After that, none of them spoke. They stayed apart from one another, their shipmates’ bond broken for the moment, Eliot sitting on the bow, Drew atop the main cabin, Will standing by the taffrail, Nathaniel lying below on the bunk in his father’s stateroom. He was still in shock, and though his gaze was fixed on the painting of Main Chance, he did not really see it. His stare was as blank as his mind, and his heart was empty also, a vacuum of numbness except when an image of Artemis’s face, jaws agape and white eyes bulging under the sea just before they were enveloped by the inky green billows, swam to the surface of his memory; then the numbness inside him was overcome by a dry nausea. He had never seen death before, even in its most benign guises—the aged aunt who sighs her last and expires in bed. Death had been a word to him, an abstraction, signifying no more than “forty below” would to a South Sea islander.

A word was all it had been to Will, Drew, and Eliot, who, seated on the foredeck with his knees drawn up and hands clasped around his legs, recalled the chub he had seen, swallowed up in a twinkling by a moray eel, and the rest of the school swimming on, as if nothing had happened. It seemed impossible that a human being, a man whom he had seen only minutes before, quick with life, could have met with a similar fate. Dragged under, torn to pieces, eaten, and all in seconds. He trembled, and wondered if he would have seen the shark if he had kept his lookout, and then if he could have shot it before it got Artemis. From what Nathaniel had told them, he didn’t think so. He might have shot Artemis instead. The schooner began to swing on her rode. The tide was turning. In six more hours, it would turn and then turn again, ebb, flood, ebb, flood. The frigates still soared on the thermals. The heavens were no less blue than they’d been before Artemis’s death; the haloed sun shone no less brightly. This continuing on of things outraged him. He felt like loading the shotgun and blasting the sun’s indifferent eye. He wanted to wound the sea and force all nature to acknowledge that a good man had died for no good reason.