Page 123 of Rears & Vices

“Mm.” Move? Everard was baffled. Even if he hadn’t been fettered and manacled, he couldn’t have moved from the dirt if twenty soldados had drawn upon him and demanded he do so. Too weak. They’d have to shoot him right where he…

… Fetch Vee? From where? Port-au-Prince? D’Arcy himself was a commonplace sight in his hallucinations—albeit clean-shaven—but Vitaliy’s presence was too unbelievable for his brain to try and conjure.

But, gad, the sound of D’Arcy’s heels on the deck seemed lifelike this time, so maybe it could.

“Don’t,” he tried to whisper, far too late; D’Arcy was long gone. It was useless, anyway, as the imagined Preston never stayed.

Although this time, D’Arcy had said he’d go… go where?

He slit open his eyes—milagro, he seemed to at last possess ones that worked as he bid them—and gazed up. The reflected sunlight was very bright around him, threads of wavering shimmer setting the weave of mosquito-net canopy sparkling. He watched it for a moment, waiting for the dream to fade and shift.

Nothing faded. Everard scowled.

The least it could do was make the time pass unfelt.

Nothing. Time crawled. A salted breeze pushed forward and sucked back the netting: once, twice, thrice.

Footsteps approached, heavy steps made with ordinary, serviceable boots, boots that wore through socks like wet paper cloth⁠—

He shut his eyes quick.

“No” was murmured from the companionway, a single word jumping out from a muddled jumble of others. Vitya.

Everard’s stomach lurched, and so too did the dream. His heart thumped hard. There he had been before, Vitya standing over his shot-through corpse, his beach-bleached skeleton, staring down impassionate—Vitya.

He held his breath. He needed to awaken now, even if it was to the earthwork fort.

“Matelot?”

Everard writhed, felt rather than heard his manacles clink softly. “Don’t. For God’s sake. Please go—I don’t want to see the rest!”

D’Arcy murmured something wavering and short.

“No,” Vitaliy said. “He is, I think. This…” His voice slid away into blur. “…nightmare-caught.”

A hand pushed beneath his shoulder, lifted slightly, pushed him over, and then his world was sideways, righted, spinning; Everard’s arm came from somewhere—unmanacled?—and caught himself from falling onto his stomach. Vitya’s hand was there, too, holding him upright, rubbing between his shoulder blades, the too-thin flesh covering them.

“Holy God,” Everard gasped, and coughed, and his eyes were open, and everything was solid again.

“Christ,” D’Arcy said. “It worked.”

Everard remembered—he remembered, and it was as real as this: every time Vitya slept on his back, he would shift and moan until Everard shook him awake. His terrified, surfacing gasps after sounded like the ones Everard was making now.

Vitaliy spoke, quiet and rapid.

“Matelot. You feel the linen beneath your fingers? You’re here, in the greatcabin of the Sévère, and Preston and I are beside you. We are at nineteen degrees, fifty-six minutes north, eighty-six degrees, twenty-eight minutes west. It is April the thirteenth, 1817, and you are safe.”

“April,” Everard mouthed without sound.

That made sense. It wasn’t outrageous. Shocking, but not outrageous; actual and precedented, nothing made-up but somehow rational, like Novemby-may the forty-second, or some such fairy nonsense. The coordinates too: somewhere southeast of the Yucatán; this checked out.

However…

“Imposter,” he whispered. “Since when… d’you call him Preston?”

Vitaliy chuckled. He leaned and put his forehead on Everard’s temple, weightless; his breath was warm and relieved on Everard’s ear. “When he needs it.”

“Which is often,” Everard agreed, a little slurred.