The explosion of the second device had rocked the Prospect. Just a sway, but enough force for Percy to start worrying about the strength of the seam in the cargo hold once again.

“Cassandra! The second detonation: I need to know the results. Now.”

“Yes, Captain Percy… I’m hearing a lot of popping and crackling. Hold on…” She scanned the sonar. The soundscape was a confusing mess: massive churning bubbles of air rising towards the surface, creaking and cracking metal, rushing water …and distant screams of terror. “Captain Percy: I’m almost certain the Grackle is finished. I’m hearing nothing but…but damage.”

Percy grinned. “I can’t believe Hemi and Shakes pulled that off! One chance in five indeed.” She lit a cheroot. “Cassandra! Your top priority now is to find the Gnat again.”

Before Cassandra could reply, the dial on the ship-to-ship unit lit up above Percy’s Head. “Sylvia…”

Percy’s eyes snapped up to the ship-to-ship. It was not the voice of Hemi or Shakes.

“Sylvia…are you leaving me to die a second time?” The voice came riding on a background of wailing klaxons, creaking metal, and shouting men.

Sylvia slowly reached a hand up to take the mic. She thumbed the transmitter. “…Owen? …But how?”

“How? You mean: how am I still alive? You left me alive, remember?” The radio went silent for a few seconds, then the transmission resumed. “You knew I was alive. You heard me banging on the hull, I’m sure of it. You left me on the sail of the Prospect, and you dove out from under me — thinking there was no way I could survive.

“And I would have died in that storm, just as you expected. Probably within a matter of minutes — except by sheer luck I washed aboard the deck of the Grackle… Unlike you, they opened the hatch when they heard banging.”

Percy could hear Owen breathing heavily into the mic. She squeezed the mic in her hand. “Owen, why didn’t you just say something? Why didn’t you raise us on the ship-to-ship earlier? We could have done something to get you off the Grackle.”

“Get me off the Grackle? The Grackle was a blessing! When the hatch opened, I felt I was given a second chance. A chance I would use to clear the world of your callous ego, Sylvia, your selfish disregard. I made the Grackle my tool. I’m the reason the Grackle continued after you! I told them all about you: that your hold was full of weapons — even after your delivery in Stilt City; that you were supplying rebels up and down the coast on this side of the ocean; that you were a crazy idealist who would stop at nothing to support the overthrow of Authority power; that you had a shipment of valuable metals aboard and would make for the fattest of prizes. I told them anything they needed to hear to keep them in pursuit.”

“Owen… I didn’t know…” Her thumb fell off the transmitter. The radio remained dead for a few seconds.

The radio dial re-lit. “…The worst thing now isn’t you leaving me to die a second time. I made my peace with death when you murdered me the first time. No, the worst thing is that there turned out to be no purpose to my second chance. There was no purpose to anything. Redeemed from drowning, I knew what my life was for: my story was to be left for dead, and then rise again to take you down, Sylvia. But now…now you’ve shown me there is no narrative. No plot. No arc. The world is nothing. Nothing but random chance, and long odds. And all of us are balanced precariously over a pit of ever-deeper nothingness that we all fall into eventually.

“…Everyone eventually. But for me, the pit is only a few seconds away now. Know this, Sylvia: even now if I had one last chance, one last torpedo or any weapon I could reach you with at all, I would take that shot. I’d make firing on you my last act, if that was an option given to me. But I’ve got nothing now. No options at all.”

The ship-to-ship radio went dark. It did not light again. Percy hung the mic up. She dropped the butt of her cheroot to the deck and crushed it under her boot heel.

Cassandra kept the sonar tracking what was left of the Grackle. What had been one contact was now splitting into two distinct parts. Those parts resolved themselves over a matter of a few seconds, and then Cassandra could hear the two pieces falling away from her. “Captain Percy, the Grackle is in two pieces. I’m losing the contact.”

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The Gnat was not sinking so fast that it did not right itself first. The sucking hole under them pulled harder on the lead weights at the bottom of the boat than the rest of it. Slowly the keel was drawn, and the sail rolled back up to where it was supposed to be.

Shakes was almost ecstatic. He started laughing. “Hemi! This is certainly it. But at least the Gnat is going down upright! With some dignity!” He found his lighter and tried to ignite the cigarette that was somehow still hanging unlit from his lips. The cigarette was soaked and refused to light, but the glow of the flame from the lighter showed them how dire their situation was.

“Give me that.” Hemi took the lighter from Shakes and snapped it aflame. He used it to look over the Gnat’s controls, passing the small, flickering light slowly in front of each dial and gauge. For good measure he pulled the emergency blow lever again. He opened all the tank trim valves. None of those things required electricity to function — they were purely mechanical devices on all submarines as a safety precaution for a situation just like this. If there was no power, the sub should still be able to make it to the surface.

But not if the ballast tanks had split and let the reserve air out. The bubble they needed to ride up had made its own way to the surface, leaving uselessly without them.

The water Shakes sat in was rising quickly. Water was pissing in through cracks in the viewport. Hemi looked at the depth gauge — pegged at one hundred meters, which was the maximum reading for the gauge.

He let the lighter go out.

His whole life he had been able to make these machines — all machines — do what he wanted them to. But this particular one was failing him now. Shakes’ resignation seemed to be the only appropriate response left. In the darkness he listened the water streaming into the submarine. It sounded like babbling brooks he had known long ago in his youth, on land. With no visual sensory input in the darkness, his mind instead saw the bright sunny brooks that brought fresh water down to the sea on the island where he had grown up. All his years on rusting and leaking submarines, and running water — a sound of death on submarines — still remained firstly the sound of life and his youth.

Then a clang in the darkness, like a church bell in the night. Hemi had expected something like this. The pressure hull would be collapsing in on itself. The steel snapping together like the jaws of some beast. He braced himself for the rush of water that should follow it.

Instead the Gnat settled flat, and the descending sensation suddenly jolted to a stop. Hemi lit the lighter again. Shakes was staring at him with a puzzled look on his face. Hemi looked at the depth gauge: rising.

“What the…” said Shakes.

“…The Prospect. They must have gotten under us.”

“And now they’re raising us to the surface? Like some newborn whale?”

“I certainly find myself overcome with awe.”

Shakes stood up and took the lighter back from Hemi. He lit it and with a renewed hope for life, he crawled forward. He pushed Herschel’s empty and guano-covered roost aside and pulled open a fuse box panel that lay behind it. He rummaged through a pile of old and corroded fuses that lay at the bottom of the fuse box to find one that looked like it was still at least partially conductive. He ran his finger down the rows of blown fuses till he found the one he wanted and yanked it out. The hopefully-working replacement went into the fuse box in its place.

He knew immediately that it did work because the radio panel lit up and the rapidly dwindling space of air in the sub was filled with the sound of radio static. “Try ship-to-ship!” he called back to Hemi.

Hemi picked up the mic from the front of the glowing box and squeezed the transmitter. The transmit power needle snapped to the right, just as it should. “Prospect, this is Hemi Howell, aboard the Gnat, do you copy?”

“I sure do Hemi!” Percy’s voice came back through the box. “We were worried that you were already flattened, and we’d just be bringing up your corpses in a squashed metal coffin! It’s good to hear from you. Shakes there?”

“Captain Shakes is here, though wet. How did you find us?”

“Cassandra of course! She managed to pick Shakes’s little sinking craft out from all the noise of the Grackle going down, and then she navigated us down with dead-on precision until we were under you. Just in the nick, too! Our batteries flatlined just after we picked you up. We’re rising on a gentle ballast blow right now.”

“The Grackle?”

“They are on their way down the hole, Hemi, dragged by their ram first, I hope. Cassandra said she heard the boat split, and the bulkheads failing, and then the two biggest pieces went down.”

There was now light coming through the viewport around the streams of water coming from the cracks. Shakes stuck his head between the lines of water and could just see the shadow of the Prospect’s sail out in the gloom.