‘How many men are there?’
‘Forty-five, sir. Everyone else was above; there was a play. We were all …’ He was starting to cry. He could only have been seventeen.
‘All right. Bring them up on deck and get together a firing squad.’
‘But we don’t know which of them – it only took three or four to load and fire six guns, but half of them are accusing the other half and—’
‘There’s no time to sort them out,’ Kite interrupted. Across the fleet, sails were already unfurling. The bang of canvas had a muffled water-echo from here. ‘The firing squad is for all of them. Then we need to be underway.’
35
Edinburgh, 1807
From the top of Arthur’s Seat, the city lights were so many spilled cinders. Joe and Kite had sat on one of the stone outcrops for about half an hour, enough to cool down. They had raced on the last stretch of the way up. Joe had always thought he was quite fit, walking everywhere through London, but Kite won by fifty yards. The electric fizz had gone away from him now. Joe had been glad to lose. Straight ahead of them, across the city, torchlight blazed at the castle, which was gaunt and full of strange angles.
Joe watched Kite in the moonlight. He had his hands crossed palm up in his lap, his forearms facing upward, the lighthouse tattoo stark against his skin.
‘Are you cold?’ Kite asked.
‘I’m frozen to this rock,’ Joe admitted.
They set off again. At first, Kite walked a little way from him. Joe chased him and took his arm. Kite let him, and leaned against him a fraction, plainly glad for someone to walk with.
The mechanical voice in Joe’s head said, And now I can snap you in half whenever I like.
Lily. It was not a bad thing to want to get home to your little girl. It wasn’t.
When Joe woke, dawn had broken and seagulls were crying to each other from the roofs. Downstairs was already full of the sounds of people who had been up and about for a while. He lay still for a few minutes, soaking in the light. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d woken up in daylight. He was too early for it even in the summer normally. Closing his hands through folds in the blanket, he turned onto his chest and breathed. The weak sun soaked through the back of his shirt.
Kite was asleep, though not easily. He was hot, his collarbones strained and shining, but sleep had paralysed him too well for him to have pushed off the covers.
Joe moved them, then opened the window an inch to let in the air. He couldn’t bring himself to throw water over the last glow of the coals. Heat was too valuable to just throw away. When he looked back, Kite had shifted onto his side. He still didn’t have any colour. The things he slept in were all thin cotton, and they made him look hopelessly fragile. They showed where his bones were.
The scrap of cannon fuse he tied his hair up with had dropped onto the floor. Joe picked it up and then swayed when he straightened.
At first he thought it was just wooziness after too long on the ship, but then the familiar epilepsy fog came down with its pure wonderful brilliant euphoria and he was right where he always wanted to be: on that pebble shore in grey weather, while the man who waited by the sea was just ahead of him.
The vision lasted longer than it ever had. The man was skimming pebbles on the flat surf, slowly; before he threw each stone, he waited for the ripples from the last one to fade altogether. It looked like one of those dull rules people made up to complicate dull games and pass the time. There was a sad patience to him. He was close enough to touch.
But he must have been a memory of someone Joe had known well, because the things he would have noticed about a new person – hair, height, build – were somehow not there at all, even though the man himself absolutely was. Wherever Joe knew him from, he had seen him so often before that day on the beach that he had stopped perceiving any of it.
And then the room was just itself again.
Joe blew his breath out in a rush. The vision was gone, but it left him full of happiness, like always, powerful as opium. This time, though, it came with a bitter edge. Something had been wrong that day, badly wrong. He could almost remember.
Seeing him again gave Joe a glimmer-hope that he had been wrong before; that it was all there in his mind – buried, but possible to excavate.
It had to be Jem. It couldn’t be coincidence that this had happened the morning after Kite had told him another story. But he hoped it wasn’t. Jem was dead, and Joe wanted desperately for the man who waited to be waiting still.
Joe eased out and lifted the door a bit as he pulled it, to keep it from scraping. There were two new marines on the landing. They didn’t say anything, but they followed him downstairs.
Breakfast was a lot better than he’d hoped. Eggs, toast, real butter; after six days of ship food and seasickness, it was the best meal he’d ever had. It was ten o’clock, and though the breakfast crowd were still there, some of the tables by the windows were free now. He sat with his hands around a cup of bitter coffee and watched the harbour. Not much was happening. No ships could get out, so no one was loading. Some had been there for so long that the frost on their hulls was as thick as snow, the rigging turned to monstrous spider webs. The sharp winter shadows showed all the hulls that hadn’t been repaired properly yet. Some had been torn open and just patched
