Frozen: Heart of Dread, Book One (17 page)

T
HE NEW CREW SETTLED INTO PLACE.
Brendon was better at plotting a course than Farouk had been. Something in the trashbergs made the compass go haywire and swing out of control, something Farouk had never been able to adjust for, which was why they had run into the trashbergs and veered out of course. Now that everyone knew about the stone, there was no more pretense concerning their destination—the Blue. Nat would spend the mornings up at the helm with them while Wes consulted the map, holding the blue stone up to his eye while he made corrections on the navigational pad. Brendon made concessions for the compass and plotted their course on the back of a coffee-stained document he found in the engine room. If they had continued to follow the compass, as Farouk had done, they would have kept traveling in circles.

But with Brendon at the bridge, they kept to a straight line. He guided the ship deftly past the mounds of trash that cluttered the ocean. His small hands moved nimbly—he seemed to have a natural feeling for how
Alby
would react as he turned the wheel. Whereas Farouk preferred to smash through the smaller piles of ice and trash, Brendon moved gracefully around the obstructions, swerving through the crowded ocean without ever once hitting the debris. It made for a much smoother ride—free of the constant scraping sound that the ship made when Farouk had sailed it through the ocean.

While Brendon kept them headed in the right direction, Roark commandeered the galley and the daily fishing. They were finally making good time and their fear of starving began to fade. It was a better crew than he’d ever had before, Wes thought. They worked as a team, like one unit, functioning smoothly. Some nights they were downright merry, with Nat leading the card games, and teaching them to play gin, whist, and snap, or poker if they were feeling punchy. The smallmen taught them the Layman’s Code, a way to communicate by knocking, as well as games they knew: Smallman’s Secret and Who’s the Sprat. Liannan tried to teach them a game from her people, but it was too complicated and involved high-pitched whistling and singing no one could imitate or understand.

Liannan and Shakes tried to keep their budding romance under wraps, and aside from Shakes grinning like a maniac all day and Liannan blushing whenever he was near, they merely appeared to be very close friends, laughing over their cards, or teasing each other when the other had failed to guess the Smallman’s Secret.

Wes was glad for Shakes, but he was also apprehensive for his friend; he had no idea what Shakes was thinking. In his experience, it was best not to get involved, but he was also a little envious of his friend’s happiness. Nat had made it clear that she wasn’t interested in him, and he respected her wishes, even if being so close and yet so far from her made him feel uneasy. The sooner he dropped her off at the Blue, the better for everyone. Then he could turn around and forget they had ever met.

That morning, she was standing too close to him again, helping them navigate through the strait. “Here you go,” he said, handing her back the stone when the task was done. His fingers brushed her palm, but he had learned to ignore the electric feeling, and he walked away from her quickly.

• • •

Nat watched him leave the bridge, feeling troubled at his abrupt departure. It was all for the best, truly, since there was no chance of them being together. But when she found him by the railing a few hours later, she went to him without thinking. “Your sister?” Nat asked, looking over his shoulder to the picture in his hand.

“Yeah, that’s Eliza.”

He showed her the photo of a little girl in a puffy snowsuit, standing next to a snowman. He was in the picture, too, his chubby arm slung around his sister’s shoulders.

Nat stared at it for a long time. “How old did you say she was when she was taken?”

“Let me see—I was seven.”

“And so was she.”

His eyes crinkled. “Shakes told you, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“We were twins, but I came out first. She’s always been my little sister.”

“So what happened to her—really?”

Wes sighed. It was hard to talk about. He didn’t remember much. “There was a fire,” he said quietly. “Smoke alarms didn’t work. It came out of nowhere and then it was everywhere.”

A fire that came out of nowhere.
Nat felt a chill in her entire body. No. It couldn’t be true. “She burned?”

He gripped the picture tighter. “No, that’s the thing . . . they never found a body. They said she must have disintegrated into ashes, but come on, there would have been something . . . something to identify her . . .”

Fire and pain.
She closed her eyes and could see it. The smoky ruins . . . the child burning within the flames . . .

“She’s alive. She has to be. She’s out there somewhere,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” Nat whispered. She was sorrier than he ever knew.

“It’s okay.” He echoed the words she had told him the other day. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Nat did not respond. She wanted to reach out to him, but it was as if he were behind a wall of glass. He would hate her now. He would always hate her. She didn’t need to push him away, she already had.
The fire. The child. The fire that came from nowhere. The child that was taken.

“Wes, there’s something you should know about me . . . ,” she said, her voice almost inaudible, just as Shakes burst from the helm.

“More ships!” he said. “Roark spotted them in the trashbergs; kid’s got eyes like a fighter pilot.”

Wes stood up straight. “RSA?”

“Not sure. Still too far to tell,” Shakes said, as he followed Wes out to the deck.

Roark was climbing down from the crow’s nest. He reported his findings. “They don’t carry the flag.”

“The engines are too loud, too,” Wes said. He took out his scope and looked out at the distant horizon. He focused the glass and he could see them better. He could hear them, too.

There was the sound of gunfire and cannons.

Brendon walked off the bridge and stood next to Roark. “What is it?”

“A battle,” Wes said, still peering at the ships through his lenses, watching bullets fly between them. “Between two slavers, it looks like.” He recognized them by their silhouette. The two massive ships were so overloaded with junk, they looked more like shantytowns than ships. It was just as he’d feared when the navy ships left them alone.

“Slavers,” Brendon whispered. “That can’t be good.”

Nat felt dread, thinking of the slavers from K-Town she had seen. Hard men, with flinty eyes and ugly tattoos.

“Looks like they’re both Jolly’s crew,” Wes said, handing her the binoculars so that she could see the skull and bones painted on both of the ships.

“Who’s Jolly?” asked Nat, returning the glasses back to him.

“‘Jolly’ Roger Stevens, otherwise known as the biggest icehole who’s ever sailed the ocean gray,” Shakes muttered.

“So why are they fighting themselves?” she asked.

They watched as the ships converged. One was clearly following the other, its crew preparing to board the smaller ship. They collided with a crash, and a moment later, the two crews were engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Men toppled into the sea. Gunfire mixed with grunts and laughter.

“Slavers rob each other all the time; it’s easier than roaming the sea for pilgrims,” Wes explained.

“With any luck they’ll destroy each other,” Shakes said. “Then we can just drift away . . .”

“Have we ever been that lucky?” Wes sighed. “But go back to the helm and try to get us behind one of the trashbergs. Maybe we can hide.”

Alby
moved toward a floating junk pile, and for a moment, Wes thought they might be lucky after all. But then the gunfire ceased. The scavengers stopped fighting.

Wes looked though the scope, studying the two ships, and realized why the attack had stopped—the slave cages on the defending ship were almost as empty as their attacker’s—there was hardly any loot to fight over.

He zeroed in on the two captains, who were meeting on the deck of one ship. They shook hands and turned, seeming to look straight at him.

The slavers had spotted them.

And it was clear: They were next.

W
ES CALCULATED HIS ODDS. HE HAD
Shakes, a blackjack dealer, a sylph, and two smallmen on his side, and none of them except he and Shakes were experienced in combat. He told Shakes to stand at his side and ordered everyone else belowdecks to the lifeboats.

But no one moved.

“We want to fight,” Brendon said bravely, as Roark nodded. “We’re not going to run anymore.”

“You’re not getting rid of us this easily,” added Nat.

Liannan was already scouting the slavers’ approach. “If you have a plan, I recommend you share it with us now. They’ll be upon us soon.”

“Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate your courage,” Wes said. “But these guys are a rough bunch—Shakes and I have dealt with them before. Let us deal with them now. One wrong word and any of you could end up dead. Everyone get down to the lower deck; if we’re boarded, take a lifeboat out—it has a small motor on it, it might give you guys some time, put some space between you and them,” Wes said, taking out his gun. “Brendon, Roark—do you know how to use one of these?”

“We do not use iron,” Brendon said, pulling out a silver dagger from his pocket. “But we are armed. And we have Liannan with us.”

“She wasn’t much help with the snipers who took out your old crew,” Wes reminded.

“I did not see them,” Liannan said coldly, as she appeared on the deck to join the group. “The ships are made of iron—which repels our power.”

“Too bad.” Wes sighed. “We could really use some help right now.”

“I’m staying up here with you guys. I’m not leaving,” Nat said. “I can fight.” She locked eyes with Wes, until he nodded.

“Okay. But if we’re boarded, we don’t have a chance,” he said.

“Then we’ll die together,” she said. It was all you could ask for, she thought.

“Boss—” Shakes said, turning to Wes. “Remember, if it comes to that, take me out, before they get here. I’d rather die here than in a cage. Shoot me first, okay?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Wes said, gritting his teeth, his heart pumping. “It’s not going to come to that, I keep telling you.”

“It’s not?” Shakes attempted a smile even as his face was paler than the sail.

“Still want to stay up here?” Wes asked Nat.

She nodded. “That lifeboat is a death trap. I’d rather die fighting than starve in the ocean.”

“Have it your way, but if we can’t take them out, we’ll take out each other,” Wes said.

Shakes put out a trembling hand. “Deal.”

Wes slapped his on top. Nat followed suit. “Done.” Liannan and the smallmen added theirs.

Their deaths accounted for, Wes sighed. “All right, if you want to fight, start by staying out of sight. We need to conceal our numbers. Grab something heavy and hide.” He motioned to Nat, pointing out a place behind one of the sidewalls where she could disappear. Brendon and Roark understood immediately and stashed themselves behind some clutter on the deck, disappearing completely. Wes looked around for Liannan, but she was already gone. Nat noticed his confusion and pointed upward. The girl had shimmied up the mast and was hiding among the sails, her slight, elven form almost invisible in the billowing fabric.

Nat crouched down with the boys. They waited, holding their breath, not speaking. She could hear the sound of the engines getting louder.

One of the slave ships sped toward their boat, the battering ram on its bow pushing ice and debris aside as it plowed through the water.

Wes raised a hand for quiet and motioned to Shakes, pointing toward the bow of the approaching ship. The soldier crawled to the back end of the big gun on the deck. The weapon wasn’t much to look at, but it packed a whopping punch. Wes had welded the base of an old howitzer behind a metal shield. The shield allowed someone to aim and fire the gun and have some degree of cover. The short-armed gun was like a miniature cannon and fired rounds as large as baseballs. It would have been a formidable weapon if only they had more than one round of ammunition for it. Shakes checked to see whether the barrel was loaded and nodded to Wes.

They only had one shot, so they needed to make it count. Wes waited until the ship was close. If they could score a good hit, they might be able to sink the slave ship before it got close enough for its crew to swim to them. Even a good hit might scare them away if they thought he had more ammo.

Wes considered his strategy: He wanted to scare the slavers away before they could see how poorly armed his crew was, but the farther the slavers were from them, the harder it would be to hit the ship.

So he waited as long as he could and then nodded to Shakes.

His friend took his time aiming the big gun. The sighting mechanism was missing, so Shakes had to guess to hit his mark.

The ship was a mile away . . . half a mile . . .

Wes was about to yell at Shakes when the soldier finally pulled the trigger.

The cannon-size gun let loose with such a bang that the whole deck shook, and the air filled with a thin cloud of smoke.

But when the smoke cleared, the slavers were still coming for them. The shot had gone wide, hitting a patch of ice thirty feet from the vessel.

Shakes cursed and Wes climbed behind the thick metal shield. “It’s not your fault,” he told Shakes, his eyes never leaving the slave ship. “The charge in that thing is decades old; it’s a miracle that gun even fired.”

The two of them watched, hands on their sidearms, as the ship moved closer. The vessel was like theirs, a run-down, put-together affair, but unlike
Alby,
which had been lovingly restored, the slave ship had a hodgepodge look. Its hull had been reinforced by car hoods, refrigerator doors, corrugated sheets of metal, a lumbering patchwork of junk. Smoke drifted from its chimneys. Wes spied several ominous-looking gun barrels poking through the metal maze.

The ship was so close now that they could hear the slavers speaking to one another.

Everyone huddled in their places and waited.

“What are they saying?” Roark whispered to Nat.

She strained to hear. “I’m not sure.” The slavers’ language sounded brutal to her ear, a corruption, all consonants and no vowels. Then she realized they were actually
speaking
textlish, a language that was only designed to be written, not spoken—even though she’d heard it in pockets of K-Town, and once in a while when she was a dealer in Vegas.

The slave ship was right next to them now; the mercenaries had tossed over a rope ladder and were boarding their ship. A raggedy troop of hard-looking boys and men climbed aboard, along with a few scary-looking women, holding guns and sharpened steel shanks. Nat counted thirty of them.

Across from her, Wes holstered his gun.

“What are you doing?” she asked, horrified. They had planned to fight. But now it looked as if Wes was just going to give up.

“If we fight, we’ll die. There’s too many of them, I thought they were only going to send a small strike crew, but we can’t take all of them,” he said. “It would be suicide. We have to surrender.”

“But we said—”

Wes didn’t let her finish. “I’m going to let them take us; maybe I can talk my way out of it—I know these guys. And if not, it’ll give me some time to think of another way out.”

“Another way?” Nat said pointedly.

“Don’t worry—I would never give them your necklace,” he said. “I promise. I would eat it first.” He grinned.

Wes nodded to Shakes and the rest of the team. Slowly, he came out from behind the shield of the howitzer, raising his arms in surrender. The group followed suit. There was no argument, no debate. Wes marveled at that; they were better at following orders than his old unit. The smallmen dropped the daggers they’d drawn for battle; Liannan descended the mast and walked regally to the front, holding her robes around her, Shakes hovering protectively nearby. Nat went last.

The slavers murmured and gestured to one another, as they surrounded the small group. Two of them took Wes. They bore the same scars, like scratches from cats or branches, on their cheeks. Wes knew that the lowest of the slaver clans cut their babies’ cheeks at birth. The scars grew as part of their faces—forever marking them as people of the black ocean.

“That’s it? That’s all your numbers?” the largest one demanded. Wes noted that his face lacked the scars—this man had grown up outside of the slaver clans. He spoke the standard tongue, but his words were barely comprehensible. He stank like the sea and his clothes were stained and tattered; he would probably wear the rags until they disintegrated.

“Yes,” Wes replied.

“Thought you ran a bigger crew than this, two soldiers and four passengers?”

“We lost a few,” Wes said.

There was a murmur in the crowd, and the mercenaries quieted down, parting for the appearance of the ship’s captain. Nat stifled a gasp. It was the familiar face of Avo Hubik, the Slob, the slaver from whom she’d won their ship. Just as in K-Town, Avo was sleek and handsome, his black eyes as deep as the night. Like the slaver who’d spoken, his smooth, handsome face was without scars, but he did sport a skeleton tattoo on his forearm. Nat noticed the scar above his eyebrow was almost the same shape and on the same spot as the one on Wes’s forehead. Coincidence, she wondered, or something else?

Avo walked up on the deck with a smile on his face.

He stopped when he saw Nat and his smile broadened. “Ah, there you are. Just as I suspected, you were too cheap to be a proper trophy. I should have known you were working for this guy,” he said, pointing to Wes.

Wes shrugged as if he weren’t caught in a trap. He matched Avo’s leisurely pose. Two old friends and adversaries meeting again.

“Slob, nice to see you again,” Wes said with a grin. “It’s been too long.”

“Wesson,” Avo said. “I have warned you many times not to call me that.”

Wes laughed. “Let us go, Slob. You can have your ship back—but I’m warning you, don’t touch my crew.”

“I
have
my ship back, didn’t you notice? Your dear old
Albatross
is aptly named,” the slaver said, no longer smiling. “And as for your crew . . .” His eyes flicked over to the girls, lingering on Nat.

“Don’t even think about it, pervert,” Wes warned.

Avo laughed. “Don’t worry, Wesson, your sloppy seconds aren’t my style,” he sneered.

Wes began to talk faster. “Hey, man, come on, be cool, you know me, let me work for you. I’ve got a good crew here, you know I can double the area you’d normally be able to cover in a day. Jolly won’t even have to pay me my usual fee—I’ll take a cut as a favor.” He smiled his easy, charming smile. Running another con, but this wasn’t a safari guide or a lazy seeker team. This was the most feared scavenger in the black waters.

Avo laughed a short, nasty laugh. “Bradley said you’d turned soft, but I didn’t believe it. Seeing you with a bunch of girls and dwarves, I guess he was right. Now I understand why you didn’t have the nerve to take the job,” he sneered.

“What’s he talking about?” Nat asked, looking at Wes. “What job?”