Read Chapter 2: The Captain's Gone

The ice screamed before dawn.

Harlow had not slept. He had lain in the shelter they’d thrown together—canvas and packing crates and the lee of an overturned whaleboat—listening to the pressure ridges grind against one another like the jaws of some vast beast. The floe trembled beneath him. Each tremor ran up through his spine and rattled his teeth.

When the gray light finally came, thin and grudging, he crawled out into a world that had changed overnight. The *Discovery* still stood a quarter mile off, but she listed now, her hull crushed and pinned at an angle that made Harlow's chest ache to look at it. More masts had gone. The foremast lay across the deck like a broken arm.

He found Dr. Ellsworth huddled by a steaming pot of tea, his spectacles fogged, his hands wrapped in wool.

“The captain?” Ellsworth asked.

Harlow shook his head. “Haven’t seen him since yesterday evening. He stayed aboard.”

“Alone?”

“He ordered it. Said he had business to attend to while the ship still stood.” Harlow rubbed the frost from his beard. “I need to go back across.”

Ellsworth’s brow furrowed. “The ice between here and there is breaking up. You saw the ridges.”

“I saw them.” Harlow pulled on his gloves. “I’m going anyway. If he’s still alive, we need to know what he planned. If he’s dead, we need to know what he left.”

He took two men—Jenkins, a boatswain with a scarred lip and a steady gaze, and Peters, young and pale and quick to flinch. They walked the floe single file, testing each step with the points of their boots. The ice groaned beneath them. A lead of black water had opened between the floe and the ship, wide as a street, and they had to circle it, picking their way across a bridge of shattered pans that shifted and ground as they crossed.

Jenkins swore under his breath the whole way. Peters said nothing.

They boarded the *Discovery* over the crushed stern, climbing a ladder of exposed ribs where the hull had split open. The deck was a ruin. Rope and splintered spars everywhere, and a drift of snow across the aft hatch that had not been there the night before. The ship gave a long, low moan as she settled, and Harlow felt the deck tilt beneath his feet.

“Captain!” Harlow shouted. His voice bounced off the frozen rigging, thin and small in the white air.

No answer.

They searched the main deck, then the quarterdeck. The wheel was lashed hard over, its spokes glazed with ice. The binnacle lamp had gone out. In the companionway, Harlow found a trail of footprints in the frost—boot prints, going down, not coming back up.

“He’s below,” Harlow said.

Jenkins shifted his weight. “Below? With the ship this gone? That’s mad.”

“He was always below.” Harlow took the lantern from Peters and started down the ladder.

The passageways were dark and cold as a tomb. The ship’s groaning was louder here, the timbers working against one another as the ice pressed in. Harlow moved through the familiar spaces—the galley, the officers’ mess, the chart room—and found them empty, ransacked, as though someone had gone through in a hurry. Drawers hung open. Papers scattered on the deck.

Mercer’s cabin door was shut.

Harlow put his hand on the latch. The metal was so cold it burned through his glove. He pushed the door open.

The cabin was empty.

Not just of people—of everything. The desk was bare. The bunk had been stripped. The shelves stood empty of books, instruments, charts, all of it gone. On the deck lay a single coat, folded neatly, and on top of it a scrap of paper weighted down by a brass key.

Harlow picked up the paper. The handwriting was Mercer’s—sharp, angular, exact.

*Harlow—* *You will find no charts here. No journals. No record of my intent. You were told to hold the course and you chose instead to question my orders. Men have been shot for less, and I would have done it gladly, but the ice has saved me the trouble of discipline.* *The Discovery is lost because you failed to obey. The crew is stranded because you failed to lead. I am done with this expedition and with its cowardice. If you are reading this, do not follow. There is nothing here for you but what you have already thrown away.* *—Mercer*

Harlow read it twice. Then a third time, slower, feeling the words settle into his gut like stones.

“What is it?” Jenkins called from the passageway.

Harlow folded the note and slipped it into his coat. “The captain’s gone. He left a letter.”

“Gone where? There’s nowhere to go.”

Harlow stepped back into the passageway and looked at the two men. Their faces were tight with cold and fear, waiting for him to say something that would make it all right. He had nothing to offer them but a lie that was also a truth.

“He abandoned us. Took what he could carry and walked off the ice in the night.” Harlow paused. “He wrote that I disobeyed orders. That the loss of the ship is my fault.”

Peters’s face went white. Jenkins’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

“Is it true?” Peters asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

“It’s not,” Harlow said. “But it doesn’t matter. The crew will believe what they want. Some of them already do.”

They stood in the shuddering dimness of the dying ship. Above them, something massive groaned and shifted, and a rain of ice chips fell from the deckhead.

“We should go back,” Jenkins said. “This ship won’t hold much longer.”

The three of them climbed out into the gray morning. Harlow paused at the rail and looked back at the companionway, at the dark throat of the ship where Mercer’s cabin sat gutted and bare. There was something he was missing. Something in the way Mercer had written that note—too neat, too prepared, as though he had known he would need it.

As though he had planned this all along.

They made the crossing back to the floe. The ice was worse than before—the lead had widened, and they had to jump a span of black water that seemed to breathe beneath them. Peters slipped and went in up to his chest. Jenkins hauled him out, and they ran the last stretch, stumbling over the ridge line and collapsing onto the firm snow beyond.

Back at the camp, the crew had gathered. Fifty men, hunched and miserable, wrapped in blankets and furs, standing or sitting on whatever they had saved from the ship. At their center, arms crossed over his chest, stood Abraham Cole, the second-in-command.

Cole was a bear of a man, broad through the shoulders, with a heavy jaw and eyes the color of winter slate. He had served with Mercer for years, and he had made no secret of his contempt for Harlow, whom he considered a bookish interloper on a voyage that demanded men of action.

“There you are,” Cole said. “We were starting to wonder if you’d abandoned us too.”

“I went to the ship to find the captain.” Harlow pulled the note from his coat. “He’s gone. He took his stores and his instruments and walked off in the night. I’ve got his letter.”

He held it out. Cole did not take it. He looked at it the way a man looks at a soiled rag.

“Read it,” Cole said. “Out loud. The men should hear it.”

Harlow hesitated. But the crew had gathered closer now, a ring of haggard faces, and he knew he had no choice. He unfolded the paper and read Mercer’s words into the wind.

When he finished, the silence was total. The only sound was the distant grinding of the ice.

Cole stepped forward. His voice was low, flat.

“The captain says you disobeyed his orders. That you’re why we’re here.” He looked at the note again. “Then the captain says he’s done with the expedition. Which means he left. And you are telling us that you, the man responsible for our situation, now plan to lead us.”

“I’m not responsible,” Harlow said.

“The captain says you are.”

“The captain drove us into the ice on purpose.”

The words came out before Harlow could stop them. Cole’s eyes narrowed.

“On purpose. You’ll forgive me if I find that hard to believe.”

“Believe what you like,” Harlow said. “But I saw him. During the crush. He was calm. He was *smiling*. He took us into the ice deliberately, and he had a plan for what came after. I tried to warn him, and he overruled me. Now he’s gone. And I find it passing strange that a man with a plan prepared to abandon us before the ship even finished sinking.”

Cole’s jaw worked. He looked at the note in Harlow’s hand, then at Harlow himself.

“Even if what you say is true,” Cole said, “you have no command. Your authority came from Mercer, and Mercer is gone.”

“Then who commands?”

Cole did not answer. He did not have to. The men were looking at him now, not at Harlow. He was older, harder, stronger. He had been with Mercer for six expeditions. He knew the ice.

“I’m taking seniority,” Cole said.

Harlow shook his head. “There are fifty men here. We have food for two weeks, maybe less. We have one serviceable boat. If we choose wrong, we die.”

“Then let’s choose right,” Cole said. “Let’s have a vote. Men who want the mate to lead, step over there. Men who want me, stay.”

A murmur ran through the crew. Men shifted their feet. Harlow watched them, reading the faces he knew so well—Jenkins, who had crossed the ice with him, stepped to Harlow’s side without hesitation. Peters followed, shaking.

But the rest did not move.

They stood with Cole.

Harlow looked at them, at the settling frost in their beards and the fear in their eyes, and he thought of the note in his pocket, written by a man who had known exactly how this would play out.

“Cole,” he said, “you’re welcome to your command. But I’m going back to the ship.”

Cole blinked. “The ship is dying.”

“Mercer cleared his cabin too fast. He left something.” Harlow turned toward the *Discovery*, still groaning in the distance. “And I intend to find it.”