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"Their loot"

The chart room was cool and quiet, and all theirs, and the tereat Jack looked up at the ceiling and half closed his eyes, and he sensed Sabine watching hi her divining with the charts--fascination, and respect

"Ghost is still on deck," he said

"It doesn’t matter" Sabine came close, and her presence was everywhere--he could smell her faint perfu and the exquisite rustle of her clothing as she moved She looked Jack in the eye, her pupils dilated in the ht now"

"Your powers," Jack said "What else do you know?" She was so alluring, and there was knowledge in her eyes that threatened to haunt hie, and yet her skin was smooth and soft, and she couldn’t have been s," Sabine said uncertainly Bad things? Jack wondered But she clasped his hands in hers and pulled hier"

"You’re right," Jack said, and her uiled him "The hold Tell me e need, and why"

Sabine leaned in to whisper in his ear, told hian to understand

Jack returned to his new cabin before alley doorway and listening for Finn He heard uneven snoring and incoherent, sleepy , and contented hi of his i of pity for Finn surprised hi and breathing, concerned about his faood or bad He’d gone wherever the as, doing his best to survive, struggling against the obstacles life put in his way as best he could, living as well as life let hiht onto the Larsen and made a monster All hope and aspiration had been ripped away fro only a need to eat

"The hold Tell me e need, and why"

Or perhaps he had always been aof family troubled Jack--by now the Umatilla would have arrived back in Oakland, and his friend Merritt would have tracked down Jack’s mother and sister to tell them of his fate Everyone beyond this boat now considered him dead, and the Larsen had becorief would form a weakness within him It was survival that h Johansen’s belongings, pocketing a sheathed stiletto, a ring of keys, and a bent eating fork--rare a away beneath the cot He paused for asoftly as he tried to probe his senses outward in the way of the wild But he was being drawn back toward the chart roo awaited hiht, and he knew that Sabine was thinking of hi for a long ti, she had not told hih they did not unsettle There was an honesty about her that he had never sensed in that twisted tree spirit Lesya, far to the north in the wastes of the Yukon She had been a , but Sabine was a woman who had suffered monstrously Jack was her chance, and he would not let her down

He closed his door and alley into theelse Two sets of footsteps inn and Muninn, perhaps, which h the way, he paused at the foot of the staircase, finding hiht, but there was so about Ghost’sto do with pride, because he knew that Ghost valued his conversation and intellect Or maybe it was fascination, because Jack could not deny that while he found the captain repellent, he, like Sabine, also found hi As a child Jack had picked at scabs on his knees, poked angry cats with sticks, balanced on the dock’s edge looking down at the waters below Danger was alluring, horror co the forbidden door and entering the gangway that ran the length of the hold He passed the secure rooht he’d spent in there with Sabine, and how Ghost had tried shielding his anger when he’d opened the door to find theether on the cot He paused at the h the crack between door and frame It was pitch-black, but he could setables, and hear the few chickens’ clucking

It took him several minutes to open the lock He’d assumed it would be easy--he’d learned how to pick locks from Flowery Bob, a hoodlu off other people--but in practice it took a level of cal as the e, and eventually he had to lean back against the bulkhead and take a breath He expected one of the doors at either end of the gangway to open at any moment It would not matter who stood silhouetted there; discovery by anyone would put hiood beating at least A feould probably kill hi slowly, breathing deeply He put the bent fork tine into the padlock, then one of the s it The padlock clicked open, and Jack was so surprised that he fumbled it as it fell It struck the floor with a heavy thu to reduce the shadow he’d throhen one of the doors opened He was thirty feet from the forecastle, where most of the pirates slept If one of theate, he’d be rising fro the short ladder fro to the deck, reaching for the door handle, pausing with his head to one side as he listened, and then…

The gangway door re the hold door open and entering without checking inside He closed the door behind him and placed the padlock on the floor beside it, then felt around for a la on a hook, and as he lit it, he tried not to i

The light fought back the night and showed him that he was alone

Baskets of hardtack lay piled against one bulkhead Crates of cured meats were stacked elsewhere, and he tried not to consider that which had been salted and packed by his own hand Jars of dried fruit sat tied on a rough shelf, tobacco hung froe crabs rotted slowly in one corner, and there were other containers whose contents he could not discern Three crates held the ship’s chickens, ragged, thin things that sometimes laid, sometimes did not When the tih and stringy

It came as no surprise to see at least five different ships’ names on the baskets, crates, and sacks

But what he sought was not ih the piles of foodstuffs--he was afraid heIf the dropped padlock had not woken anyone, a ruckus from the food store surely would

I could poison every part of it, he thought But even if he’d carried a vial of poison, he was not sure he could have gone through with it They olves andvictiht save lives in the future, but to kill them in secret instead of in combat would damn Jack’s own

He turned in a slow circle, wondering where the true hold , and all their loot was kept in Ghost’s cabin? If that was the case, then their plan could never work, and they’d have to find another way to do as required

"Daot to be here!" he whispered, and then he saw the line in the floor Jointed boards were generally staggered to give strength, but stretching between a pile of bulging sacks and a stack of crates was a cut directly across the floor, and it couldchickens as he shifted their crates aside as quietly as he could, and revealed the hatch, just wide enough for a man to lower hi few minutes to pick it, and then he lifted the hatch and leaned it against the bulkhead Frorowl, and the creaking of boards, and the swish of water flowing this way and that He was deep in the ship here, roas the sound of water passing over the barnacles clustered on its belly Finn had had close experience with those barnacles, and if anyone caught Jack here, he’d likely receive the saining those terrible wounds ripped across his own flesh al the oil lamp, he lowered himself into the hole beneath the hold It was barely four feet high and eight feet square, and piled with boxes, bags, and other containers He opened a few and saw the glint of precious things

This hat he had come for Sabine knew some of as here, because she had been told The currents communicated to her, the sound of a ship’s hull transh a thousand ht of displacement from one hull to the next, the warm flow and cold draft of different depths She had not been able to tell Jack how she sensed such things--there was no sight or touch, no sense of discrete awareness or mysterious co her knowledge was to call it forgotten ain