“Arm the cannons!” Max yelled, and people started scrambling, trying to get to their rightful station.
We needed to kill this monster, and I needed to get to the cannons on the lower deck to help load the weapons. Now.
I changed course and tried to head for the ladder, holding my side to apply pressure to my minor injury.
“Incoming!” Hawk-Eyes yelled, although she was halfway down the mainmast shroud now instead of up in the crow’s nest. Good grief, she moved fast.
“Fire at will!” Max yelled.
As cannons went off, I turned to watch, hissing in pain at the sharp movement, and got my first look at a real, live sand monster. It wasn’t something I’d ever wanted to see in person, and the second I laid eyes on it, I wished I could unsee it.
About a hundred yards away, a monster bigger than I ever could’ve imagined emerged from the sand, climbing out of a now-gaping hole. There were so many tentacles moving through the air I wasn’t sure if they all belonged to the same creature or if there was more than one of them coming to attack us.
But then I saw its body.
It used its bazillion legs to pull itself up and out of the sand, then crawled in a way that reminded me of a creepy spider. Its hundred-foot-long body was shaped like a giant squid, except it had hard plates on its back like an armadillo, probably to help dig through the sand and rock. Its arms were three times as long as its body, and they were digging into the rock and sand with such ease, I had no trouble picturing it tearing apart our ship.
The very sight of it brought on a visceral fear I could feel in every inch of my body.
We were going to die.
Everyone on this ship was going to die because of me.
Because I was too much of a coward to fix the problem before now. Because I’d deemed my freedom more worthy than the lives of this crew.
Because there was no way in hellfire I was getting down to the engine room, charging the fluxstones, and getting this ship in the air before that monster reached us.
We were going to die, and it was all my fault.
Max… Max was going to be killed.
Willy, Ariella, Hawk-Eyes, and all the others were going to be eaten.
Sweat broke out on my body, my heart racing uncontrollably as it fractured in my chest, making my ribs even more sore.
Several cannonballs hit the beast, but it didn’t even stumble from the impact. It kept on coming at us as if our measly cannonballs were nothing but annoying gnats flying around its face.
Maybe we couldn’t get out of here before it reached our ship, but maybe I could save some of the crew. Maybe we could still escape before… before it got too bad.
With that thought in mind, I headed for the ladder again, only I wasn’t planning on going to the lower deck. I was going into the hold where the engine room was. I needed to charge those fluxstones and save everyone on this ship—if I wasn’t too late already.
I’d deal with the consequences as they came.
“Look out!” someone yelled.
I glanced up just in time to see a huge tentacle arm, brown scales shining in the sunlight, breaking through the clouds. It rose up at least two hundred feet in the air, swinging wildly as if it couldn’t decide which part of the ship it wanted to break.
Holy unicorn horns, that thing was fast. How had it reached the ship already?
“Shoot it! Chop it off!” Max yelled. “KILL IT!”
Everyone was already firing everything they had at it, so I doubted most of the crew even heard him over the commotion. From the looks of it, every gun on the ship was in use, and all of the cannons on our port side were firing at the monster to no avail.
Screams lit up in the air, and I watched in horror as a tentacled arm wrapped around Two-Toed Roch’s ankle and dragged her toward the side of the ship.
Toothless Jimmy grabbed for her, clinging to her wrists and trying to pull her loose as she kicked and screamed. But the sand kraken was just too strong. Two-Toed Roch was ripped out of his arms and dragged across the rest of the deck. Her screams were cut off when she banged her head against the quarterdeck’s staircase, leaving a trail of blood in her wake as she was pulled overboard and straight into the mouth of the sand kraken.
Jimmy wailed in agony at the loss of his friend, and Butcher screamed something about making the monster suffer.
