While they fought, I watched the wounded they had left behind: seven or eight men and boys moaning on the dock as their blood dripped down into the river. The shadows crept up on them slowly, eating the pier. Moans turned to screams, and then to silence, as the shadows swallowed the wounded whole. The battle continued. No one had noticed but me.

I lowered my head and kept climbing. It would take quite a light to drive those shadows back. My hands were slick, my muscles aching, my lungs burning, but I had seen Cherub’s foolish grin as he charged down that dock, saber held high, and I kept his face fixed at the front of my mind until I finished the climb.

I reached the lip of the deck and hauled myself aboard. If Juliette had posted any guards to this side of the ship, they had deserted their stations. I opened the door to the hold and went below. Any noise I made clattering down the metal steps was masked by gunfire and the screams of dying men.

The ship was lit by dim electric lights—another wonder imported from the other New York—and I had no trouble finding my way into the belly of the ship. I turned a corner and paused, not sure where I was going, but certain I had to get there fast. I knew I’d made an error when I felt the hand on my shoulder and the gun nestle against the base of my skull. I smelled bad liquor and knew it was Eddie Thorne.

“I’m not as stupid as your daddy thought,” he said.

“You’re still not very bright.”

He brought the butt of the pistol down against my head. Pain exploded across my skull, yellow and red and blinding. I fell to my knees and fought the urge to vomit. Thorne laughed. It was an unappealing sound.

“You get it?” he barked. “You get it? I’ve got the guns. I’ve got the liquor. I’m not a joke anymore.”

He kicked me in the stomach. Or, rather, he tried to. He was sluggish, like he was underwater, and I was able to roll onto my back before his boot connected. It wasn’t much of an advantage—I was still flat on the deck, staring up at the pistol clutched in his sweaty, swollen hand—but it was a comfort, a shred of hope, until he pulled the hammer back. He squatted on top of me, holding me down with one hand, pressing his knees against my arms to keep me from getting away.

“I’m gonna kill you,” he said. Normally, I might have responded with something clever, but nothing glittering came to mind.

“Thorne—”