As we glided away from shore, familiar sensations swamped me. The rock and sway of the waves. The trickle of oars moving through the water. The smell of brine and damp wood. All of it took me back to a time when I’d been someone else. The currents grew rougher as we moved farther out, swirling with eddies. I sensed the little boat’s struggle and confusion, but the two men steered us ably and we moved deeper into the night.

“Starboard quarter,” Austin said some time later, his voice a quiet rumble, the straw bobbing in his mouth. “London traders.”

“What are London traders?” I whispered. I didn’t see anything off the starboard.

“Smugglers,” Beckett replied just as a whaleboat sliced from the darkness.

I gasped—it was so startlingly close I could’ve touched it. As it glided by, I saw a blur of eyes and dark caps. Blankets thrown over baskets and crates. Beckett raised a hand. One of the men in the whaleboat returned the gesture. Then it was gone.

For long moments after, my blood hummed from my head to my toes. I suddenly wanted to know everything about this strange and forbidden world. My body knew this—this feeling of daring and possibility. It felt new—and like coming home.

As the Brooklyn coast took shape, Austin and Beckett wrapped rags over the paddles to quiet them and plied on slowly, like they were stirring honey.

“There it is,” Austin said soon after. “Wallabout Bay.”

I’d heard of it before. The British had converted sugarhouses, warehouses, and even churches into prisons, but there still wasn’t enough space to keep captured Americans, so they’d turned to using condemned ships. Wallabout Bay was where many of these floating prisons were moored. But knowing about it didn’t prepare me for what I now saw.

Several gaunt ships were scattered over a wide bay silvered by moonlight. Large ships. Brigs. Ships of the line. Each had to hold hundreds of men, perhaps thousands, yet the entire bay was wrapped in an eerie, graveyard silence. A smell of human waste wafted our way, so foul I shuddered.

Malcolm coughed into his sleeve.

“You think that’s bad?” Austin made a gruff sound. “Just wait.”

They steered the boat into a narrow inlet north of the bay so covered with branches we had to duck to pass through. I stepped onto the silty shore and helped the men pull the boat between shrubs, sliding it into hiding.

I was in Brooklyn now. On shores that had always been across the river.

“Follow me,” Austin said. “Only a little farther.”