The bell struck once—hard and hollow—and rattled straight through Jack's bones.
He came awake with a grunt and a full-body ache. Palms torn raw. Shoulders tight as knots. He'd scrubbed until the boards blurred and the brush squealed and the lantern made two moons in his vision. The deck under him now was lighter, not clean—never clean—but honest enough to keep a man on this side of the rail.
Not dawn yet. The sky was a smear of charcoal with a thin bruised edge where light would pry its way in. The ship rolled and creaked, timbers answering each other like old friends.
Around him, the day had already started without him. Boots thudded. A block squealed high in the rigging—dry line—then quieted as someone threw a handful of tallow at the problem. Barrels clonked against knees, rolled, thumped into place. Men moved as if the deck itself had told them where to go.
Jack sat up slow. The skin on his hands had split in three places; the salt had filled the cracks with fire. He flexed his fingers anyway. Pain meant he was here. Pain was proof.
His mother's voice slid between the aches, quiet and too clear: You'll regret this, Jack.
It wasn't loud. It never had been. That had made it worse.
"On your feet, runt!" the boatswain bellowed, and the memory snapped like a rope under strain.
The man was a barrel with a neck, arms roped thick, beard salted. He wore the ship like old skin and had a voice that made birds shut up.
Jack pushed himself upright. The world tilted, then settled.
"Haul," the boatswain said, pointing with his whole hand at a coil of hemp thicker than Jack's wrist. "Up with it. Don't look at it like it owes you money."
Jack bent. The rope bit straight into the new wounds, fiber digging to meat. He hissed and hauled anyway. The men around him fell into rhythm—one, two, heave—backs and legs doing a job they did every day. Jack was all elbows and wrong timing. He hung on, breath ragged, shoulder burning, vision pulsing. He found the beat by losing the part of him that wanted to think about it.
"Dead weight," someone said, not quietly.
"Captain's pity," someone else said. "Only reason he's not chum."
Snickers. A smack of palm on palm. Jack tightened his grip until the rope's twist left its pattern in him. He dragged air into his chest and kept time. He was not going to drop his end. He would rather crack something.
They belayed the line. Sail bellied. The ship took it. The boatswain moved on, flinging orders like he was tossing bread to gulls and they were catching every piece.
Jack stepped to the rail and let his shoulders shudder once. The smell up here was all wind and tar and brine and the ghosts of old meals. He raised his eyes.
The main topsail was wrong.
He didn't know how he knew before he knew. He just did. The yard was braced too far off the wind—canvas taking it crooked, a belly and a wrinkle where there should be one clean curve. He'd read this complaint in some captain's hand from some other century. He'd seen diagrams in books while his father told him to put the books away and eat and his mother stared into her tea.
If they kept it that angle, they'd drag water and lose speed, and if a squall shouldered them wrong the seam would split.
"Quit gawking!" the boatswain barked. "Barrels aft!"
Jack turned to the stack of water casks, hands already screaming at the thought. He swallowed the thing in his throat. He could leave it. It wasn't his ship. It wasn't his anything. But the thought of the yard hanging wrong nagged and scraped like grit in an eye.
He pivoted back before he could talk himself out of it. "The topsail," he said, too fast, the word tripping over his teeth. "It's— the yard's too far off. You're dragging her. Brace a span windward and—"
The deck paused. Just a sliver of a pause. The kind that tells you everyone heard you and half of them wish they hadn't.
The boatswain stared like Jack had grown a second head. "What did you say?"
"The angle," Jack managed, pointing with a hand that didn't want to move. "You'll— you'll get a cleaner draw if you—"
A wiry sailor with a gap where a tooth had been started laughing, so wide it showed the missing bit like a door. "Hear that? Captain's little bastard's a master now, is he!"
"Read it in a nursery rhyme," another called from a pin-rail.
The boatswain took one step that said he would prefer to fix the rigging on Jack's mouth first.
"Check it," a voice said. Not loud. Calm.
Draven.
Jack turned. The eldest Veynar leaned hip to rail, arms folded, one eyebrow tugged up by an old scar so he always looked slightly surprised by the world. He didn't smile. He didn't need to.
The boatswain's jaw worked. He jerked his chin. Two hands were already going—up the ratlines like they were born with them—boots finding rope in the dark without looking. They put shoulder to yard, worked the braces, eased, took, eased, took. Canvas cracked like a wet sheet snapped in winter air. The belly smoothed. The ship took a breath, then another, then hurled her head straight through the water like she'd remembered her name.
Everyone felt the change. Sea underfoot, suddenly eager. A handful of men looked at each other with the smallest flick of eyes. The boatswain didn't look at anyone.
Silence held long enough for Jack to taste pride—small and stupid and warm.
"Fluke," a voice said, quick as a knife sliding in.
"Blind luck," somebody else agreed.
"A broken compass points north twice a day," another chimed, almost pleased with himself.
Laughter came on top of that—rough and easy. Kairon's voice rode over it, slick as oil. "Don't start believing your mouth, runt. Even fools trip over the right answer sometimes."
Liora didn't laugh. She didn't say anything at all. She just looked at him like he'd stolen food out of a dead girl's hand. Grief has a face. It makes the rest of the world trespass.
"Barrels," the boatswain said, shoving a cask against Jack's thighs. "Move." The word didn't need a second syllable.
Jack wrapped his hands and pushed because they told him to and because his mother's voice was suddenly there again—You'll regret this, Jack—and if he didn't move he was going to choke on it.
He shouldn't have heard her here. That was the worst part. He had crossed a world—he was sure of it, even if he couldn't explain how—and she still found him. Maybe she would for the rest of his life, or the life he'd stolen, whichever label fit the day.
He bent into the barrel. Wood to ribs. Salt up his nose. He pushed.
Work ate hours. That was what work was for.
He hauled water. He coiled line until he understood how to lay twist on twist so it paid out without snarling next time. He scrubbed a second set of stains that had somehow found fresh boards before the sun had even cleared the clouds. Every task had a way to do it wrong that made the next thing worse. He learned three of those ways and one right one before the first bell.
The crew used words like tools. The dull ones were for him. "Son." "Boy." "Dead meat." The sharp ones were for each other, and they came out like jokes and went in like hooks.
He listened anyway, because listening required fewer parts of him than lifting, and because listening told you where the ship's bones flexed. The men spoke of the Grand Azure Belt like you talk about a god you've seen drunk: with respect, with contempt, with stories that were more warning than boast. They threw the name of the Blood Current over their shoulders, the way a farmer says "wolf" without looking at the tree line. They called the government Iron, like iron was a church or a disease.
None of those names belonged on any map he'd ever seen. Then again, the map he'd glimpsed on the chart table when the quartermaster left the door too wide open had islands where there should've been empty blue, and a chain that bent wrong, and a mark like a scar where nothing should be.
This wasn't history reanimated. It was a cousin with the same eyes and different scars.
By midmorning he knew how many guns they carried by the weight of them in the roll—more than a merchantman, less than a ship of the line, and hung on carriages with a strange screw behind the trunnion that would make for faster run-out after recoil. He'd never seen that design. He filed it away because he had nowhere else to put it.
Kairon drifted through his day like a problem you keep seeing out of the corner of your eye. He never lifted when Jack lifted, never swung when Jack swung, but somehow he knew exactly when to be nearby when Jack staggered or swore under his breath. "Careful," he'd murmur with a smile. "Wouldn't want you to die before Father remembers your name." The men around him made that sound that isn't quite a laugh. They liked being near the fire and not in it.
Liora kept her distance like distance was dignity. She worked clean and fast and furious and did not miss a step. At one point she knelt to wedge a chock under a rolling butter tub, rose, and caught Jack watching. Her face tightened. She looked past him like he was a gull.
Draven spoke once. "Grip the coil the other way if you want your fingers in a week." Not a kindness. A fact that happened to be useful. Jack changed his grip. His fingers believed the advice before his head did.
At noon a squall licked the horizon and thought better of it. Jack could feel the air change. You don't learn that from books, not really, but he had spent enough time staring at storm charts and watching foam lines on a screen to have some sense for how a sky breathes before it spits. He checked the rig with his eyes because nobody wanted his voice right now and because the boatswain had said as much.
His mother's voice dropped through in the slack moments, the way an anchor drops and hits mud. You'll regret this, Jack. He'd left her at a table with a mug she wasn't drinking and a man who had stopped arguing and started being disappointed. He had slammed a door because slamming doors feels like a choice when you're seventeen and hot with yourself. He had walked out into winter air that burned his molars and a street where a car wasn't going to stop because things don't stop just because you're having a moment.
It would've been easier if she'd shouted. It would've been easier if she'd said I'm ashamed of you or don't come back. But she'd said you'll regret this like a fact. Turned out facts traveled.
By late afternoon his arms shook at their sockets and he found out there was a place beyond that where they shook less because they were too tired. The sun sawed through cloud and laid silvery knives across the chop; the ship cut each one neatly in half.
When the work eased, Jack drifted to the lee rail and let the wind hit his face from the side where it didn't sting the cracked places. The sea went on and on, the edge of it not an edge at all but a promise. Somewhere out there were free ports where even enemies bought the same stale bread. Somewhere were government ships that kept perfect time. Somewhere was the Current the men wouldn't name twice. Somewhere was a village burned because a straight line on a map had needed straightening and a woman had died believing the world was made of rules.
Boots stopped beside him.
Draven didn't lean. He stood like a man who had learned early that straight spares you one kind of pain and makes another kind bearable. He watched the horizon a long breath before he said, "You were right about the topsail."
Jack kept his hands on the rail because taking them off would have made this a talk and he did not have the strength for a talk. "They called it luck."
"They would have even if you'd moved the wind yourself," Draven said. "Let them. Men with something to prove need noise. It keeps them from hearing the sea." He glanced sideways. "Keep seeing. Just don't mistake seeing for doing."
Jack nodded because anything else would have come out like breaking.
Draven's gaze dropped to Jack's hands. "When the skin goes, wrap the brush handle. Cloth buys you an hour." He paused. "Ask the cook for ash. Mix it with water when you scrub blood. Pulls iron faster."
"Thank you," Jack said, and meant it, and hated that he meant it, and knew both could sit next to each other without a fight.
Draven's mouth twitched like it remembered how to smile and didn't trust the deck not to shift under it. He clapped Jack once on the shoulder—solid—and walked away, fitting himself back into the machine the ship was.
Jack stared at his hands. They didn't look like his hands anymore. Maybe that was the point.
The crew drifted toward evening tasks. The boatswain's voice lost a layer of gravel. Someone forward started a song too quietly for anyone to call him on it. The sky turned the color of a bruise healing.
Kairon passed within arm's length, all easy grace and knives for eyes. "Nice guess this morning," he said. "Try not to choke on the next one." He didn't wait for a reply. He didn't need one.
Jack let the words roll off and hit the scuppers. He gripped the rail and felt the ridges in the wood and knew exactly how much of this ship had been worn by hands like his. He tasted salt. He listened.
You'll regret this, Jack, his mother said again—no anger, just the kind of tired that sits between the hours and decides to stay.
He breathed the sea until there was room for another thought alongside her voice.
They could call it luck. Fluke. A broken compass pointing north because north was everywhere if you squinted. Fine. He'd take fluke. He'd take a hundred flukes in a row and stack them until they looked like skill from a distance you couldn't argue with.
The bell struck twice. The ship shifted her weight. Night crept in, and the lanterns lit, and the world became smaller and sharper.
Jack pushed away from the rail, found a rag, and wrapped the brush handle the way Draven had said. He didn't ask the cook for ash; he'd do that when he had to, when there was blood again, and there would be blood again because this was the kind of world where that was a schedule, not an accident.
He set the bristles to the grain and worked a small circle clean. Not white. Whiter.
If the sea wanted him as a joke, it was going to have to laugh a long time.
He dipped the brush. Worked the next circle. The wind pushed lines into his hair. Somewhere aft, someone laughed at a story he couldn't hear. The ship pointed her blunt nose at dark water like it had insulted her.
They called it luck. He let them.
Tomorrow he'd make another "fluke." And another. And another, until the word didn't fit in their mouths anymore. Until the deck itself remembered his hand.
His mother's voice softened, or maybe he was finally strong enough to hear it without flinching. You'll regret this, Jack. Maybe. Not tonight.
Jack kept working toward the edge of the lantern light, and the sea kept breathing, and the ship went on.