The sun came up over Salt Pan like a slap.
Kofi crouched in the scrub at the edge of the pans and shaded his eyes.
For a mile in every direction the ground lay flat and white, crusted with salt that threw the light straight back into his face.
Shallow water shimmered in square pens cut into the flats.
Heat already rose off it in waves.
Nothing grew.
Nothing moved but the rakers, bent double in the pens, pulling salt into heaps with long wooden rakes.
“God,” Titus breathed beside him.
“It’s worse than cane.”
“Everything’s worse than something.”
At the far end of the pans stood a squat stone salt house with a slate roof.
Around it, driven into the ground in a wide ring, stood a line of black iron stakes as tall as a man.
A wooden dock ran out into the water beyond, where a sloop sat low with salt sacks.
Two overseers walked the pens with muskets.
A pack of dogs lay panting in the shade of the salt house wall.
Behind them in the scrub, Clementine sniffed the air and frowned.
“That ring of iron,” she said.
“That’s what’s pushing Phibba back. Iron and all this salt. Spirits can’t breathe here.”
“Good thing none of us have one,” Theo said.
“First time that’s ever been a good thing.”
Obi crouched at Kofi’s elbow with Pockets on his shoulder.
His face was set and pale.
“Remember,” Kofi said.
“Find the huts. Find two women and four children who came in last month. Tell them to be ready at noon when the bell rings. Don’t let anyone see you.”
“I know.”
“Toby made me swear I’d bring you back.”
“I know.” Obi swallowed.
“They’re kids like me. They’ll trust a kid.”
Kofi squeezed the boy’s shoulder.
Then he looked at Theo.
Theo was wearing the best coat he owned, a French cut in faded blue, and a hat with a feather that Bess had called an insult to birds.
He adjusted the feather.
“How do I look?”
“Like a fool.”
“Excellent. Fools make the best buyers.” He straightened his cuffs.
“If I’m not out by noon, assume I’ve been hanged, and please tell Pinder the feather was his idea.”
He walked out of the scrub toward the salt house, whistling.
Josias Tucker’s office smelled of ink and sweat.
A ledger lay open on the desk.
Behind it hung a gray banner stitched with a plain iron ring.
Tucker was thin and burned red by the sun, with a nose peeling in strips.
He looked Theo up and down.
“You’re from where?”
“Port-de-Paix. Saint-Domingue.” Theo swept off his hat.
“Théodore Marchand, buying for a house in Léogâne. They pickle fish by the barrel and use more salt than God.”
“I sell to the Company.”
“And the Company pays you what? Six shillings a bushel?” Theo sat without being invited.
“I’ll pay eight. In silver.”
Tucker’s eyes flicked.
Behind him, near the door, a second man leaned against the wall.
Big, sunburned, a musket cradled in his arms.
Carved into the stock, Theo saw a small mark like a bird’s three-toed foot.
The man’s eyes were strange.
In the dim room, they caught the lamplight and glowed faintly red.
“Saunders,” Tucker said.
“My overseer.”
Theo smiled at him.
His heart was hammering.
“Pleasure. That’s a fine hat you’ve got, Mister Saunders. May I have it?”
It was a joke.
Something to say.
Saunders’s face twisted.
His hand went up, took off his hat, and held it out.
He looked as startled as Theo.
Theo took the hat.
He turned it over.
He looked at the three-toed mark on the musket and the red glow in the man’s eyes.
“Thank you,” he said slowly.
Saunders’s jaw worked.
He said nothing.
Some kind of rule, Theo thought.
A spirit’s Law.
The man had to give it.
He had to.
Theo’s mind raced.
And I just spent it on a hat.
The rakers worked with their heads down, and nobody looked twice at two more men with rakes.
Kofi pulled salt in the pen until his arms burned.
The glare stabbed through his eyelids even when he squinted.
By midmorning his vision had narrowed to a gray tunnel.
He worked by feel, by the scrape of the rake, by the sound of the water.
Titus worked beside him.
He hadn’t spoken in an hour.
“Look,” he said suddenly.
“Next pen.”
A woman stood in the water with a rake, a boy of eight or nine working beside her.
On the back of her shoulder, just above the rag of her dress, a raised scar shaped like an iron ring stood out against her skin.
Tucker came walking along the edge of the pens with a riding crop.
He stopped by the woman and looked down at her.
“You’re slow today, Juba.”
“My eyes, sir. The light—”
“Hold.”
The word came out flat, as a stone dropped.
The woman froze.
Not stopped.
Froze.
The rake hung in her hands.
Her mouth stayed half open.
Her eyes went blank and empty as glass.
Beside her, her boy stared up at her, terrified.
Tucker watched her for a long moment, tapping the crop on his boot.
Kofi’s hands tightened on the rake until the wood creaked.
“Work,” Tucker said.
The woman jerked back into motion as if a string had been cut.
She gasped.
Her boy grabbed her arm.
She bent over the rake and worked, shaking.
Tucker walked on.
“Kofi.” Titus’s voice came out rough.
“I don’t know.”
“She couldn’t move. He said a word, and she couldn’t move.”
“I saw.”
Titus’s knuckles had gone gray on the rake handle.
“I’m burning this place. When we go, I’m burning all of it.”
Clementine crouched behind the salt house with a clay pot of grease and scraps.
The dogs lifted their heads and sniffed.
She tossed the first scrap.
A dog snapped it out of the air.
Then another.
In a quarter hour, all five lay in the shade on their sides, snoring.
She straightened and turned toward the huts, and stopped.
Something was crying.
Faint.
High.
Not a child.
Not an animal.
It came from the row of huts and from the pens beyond, from many places at once, like the whine of mosquitoes in the dark.
She followed it with her eyes and found a woman in the pens, a scar on her shoulder shaped like an iron ring.
The crying came from there.
From under the woman’s skin.
Clementine put a hand over her mouth.
Obi slipped between the huts like a shadow.
Pockets rode on his back, quiet for once.
In the last hut he found a woman sitting on a mat, too sick to work, with a little girl asleep against her side.
The woman’s eyes were red and swollen from the glare.
The iron ring stood out on her shoulder.
She grabbed a stick when she saw him.
“Wait! Wait. Mother Phibba sent me.”
The stick lowered.
“You’re a child.”
“I’m Obi. I’m with Kofi Brook.”
The woman’s face changed.
“The one in the song?”
“Yes. He’s here. In the pens. At noon, when the bell rings, get everyone out toward the dock. There’s a boat. We’re taking you to Phibba.”
The woman stared at him.
Then she started to cry without making a sound.
“I’m Sukey. That’s Hetty. Juba’s in the pens with her boy Cato. And the twins, Mingo and Nell, they sleep in the next hut.” She wiped her face.
“Juba won’t make it far. She fought when they branded her. Tucker had it done twice.”
“We’ll carry her.”
“You don’t understand.” Sukey touched her own shoulder.
“When we leave, this burns.”
Pockets reached down from Obi’s back and patted Sukey’s head with a small brown hand.
She laughed once through her tears.
At noon, Tucker rang the bell for water break.
In his office, Theo was still talking.
“—and of course the house in Léogâne would want a standing order, fifty bushels a month—”
“Which house?” Tucker asked.
“Pardon?”
“You said a house in Léogâne. Which merchant?”
Theo opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
“I trade with Léogâne,” Tucker said slowly.
“I know every buyer there. There is no Marchand.”
He stood up.
Outside, a dog should have been barking.
None were.
Tucker looked at the window.
Then at Theo.
Then at the door.
“SAUNDERS!”
Everything happened at once.
Pockets dropped off the salt house roof onto a sleeping overseer, snatched the ring of keys from his belt, and fled across the salt.
The overseer woke shouting.
Obi ran from hut to hut.
Sukey came out with Hetty on her hip.
The twins stumbled after her.
In the pens, Kofi dropped his rake and grabbed Juba’s arm.
“Come with me. Now. Phibba sent us.”
She looked at him with red, streaming eyes.
Then she grabbed Cato’s hand and ran.
The overseer raised the musket.
A shot cracked from the dock.
The overseer spun and fell.
Yaw lay flat on the planks with a musket, already reloading.
Saunders burst out of the salt house door.
His eyes blazed red in the glare.
He raised his musket at Kofi.
Yaw fired again.
The shot should have taken Saunders in the chest.
Instead, Saunders stumbled on the salt crust.
The ball passed through the air where his head had been.
Yaw fired a third time.
Saunders’s hat blew off his head.
He didn’t even flinch.
“Can’t hit him!” Yaw shouted.
“I can’t hit him!”
“It’s his spirit!” Theo came flying out of the salt house behind Saunders, coat tails flapping, feathered hat gone.
“It’s luck! Bad luck for us, good for him!”
Titus charged Saunders from the side.
The salt crust broke under his foot, and he went down on one knee in brine.
Saunders turned and leveled the musket at Titus’s head.
“His Law!” Theo screamed.
“He has to give a stranger the first thing they ask for! I wasted mine on his HAT!”
Kofi was still running with Juba and Cato.
He didn’t stop.
“SAUNDERS!”
The overseer’s red eyes snapped to him.
“Drop the gun.”
Saunders’s arms shook.
His face twisted in fury.
His fingers opened one at a time.
The musket fell into the brine.
Titus came up off his knee and hit him in the face so hard that no luck in the world could have saved him.
“HOLD!”
Tucker’s voice cracked across the pans.
Juba froze mid-stride.
Her hand locked on Cato’s.
The boy slammed to a halt and screamed.
The twins stood stiff as fence posts.
All six of them.
Blank-eyed.
Still.
Tucker stood at the salt house door with his riding crop, breathing hard.
“You can’t carry them all,” he called.
“And you can’t break it. They belong to the Company. They’ll always belong to the Company.”
Kofi looked at the six still figures on the salt.
At the iron stakes.
At the overseers running from the far pens.
“Titus. Take Juba. Clementine, Obi, the children. Theo, Sukey. I’ll bring the twins.”
“They can’t move!”
“Then we carry them.”
Titus scooped Juba up like a sack of cane.
Kofi got an arm under each twin.
They were stiff and cold as wood.
The overseers were coming.
Five of them now, muskets up.
Kofi ran past the salt house door.
He saw the heavy roof beam over the doorway, old wood, split along the grain, the peg holding it half rotted through.
He set the twins down, drove his heel into the doorframe below the peg, and threw his shoulder into the post.
The beam cracked.
The roof above the door sagged, then gave.
Slate and timber crashed down across the doorway in a cloud of salt dust.
Tucker and two overseers vanished behind it, shouting.
Kofi grabbed the twins and ran.
They reached the edge of the salt at the dock.
Past the last line of iron stakes, Juba’s body jerked in Titus’s arms.
She screamed.
Then all six of them screamed.
The freeze broke all at once.
The children thrashed.
Sukey clawed at her shoulder.
On each of them, the iron ring scar glowed a dull orange beneath the skin.
“It’s burning!” Sukey shrieked.
“It’s burning, it’s burning—”
“Keep going!” Kofi roared.
“Get them in the boat!”
Bess stood in the longboat at the end of the dock with Toby at the oars and Ezinne at the tiller.
They grabbed children as fast as they came.
Hetty, Mingo, Nell, Cato.
Sukey fell into the boat, still clutching her shoulder.
Titus carried Juba down the dock last.
Smoke rose from her shoulder.
The skin around the brand had gone black.
She had stopped screaming.
Her eyes rolled toward her son.
“Row!” Kofi shouted.
“ROW!”
They pulled away from the dock with musket balls splashing around them.
Past the reef.
Out into open water.
Behind them, a gray wall rose from the sea and swallowed the island.
The fog.
It rolled over the boat, cool and smelling of tobacco.
Phibba’s small gray boat slid out of it alongside them, her pipe glowing.
She took one look at the six of them and started blowing smoke, fast, over one shoulder after another.
Sukey’s brand dulled from orange to red to dark.
The twins stopped screaming.
Hetty went limp and began to cry in ordinary, tired sobs.
Cato’s scar dimmed.
Phibba reached Juba last.
She blew smoke over the burned shoulder for a long time.
The glow faded.
Juba didn’t move.
Phibba stopped.
She took the pipe out of her mouth.
“Him brand her twice,” she said quietly.
“Deeper. Mi smoke can’t reach it.”
Juba’s eyes found her son.
Her hand came up an inch off the planks.
Cato grabbed it.
“Go with them,” she whispered.
“Go free. Don’t let nobody put iron on you again.”
“Mama—”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
She let go of his hand.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
The fog pressed close around the longboat.
Somewhere a bell rang, far off.
Cato lay with his head on his mother’s still chest, not crying, just breathing.
Kofi sat in the bow with his hands hanging between his knees.
They were raw from the rake.
Salt had crusted into every cut.
He looked at Juba’s shoulder.
At the iron ring burned into it, black at the edges, the Company’s mark on a woman they had marked twice because she’d fought.
He’d spent sixty-seven years building ships for men like Tucker.
He’d told himself he was only building ships.
He looked at Titus.
Titus looked back.
For once, there was no argument in his face.
Just the same thing Kofi felt, hard and cold as iron.
“The Ironbound Company,” Kofi said.
“The Ironbound Company,” Titus answered.
It sounded like a promise.
In the great cabin of the Vigilant, Delancey Pinder sat across from Bell and helped himself to the captain’s wine.
“A tall young man. Mixed, light-skinned, French manners. Talks too much. Smiles too much.” He sipped.
“Wore a hat with a feather that would shame a peacock. He sold me the scales of a Mermaid Queen. Said his ship was called the Honest Mistake.”
Bell wrote it all in his ledger.
“And where would a crew like that go next?”
Pinder smiled and rubbed two ringed fingers together.
Bell set a purse on the table.
Pinder weighed it in his palm and tucked it away.
“There’s an old witch in the southern cays who runs runaways through fog,” he said.
“Everyone in Nassau knows the story. Nobody knows where she lives. A crew hunting for spirit knowledge would go looking for her.” He leaned back.
“Find the fog, Captain, and you’ll find your singing bird.”
Bell closed the ledger.
“Cross. Plot a course for the southern cays.”