“You don’t have to. I’ll do it. Stay here.”
Oskar halted him with a hand on the arm. “Let us go first.”
Relief ripped at Augustus’s knees. This ship had been his home. He’d run and laughed and played and worked and fought and fucked all over these decks. He’d grown into a man here.
What he hadn’t been before now was a man frightened by the unknown in the dark below.
Oskar motioned to the Blades within the group, and the half dozen men in black tunics descended into the bowels like a dense shadow.
An eternity crept by with Lili to one side and Blaze to his other. He hadn’t moved in so long that he wasn’t sure he remembered how.
“I could go,” Blaze offered when the Blades didn’t return.
Augustus’s body screamed yes, but something inside him held firm. A voice.
Cassia."A captain doesn’t send others into the dark to face what he fears. They go first, Augustus. They face their dead. They carry them home."
Cassia’s words, snapped years ago when a younger Augustus balked at delivering news of a crewmate’s death to the family waiting at home. She’d cuffed him on the back of the head, and made him walk barefoot to that house with a bottle of whiskey and no excuses.
“If you ever want to command your own ship, you’ll learn this: your crew follows your courage, not your orders.”
His mother had never softened the truth. And now, her truth sat in his chest like an anchor.
Augustus unclenched his teeth. “No. I’ll go.”
Blaze glanced over to Lili, then said, “Why don’t we all go?”
Lili nodded, her lips pinched together.
The air cooled as they descended, and the smell worsened. In the cargo hold, Augustus released his held breath. The damage was worse here than it had been above, but still no bodies. No life, either. The contents of overturned barrels leaked onto the floor, forming dark puddles. Crates were smashed. And shackles had been used and discarded—hundreds of them.
“The Blades must be in the lower hold,” Lili said with tears streaming.
They all understood what had happened here. The crew had been held captive here until the end.
Blaze opened the hatch, and lamplight erupted upward like rays of sunlight. He met Augustus’s eyes, then wentthrough.
At the hatch, the smell hit Augustus in full force, but all he saw were piles of decaying food and swarms of flies. Was this all it was?
“Food,” he said to Lili, breath flying from his chest in a gust. “It’s rotting food.”
She laughed through her tears. “Really?”
Blaze appeared in his eyeline, his expression grim. He shook his head.
Augustus flew down the stairs only to skid to a stop.
He didn’t understand what he was seeing at first. Couldn’t process it.
Oskar and the Blades strolled through the upright planks that had sprung up like stalks of dry wheat. Hundreds of them nailed to the floor with blood streaking the pale wood.
He’d never seen anything like it—the time it must have taken to fashion them in such a way?—
Lili took one staggering step. Then another. Her hand flew to her mouth.
“No,” she moaned. “No, no?—”
Her scream curdled his blood. She bolted forward and crashed to her knees before a face too familiar to mistake.
