The cutter found the Vigilant an hour before dawn.
Bell was on the quarterdeck when the lookout called it.
A single lantern, low on the water to the northwest, rising and falling on the swell.
He watched it come for half an hour without moving, hands clasped behind his back, while the two sloops held station off his stern and the black water hissed along the frigate’s sides.
When the cutter came alongside, Isaiah Cross was the first man up the ladder.
He looked thinner than when Bell had sent him away.
His coat was salt-stained and his split lip had healed into a pale seam.
He touched his hat.
“Captain.”
“Mr. Cross. You’re late.”
“Nassau’s a hard town to buy, sir.” Cross jerked his chin toward the cutter.
“Brought you something besides news.”
Behind him, men were coming up the ladder.
Eight of them.
Then twelve.
They came slowly, shoved from below by the cutter’s crew, blinking in the lantern light.
Some wore the rough canvas of fishermen.
One still had a tavern apron tied around his waist.
Two had their hands bound in front of them.
A boy who couldn’t have been sixteen had blood dried black under his nose.
“Pressed off the Nassau docks,” Cross said.
“Drunk, mostly. Two of them fought. Every one of them’s sailed before.”
Bell looked the line over.
Fourteen men, swaying on his deck, staring at the guns and the rigging and the officers with the dull, sick look of men waking up somewhere they didn’t remember choosing to go.
“Bosun. Have them sworn and read the Articles at first light.” Bell turned away.
“Any man who tries for the side after that is a deserter, and you know what the Articles say about deserters.”
The bosun knew.
So, by the way their faces changed, did the pressed men.
“Your news, Mr. Cross. In my cabin.”
Bell’s cabin smelled of lamp oil and old paper.
The ledger lay open on the desk.
The tally ring hung from a nail above it on its black thread, turning gently with the roll of the ship.
Pointing north.
Cross saw it and stopped in the doorway.
Something hungry moved across his face.
“Sit,” Bell said.
Cross sat.
Bell remained standing.
“The fog woman,” Cross began.
“Everyone in Nassau knows the story and nobody knows where she lives. Fishermen won’t talk about her. But I found an old turtler who sold me what he knew for a bottle.” He leaned forward.
“He said her boats have been seen for thirty years around the out islands. Always in fog. Always near Cat Island.”
Bell said nothing.
“There’s a lake in the middle of Cat Island. Inland. Salt water, though there’s no river to the sea. The turtler called it the Boiling Hole. Says it bubbles and churns on its own, like a pot on a fire, and anything that gets too close to the edge gets pulled under.” Cross’s mouth twisted.
“Says there’s a monster in it. Half shark, half something else. Arms like an octopus. People won’t walk within a mile of the place.”
“And you believe him.”
“I believe the island’s got a door nobody uses, Captain. And people who want to hide always pick the house everyone’s too scared to visit.”
Bell looked at the ring.
It hung from the nail, pointing north, steady.
He walked to the chart pinned on the bulkhead and laid a finger on the long, thin shape of Cat Island.
“Then that’s where she is,” he said quietly.
“And that’s where he’s going.”
“How do you know he’s going there?”
“Because he’s a man who keeps his promises.” Bell traced the coastline with his finger.
“I’ve read every report. He went back for a girl in Trelawny. He went back for six branded wretches at Salt Pan. He’ll go back for whatever he’s left in that hole.” He took his finger away.
“Men like that are easy to find, Mr. Cross. You only have to find what they love.”
There was a knock.
The first officer leaned in.
“Captain. You’ll want to see the sky.”
The east had gone red.
Not the clean gold of a good morning.
A deep, bruised, angry red, low along the horizon, bleeding up into a sky the color of tarnished brass.
High above, the clouds had pulled out into long thin streaks, white strands combed straight across the heavens from the southeast.
The swell had changed.
Bell felt it under his boots before he saw it.
Long, slow, oily rollers, coming out of the southeast under a sea that was otherwise almost calm.
Each one lifted the Vigilant gently, held her, and set her down again.
Every old hand on deck had stopped working to look.
“Red sky at morning,” the bosun muttered.
“I’m familiar with the rhyme, Mr. Pike.”
“Begging your pardon, Captain. That’s not a red sky. That’s a warning. I’ve seen a dawn like that twice before.” The bosun’s weathered face was grim.
“Off Barbados in the year ninety-four. And off Antigua. Both times a great storm came within two days.”
Sterling Brook had come up the ladder, cane thumping.
He looked at the sky, then at Bell.
“Well? Do we run for harbor?”
Bell watched the red light on the long swells.
“Which harbor would you suggest, my lord?” He turned.
“If a great storm comes, it comes for him as much as for us. He’s a day’s sail south of us at most, crossing open water in a patched ship with a hole in her rail.” He clasped his hands behind his back.
“We hold our course. Double-reef the topsails and have the sloops close up. If he means to reach Cat Island, he’ll have to come through this weather to do it.”
Sterling looked uneasy for the first time since the escape.
“And if the storm takes us instead?”
“Then God has a sense of humor, my lord.” Bell turned back to the red horizon.
“Mr. Pike. Read the Articles to the new men. Loudly. I want every soul on this ship to understand what desertion costs before the weather gives anyone ideas.”
Two hundred miles to the south, on the Morning Star, Kofi had the morning watch.
He stood at the wheel with the ship’s bell at his shoulder, waiting for the half hour.
The deck was quiet.
Titus slept against the capstan with his arms folded.
The hens muttered in their crate under the mainmast.
Ration the goat chewed something she shouldn’t have, probably a rope end.
The smell of the ship was the smell it always had at dawn, tar and wet wood and the sharp green bite of the callaloo growing in the soil boxes along the waist.
He rang the bell.
Five strokes.
Then he looked east, and his hand stopped on the rope.
Red.
A deep, bruised, dirty red, low along the sea, bleeding up into a sky the color of old brass.
Above it, high and thin, long white streaks of cloud combed straight across the heavens from the southeast.
And under his feet, the swell.
Long.
Slow.
Oily.
Out of the southeast, rolling under a sea that was otherwise almost glass.
Lifting the ship gently, holding her, setting her down.
A frigate bird passed overhead.
Then another.
Then five more, all of them flying hard to the northwest.
Away.
Kofi knew this morning.
He’d stood in the shipyard at Brook’s Reach and seen this exact sky.
He’d been twenty-three.
Thorne had come out of his house with his coffee and stared at the east and gone pale, and for the first time in Kofi’s memory had ordered every hand in the yard to stop work and lash down everything that could move.
The cane had been flattened two days later.
Half the roofs on the row had gone.
A brig in the bay had been thrown up onto the black rocks and broken in two, and Kofi had spent the next four months rebuilding her keel.
People had talked about that storm for the rest of his first life.
The great storm of ’12.
The first great hurricane the English had ever seen in Jamaica.
He’d heard captains name the day like they were naming a battle.
The twenty-eighth of August.
He counted.
They’d been at sea four days since the cove.
Before that, three days on the mountain.
Before that, the crossing.
His mouth went dry.
Tomorrow.
It would hit tomorrow night.
And somewhere far to the south, in the harbor at Savanna-la-Mar, a ship from Guinea was riding at anchor with two hundred people chained in her hold.
He’d heard about her for years after.
Sailors had told it over rum in the shipyard like a ghost story.
The way she’d foundered at her moorings in the night.
The way nobody had unlocked the hatches.
He gripped the wheel so hard his knuckles cracked.
“Pretty,” Theo said behind him.
“In the way a man’s fever is pretty.”
Kofi turned.
Theo had come up from below with a cup of Toby’s ginger tea in each hand.
He held one out.
His eyes were on the east.
“You see it,” Kofi said.
“Hard to miss.” Theo sipped.
He studied the sky the way he studied a chart, narrow-eyed, lips moving slightly.
“Mares’ tails out of the southeast. Long swell, same direction, getting longer. Birds running.” He lowered the cup.
“Something big is out there. A real blow. Maybe one of the great ones.”
“When?”
“Nobody can say when.” Theo shrugged.
“Could be two days. Could be five. Could swing south and never touch us. My father used to say the only thing you know for certain about a great storm is that you’ll know where it’s going after it’s already gone.”
“It’ll hit tomorrow night.”
Theo looked at him.
“Tomorrow night,” Kofi said again.
“From the south. It’ll pass below Jamaica and drag across toward Cuba, and the north edge of it will cross the passage behind us. If we hold this course for Cat Island, we’ll be in open water right in the teeth of it.”
Theo’s expression didn’t change for a long moment.
“How,” he said slowly, “do you know that?”
Kofi had no answer that he could say out loud.
“Change course,” he said instead.
“Northeast. Toward the banks. We need to be in the lee of something when it comes. Somewhere the sea can’t build.”
“That’s two days off our heading.” Theo set his cup down on the binnacle.
His voice had gone careful.
“Two days, Kofi. You told us Sukey’s brand might be leading someone to the Hollow. You told us we had to hurry. And now you want to turn away from it because the sky’s red?”
“Because a storm’s coming.”
“I know a storm’s coming. I’m the one who just told you.” Theo’s face was tight.
“What I don’t know is how you can name the day. Nobody can name the day. Not my father. Not any captain who ever lived. You’ve been at sea for two months.”
Kofi said nothing.
Theo waited.
“Your ship, Captain,” he said.
“I’ll plot your course.”
He picked up his tea and went below.
The argument came at noon, in front of everyone.
They’d come up to eat.
Bess had served out hardtack and salt fish and the last of the fried plantain, and they sat around the galley hatch in the hot, heavy air.
The sky had gone hazy and white.
The swell was longer.
No wind at all.
Titus was the one who said it.
“We’ve turned northeast.”
He said it to his bowl.
Then he looked up, straight at Kofi.
“Theo says you ordered it. Says you’ve got some notion a storm’s coming tomorrow night.”
“It is.”
“Theo says nobody can know that.”
“I know it.”
“How?”
The deck went quiet.
Bess stopped chewing.
Obi looked from Titus to Kofi with his eyes wide.
Anne, sitting on an upturned bucket near the rail, slowly lowered her bottle.
“Here we go,” Mary murmured.
Kofi set down his bowl.
“I’ve seen this sky before,” he said.
“I know what comes after.”
“You’ve seen it before.” Titus’s voice was dangerously flat.
“At Brook’s Reach? You’ve been at Brook’s Reach your whole life, same as me. You think I’ve never seen a red morning? I’ve seen a hundred. Never once did it come with a date on it.”
“This one does.”
“How?”
Kofi held his gaze and said nothing.
“His knees,” Yaw said suddenly.
Everyone turned.
Yaw had the dog in his lap.
He looked like a man who had just jumped off a cliff and only now noticed how far down the water was.
“His knees ache,” Yaw went on.
“Before a storm. Always have. Since we were boys. Old injury. From the shipyard.” He nodded firmly.
“Never wrong.”
There was a long silence.
“His knees,” Titus repeated.
“Very reliable knees.”
Theo was staring at Yaw.
So was Clementine.
Anne made a small choking sound into her bottle that might have been a laugh.
Titus turned slowly back to Kofi.
“That,” he said, “is the worst lie I have ever heard in my life.”
Yaw opened his mouth.
Kofi shook his head once, and he shut it.
“I can’t tell you how I know,” Kofi said.
“I’m asking you to trust me.”
“I did trust you.” Titus stood up.
His bowl clattered on the deck.
“I trusted you when you ran past that slaver. I trusted you up the mountain. I watched you walk into a graveyard and come back with a dead man’s cane and a taste for rum you never had, and I trusted you.” His voice cracked.
“And every time I ask a question, you give me nothing. Not once. You think we don’t notice? You think Mary’s the only one who sees something in you that doesn’t fit?”
Mary’s hand went still on her whetstone.
“I’m not asking for everything,” Titus said quietly.
“Just one thing. One true thing. Why you know what you know.”
The silence went on too long.
“When the storm comes,” Kofi said finally, “you’ll know I was right.”
Titus looked at him for a long moment.
Then he laughed.
It was a short, sour sound.
“That’s what masters say.”
He walked away to the bow.
Nobody moved for a while.
Theo stared into his tea.
Bess began, very slowly, to collect the bowls.
Ezinne was the one who finally broke it.
She stood up, brushed off her skirt, and looked at the white sky.
“Well,” she said.
“If a storm’s coming, I’d like my fiddle somewhere dry. Obi. Help me.”
People started moving again.
Not because anything was settled.
Because somebody had given them something to do.
They spent the afternoon making the ship ready.
There was a lot to do and Kofi was glad of it.
Every task was a task he didn’t have to think around.
He and Titus took down the topgallant masts and lashed them on deck.
They worked side by side all afternoon without saying a word that wasn’t about rope or timber.
Theo and Anne went aloft and sent down every sail but the storm canvas, Anne swearing creatively at every knot.
Mary doubled the lashings on the boats and the water casks.
She tested each knot twice.
Bess was everywhere at once.
She counted every cask of water, every sack of rice, every keg of salt pork.
She made Toby help her shift the heaviest stores low in the hold, where they’d steady the ship.
She stood in the middle of the deck with a slate and a stub of chalk, tallying, muttering.
“Six casks. Two hundred pounds of rice if the damp doesn’t take it. Twelve hands. Three children. Two pirates who eat like a regiment—”
“I heard that,” Anne called from aloft.
“You were meant to.”
Cato carried the hens down into the hold, one at a time, cradled against his chest.
Each one complained bitterly.
Mingo dragged Ration down the ladder by her rope while she bleated and planted her hooves on every step.
Nell went along the soil boxes with Clementine, laying old sailcloth over the seedlings and weighting the corners down with stones.
“Will they drown?” Nell asked, touching the small ginger shoot that had been her first.
“Not if we cover them well,” Clementine said.
“Will we?”
Clementine looked at her.
Then she knelt and tucked the sailcloth tighter over the ginger with her own hands.
“Not if we cover each other well,” she said.
Late in the afternoon, Toby set a wooden mortar on the deck by the galley hatch and began to pound yam.
He’d boiled it first, and now he was beating it down with a heavy pestle as long as his arm.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Slow and steady.
The soft, starchy smell of it rose in the heavy air.
Bess sat down on the hatch coaming beside him and watched.
“You do this every Sunday,” she said.
“Is it Sunday?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
“Close enough.” Thud.
“Storm doesn’t care what day it is. Neither do I.”
Bess watched the pestle rise and fall.
“Why do you always say it’s wrong?”
“Because it is.” Toby turned the yam with his hand and pounded again.
“My mother made this every market day. Pounded it in a mortar bigger than this one, with a pestle taller than me. Smooth as cream. And she’d have a soup next to it, green and thick, with a leaf in it I can’t remember the name of.” He shook his head.
“Forty years, I’ve been trying to taste that leaf again. Never found it on any island. So it’s always wrong.”
“What did it taste like?”
Toby stopped pounding.
He thought about it for a long moment.
His face went soft and far away.
“Bitter,” he said.
“And then sweet after. Like it was apologizing for the bitter.”
Bess didn’t say anything.
She sat on the coaming with her arms around her knees and looked at the pestle.
“I don’t remember anything,” she said finally.
Very quietly.
“From before. I was born on a plantation in St. Ann. My mother died before I could talk. Nobody ever told me where she came from. I don’t know any songs. Any words. I don’t know any leaf.” She picked at a splinter on the coaming.
“When you all talk about home, I just sit and listen. Like somebody looking through a window at a house they’re not allowed in.”
Toby set down the pestle.
He reached into the mortar, broke off a piece of the pounded yam, rolled it into a ball between his big fingers, pressed a dent into it with his thumb, and held it out.
“Here.”
Bess looked at it.
“That’s how my mother fed us,” Toby said.
“You make a little cup with your thumb. Then you scoop up the soup with it.” He kept holding it out.
“There’s no soup. But that’s the right way to hold it. Now you know one thing.”
Bess took it.
She turned it over in her fingers, pressing the dent with her own thumb.
“It’s wrong,” she said, and her voice cracked.
“Yes,” Toby agreed.
“It’s always wrong. Eat it anyway.”
She did.
The wind came up at dusk.
Not much.
A warm, damp breath out of the east, gusting and dying, gusting again.
The sky had gone the color of a bruise, purple and yellow and grey.
The long swells were taller now.
The Morning Star climbed each one slowly and slid down the far side with a groan from somewhere deep in her timbers.
Below, in the cleared space by the children’s hammocks, Yaw sat cross-legged with a lantern in front of him and the yellow dog asleep against his knee.
Cato, Mingo, and Nell sat in a row across from him, wrapped in a single blanket.
Obi sat beside them, pretending he was too old for stories and leaning forward anyway.
“So,” Yaw said.
“Anansi.”
“The spider,” Nell whispered.
“The spider. The cleverest creature in all the world. And one day, Anansi decides he wants all the wisdom. Every bit of it. Not just some. All.” Yaw spread his hands wide.
“So he goes around the whole world with a big clay pot, and from everyone he meets, he takes a little wisdom and drops it in.” He mimed scooping.
“From the elephant. From the river. From the old women in the market. Every last drop. Until the pot is full.”
“Then what?” Cato asked.
“Mine. All mine. So he decides to hide it at the top of the tallest tree in the forest, where nobody will ever find it.”
Behind the children, at the foot of the ladder, Bess had come down with an armful of blankets.
She stopped.
She stood very still in the shadows and listened.
“So Anansi ties the pot to his front. Like this.” Yaw clutched an invisible pot against his belly.
“And he starts to climb. But the pot’s in the way. He can’t hold the tree. He slips. Climbs a little. Slips again.” Yaw slid sideways, flailing.
The children giggled.
“All day, he tries. And he can’t get up that tree.”
“Then what?”
“Then his little son comes by. Ntikuma. Just a small boy. Small as you.” Yaw pointed at Mingo, who sat up straighter.
“And Ntikuma looks up and says, ‘Papa. Why don’t you tie the pot on your back? Then you could hold the tree with all your arms.'”
Obi laughed out loud.
“And Anansi realizes,” Yaw said, “that with a whole pot full of all the wisdom in the world, he still didn’t know the simplest thing. And a small boy did.” He sat back.
“And he’s so angry, he throws the pot down out of the tree. And it smashes on the ground. And all the wisdom spills out, everywhere. And the wind picks it up and blows it all over the world. And that’s why nobody has all of it. Everybody has a little.”
“Even me?” Nell asked.
“Especially you.”
At the foot of the ladder, Bess wiped her eyes quickly with the back of her wrist and climbed back up before anyone saw her.
The yellow dog opened one eye and watched her go.
Kofi found Clementine at the stern rail after dark, watching the wake.
There wasn’t much to see.
A pale smear of foam on black water, swallowed every few heartbeats by a swell that came up out of the dark from the southeast, lifting the stern high, then dropping it with a hiss.
The wind had a voice now, thin and high in the rigging.
She didn’t turn around.
“My grandmother had a word,” she said.
“Kalunga.”
Kofi came and stood beside her.
“It means the line. The border.” She nodded at the black water beyond the wake.
“Between the living and the dead. She said it’s water. The dead go down into it and across it, to a country on the far side where everything is turned around. Day there when it’s night here. White clay where we have dark earth. The ancestors live there, she said. Upside down. Looking up at us through the water, the way we look down at our own faces in a pond.”
A swell lifted them.
The stern rose and fell.
“When I was a girl, I used to look into the river for hours,” Clementine went on.
“Trying to see them.” She almost smiled.
“I never did.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
She turned and looked at him then.
Her eyes in the dark were very steady.
“Because the dead go across the water and they don’t come back.” She studied his face.
“That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked.”
Kofi said nothing.
The wind sang in the shrouds.
“And you came back across it,” Clementine said softly.
“Didn’t you?”
His hands had gone tight on the rail.
She waited.
When he still said nothing, she nodded slowly, as if he’d answered anyway.
“I won’t ask you,” she said.
“Not tonight. Maybe not ever.” She reached up and drew a leaf out of her hair, small and green, and turned it in her fingers.
“But I’m not Titus. I don’t need you to tell me. I just need you to know I know.”
She pressed the leaf into his palm, closed his fingers over it, and went below.
Anne was waiting for him at the mainmast with her bottle and a grin.
“You look like a man who just got caught,” she said.
“It’s been a long day.”
“It’s been a long day for everybody. Your navigator’s sulking. Your big man’s sharpening his machete at the bow like he’s thinking about using it. Your little cook cried in the hold.” She took a drink.
“And you’re about to run us all into a storm you can name the hour of.” She held out the bottle.
“Here. Then fog.”
He took the bottle.
Drank.
The pepper burned all the way down, and he felt better at once, and hated that he felt better.
“Again?”
“Again. You’ve got the letting-it-out. Now you learn the putting-it-back.” Anne nodded at his cane.
“Open the door.”
He twisted the skull.
Drew the blade a hand’s width from the grave-cross sheath.
He didn’t push this time.
He breathed and loosened his grip and thought of the drowned men standing in the grass.
The cold came.
Grey fog slid off the steel, curled down around his boots, and began to spread across the deck.
“Good,” Anne said.
“Now close it. Gently.”
He tried to pull it back.
It kept coming.
“You’re grabbing again,” Anne said.
“You let it out like a man opening a gate for a friend. Now close it the same way. Not like you’re slamming it on a dog. Like you’re closing it behind someone you love who’s walking home.”
He thought about that.
He thought about Sabina, tilting her head.
The fog stopped spreading.
It hung on the deck for a moment, thin and pale.
Then it drew back slowly toward the blade and slid into the dark steel and was gone.
He slid the blade home.
It clicked.
Anne was watching him with an odd expression.
“Where’d you learn to read weather like that?” she asked.
“Truly.”
“I’ve seen this sky before.”
“Mm.” She took another drink.
“You know, everybody on this ship has something they won’t say.” She looked away, out at the dark water.
“Everybody. Me included.”
Kofi looked at her.
“So I won’t push,” Anne said.
“Just don’t let whatever you’re keeping sink us. That’s all I ask.”
She clapped him on the shoulder, hard, and went forward to check the boat lashings.
He stood alone at the mainmast.
In his fist, Clementine’s leaf.
On his tongue, the burn of pepper rum.
Everybody on this ship has something they won’t say.
He wondered what hers was.
Theo came to him an hour before midnight.
Kofi had the helm again.
The wind had risen through the evening, steady now, hard out of the east and backing slowly toward the northeast.
Rain came in sheets and stopped and came again.
The Morning Star ran under a scrap of storm sail with the swells growing taller behind her, every one lifting her stern and shoving her forward with a long, sickening rush.
Theo stood at his shoulder with a lantern hooded inside his coat and his charts rolled in oilcloth under his arm.
“Banks are twenty miles off the starboard bow,” he said.
“If your storm comes, they’ll break the worst of the sea for us. If it doesn’t, we’ve wasted a day and a half running from a pretty sunrise.”
“I know.”
Theo was quiet for a while.
The wind whined in the rigging.
“How sure are you?” he asked finally.
“Not how. I know you won’t tell me how. Just how sure.”
Kofi looked out at the black water ahead.
“As sure as I am that the sun comes up.”
Theo absorbed that.
He nodded slowly.
He didn’t look happy.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“I don’t like being steered by something I can’t see. I’m a navigator. I steer by stars and logs and lead lines and things I can measure. Not by feelings. Not by smoke. Not by Auntie’s ribcage.” He tried a smile.
It didn’t hold.
“And not by secrets.”
“I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” Theo’s voice was quiet.
“I told you about the girl on the Sainte-Hélène. I’ve never told anyone that. I told you because I thought on this ship, nobody had to carry things alone.” He shifted the charts under his arm.
“I’ll plot your course. I’ll get you through tonight. But it hurt, Kofi. Being shut out like that. It hurt.”
He went forward before Kofi could find anything to say.
The storm came at midnight.
Kofi heard it before he saw it.
A low, rising roar out of the south, under the wind, under the rain, under everything.
It sounded like surf on a reef a hundred miles long.
Like a city falling.
The rain stopped.
For one long breath, the night went almost still.
The wind dropped.
The sails sagged.
The ship rolled in the swell with her rigging creaking.
Every head on deck came up.
“Kofi,” Yaw said, very quietly.
He was at the mainmast with a rope around his waist, the yellow dog pressed against his legs, hackles up.
“What’s that sound?”
Kofi didn’t take his eyes off the south.
Out there, in the dark, a line of white was coming toward them across the black sea.
A wall.
It stretched from one edge of the world to the other, pale and boiling, and as he watched, it grew.
The roar grew with it.
Louder.
Closer.
He’d seen the aftermath at Brook’s Reach.
Flattened cane and broken ships.
He’d never stood in front of one coming.
“Lash yourselves,” he said.
His voice came out steady.
He didn’t know how.
“Every one of you. Get the children below and bar the hatch. Titus, the helm with me. Theo, the lead line. Anne, Mary, the storm sail.”
Nobody argued.
Not even Titus.
He came aft without a word and took the other spoke of the wheel, and Kofi felt the solid weight of him settle in beside him.
Titus looked south at the wall of white coming across the sea.
“Tomorrow night,” he said hoarsely.
“You said tomorrow night.”
“It’s past midnight.”
Titus stared at him.
Then the wall hit them.