It’s midnight, and tendrils of mist curl through the narrow streets like the tentacles of a large sea beast.
“Damn,” Maud runs a hand across her damp coat. “It’s thick today.”
“You’re thick,” Florence slurs as she follows Maud down Half Moon Alley towards the docks. “Captain.”
“Alright,” Maud laughs, “no need to make it personal.”
“Probably shouldn’t’ve had that last pint,” Florence sighs. “Why are we here?”
“Figured a bit of air could sober us up,” Maud says, hooking her arm around her friend’s waist before they stumble up the quays. Ship bells clang in the distance and rigs tick against wood and steel.
“Shame there’s no air. Just mist.” Florence lets go of Maud and plops down on a bollard.
Maud, still standing, peers into the blank darkness. Her mind is sluggish, weighed down by the ale, but the alcohol has not drowned her anxiety about the unconditional ban on embarkments. In her mind’s eye she sees the outlines of ships, the riggings, their smooth hulls. Her ship, the Archimedes, is docked further down on Bainbridge Quay, but she imagines its masts amongst the dark forest of ships. She inhales, but the mist has blanketed all the familiar scents of seaweed, silt and salt.
“You can’t see the Archimedes from here, for once not because you’re half blind,” Florence says, doing magicians fingers at Maud’s pale sightless right eye, “but because we can’t see a damned thing. This mist is sinister! How’s this happening in the middle of summer?”
“I can see enough to know this place is cursed.”
Florence snorts. “You think everywhere is cursed! Every port, ‘something’s not right here.’ You have a weird dislike of the land.”
Maud absentmindedly reaches for the small Saint Brendan pendant around her neck. It’s true she doesn’t enjoy towns life, with its urine-stench miasma, constant pressing of crowds, and the bloody noise of it. She would always rather be at sea and feel her ship beneath her feet instead of wet and slimy stones, but she protests Florence’s dismissal of the situation at their port of call. She looks back at her best friend and trusted quartermaster.
“I don’t dislike the land, I dislike people. But you have to admit this is different. It’s never been like this. Not only are we stuck… There’s talk, now.”
“Oh no … not talk.” Florence sways on the bollard. “Talk of what?”
“I don’t know, something… whatever the mist can carry. Ghosts? Sickness?”
“We’ve been to every continent and seen every disease there is to see, we know there’s no such thing as mist-born maladies.”
“We’ve also seen wonders we can’t explain. There is something going on. Have you ever seen harbormaster Gilles so worked up? All these ships stuck here, the closure of the harbor and therefore no new taxes and dues coming in. It sure tipped his teapot.”
“He was very red in the face,” Florence admits. “He’s usually quite reddish, but he was vermillion.”
“And quivering with rage.”
“Like a pudding!” Florence contemplates. “He spooked me too, but what’s there to it? They’ll figure it all out soon enough, lift the embargo, and we’ll be on our way again, lickety-split.”
Maud hauls Florence back to standing. “How you reckon they’ll sort it?”
“They’ll, you know,” Florence flops her hands, “disperse it or something.”
As they fall in step, Maud jokes, “Get a giant fan and waft it all out to sea?”
Florence cackles, a sloppy drink-addled sound of pure delight. “Get a giant whale to use his—the thing at the top of his head—”
“Blow hole.”
“His blow hole and pbbbbbt!” She spits as she mimics blowing.
Since they were little, they’ve made games out of all sorts of situations, and this is one of their best, building greater and fantastical scenarios that could never be. Maud proposes cannonballs to clear the fog, Florence counters with a thousand washerwomen farting toward sea, and every new outlandish idea cracks them into laughter until they are bent over wheezing.
The laughter stutters to a halt in Florence’s throat when she notices how dense the mist has gotten. She squints into the roils of white, “What’s that?”
It takes Maud a moment to process what she sees, straining her good eye while it seems her mind wants to shield her from the impossibility.
A few yards away, something floats above the docks, moving slowly towards them, fluidly, gathering all the mist around itself. It takes the vague outline of a person, pale swaths like fine silk circle its body, thick ribbons of mist blend into long strands of hair.
Florence whispers without so much as moving her lips. “Is that… me?”
The figure is Florence, dressed in her former Navy uniform. The brass buttons on her jacket gleam brighter in the night than they did the day the livery issued it to her. Her eyes are dark, her hair a billowing black storm. As she nears, mist-Florence eddies into color. Her face is clean, her cheeks perfectly rosy, framed by hair tamed into glossy locks. The uniform is now shifting too: into a dazzling dress of intricate embroidery and lace trimmings as white as the expensive bone china packed in crates on the Archimedes. A veil flutters delicately over her eyes, in her hand she holds a small bouquet of baby’s breath, forget me nots, and lilies of the valley.
She is magnificent and terrible and beckoning as she steps onto the dock.
“No,” Maud gasps.
Mist-Florence’s shoes crack on the stones as she strides towards them, fast— until she’s almost upon them. She lifts a hand and, mouth agape, Florence mirrors the gesture, reaching—
“No!” Maud yells again, as if waking from a bad dream. She yanks Florence back—pulls so hard they both go down. For a moment it’s a jumble of wet cobblestones, legs, and coats.
Her friend’s hands are under her arms getting her aright as Maud’s tailbone shrieks in pain. Urgently, against her ear, Florence says, “Run!”
They move like they’ve pulled the devil’s tail and the dastard himself is chasing them. They never look back as they dash down the docks, up Finnegan’s Quay and in a blind panic take a corner only to run straight into Grayson standing outside The Mouldy Planck.
“Sis!” he chides, swaying from the impact.
Maud sighs with relief, clapping her brother on the shoulder. The fortuitous encounter has brought her favorite people back together. Since Maud has captained a ship, Grayson has been her gunner. He’s steady, thoughtful, and has kept his cool through many adventures. The very sight of him calms her and she quickly catches her breath.
She explains, “I swear, we didn’t have that much to drink but I’ll be damned if the mist didn’t play tricks on our eyes. We saw Florence coming out the mist. Like—a ghost version, in a wedding dress! Can you believe that? We—”
He interrupts. “Florence?”
“Nay, the Ghost of Christmas Past. Yes! Florence.” Maud checks his pupils to gauge his inebriation. His eyes are big copper coins of worry, his face is pale as a sheet, but he otherwise appears sound. “Except, it wasn’t. It was…”
“I saw Florence, earlier,” Grayson interjects.
“You would’ve walked by the docks to get here—you saw the apparition of her, too?”
He glances behind Maud and insists, “No,” and grabs her elbow to pull her closer.
Maud jerks her arm free. “Stop being weird. We saw—”
Grayson moves quick, pulling her into a hug so that his lips are near her ear. His breath is cold and his voice shakes as he says, “Sis, that isn’t Florence.”
Her face is pressed into the wool of his shirt so all she can see of Florence from the corner of her eye is a woman-shaped shadow. Her nerves haven’t settled enough to make any of it funny. “Stop messing around.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” Grayson whispers.
The tremolo of fear in his voice reminds her she is the captain. She’s meant to steer them through rough waters, no matter what. She pushes him away and turns towards her friend. She gestures for Florence to come close, move into the light so that they can see her cheery countenance in the warm glow of the window, then laugh together about mist and apparitions and drunken, mistaken identities. But instead, Florence moves away, deeper into the darkness.
Maud steps outside the circle of light towards her friend. Florence steps back, too.
“Come here,” Maud says. “Let’s go in and have a drink with Grayson.”
Florence tilts her head to the side, an unnatural angle that too much ale allows in the evening, only to cause pain the next day.
“What’s wrong?” Maud asks.
Florence hisses, “That’s not Grayson.”
A shiver runs down her back as Maud looks from the friend she’s known her entire life to her brother.
He is a man-shaped shadow, standing ever so still. She can’t see his features, either, now that he’s backlit by the light from the tavern’s window. He tilts his head at a sharp angle.
Hovering between the darkness and light, Maud feels as if her vision is getting blurry, now that she can’t see either of them properly. The mist seeps from the bricks, and unspools from the street, turning the blue-black night to white, slowly climbing, softly drowning out the light.
“Ha!” Maud claps with forced cheer and shouts, “I get it, you’re pranking me, like when you two pretended you could speak Portuguese. It’s all very funny. I’m going in, don’t care what you lot do.”
Maud shivers as she dives into the warmth of the tavern. Voices buzz above the clinking of glasses. Some sailors turn and watch Maud make her way to the bar.
“Blinker?” she says to the barkeep, trying to ignore the stares. “You’re dressed in your bib and tucker, I hardly recognize you! You got married or something?” Maud forces herself to sound lighthearted, but she half listens for the door to swing open, for Grayson and Florence to stumble in, cackling about her fear.
Blinker, contrary to his name, doesn’t bat an eye but pours her a drink, which she holds up to him as thanks before taking a swig. She glances around the room. There are many familiar faces, and yet, why do they look foreign? It’s as if she’s stumbled into a dream version of the tavern where everybody is hale and dressed for Sunday mass.
“Alright,” she smirks, trying to hide her growing anxiety. “I get it. You’re all in on the joke. Like that time in Azores when they got everybody in the pub to fake sneeze whenever I started talking.”
Everybody in the room leers at her, but they don’t smile, not a single drunken giggle, or a guilty glance.
“Well, I’m not buying!” She slams the drink back and strides towards the door.
Into the quiet a single, baritone voice rumbles out, “She sails the seas high and low.”
Every person in the room pounds their fists on the table in perfect sync, startling Maud to a standstill.
Their eyes stare, unfocused, as they join the next lines, sung low and slow:
Ne’er afraid, on winds high and low,
Tame the waves come tides and low,
Below her bow, below we bow, heave ho.
Maud hesitates at the threshold, afraid of the mist out there, but now terrified of the sailors in the pub.
They thump the tables, rattling cutlery and cracking wood, before launching into the next verse—and it’s enough to drive Maud out, stumbling into a pure, gauzy whiteness that seems to hold the echo of their voices.
Heed the call for once and all,
Raise her sails high and tall,
High and low the Archimedes is us all,
So pray we may her colors ne’er fall.
Her eyes feel gummy from the dampness of the mist, and she is practically blinded, but Maud can only think to move away from the sound. She half runs down the street, arms out to feel for any impediments.
She wants to call out for Florence or Grayson but doesn’t. If she calls them and they won’t answer, she’d have to reckon with the reality that this might not be some bad prank after all.
The cold pierces while the mist tightens around her. Her teeth clatter and she is getting dizzy from disorientation.
“Maud O’Connell,” a woman calls behind her. She swings around to peer at a figure materializing from the gloom. Even before it comes into focus, Maud understands—it’s her, a mist version of herself. Except she doesn’t have a ragged scar across her forehead, cutting through the brow to end just below her clouded eye. In fact, both her eyes are bright and focused, her hair brushed and coifed into rills, her skin rosy and the Royal Navy uniform she hasn’t worn in years almost looks painted in oils, vibrant and rich. This version of Maud even walks purposefully, without the slight limp.
It’s the Maud who didn’t shatter the bones in her leg when a cyclone shook her from the crow’s nest. It’s all-her-original-teeth Maud who didn’t take the bet that she could score at least one punch on the Giant of Gibraltar in his fighting pit. It’s the politically savvy captain who didn’t get kicked out of the Navy for disobeying royal orders to deliver the cargo for a national trade deal to save the crew of a wrecked barque. It’s who she would have been if she hadn’t loved ale, rich food, and a good fight.
She’s healthy and beautiful and Maud understands that this is an offering, a way to heal the aches of her body and her foibles if she were to simply reach out and grasp beautiful-Maud’s hand.
The mist offered the same to Florence. It showed her a vision of the road she didn’t take, wed and land-bound to a family. And Grayson, what did the mist offer him? How could he have chosen this over the life at sea with her and all their friends? How was this the better choice?
From behind, singing rises as if a crowd of people are moving towards her, distorting the shanty into something ominous,
Turn your eye towards the horizon,
Tide high and low follow the sun.
And though the register of the song is low she wonders if Florence’s voice is a part of the chorus.
Mist-Maud tilts her outstretched hand, cocks a smile.
Trembling, Maud backs up. If she takes that hand her history will be erased. A blank slate, like the sea smoothing footprints in the sand.
“No, that isn’t a life I want.”
She turns and sprints towards what she hopes is the sound of the water sloshing against the docks. She looks over her shoulder to stay out of orbit of the mist creature.
Her speed outpaces it for there is a slight clearing of the void ahead as she breaks to the shoreline. Her goal: the Archimedes. That ship has always been her haven. She sprints onto the docks, heading for the quays.
She’s jerked to a stop by a hand around her arm, a beefy clamp of human touch that swings her around the corner of a warehouse, bringing her nose to nose with the harbormaster.
“Mr. Gilles,” Maud breathes, “what is happening? The whole town is possessed!”
“Are you real?” he demands to her face.
Maud yanks free of his grasp and wills her heart to calm. “Why’d you grab me if you didn’t think I was real?”
“Heard you running and they don’t seem to run. But you never know.”
“They seem keen on grabbing, so how do I know you’re real?”
“’Cause I asked if you’re real, and one of them wouldn’t do that,” he says. His gruff manners make his every statement sound like an accusation.
He’s the type of harbormaster to inspect each shipment, cross reference every manifest, and calculate taxations to the last penny. She would have chosen any other human to be here with her.
Then again, he appears to be himself. No mist version could improve on how impeccably he dresses, always buttoning the top button on his starched shirts even as it presses into the soft folds of his prodigious jowls. The color is high on his cheeks, his red nose as livid as she’s ever seen, and his eyes are rimmed with white.
Gilles lowers his voice, confiding in her. “This bloody fog, it sent some poncy version of me to tempt me.”
“It did the same to me!”
“Keep your voice down!” he ushers her inside the warehouse. “You weren’t tempted to touch it were you?”
“Absolutely not. But … Florence … was.” She can barely get the words out.
He huffs. “Right you are. That’s a rough one.”
“Do you think I can find her? Turn her back?” Maud didn’t realize that hope burned until she said it.
“Near as I can tell, it wipes you. Tempts you close enough to touch and takes over completely. Takes about half an hour and it’s done.”
“Where did it come from?”
“My best guess? Four days ago, the Belliqueux docked and there was something weird about the crew. I’d met the fellas once before and they looked the same, but they weren’t the same. They all seemed to move in unison. They were clean. Too well-behaved. Paying for duties with new coin.”
“Why didn’t you close the harbor then?”
“On what grounds? That the Belliqueux crew is too nice? That their nice seems to be spreading? Couldn’t close the harbor until the fog rolled in so thick-like you couldn’t tell a dove’s tail from a sheep’s arse.”
“Dooming us all!”
His whole body quivers with indignation, “I’m going to allow that because I expect you’re out of sorts over Florence.”
“They’ve got my brother too! My whole crew!” Maud’s voice almost breaks. She doesn’t know if her whole crew is gone for sure – they’re on leave for days and maybe a few left and made it outside the purview of the mist, or maybe a few are hunkered down somewhere scheming to get back to the ship. But it’s got Florence and Grayson and that’s the crew that matters.
“Then we’re on our own.”
“There’s no ‘we,’ Gilles. I’m getting to the Archimedes and far, far away from here.”
“Only for you to carry the mist to the next harbor? And doom the next town?” he scoffs. “Over my dead body!”
Maud briefly considers pulling the knife from her boot and slicing through his gut like a winter ham—because she can, and his presumption of authority fills her with rage. She warns him, “If that’s the way you want it, I can make it happen. You’re not stopping me.”
He shifts to a fighting pose, positioning himself between her and the door. “I won’t allow it.”
Maud steps to the left, sweeps his legs and completes the takedown with a hard punch to his liver. He is sprawled on the ground surrounded by splintered crates.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” he moans and rolls on his side away from her.
Maud doesn’t pity him, per se, but she’s slightly sorry he broke so easily.
She checks: “You alright?”
“Who gives a flying hoot?” He still manages to be shouty. “You’re going to leave me to the cursed fog, anyway.” Gilles heaves himself to a sitting position.
“No,” she protests, but he’s right. She was ready to leave him mere seconds ago. “Don’t be ridiculous, I—”
She stops to listen. A sound is growing outside, the rise and fall of a chorus.
She won’t go down without a fight,
Archimedes’ll strike with all her might.
The hair on her arms rises and she briefly loses all thoughts. It sounds as if a hundred voices are intoning the song. An army advancing towards them.
“God save us,” whispers, making the sign of the cross. A few buttons of his shirt have come undone, and his hair is askew, as if he’s fresh from his bed. She’s never seen him so rattled. It adds another tenor to her terror. But the tragedy of his human frailty pales next to her fear.
She must act, quick. The Archimedes is so close. She sticks her head around the corner. To her left the voices are coming closer but she can’t see a thing. The water is straight ahead and to the right, along the docks towards the ships, small flickering lanterns burn valiantly against the white dampness. Behind that, Bainbridge Quay—where what seemed an eternity ago, she and Florence were joking about the mist.
Maud is now filled with aching fury, like a storm that battered her ship in countless storms, and a willingness to do whatever it takes, against reason, against a gnawing knowing better. The mist has taken enough. She looks back at Gilles. “It’s almost here. It might just take us if we stay here and chat like retired clam diggers.” She balls her fists.
Gilles, slumped against a barrel, rubs his side and insists, “You can’t punch your way out of everything.”
She swallows a snarky response and considers, “What’s it doing? Is it looking for us?”
“It doesn’t need a whole troop of ghosties to get me, apparently.”
“Right,” she paces back and forth, her heart racing. “But it’s on the move. Why?”
Gilles cracks the door and tilts his head to listen. Ice runs down Maud’s spine at their discordant song.
He speaks haltingly as it comes to him, “It’s moving to the harbor … It’s … they are boarding the ships.”
In a blind panic, Maud busts past Gilles and sprints down the docks, more by muscle memory than sight, almost running into capstans and stumbling over ropes. All she wants is to stay ahead.
Behind her the chorus is closing in, but a light sea breeze cools the tears on her face as soon as her boots touch the deck of the Archimedes, relieving her terror slightly. The masts creak quietly as the ship stirs in her berth, reminding Maud of quiet watches far out at sea.
She’s thrown the first lines before Gilles catches up with her.
“Hurry up, and get on board,” she tells him, not pausing to help him up. “Tide’s receding.”
She swiftly secures a halyard on its belaying pin, turns, and he’s right there, on the deck, jowls atremble.
“We can’t let them leave,” Gilles whispers. They can hear the ships creaking all around them as mist-crew fill the armada of idle ships.
“I will tie you to the mast, Gilles, don’t think I won’t,” she whispers back, nose to his nose.
“So they can spread their—their infection to some other town? We can’t let it.”
Weary of protests, she sidesteps him to cast another line. Down the harbor, the sail of one of the merchant ships flaps in the light breeze.
He holds his ground and says at regular volume, “Are you really going to let some other Florence in some other town get taken by the fog?”
It jerks her back like her neck is on a chain. She may have flipped him sideways and struck a punch earlier, but he’s gutted her now.
She turns halfway—unable to look him in the eye—and asks, “What’d you have in mind?”
“We’ve gotta ram them. Destroy their vessels,” he says.
“That will hurt one, maybe two ships,” she counters. “Plus, we don’t exactly have a crew. It’d be hard enough to clear the harbor.”
“Right, right,” he inhales.
They can no longer make out the docks; the mist seems to have swallowed them whole. Sails whoosh and ropes whip all around them.
He muses, “We have to multiply the damage. If only we could get to the Queen’s Hand. She’s carrying a hell of a load of powder.”
Maud lowers the rope she is tying. She laughs wryly at his brilliance. “Wait here.”
After she lowers herself below deck, she takes a moment to adjust to the darkness, though she knows the way blind through the berth.
In her quarters, she hauls a crate from under her bed and hurries back, tamping the urge to cut lines, drudge the anchor, and fill the sails. Gilles, strong as he is wide, lifts the crate onto the main deck and cracks the lid off with a quick shove of a crowbar.
They stand shoulder-to-shoulder regarding the contents.
“O’Connell, did you bring illegal fireworks to my port?”
“Been doing it for years. I get them every time we stop in Wenzhou.”
“How in the—”
“You never search my quarters, Gilles. You think it’s impolite because I’m a woman.”
Gilles clicks his tongue and admits, “You’ve always been sharp as a tack, O’ Connell.”
Without words, they lower the dinghy quietly as they can, stopping to listen each time the side bangs or scrapes against the hull of the Archimedes. They move as quick as they can, and they’re in sync now, as if they’d always crewed together. Around them, voices hum low, the melody distorted into a twisted song they can no longer make out the words from. Maud hears them high in the masts in the ships, down in the holds, and creeping along the riggings of the tallest ships. She wonders which ship Florence and Grayson are on. Or, what’s left of them. Something stirs above her head making her peer up along the side of the Archimedes. A white figure is climbing towards the crow’s nest.
“Florence!” Maud shouts, but Gilles is next to her, folding his hand over her mouth.
“No,” he whispers. “That’s not Florence.”
Maud wants to bite his fingers that smell like tobacco and wood, but all she tastes is the salt of her own tears.
“Then how can she know her exact way around her own ship?”
Gilles shakes his head. “They must retain some knowledge, elsewise how’d they get here? But that is not Florence. Focus.”
She pushes him away from her and he lets her and without another word they reposition themselves on the bench.
The oars creak in their locks and they traverse the dark waters until they are surrounded by roiling grey. A brig glides past them, barely missing their dinghy. Opaque figures move about the vessel, and Maud tries not to look.
The exercise in the thick air has slowed her down, and Gilles heaves big breaths next to her. She’d always thought it would be Florence by her side. Her friend, laughing and scolding at whatever shenanigans they’d gotten into. Gilles’ pudding face doesn’t evoke an iota of tenderness in her, but then he quirks an uneasy smile and she catches a glimpse of a different sort of man, one who may have done many ill-advised and fantastic things in his youth. That it was only time and bureaucracy that dulled his shine and now that they’re exposed, just tiny fleas on the dog of the sea, all his propriety has dropped away to reveal his true self.
When he catches her eye on him, he says gruffly, “Don’t get sweet on me now, O’Connell.”
Maud wipes her nose and lifts an eyebrow, “I make no promises, old man.”
He chuckles and stops rowing. “Ready?”
Maud holds the first flare as it eagerly takes to the flame of Gilles’ tinderbox. He points at a ship in the middle distance, and she aims at its nearest gunport.
It pops from her hand, zooming straight into the water with a shriek then fizzle.
The second one also hits the water.
“I don’t aim as well with one eye,” Maud grunts.
“I’m a bloody good marksman! Let me do it!”
She shoves the fireworks at him and takes up the tinder box.
He lets the fuse burn almost all the way down as he lines up the shot. With a pop, the third one shoots straight into the darkness of the ship. “Ahoy, dead hit!”
Maud strains her eye. “I think it’s gonna take more than one—” but she is cut off by an explosion. Splintered wood and debris rain down like hail as the hold of the ship blows outward. The powder kegs in the hull ignite in rapid succession, billowing great plumes of fire.
The energy of it sends giant waves to knock them about in the dinghy and push them further towards the bay.
The mist shrieks. White shapes writhe in the smoke and crackling wood. Even the best bucket brigade couldn’t smother what’s happening—with the ships packed in so tightly the flames dance over to the next ship—but the mist crew aren’t even trying as if all of the sailing acumen they acquired has been lost in their terror.
The human shapes dissolve, the mist shifting back into formless eddying white only to be sucked down by the warping hungry heat. Their cries are horrendous as they are burned into vapor by the fire.
Their terror fuels Maud’s rage. She’s almost giddy with it. “It’s working, Gilles!” She shouts back at them, “For Grayson! For Florence!”
They light more fireworks and aim them into the carnage. Some of them fizzle out on the water, but many hit ships, sails, the docks.
The harbor is chaos. The ships reel towards each other, bowsprits piercing through hulls and spreading the fire like a contagion. The warehouses have caught fire, the dried goods stacked in crates and wrapped in burlap inside welcoming the blaze like an old friend, and the sea of flames is a coppice of burning masts, shreds of sails dripping as mist starts to rise from the town.
Maud comes to herself standing in the dinghy, her sea legs barely balancing her. There are a few more fireworks but she’s expended now.
“Steady now,” Gilles murmurs.
She turns and drops like a rag doll to the edge of the boat. Her back is to the havoc, but she can see the shimmer reflected in the wide darkness of Gilles’ eyes.
She doesn’t look over her shoulder, afraid of what she’ll see of her ship. She asks him, “Do you reckon… the Archimedes is okay?”
He smiles at her, and she can’t tell if it’s sadness or comfort.
There is a lightening on the horizon in the east. Because she’s facing the sea she catches the schooner that has skirted the melee. It is the Alverton, pushing to clear the burning wreckage and head to open sea.
“Gilles!” she points at the ship.
He turns stiffly and hollers, “Good grief!”
“We can’t let it escape! Or it’s all for nothing!” She fumbles to ignite their last firework, but he shouts, “No! Damnit, we’re too far away, we’ve only got one left, and you can’t aim for shit.”
She drops it back into the sawdust of the crate. “We can cut it off if we row hard.”
“No,” Gilles grabs the closest oar before she can. “O’Connell, can’t say I would have picked you, but it’s been great being with you here at the end. You’re a smart lass. So, you know the Alverton got no gunports. It has to be boarded.”
“Then we better hurry!”
He smiles again, and this time it’s unmistakenly a smile of great sadness “Oh, O’Connell, there’s no more ‘we’ about it.” He reaches down, grabs her boot, and with one mighty heave up, tips her on the fulcrum of her hip backward into the water.
The cold water shocks the breath from her. For a few disorienting seconds she’s looking up at a sky lit with fire. Ship debris bobs above and treasures broken free of holds drift gently past her as they sink to the depths.
Filled with rage at his guile, Maud claws her way to the surface. She breaks through, screaming, “Gilles!”
But he’s a shadow in the smoke rowing furiously towards the escaping ship.
The water freezes her even as the flames release a heat so intense it singes her hair.
She could swim towards the Archimedes now, relieved of obligation, but she wipes her face free of water and struggles to keep track of Gilles. She bobs, at the whim of the waves, and drifts where she can’t see well. A broken plank floats next to her, and she leans on this makeshift raft while she searches the dark for a sign of Gilles. A large piece of hull is about to ram into her, and she dives under water just in time.
When she comes back up, she sees the Alverton alight. Though it must have been Gilles, she can’t see him in the flickering shadows, for the ship burns in the distance, alone from the others. It burns brighter and brighter red against the black water, haloed by white as the mist roils off into the sky until the fire must have reached some explosives, and it errupts into a massive fireball.
“Gilles!” She yells, a tiny note in the high-pitched agony of the thwarted mist. She goes under, comes back up, calling his name desperately, over and over, but no answer comes. The air around her is empty and open even as wreckage covers the water.
She can’t hear the dip of oars in water, not over all the shrieking and rumbling of burning, so it could be that Gilles is fine, rowing back to her. In which case, they’ll surely need a boat, the Archimedes, to make their escape.
Maud finally turns to the harbor, letting go of her makeshift raft.
Voices have stilled, but the mist moans, melting into darkness as the night burns away.
Another burning ship has careened from the docks and looms over her. She looks up and recognizes the stern out of a million. The elegant woodwork, the name painted with gilded flourishes. Her ship burns bright.
Everything she sees is golden, raging splendor eradicating every hint of shadow and mist, and Maud can no longer tell if it’s the burning or daybreak as giant-tongued flames lick the taverns, devour the docks, hunger for the houses.
–
Lilian D. Vercauteren is a writer from The Netherlands who roamed strange lands for almost 20 years before recently returning to her tulip-y roots. She started writing at the Writers Studio in Tucson and left a piece of her heart buried somewhere in the wide open spaces of the American West. Her work has appeared in Lowestoft Chronicle, Ghost Parachute, Maudlin House, The Brussels Review and more. www.ldvercauteren.com
Reneé Bibby (she/her) is a writer based in Tucson, Arizona. She teaches at The Writers Studio and reads for Brink. Her work has appeared in Fractured Lit, Luna Station Quarterly, Taco Bell Quarterly, The Worcester Review, and Wildness. Her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. www.reneebibby.com
© 2025, Lilian D. Vercauteren and Reneé Bibby
Halfway Down the Stairs 