A Dawn Most Wicked

It was no wonder she had tamed the Mississippi.

And it was no wonder I was in love with her.

After her cabin door had swung shut and her drumming footsteps were out of earshot, I crept to the window and peeked behind the curtain. Eight long, tight breaths later, Cochran’s broad form stomped by and swooped down the stairs. Once his head vanished I counted to ten—enough time to get him too far ahead to see me—and then squeezed out the door. With my head constantly darting left and right I surged over the Texas and down to the Hurricane Deck.

But as I raced to the next set of stairs, a flicker of movement at the front of the boat caught my eye. A body at the middle of the jack staff. My stomach hitched. Where was Cochran? If he was still stomping in the same direction as me, he could see Jie too. . . .

Two heavy heartbeats thumped past. I didn’t move. But then Jie reached the top of the pole, and I realized that me standing still and holding my breath like a Nancy wasn’t going to change a damned thing.

I sprang into a run. Once we had the horns, I needed to get Joseph and Jie out of sight—stowed away somewhere safe and private to deal with the lodestone curse.

I bounded off the final steps and onto the Passenger Deck, my breaths coming in shallow and fast. Ghosts swooped and snarled, but I skittered left, right, left, and soon reached the main stairwell.

It was then, just as my feet hammered down the last set of stairs and the Main Deck opened up before me, that Cassidy’s voice screamed out, “Depth! Barnes, I need a depth!”

I jolted, almost tripping down the remaining steps.

“Depth!” Cassidy shouted again, her voice now shrill. Panicked.

Why wasn’t the first mate answering?

For that matter, where was the first mate? I jumped off the last steps and aimed right, toward the edge of the Main Deck where the old man should be. . . .

But he wasn’t.

I skittered to a stop, my arms flying out to keep my balance. Then I twisted around, cupped my hands over my mouth, and hollered, “Cass! Barnes ain’t here!”

For several moments the only sounds were the beating paddles and thrumming engine. Then Cassidy’s voice shrieked out, “Get me a depth, Danny!”

A quick scan of the first mate’s station showed his lead line was gone, so I swiveled around and dove toward the hallway behind the stairs . . . to a series of hooks where the extra lead lines should have been. They weren’t.

“Hey!” said a girl’s voice. “We’re over here!”

I flung a sideways glance, caught sight of Joseph and Jie hovering beside the clerk’s office, but all I could do was nod at them and then charge back onto the Main Deck.

“Cassidy!” I yelled up. “Full stop! Full stop! Now!”

Jie and Joseph rushed out behind me. “Where’s the first mate?” I asked them. “The man hollering depths— have you seen him?”

Jie shook her head. “He wasn’t here when I climbed down. The horns weren’t there either,” Jie added softly.

That stopped my shouting. “What?” I rounded on her. “Not there?”

“There’s only one set up there.” Jie lifted her hands defensively. “And it said Memphis on it.”

“Someone must have taken them down recently,” Joseph said. “Jie claims the wood is damaged.”

She nodded. “Maybe someone got to ’em before the race started.”

“Danny!” Cass’s voice ripped into my brain. “I need a depth!”

“The lead line ain’t here!” I bellowed back. “You have to call for a full stop, Cass! Full stop!” My gaze dropped down to the paddles, waiting for a slow in their rhythmic beat. If Cassidy didn’t know the depth and the boat ran aground at full steam . . . it would rip a hole in the Queen’s hull that would sink us in minutes.

Worse, it would jostle the boilers, and jostled boilers were a guaranteed explosion.

“Full stop!” I roared, and this time she roared back, “I’m trying! Murry ain’t responding!”

Black fear uncoiled in my chest. The command bells were broken—Cochran had said that. . . .

But why were they broken?

My eyes locked on Joseph. On Jie. We were going to die, and they saw it in my eyes.

As one, we burst into a sprint for the engine room. Behind the main stairwell, past the blacksmith, and finally into the electric-lit engine room.

But what met my eyes was far, far worse than I could have imagined. Sprawled just inside the doorway, blood seeping from the front of his head, was Second Engineer Schultz. I pulled up short, spinning my arms to keep from falling on him—and then I caught sight of Barnes, also in an unconscious heap a few paces away.

There was no sign of Murry. Or of Captain Cochran.

“Are they alive?” Joseph asked. He didn’t wait for an answer before crouching to check Schultz’s pulse.

And my attention whipped to the far greater emergency at hand: the paddles. Both pistons had clubs lodged in them—the valves were completely open and steam shrieked into the engine. But worse, the clubs were wedged twice as far as they were ever supposed to go—too far to be pulled back out. If the steam didn’t lessen, we could never slow the ship down.

I twisted toward Jie a few steps away. “Stop the firemen,” I ordered. “No more coal on the fires— none!”

Nodding once, she rocketed from the room. I jumped over Barnes, Schultz, and the kneeling Joseph, and scrambled for the speaking tube. I yanked desperately at the pilothouse bell. “Murry’s gone,” I screamed into the tube. “Schultz and Barnes are knocked out, and we got two engines jammed at full steam.”

I pushed my ear to the tube, and when Cassidy’s voice slid down, my heart stopped.

“Then God save us all,” she said.

A half breath later, the whistle screeched through the night, stabbing over the engines and shaking through the speaking tube. It would alert everyone on board to the emergency.

Then Cass was back on the tube. “Are Schultz and Barnes all right? And where’s my father?”

I glanced at the prostrate men. Joseph was applying pressure to Schultz’s head wound, meaning the engineer must still be alive, and Barnes’s chest moved steadily.

“You’re pa ain’t here,” I told Cass. “Schultz and Barnes will survive, but they can’t help me unjam the pistons.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“I’ll be too slow if I fix the paddles alone,” I argued. “But if someone could help me—”

“Danny,” she snapped. “It doesn’t matter. We’re coming up on Devil’s Isle, and I can see from here that the water’s low.”

My eyes clenched shut. Devil’s Isle. A vicious sandbar that ran more boats aground than any other bar in the Mississippi. Even if the river wasn’t low, it would take constantly changing speeds, constantly shifting directions, and constant maneuvering to get around that bar.

And we couldn’t maneuver if the ship was stuck in full steam ahead.

“How close?” I asked, my voice pinched.

“Less than half a mile,” she said. “Even if the furnaces aren’t fed and we release the extra steam, the ship can’t stop in that little a time. Not without the paddles in reverse. There’s only one thing to do, Danny, and that’s get everyone off the ship. Now.”

For three pounding heartbeats I didn’t answer. There was really nothing I could say.

Because of course we couldn’t get everyone off the ship and Cass knew that. The roustabouts had cleared away all the excess weight—including lifeboats.

A ghost flickered in front of me, rasping in the voices of my past, but for once I was too distracted to care.

“Cass,” I started. But then Jie’s voice exploded in the engine room: “The horns!”

I flinched, my body snapping around.

“The engineer has them!” Jie cried. “I saw him up on the Texas.”

Joseph pushed up from his crouch beside Schultz. “You are certain?”