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“run a rig”– Play a trick.

JACK HAD BORNE the entire dreadful nightmare of the Cataclysm in her treehouse. The darkness had set upon the World as though the sky was its greatest enemy, and stars like no others yet seen had moved swiftly along with strange winds, winds that had upon them an odour of death. Jack sat in her treehouse and listened to the madness away in Port Royal, and it soon transpired that others who lived out here in the jungle in their own treehouses came down for want of food and some of them never came back.

And all the while Jack listened, and starved. Food had already been scarce for her when the Long Night fell, and while her pickpocketing and theft and all other running of rigs had provided her with enough to get her by for a few days, nothing could have prepared her for the terrors that kept her couped up in her treehouse while the island lost its mind.

There was something in the jungle. Or had been. Something moving through the trees and had lifeless purple eyes and that carried with it the stench of death. She had seen those eyes on occasion when she looked out her window to see if Port Royal was still there. Because it was so dark. Torches were always lit up in Port Royal, and the lamplighters made sure all the lamps were kept going until morning. But not this time. Jack reckoned they had been caught off-guard by the Long Night, just as she had been. And so rarely did she see light moving through Port Royal’s streets.

But now the sun was up—the beautiful, wonderful sun, whose Light she would never again take for granted, mark her truly—and when she finally dropped her rope ladder and descended it to the jungle floor, she did so with knife in one hand, pistol in the other. She did not care who saw her carrying it, not now, not after she’d heard away in Royal.

She stalked carefully back into the alleys, then lowered her pistol when she saw others carrying on normally. No, not normally, Jack thought. Just look at them. Utterly terrified. And they ought to be. Jack saw people moving with far more pep in their step, as if anxious to get things done before nightfall. Because they no longer know how long night will last.

With a child’s simple but direct grasp on Nature and human behaviour, she understood that this was the way it was now.

She now hid the pistol inside the satchel that hung from her side, and jogged down to the harbour. Many privateers had sailed on, and new ships had come in to anchor. She then jogged over to the Turtle Crawles and was crestfallen to see the Hazard had already sailed away. Jack had been unable to find Captain Laurier and ask him for a spot on the ship, and the rest of ships anchored there were nothing more than sad little dinghies and tartans. Nothing she could make a living on.

Her stomach squeezed. She washed her face in a horse trough and caught a glimpse of her face in the water, her pale and etiolated face not ringing a bell, she looked like some plague had her. She felt weak and looked the part. She wandered about aimlessly, not knowing where she might go next. She tried visiting Mr. Cowert but he wasn’t home and nobody knew where he was. The proprietors of the other stalls regarded her as a stray and waved her away when she begged for any coins, when they answered her at all.

And when at last circumstances made her desperate she wandered down to the shore to search along Chocoletta Hole, and looked out across the water at the warehouses and Fort Walker that sat upon the Hook. She tried to look for a dinghy, sometimes those were left out for anyone to take for a quick fishing trip, but all the dinghies were either gone or occupied by people ready to shove off.

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Jack wandered up York Street, passing Fort Morgan and St. Paul’s Court. Twice did a man pinch her face and made the suggestion that “a young boy could make a quick few guineas if he would be a good friend for only a few minutes,” and for the first time ever Jack considered it. In fact she very nearly took the men up on their offer, but some nameless and overriding principle would not permit the thought to go any further, and hours later she found herself pickpocketing again.

It was harder now. People were more alert than ever, their paranoia having them clutching everything from their purses to their children much closer. She ran a rig on one woman, crying and pretending to mourn her dead mother. Neither the tears nor her fear were particularly false, and the woman saw her sincerity and came close, offering Jack a few guineas. “My God, dear boy, you’re all bones,” the woman said. Jack hugged the woman close and picked her purse, then thanked the woman and ran away.

An hour later she was back in the jungle sitting in the mud beside her parents’ graves, eating a leg of chicken. She knew she ought to save some for later, but her stomach would not be denied, and she devoured it all, holding the bone between shivering fingers and licking it clean like a dog. She even felt like a dog because a few of Royal’s strays had found her, perhaps sensing she had scraps, or else predicting she would be dead soon.

____

Jack’s parents’ graves were unmarked, as were most people’s in Port Royal. The graveyard behind the Old Church was not large enough for everyone who lived in the harbour town, so only wealthy nobles and officers could afford to be buried there. Jack had buried her mother all by herself. It had taken her all day, and she still didn’t think she’d dug nearly deep enough. There were two mounds of mud side by side, because Jack had believed her father ought to have a grave, too, despite his body being lost to the sea. “Shark bait,” his father had told her one night. “That’s what we call a dying man whose about to have his body tossed into the sea.”

Perhaps it was grotesque to made a mound of mud and place a couple of sticks in the mud to mark a bodyless grave, she had no idea. It just did not seem right that a person was not allowed a grave just because their body was elsewhere. Just not right. So Jack made the second mound of mud right beside Mother’s and sat and looked at them, pretending that her mother and father slept side by side there, as she had so rarely seen them do.

Several strands of hemp were in her hand, and she stripped some bark away from a tree to fray it, then began weaving it all together into a line of rope. She bound them together in a whipping knot, seeing her father’s rough, callused hands as they moved with preternatural elegance, next forming the constrictor knot. “These’re the first knots yeh want to know,” he told her.

“Yes, Papa,” she said presently. Papa was what she called him when she was small, he’d asked her to call him Father when last he saw her. Because she was growing up.

A few of the dogs that had followed her were asleep all around her. She gave them names—Tippy, Gracie, and Momo. Momo was some sort of small terrier, and when her ears perked up, Jack looked around. Then all three dogs leapt up and started barking at something moving in the trees. Jack stuck her hand inside her satchel and gripped the pistol, waiting. She cocked the pistol with some effort. She heard a sound like a twig snapping, and slowly stood. Out from the forest came a familiar face, it was one of the men who had offered her money to be his friend. He had a bald pate, but the hair around her crown was long and stringy. His near-toothless mouth grinned at her. They both stared at one another. The dogs were all barking.

Jack felt utterly foolish. She had forgotten to check to see if anyone had followed her from town, and now fear replaced hunger in her gut.

When the man charged, Jack had barely enough time to pull the pistol free and fired. The boom frightened her immensely and the smoke blinded her all at once. The lead round grazed the man’s left arm and he screamed and came after her. She tried to run but he reached out and grabbed her hair and flung her to the ground facedown on top of her mother’s grave. He straddled her, and pulled her breeches down and laughed while he slapped her.

But then she felt something warm on her back, and the man leapt off of her. She rolled over, pulling her breeches up fast, and watched the man clutch his arm. She had hit him better than she thought and the wound was gushing. He said something through his mushy mouth, and staggered away, into the jungle. The dogs were still barking and chased after him a little before returning to Jack, who sat in the mud sobbing.