He felt a hand on his shoulder and started, his eyes flying open. Theo was kneeling beside him, his face hovering a few inches above his. Yarrow stood just behind Theo, a bucket clutched in one hand and an expression of concern on their face. They were both sopping wet.
Then it came back to him.
The ship. The compass. Ace. The handle of her dagger, plummeting toward him.
The man.
“They took her!” Zander said, suddenly frantic. “They took Ace.”
He tried to sit up again, but Theo gently held his shoulders, making comforting noises, sounds a mother would use to calm her crying child.
“We have to leave, Theo!” His voice broke, the terror of the past several hours rushing through him all at once. They had Ace. They were leaving. He needed to go, to chase them. Why weren’t they already leaving?
“Shh, mate,” Theo said gently. “We know. You’re in no state, trust me.”
A sob escaped Zander. Beneath the encompassing panic, he knew Theo was right. The number of shocks his body had experienced in the last few minutes alone rocked through him, almost vibrating in their intensity. But as the frantic energy slowly leaked from his pores, a profound exhaustion took its place.
“We have to go get her,” he said. His voice sounded as weak as his body felt.
Yarrow kneeled at his other side. Their face was marked in lines Zander had never seen. They looked worn, sorrowful. They put a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“We know,” they said. They looked away, their eyes scanning the sloop, then Theo, then settling again on Zander. “But there’s no chasing to be done. Not yet. The Valerian isn’t fit to sail, and neither are the three of us. If we want to save our friend, we must tend to our ailments as well as hers.” They gestured to the sloop. “We must take a moment to rest. To grieve.”
It was then Zander noticed the exhaustion lining Yarrow’s face. They looked paper thin.
He took a deep breath and nodded. With Theo’s help, he pulled himself into a sitting position.
The devastation he saw around him took his breath away. The mast was badly damaged. Pieces of the shattered railing were scattered here and there. The sails hung limp, lifeless. The edge of the upper deck above the captain’s quarters looked like it had opened into a gaping hole. A longer look revealed it wasn’t a chasm, but an irregular fissure surrounded by a blanket of charred, blackened wood. And then there were the bodies.
Zander, Theo, and Yarrow were the only living people aboard The Valerian. Bodies—dozens of them, pirates and invading sailors alike—lay sprawled on the deck, their blood running back and forth in small red rivers as the sloop rocked gently on the waves. Zander began to cry as he picked out the faces of the crew, men he’d grown to think of as his family. Jurgen. Raphael. Jan. Abdoul. Jubal. Daniel. Aled. He thought of the rest—those that surrendered—and prayed they were safe and unharmed.
It had never been so quiet on the sea.
As he shifted his weight, his hand landed on something cold and hard. Ace’s cutlass. He gripped the ivory handle, squeezing it until his knuckles turned as white as the bone itself. His own sword was nowhere in sight, but he could feel his twin daggers tucked securely in each of his boots.
He brought his attention back to Theo and Yarrow. They were both wounded—Yarrow’s arm was bleeding, and their face bruised. Theo was bleeding badly from his shoulder, and he gripped his side in pain. A thin layer of gunpowder coated his fingers. Zander had so many questions, but just one screamed to be said out loud.
“Who was that man? The one who took Ace.”
Theo and Yarrow shared a look.
“Who was he?” Zander demanded.
Yarrow sighed. “Her husband.”
Once, he was dancing.
Fluorescent lights reflected blindingly on the ugly tile floor, blinking and buzzing almost imperceptibly against the music in the nursing home’s recreation room.
He’d come here once a week to volunteer since his wife died. It gave him something to do, and in the faces of each resident he saw something that reminded him of her. It was painful, like scratching open an old wound just to see it bleed again, but he found a strange sense of relief in seeing the same confusion and vulnerability echoed on a stranger’s face that he once saw on hers.
Alzheimer’s was a nasty sonofabitch. It stole her from him, allowing him only glimpses of her vitality toward the end as she struggled to find lucidity. But as she passed from this world to the next, she smiled at him in a knowing way, as if her spirit resurfaced just for a moment in order to say goodbye.
He kept coming here to visit the patients who had no spouse or children to sit by their side each day. It hurt, but also soothed, to know he could provide some sort of comfort.
Today was a special resident event. A dance. It wasn’t his usual day to visit, but one of the nurses approached him weeks ago and begged him to come.
“We don’t get many older gentleman volunteers,” she’d said. “Having you there would give all the ladies a chance to dance with a partner.”
So of course, he came. He thought of his Hannah, and how she’d love something like this even if she didn’t know the man she was dancing with was her husband.
He was just finishing a dance with Margaret, a little woman who always called him Dave even though that wasn’t his name, when the activities coordinator took over the mic to make an announcement. He helped Margaret back to her seat, patting her hand affectionately when she thanked him for the dance.
That was when she caught his eye.
She sat in the corner of the room, hunched over in her chair, her eyes out of focus as they gazed at the floor. Her white hair fell haphazardly over her face in a curtain that obscured one eye. Her fingers fiddled absently with an afghan on her lap. He’d never seen her before, but then again, he did most of his volunteering in the common areas of the nursing home, never visiting rooms unless the staff or a resident requested it.
He thought it was the memory of his wife who drew him to her. She declined rapidly at the end, and the empty look in this woman’s eyes was eerily similar to an image of his wife that haunted his dreams of late. But in truth, there was something else about the woman he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Perhaps he knew her once, long ago? After 84 years of living in the same town, it wouldn’t be surprising to run into someone he once knew here.
But as he approached her, he struggled to find anything familiar about her face. The draw to her came from the inside, as if his very soul tugged him toward her, recognizing something he couldn’t see.
Indeed, it did.
He knelt down in front of the woman and gently touched her hand. She didn’t respond.
