Read Chapter 10: Cummings' Mutiny

The wind had teeth that night.

Harlow heard it first as a change in pitch—a sharper note threading through the constant groan of the ice—and then as a human sound beneath it. Shouting. Muffled by the canvas of the supply tent but unmistakable.

He was on his feet before his mind caught up, the compass still warm in his palm from where he'd been studying its scratched surface. He shoved it into his coat pocket and stepped out into the burn of the Arctic night.

The camp was wrong. Lanterns swung in erratic arcs. Men moved in clusters, not the loose shuffling of a watch change but the tight, purposeful motion of something coordinated. And at the center of it, a figure stood on the crate that served as the mess table, gesturing at the ship's darkened hull.

Cummings.

Harlow's blood went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.

"—back the way we came! The ice behind us held for a hundred miles. The chart is a fraud, and the man who holds it is a murderer. You all know it. You all *felt* it when Jenkins went through the ice under his command—"

"I gave no order that sent Jenkins onto thin ice," Harlow called out, stepping into the lantern light. His voice carried flat and hard across the packed snow. "And you gave no order at all, because you were confined to the supply tent for attempting exactly this."

Cummings turned. His face was shadowed, but Harlow could see the glitter of his eyes, the set of his jaw. He looked thinner than he had a week ago. Hungrier. Men who had nothing left often became more dangerous, not less.

"Supply tent," Cummings repeated, spreading his arms. "A cage. You put me in a cage, Harlow, for telling the truth. Ask yourself why."

"Ask yourself why Mercer locked his own log away," Harlow said. He walked forward slowly, not toward Cummings but toward the ring of men around him, meeting their eyes one by one. Parsons. Greely. The two brothers from the engine room whose names he still sometimes mixed up. "Ask yourself why a man would tear a page from the captain's book and hide it aboard a ship he meant to abandon."

Murmurs rippled through the crew. Harlow saw Bryant at the edge of the circle, arms crossed, face unreadable. Cole stood near the ship's ladder, a harpoon in his hand, watching Harlow with an expression that might have been loyalty or might have been judgment.

"The page is torn," Cummings said. "You could have written it yourself. You could have torn it from anywhere. You've had command of the ship for weeks. Do you think no one noticed the ink is fresh?"

A chill ran through Harlow that had nothing to do with the wind. He had not considered that. He had produced the page with such certainty, such confidence in its provenance, that he had never stopped to ask whether it looked *new*.

He forced himself not to reach for the page in his pocket. Forced his face to stay still.

"Fresh ink in this cold?" he said. "You've been on the ice long enough to know ink freezes before it dries. That page has the cracked bloom of month-old writing, and every man here who's held a pen knows it."

He didn't look at Cummings. He looked at the crew. At the faces that had begun to turn back toward him.

"Captain Mercer planned this passage," Harlow said. "He marked it, provisioned it, and hid the evidence of it from men who believed the only way out was the way we came. He didn't trust this crew. He had reason not to." He let his gaze settle on Cummings. "Some of you, he had reason not to trust. And some of you—" He turned to Pence, standing paler than the snow behind a barrel, "—were merely afraid. There is no shame in that. But fear is what mutiny feeds on. Fear is what puts men on thin ice."

"You're the one who put Jenkins on thin ice!" Cummings shouted. His voice cracked on the name, and Harlow saw the crew flinch. "You marched him out there to prove your passage was safe! You—"

"Jenkins fell because the ice was unpredictable," Harlow said, and the admission cost him more than any denial could have. He let the silence stretch. "I cannot change that. I will carry it. But I will not let his death be used to doom the rest of you."

He drew his pistol. It was a slow, deliberate motion, not a threat but a statement. Several men in the circle reached for their own weapons; others stepped back.

"There will be no mutiny tonight," Harlow said. "There will be no march south through ice we have already crossed and found wanting. There will be no surrender to a man who was confined for sedition and escaped his cage."

Cummings laughed. It was a brittle, breaking sound.

"You think they follow you?" He gestured at the crew. "They follow the man with the food. And you've been counting rations for weeks, Harlow. You know as well as I do that the westward march will kill them all. South means open water. South means rescue. South means—"

"South means a hundred miles of the same ice that killed Jenkins," Harlow said. "We did not come here to go back."

For a long moment, no one moved. The wind screamed across the floe. Harlow could feel his fingers numbing around the pistol grip, could feel the weight of every man's eyes on him.

Then Cummings moved.

He was fast—faster than Harlow expected from a man who had spent days in a tent. He lunged sideways, not at Harlow but at the stacked provisions near the mess table, and suddenly he had an armful of salted pork and a canvas sack, and he was running, shouting as he went:

"Anyone with sense, with guts, with a will to live—come with me now! South! While we still can!"

Three men broke from the crowd. Four. Pence's debtor—Harlow caught a glimpse of the man's scarred hands, the set of his shoulders—and then two others Harlow had trusted with the watch.

"Stop them," Harlow said. His voice was quiet, but it carried.

No one moved. Cole's hand tightened on the harpoon. Bryant looked at Harlow, then at the running men, then back.

"Stop them," Harlow repeated. Louder.

"They're armed," Cole said. His voice was flat. "And they're not the only ones who want to go."

Harlow stared at him. The wind howled. The running men were already shadows at the edge of the light, and the provisions in Cummings's arms were enough to keep four men alive for two weeks.

Harlow raised his pistol, aimed at the darkness where Cummings had vanished.

He did not fire.

"They'll die," he said. The words fell into the silence like stones. "They'll die out there, and we will bury them when we find them."

He lowered the pistol. Turned his back on the crew, on Cole's unreadable face, on Bryant's calculating eyes.

Behind him, in the dark, Cummings was gone.