Steel

“I have the count!” He waited for a dramatic pause. Jill was about to scream at him, but someone did it for her.

“Just tell us what it is, you black dog!”

Then Abe smiled. “Jenks has eighteen votes. Captain Cooper has twenty-seven and is our captain still.”

A cheer went up—and most everyone cheered. Probably even a few who had voted for Jenks. No one questioned Abe or asked for a recount—he’d been voted quartermaster and everyone trusted him. They’d all watched him count. Jill might have expected fighting to break out, the whole rowdy crew taking sides and battling for control of the ship. But they re

spected the vote. Not even Jenks protested.

Cooper stepped slowly across the deck to where Jenks stood, his bottle of rum hanging at his side.

“Jenks, you’re the best sailing master on the seas. But I can’t let this pass.”

Jenks took a long draw on the bottle, then coughed. His look turned sad. “I’m only tired, Captain. I meant no harm.”

“And what happens the next time you’re angry and drunk and you call me out again?”

“I won’t, I promise—”

“I don’t believe you. Abe, Tennant, get one of the boats ready.”

“No, Captain, I didn’t mean anything!”

Jill found Henry again. “Now what’s happening?”

“He brought it on himself,” he said.

Abe, Tennant, and half a dozen others hurried around the rowboat, arranging the pulleys that would lower it into the water, and loading it with a bucket of water, a bag of food, and an oar.

Then they loaded Jenks into the rowboat. You didn’t need an island to maroon someone.

As the boat was lowered toward the water, Cooper stood at the side, holding a pistol aimed at Jenks. The first mate—or former first mate—had turned sullen, splayed on the bottom of the boat, glaring up at the captain, unable to rebel any further.

The captain called to the rest of the crew, “Anyone else rather put their lot in with Jenks than with me, if you think I’m such an awful captain?”

They were all leaning on the side with her, watching, silent. Not even Jenks’s supporters made a sound. Cooper made sure to look at each of them, hold their gazes, and stare right through them. Every one of them ducked away. The ropes and pulleys creaked as the rowboat sank to the water.

When the boat finally touched down to be rocked and shaken by waves, Jenks shouted, “Curse you! Curse you all!” By then the boat had been cut loose to drift away as the wind pushed the Diana onward. His voice was quickly lost amid more common shipboard noises.

“Now,” Cooper said, slipping the nose of the pistol under her belt. “We sail for Nassau. Then we go hunting like we ought to. We have a reputation to maintain. Any more arguments?”

None. The crew got to work as though nothing had happened. Jill looked back and saw a dark, foreign shape bobbing on distant waves. Then she didn’t see anything. Cooper never once glanced back.

Then the usual drinking started. By morning the Diana was repaired, the sails were unfurled, and the course set for the Bahamas.

Back where Jill started.

COUPÉ

Jill was learning to always notice the wind, where it was blowing and at what strength, and how it played against the sails. You didn’t want the wind directly behind the ship—most of the sails’ surface would be blocked by each other and the rest of the rigging. But if the ship was at a slight angle to the wind, the yards slightly turned, then every single sail would catch the wind’s full strength and the ship would fly. And while you didn’t want to be moving directly against the wind, a ship could still move into the wind by tacking, traveling at angles like following switchbacks up a steep hill.

Between islands, she couldn’t have said where they were, and she could only vaguely guess their direction by the sun. The ship must have had a compass, a real one, and Captain Cooper must have had a map of some kind, or maybe she’d just memorized the location of every port and spit of land in the Caribbean. People were supposed to be able to navigate by the stars, but Jill hadn’t learned the trick of it reliably yet. At night before going to bed, she’d lie on the deck, looking up into the sky, a vast, dark expanse filled with stars, packed with them like sprays of glitter. She’d never seen so many—there were almost too many to pick out individual stars. But somehow, Cooper knew where they were going, and one morning, a few days after the battle with the Heart’s Revenge, the lookout high up on the mainmast called “Land, ho!” This time when Jill looked, she recognized the smear of shadow on the horizon that meant land.

The work began to trim the sails to take the Diana into port. Jill worked with the crew, pulling lines taut and tying off sails, until the ship rode the waves along New Providence Island and into Nassau’s harbor.

This wasn’t the Bahamas she remembered. When she came here with her family, Nassau was a postcard-perfect resort town. Rows of houses painted in bright colors had everything from shops to restaurants to government buildings. Crowds of tourists wandered on foot or took the little horse-drawn carts that lined up by the pier. At any given time a dozen huge cruise ships were docked on a long concrete jetty. A few miles away, a massive hotel dominated an inlet called Paradise Island. The only sign that the island had ever had anything to do with pirates or old sailing ships were the two crumbling forts looking out over the sea.

This was nothing like it.