“Please, god, please no. Listen, listen to me I’m begging you, if you would just—”

A gunshot echoed over the open sea, fading before it could reach any sympathetic ear. Nobody heard me die, save for my killer. Nobody had heard me die the first time, either. Nor the second. Nor the third. This, the fourth time, was obviously no different—and I wagered that the fifth, tomorrow, would be the same.

For fourteen hours my body would lay motionless below the decks of the Kestrel, and during the fifteenth, it would begin to twitch. I wouldn’t regain consciousness until the sixteenth hour, in which I would become acutely aware of the pain I was in. Certainly a shot to my head no longer rendered me permanently deceased, but these temporary deaths were far from painless.

The shot itself had sent waves through my body before life left me completely. Then slowly as my brain knit itself back together, just as it had been before, the first thing it would allow me to be aware of was pain. Before my mind could form a cohesive thought, before I remembered what the word for it even was, I was wracked with the stuff. This would go on for hours yet. I wondered if as more time went on, I’d get better at this. If it would hurt less. If I would heal faster.

Eventually the pain would subside enough—or perhaps my mind would simply find itself to have a thought in spite of the agony, whether or not it had actually waned. Either way, I would be even more trapped then than I had been before. Still and motionless, sometimes I would only have darkness if she had aimed low and taken my eyes. Honestly, the darkness was almost preferred. Today, though my eyes were left functionally intact, I chose to close them anyway. Leave myself to my thoughts and my pain.

There wasn’t much to think about. The first day I’d had only confusion—I was certain that I had left the mortal world behind, so I was shocked to have seemingly returned to it. But I hadn’t, had I? I was mortal no longer, for better or for worse. The realization had only confounded me for the few hours I’d had the capacity to think, and then she enacted upon me my second murder. When I had recovered from that second death, my thoughts had been a tad more practical. I had marveled at the fact I could remember anything at all. My mind, as it reformed, retained language and memory just the same as they had been before my execution. Perhaps it was all of it a bit fuzzy but it was there nonetheless. Enough at least that I could beg for my life yet again when the time came for it.

The begging never worked. I wondered if she heard what I just told you, if she knew my suffering, would she stay her hand?

I wondered this presently, actually, as another hour passed and I lay with only a slight gaping hole in my skull and almost my full mental capacity returned to me. I could move now, if I felt like doing so. I didn’t feel like it, of course, so I stayed on the floor. There was hardly anywhere to move anyway, so what was the point? She had locked me in the brig quite handily and apart from the rats, there was nothing here to entertain me.

The rats …

I turned my eyes toward one who was sitting at the edge of the room, gnawing on a bit of flesh. My flesh, I thought, but I tried not to dwell on it (or the fact that it had likely been flung from the back of my head by the impact of her shot, and contained a piece of the brain I had just been forced to re-form manually. No, what was the use of dwelling on morbid things like that?). It was tit for tat anyway, I remarked to myself as he ripped a bit of meat away from the pale skin, artfully avoiding the red-blond hairs that were stained redder by my blood. Once I had a moment to heal a bit more, once I could move quicker, that rat would find himself as much digested by me as I had been by him.

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God was I thirsty.

But it hurt too much to move.

And even when I had drunk, I would be thirsty still.

And yet a rat was better than nothing.

Eventually another hour passed, and another. Finally, I could sit up. Tentatively I reached my hand around the back of my head, touching the spot where I knew the bullet had exited. The wound was still slick with blood, but it had mostly closed. The scent was foul. My blood was not the blood I needed. I could still smell the rat—intoxicating almost, salty and metallic and only a few feet away. The smell of the damp on my fingers was nothing like that. It was sour. I lifted my fingers to my lips and licked at it anyway, desperate for anything that might give me energy. I tasted my own blood like rot.

I didn’t spit it out.

Was I rotting from the inside, or had I only rotted for a bit before starting to pull back together? Was the taste I was tasting still inside of me, or was it just the remains of the little death I had experienced?

Enough of that, enough of those thoughts. I turned my attention yet again to the rat.

It had found a new piece of carnage to nibble at. No, it might be a new rat entirely. I could smell them all around me, in the walls and under the straw that covered the floor. I felt as though I could reach out and plunge my hand into one of the piles of the stuff that surrounded me and I would come away with at least one of the vermin in my clutches, maybe two. I settled on the one I could see, though. I hadn’t the strength to get clever about this.

When I lunged for it, I moved with such speed it was incredible. What strength I lacked to think clearly I did not lack to pounce on the rodent. With not a moment’s pause between lunge and bite, I ripped into its neck, digging my teeth into fur and flesh like an animal. Once I had broken skin and the salt hit my tongue, it was like time stopped.

The ship, my death, my … circumstances … all seemed miles away. There was nothing but me, the warm blood in my mouth, and vigor returning to me. I could not even register the squeaking of the rat as it slowly died in my grasp.

I finished my meal and the drained corpse of the rat dropped to the ground between my knees where I knelt. What a sight I must be, I thought. A puddle of my own blood and rot was sinking into the planks around me, and the bodies of rats lingered longer than I would like. What flesh I left behind was eventually devoured by their own kind, and I let them do it. I had no use for it. The meat did not tempt me, only the blood.

What had I become?

That question had lingered on my mind more than any other as I sat in the dark, damp brig. I remembered very little of the moments directly preceding this cycle—the executions, the brig and the rats. I remembered my life before, of course. I remembered getting this ship out into open water. I remembered greeting the passengers as politely as I could manage, despite my feelings about them. I even remembered greeting her at the time. She hadn’t paid me so much as a second glance, and neither had I to her. There had been no thought in our minds about what the future could become, because who could have foreseen this?

Who could have foreseen that thing?

I did remember one other detail. Yet more pain, but this pain unlike anything I had felt before, as I was set upon by the beast. Much like my teeth had torn into the rat, my own throat had been torn open. I had twitched under it just the same as the rat had twitched in my hands. I had squeaked much the same as the rat had squeaked. But I had not died as the rat did.

I wish I had.

I smelled the iron of her blood first, before I even heard her footsteps. Had a whole day passed already? I dared to look

She was standing over me again, musket in hand.

It was time for me to beg again.