With a gasp, I found myself lying face-up, choking, drowning as if submerged in the sea. The deck stretched out beneath me. The stink of farm animals flooded my nose. My limbs felt weighted, my entire body soaked. If I had to guess, someone had dumped a bucket of water on me to rouse me.

Sounds were distant. Garbled. Voices. Someone was talking to me, saying my name over and over. That English accent didn’t make sense. I recognized it and turned my head, seeking its face and blinking through sheets of misery. Christ almighty, I hurt…everywhere.

My eyes opened, and I stared up at the concerned mien of Lieutenant Flemming.

Bending over me, the blond doctor reached down and gently tipped my chin side to side. Creases fanned from the corners of his miserable eyes, his face pale with fear.

Given his crestfallen expression, he wasn’t here as a willing new recruit. He was a captive, just like me. Because every pirate crew needed a doctor, and Flemming happened to be the only ship’s surgeon on Blitz.

“Where are we?” I croaked.

His head angled down, shaking slightly as his eyes lifted to the pirates lounging, drinking, and belching around us.

“The arm will need to be set and braced, sir.” Flemming sat back and looked up at whoever stood outside of my view.

“I dinna care about fixing her.” Madwulf’s voice sieved through my chest like ice water. “Just keep her alive long enough to open that compass.”

The task of solving the puzzle suddenly felt too big, too impossible, and it grew more so as I turned my neck and saw the mutilated wreckage of my arm.

A splintered white bone protruded from a bloody gouge near the inside of my elbow. My forearm curved outward in an unnatural angle, lying like a dead, displaced thing on the deck.

I gagged and released a soundless scream as my stomach clenched and heaved. Viscid, bitter fluid projected from my mouth, and the shivering… God save me, the tremors were overpowering, uncontrollable. As the magnitude of my injury forced itself upon me, I shook with a violence that engaged every muscle and ripped apart every nerve.

No need to look at Lieutenant Flemming’s grim face to glean my fate. I wouldn’t survive this. My heart had known that all along, but the bulwark of stubbornness within hadn’t allowed me to accept it.

As Flemming tipped a medicine vial and poured a sizzling liquid over my exposed bone, the unholy pain tried to drag me into its darkness again. Blood ran cold through my veins, and my breaths hissed wetly past my clenched teeth, each exhale riding on the lamenting sounds of my cries.

Through the haze, a final wish rose to the surface. A wish I’d carried with me since the day I found my father hanging on the gallows.