“That’s the heart of it way out there! Been keeping my eye on it! Tracking north by northeast, staying out to sea! We’re catching the edges! Or they’re catching us! Shouldn’t get any worse!”

Which is bad enough, Nathaniel thought, wrestling with the hatch cover to go below for the sea anchor. Had to be blowing fifty now, a Force 10 gale. Inside, after he slammed the hatch shut, the wind’s shriek and the roar of breaking seas were muffled, but a scene of disarray greeted him: Drawers and lockers were open; gear was strewn over the floor; pots, pans, and broken crockery littered the galley, where cabinet doors, their brass hooks popped loose, whipped back and forth on their hinges.

Staggering forward, he passed Drew’s berth and saw him lying on his side, knees pulled into his chest.

“You all right?”

“Sure not. I’m trying, Nat.…”

“Yeah, I know,” Nathaniel said, indulgently. Yet beneath his indulgence of Drew’s condition lay a peculiar satisfaction. Not that a bout of seasickness nullified Drew’s heroics in New York, but it was a sign that the old kid brother had not completely vanished, the kid brother whose weakness provided foil to Nathaniel’s strengths.

“Think you could secure things down here?” he said. “The locker doors in the galley are going to get torn off if they’re not lashed shut quick.”

Drew sat up and stumbled toward the galley.

The howling outside seemed twice as loud, after the relative peacefulness inside. Will’s forecast notwithstanding, the weather had gotten worse. A savage squall spawned by the distant center of the hurricane—a storm within a storm—bore down. The winds accelerated, the skies collapsed in a deluge of slicing rain, lightning spiked, the vertical streaks throwing out jagged branches, and the flashes showed spindrift twirling on the faces of broken, wandering seas sixteen feet high.

Below decks, in the swaying light of the gimbal lamp, Drew battled to stop from vomiting while he braced himself against the rolls and lashed the cabinet doors. A bolt of lightning struck very close to starboard—the cabin lit up for an instant with a bluish fire, and he felt rather than heard the blast; felt it get inside him and rattle his bones. A few seconds later, another hit on the opposite side, and he began to mutter his chants—“It’s only the separation of an electrical charge caused by … It’s only the sound of the shock wave caused by …” but they failed to overcome the feeling, in the core of his heart, that the heavens were hurling thunderbolts at him and his shipmates with malevolent intent.