Atticus’s eyes bulged, and Cade remembered how he had lied to the man’s face about not having the Codex.

“Would you oust me as leader of this group too?” Atticus hissed. “You are as Brutus, the usurper. Treacherous to your core.”

Cade knew this could not continue. He had to find a way to work together with Atticus. So he did something that took the greatest of effort. He knelt.

“Consider me a guide. That’s all.” Cade lowered his head in supplication. “I promise you. I’m only trying to win this game and get us all home.”

He turned his head, speaking with as much feeling as he could muster.

“Have I not fought beside you this whole time? What else do I have to do to prove I’m telling the truth?”

More murmuring, too quiet or too garbled for the Codex to translate. But Atticus knew he had lost the argument. The legionaries, at least for now, were on Cade’s side.

“March on,” Atticus called, leaving the decision hanging in the air. “We must reach the ship by nightfall.”

CHAPTER

41

The ship was an empty hulk, one impaled through the trunk of a tree, leaving a gaping entrance in its side. They reached it as the sun set, following a desperate effort in the dusk light for fear of being stranded in the darkness.

Their arrival was marred by the discovery of bones scattered about the ship’s exterior, and a gaping, empty skull at the entrance—the remains of men long dead, scavenged by the beasts of the forest.

Now, Cade huddled with Scott at the back of the ship, disgusted by the rusted chains upon the walls. Some shackles still held human remains, and finger bones were strewn about the ground like game pieces. Cade tried not to think of the fate of the men who had been abandoned here.

Tried … and failed. He saw it in his mind’s eye. Men chained to a wall and left to die of thirst, or be savaged, helpless, by whichever beast came across them. It reminded him of his time upon Ishak’s ship, and the memory made him shudder. But it was either that or the cold.

The small campfire Atticus had allowed them to light was little comfort as the temperature dropped lower than Cade remembered it had on that long night in the slavers’ captivity, all that time ago.

Their makeshift hearth was within the ship itself, its smoke drifting between the broken spars of the boards above, giving off meager light. It was too dark to see if there was anything worth salvaging—a musket perhaps, or some gunpowder.

But Cade already knew it was unlikely the ship would house anything of value. The chains were rusted through—the vessel had likely been left here a century ago or more.

“Pup,” Atticus called from the deepest recess of the ship. His face was illuminated by a tallow-fat candle, the only light other than the campfire, and that of the red moon above.