Dead Reckoning
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 9
I found Anne below deck.
She was standing in the middle of the chaos with the stillness she could produce when everything around her was moving badly, watching the crew with an expression I recognized. The expression of someone who has done the mathematics and found the answer insufficient.
The crew was drunk. Not moderately drunk. Not the functional drunk that sailors maintained as a kind of baseline operating condition. Insensible. Several men were already horizontal. Others were moving with the careful exaggerated precision of people whose bodies had stopped receiving accurate information from their minds. Jack was among them, which was the fact that mattered most and could not be changed.
Anne looked at me when I came in.
I held up the cutlass.
She looked at it for a moment. Then she reached for her own.
We did not discuss it. There was nothing to discuss. The Navy was coming and the crew was useless and there were two people on this ship capable of standing on deck with a weapon and we were both of them and we both knew it and that was the complete extent of the available conversation.
I looked for Thomas.
He was at the charts. Of course he was. Even now, even with the sound of the approaching vessel audible through the hull, he was at the charts with his finger on the coastline working out something I would never know the conclusion of. He looked up when I came to him and his eyes went to the cutlass and then to my face and he read both with the accuracy he brought to navigation.
He stood up immediately.
I put my hand on his chest and stopped him.
He said — Mary.
I said — No.
He looked at me with everything he had, all of it, the complete unguarded fullness of a twenty year old who has not yet learned to ration what he feels. He was afraid and trying not to be and the trying was visible and I loved him for it with a specificity that I am not going to diminish by elaborating on it here.
I put my hand briefly against his face.
I said — Stay below. Whatever happens. Stay below.
He understood what I was asking and why and he didn’t like it and he was going to do it anyway because I asked him to and because he understood that the child I was carrying needed at least one of us to survive this morning and the one most likely to survive it was the one who stayed below deck and that was the mathematics and we both knew it.
His jaw tightened. He nodded once.
I turned and went back to Anne.
We went up together.
The deck was empty. The Caribbean morning was extraordinary, the way it always was, indifferent to what was happening on the water beneath it. Blue and gold and excessive, too bright, too alive, the sky making its usual argument about what the world contained.
The Navy vessel was closer than I had estimated. Moving fast, guns run out, her crew visible at the rail in their red coats, organized and purposeful and coming with the absolute confidence of people who do not expect meaningful resistance.
They were not wrong to be confident.
Anne looked at the vessel and then looked at me and said — Well.
I said — Yes.
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.