Dead Reckoning
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 7
The Caribbean was changing.
I noticed it the way I noticed most things — quietly, incrementally, without announcing my conclusions until I was certain of them. It was in the shipping patterns first. Fewer merchant vessels taking the routes we favored, which meant either the merchants had better intelligence than before or the Navy had better coverage than before, and either way the mathematics were shifting against us.
Then the news started coming in from port.
Blackbeard dead off the Carolina coast in November of 1718. I had never met Edward Teach but I knew his reputation the way everyone in the Caribbean knew it, which was as a fixed point, a constant, something so embedded in the landscape of these waters that its removal seemed almost geographical. Like an island disappearing. The Navy had not just killed him. They had mounted his head on a bowsprit and sailed it into port as a message.
The message was not subtle.
Charles Vane taken shortly after. Bartholomew Roberts moving his operations further from Jamaica, which meant even Roberts understood something had shifted. The pardons being offered to pirates who surrendered were genuine, which was new, and the executions of those who didn’t were public and thorough, which was not new but was newly efficient.
I watched Calico Jack absorb this information over several months and I watched what it did not do to him, which was produce adequate caution. Jack was brave in the way that men who have never seriously calculated their own mortality are brave — completely and uselessly. He took the news of each fallen pirate as confirmation that we were different, that our luck was particular to us, that the waters that had claimed others would not claim us because they had not claimed us yet.
I did not share this assessment.
I shared it with Anne one evening while Jack was below drinking with the crew. We stood at the rail in the position that had become habitual for us, the water doing what Caribbean water does at dusk, and I told her what I had been calculating and what the calculations produced.
She listened without interrupting, which was not her natural inclination and meant she was taking it seriously.
When I finished she was quiet for a moment. Then she said she knew. She said she had known for some time.
I asked her what she intended to do about it.
She looked at the water for a long time. Then she said — I’m not leaving him.
I had expected this. Anne’s loyalty was not a calculation. It was a condition, like weather. Jack was her choice and she had made it with full knowledge of what he was and what it would cost and she was not the kind of woman who unmade her choices when they became inconvenient.
I understood this about her. I did not entirely understand it but I understood it.
I asked her if she had told him what she thought.
She said she had told him everything she thought on multiple occasions and that Jack listened to her with complete sincerity and then continued doing exactly what he had been doing, which was his most consistent quality.
We stood there in the particular silence of two people who have said the true thing and exhausted the available responses to it.
After a while Anne said — What about you.
I thought about it honestly the way I had learned to think about things in that period of my life, without sentiment and without the comfortable evasions that make thinking easier and conclusions less accurate.
I had nowhere to go. That was the first truth. The life I had built was this one, on this ship, in these waters, with these people. The alternatives were the merchant routes, which felt like retreat, or land, which felt like surrender. I had crossed an ocean to get here. I had become someone worth being afraid of. I had Anne.
I had Thomas.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.