“That ring around the sun yesterday,” Drew murmured. “Dirty weather, Artemis said.”

The mere mention of the name cast a pall. They stood looking silently at one another, or at the floor, where Artemis’s Georgia bundle—a piece of sailcloth tied around an oilskin jacket and a spare shirt—lay with his cast net furled atop it. Nathaniel’s face was a desert of emotion. He looked exhausted, and he was: exhausted on the inside. All he could think about was how the shark had ripped Artemis from his arms as effortlessly as he could snatch a rattle from a baby’s hands. If he had been more alert, if he had seen the shark sooner and reacted more quickly … But he could not have. No one could have.…

“Dirty weather it’s going to be,” Will was saying, as he spread charts on the chart table. “The question is, what kind of dirty weather and how much of it is there going to be and what we ought to do. Stay put and see what comes? Get the hell out of here, and if we do, where to?”

With Artemis guiding them, Will had had no need to make a careful study of the Dry Tortugas’ geography. Now, lighting a cigarette, he examined it with a scholar’s attentiveness. The oblong basin of deep water, some eight or nine miles long by four wide, was blockaded to the northeast, east, and southeast by the crescent reef called Pulaski Shoal, to the south by the reefs surrounding Bush and Garden Keys, and to the west by Loggerhead Reef and Brilliant Shoal. Three channels, called Northwest, Southwest, and Southeast, allowed passage through the barriers, but the channel bottoms were an obstacle course of patch reefs, banks, coral pinnacles, and sea mounds. Some lay deep enough to allow the schooner to pass over safely, but in other places, the sea floor jumped abruptly from sixty feet to six or less. There were only a few markers, and none were lighted. The only beacon was the lighthouse on Loggerhead Key. Clearly, said Will, to try to sail out of this maze in darkness could be disastrous.

He gazed at the chart again and traced a line with his finger.

“We’re just about in Northwest Channel right now, and the patch reefs in it look like the deepest. See here—the shallowest is two and half fathoms, more than enough. We could sail due north from this anchorage for about two miles, then head east along the north side of Pulaski. Four miles and we’re clear of it. Then we bear south southeast through the Rebecca Passage and back into the same channel we followed coming out here. Then east by north to Key West.”

Eliot and Drew frowned.

“Yeah,” said Will. “Yeah. If whatever’s brewing out there catches us between here and Key West—nowhere to hide.”