're two hours out."
Two hours. Adrian looked at the flames spreading across the deck, at the smoke billowing from the hatches, at the dark water already lapping at the scuppers. The Misericordia did not have two hours.
"Get to the life rafts," he said. "Get everyone you can. Tell them to abandon ship."
"What about you?"
"I'm going below."
Dara stared at him as if he had announced his intention to walk into the sun. "The lower decks are on fire. The engine room is gone. No one down there could have survived."
"Isak is down there. Finn was freeing the crew in the berth deck. I'm not leaving them."
He turned away before she could argue. The hatch to the lower decks was a twisted mass of metal, the steel glowing dull red from the heat. But there was another way—a maintenance shaft near the stern, too narrow for the overseers to use but wide enough for a man who was willing to crawl. Isak had shown it to him during those long shifts in the engine room, a contingency route that the ship's builders had included in the original plans and Harrow's crew had apparently forgotten.
Adrian found the shaft behind a stack of empty fish crates. He lowered himself into it feet-first, his broken hands screaming as they brushed against the walls. The shaft was dark and hot, the air thick with smoke that burned his throat and made his eyes water. He descended by feel, his feet finding the rungs of a maintenance ladder that had been welded to the bulkhead decades ago.
At the bottom, the smoke was thicker. The heat was immense. Adrian pulled his shirt up over his mouth and pressed forward into the darkness.
The berth deck was a vision of hell. The fires had not reached it directly, but the smoke had, billowing through the ventilation ducts in thick, choking clouds. Men were stumbling through the gloom, some still chained to their racks, others free but disoriented, coughing and retching and calling out for help. The emergency lights had failed here too, leaving only the faint glow of the fires above to illuminate the chaos.
Adrian found Finn near the aft ladder, his face bleeding from a cut above his eye, his stolen knife still clutched in his hand. He was trying to drag a wounded man toward the ladder, but the man's leg was broken, and every movement made him scream.
"Isak?" Adrian shouted over the roar of the fires.
"Engine room. He went to shut down the fuel lines." Finn coughed, a deep, wracking sound. "Pallas is with him. But the first explosion came from down there. I don't know if they made it out."
Adrian looked toward the engine room access. The hatch was a wall of flame, the steel warped and buckled. No one could have survived that. No one could have—
A figure emerged from the smoke. Isak, his clothes smoldering, his face a mask of blood and soot. He was dragging Pallas behind him, one arm hooked under the big man's shoulders. Pallas was unconscious, a shrapnel wound in his side leaking blood in a steady stream.
"The charges," Isak gasped. "Harrow rigged the whole ship. The fuel tanks, the generator, the ballast pumps. I managed to shut down two of them, but the third—" He coughed, spitting black phlegm. "The third went off before I could reach it. The ship is breaking apart. We have to get out."
Adrian grabbed Pallas's other arm, hooking his forearm under the man's shoulder. "Up the ladder. All of you. The maintenance shaft near the stern. It leads to the weather deck."
They moved together, a slow, agonizing procession through the smoke and heat. Around them, other men were climbing toward the hatches, some helping the wounded, others simply fleeing. The ship's discipline had collapsed entirely. The overseers who were still alive had abandoned their posts, seeking their own escape. The crew was on its own.
The maintenance shaft was narrower than Adrian remembered, or perhaps the smoke had swollen the walls. They pushed Pallas up first, Isak climbing behind to steady him. Finn followed, then Adrian, his hands leaving smears of blood on the rungs as he climbed.
When they emerged on the weather deck, the scene above was barely less chaotic than the one below. The fires had spread to the superstructure, consuming the bridge and the officers' quarters. The flames cast an orange glow across the water, illuminating the life rafts that bobbed on the swells around the sinking ship. Dozens of men were already in the water, clinging to debris and calling for help. Others were still on deck, struggling to launch the remaining rafts while the ship listed ever more sharply to port.
Adrian found a raft still in its canister near the stern. He pulled the inflation cord with his forearm, and the raft blossomed open with a hiss of compressed air. "Get in," he shouted to the others. "Get Pallas in first."
They loaded Pallas into the raft, then Isak, then a handful of other men who had staggered out of the smoke. Finn was the last, pausing at the rail to look back at the burning ship. His face was unreadable, his eyes reflecting the flames.
"We did it," he said quietly. "We actually did it."
"We're not safe yet. Get in the raft."
Finn climbed in. Adrian was about to follow when he saw a figure emerge from the flames near the bridge. It was Kelvan, the chief overseer. His uniform was burned, his face blistered, but he was still moving, still clutching a pistol in his hand. He saw Adrian and raised the weapon.
The shot went wide, ricocheting off the steel bulkhead behind Adrian's head. Adrian lunged forward, swinging his stun baton in a wild arc. It caught Kelvan across the face, and the overseer went down, the pistol skittering away into the darkness. Adrian knelt over him, his baton raised for a final blow.
But Kelvan was already dead. His eyes stared up at the sky, empty and unseeing. The flames had done their work before Adrian reached him.
Adrian dropped the baton and climbed into the raft. The sea was rough, the swells lifting them and dropping them in a sickening rhythm. Around them, the other rafts bobbed on the water, their occupants huddled together against the cold. The Misericordia loomed above them, its superstructure a funeral pyre against the black sky.
"Is everyone accounted for?" Adrian asked.
Finn shook his head. "Maybe a hundred and fifty made it out. Maybe less. The others were still below when the charges went off."
A hundred and fifty. Out of more than two hundred and forty. The sea had taken its payment once again.
A groan echoed across the water, deep and resonant. The Misericordia's bow rose slowly into the air, the ship pivoting on its stern as the flooding compartments dragged it down. For a long, surreal moment, it stood almost vertical, its rusted hull glowing in the firelight. Then it slid beneath the surface with a final, thunderous crash, and the sea closed over it as if it had never existed.
Adrian watched it go. He thought about Harrow's body, still lying on the deck where he had fallen. He thought about Rook and Theron and Pavel, their bodies scattered across the ocean floor. He thought about his brother, whose remains had been thrown into this same sea months ago, and whose journal had been lost in the flames that consumed the bridge.
But the journal was not the only record. The photographs Dara had transmitted. The testimony of the survivors. The files on Harrow's laptop, if it had survived. And the men in the rafts, a hundred and fifty witnesses who could tell the world what had happened on the Misericordia.
"We need to find shelter," Adrian said. "The naval vessel is two hours out. We need to stay alive until then."
He looked across the raft at the faces of the men who had survived. Isak, his face still streaked with blood, his eyes hollow with exhaustion. Finn, his jaw set, his gaze fixed on the horizon. Pallas, unconscious but breathing. The others, whose names he had not yet learned, huddled together in the cold, their faces reflecting the same mixture of shock and relief and grief.
They had done what no one else had done. They had broken Harrow's ship. They had freed themselves. But the cost had been enormous, and the journey was not over.
The raft drifted on the swells, one small speck among a scattered flotilla of survivors. Above them, the stars wheeled slowly in their ancient patterns, indifferent to the drama unfolding on the dark water below. And somewhere beyond the horizon, a Veridian corvette was cutting through the waves, racing toward a distress call that might already be too late.
Adrian closed his eyes and let the cold seep into him. The pain was still there. The grief was still there. But beneath it all, there was something that had not been there before.
Hope. Fragile and battered, but still alive.
He held onto it like a candle in the wind, and he waited for the dawn.
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