The shot atomised her.
It hit her square and she came apart at the seams. A soft mist pattered across Joe and on the deck. It wasn’t as red as he would have thought. The drizzle was already washing it from his hands. He couldn’t move. All his thoughts looked normal, not caught up in the anxious whirl they usually were if he was scared. But he still couldn’t move.
‘Help!’
Joe came back to himself enough to pull the burned man towards the ladder. At the hatch, he looked back. Edinburgh was close. The harbour front strobed as they fired the land guns.
The infirmary was chaos. The surgeon’s first and second mates were there, both women in indigo dresses, and Alfie knew what he was about remarkably, but it wasn’t enough. Without Agatha, Joe lost the sense of normalcy from before. Along the back were beds full of people too torn up to help. Lieutenant Wellesley loaded four pistols and shot the injured men one by one in the head.
Gradually, he became aware that the guns were firing less frequently, and that the French shots were coming from behind them, not ahead.
Without deciding, Joe dropped the bandages he had been counting out and went back up to the top. He was just getting in the way, and he wanted to find Kite. Really, urgently wanted to find him, because Kite was a murderer who had just seen his sister killed, and it was a small hop from murderer to real lunatic, and Wellesley was in the infirmary shooting people, and there was no one else to stop Kite changing his mind and turning back and getting them all killed for a chance at revenge.
It was an opportunity too. Somehow, Joe was going to have to get round Kite over the next few days. Pretending to be worried about him now was as good a start as any.
Kite was just coming down the quarterdeck stairs. A couple of the younger lieutenants trooped up to him and Joe thought they would have some kind of report, but instead the three of them thumped together in a brief hug that exuded gratefulness to be alive. The littlest midshipman, the one who’d said she was gullible, rushed up and bumped face-first into Kite’s chest, in tears. Kite lifted her up and spoke to her too quietly for Joe to hear, then handed her over to one of the lieutenants.
‘Oh, Joe. You’re alive,’ Kite said when he saw him, sounding honestly relieved.
‘So are you,’ Joe said, relieved as well, against all logic and reason. ‘Agatha …’
‘I saw,’ said Kite, toneless.
Do it. Pretend.
‘I came to see if you were all right,’ Joe said, and even though he had been sure he was pretending until then, he didn’t feel so clear about it now that they were talking.
Kite’s wolf eyes ticked over Joe and Joe felt certain he could read the lot, the determination to make Kite like him enough to let him go, muddied by what felt uncomfortably like real worry. ‘Thanks,’ Kite said.
They were coming into the harbour now. The water was deep, and they drifted right up to the wharf. Men all along the side threw down balls of knotted rope to keep the hull from grinding against the stone. The air was still thick with black smoke. Kite showed no sign of turning them around for another go at the French.
A hissing came from behind them. Sailors were going over the deck with wide brooms, pushing all the pieces of people overboard and leaving red comb patterns behind – it was the brooms that hissed. Kite watched for too long, then seemed to catch himself and put both hands on the rail to keep himself facing forward.
The gangway bumped onto the wharf. Joe expected the sailors to go down, but they didn’t; the women on the dock came up.
‘We can’t go?’ he said, not understanding. ‘What about the wounded?’
‘Not until the ship’s paid off. It takes a few days. The surgeons come to us,’ Kite explained, nodding to the women. He sounded too normal. He might have just come on to the deck after a morning spent reading the newspaper; there was nothing in his voice, for all he was grazed and smoke-stained, to say he had just seen his sister killed. Joe had a surge of real indignation.
‘That’s insane. These people need to get away now, Kite. Not everyone’s a bloody machine!’
But Kite was shaking his head. ‘Have you heard of battle fatigue?’
‘What’s that?’
Kite glanced at the gangway and the surgeons. They looked so clean they didn’t seem real. ‘During a fight, you want to keep your friends safe, but you can’t. When you leave the ship, you just want to hurt everyone, because all these people were tucked up safe and sound while your mates were in bits on the deck. If you have it badly enough, you end up punching someone. Or worse. We can’t let people out straight away. They might hurt their families.’ He still sounded quite together and presentable. ‘I shouldn’t be allowed ashore yet either, I expect I’ll lose it later. But there isn’t much we can do about that.’
‘You know you probably wouldn’t hurt anyone if you admitted to feeling something right now,’ Joe said angrily. ‘A stitch in time saves nine?’
Kite looked across at him. The perfect calm didn’t break. He decided – and Joe saw him decide – to snap it with perfect precision right down the middle. ‘You are so fucking French.’
It felt like an electric shock. Joe couldn’t remember even hearing Kite swear before. He wanted to back away. If he left things like this, though, Kite was more likely to shoot him behind a shed somewhere than to let him go.
‘I’m sorry,’ Joe said. ‘I didn’t mean …’
‘What, that the correct response for me now is to go to pieces while I still have a battleship to repair and six hundred living people to worry about?’
‘No, I
