Read Chapter 29: The Split

The cold inside the cave had a different quality than the wind above—still, patient, tasting of stone and salt. It settled into Harlow’s bones as he stood at the water’s edge, watching his crew sort themselves into two camps without a word being spoken.

It was Mercer who broke the silence.

“You’ve done well by them, Harlow. No one can say otherwise.” He stood at the head of the natural harbor, arms crossed, chin high. Behind him, his men had already begun hauling supplies from the hidden cache—canvas-wrapped bundles, coils of rope, a collapsible mast frame. “But you’ve taken them as far as you can. The ship is dying beneath their feet, and you know it.”

Harlow turned to face him. “The ship is wounded. Not dead.”

“Wounded enough.” Mercer nodded toward the cave mouth, where the faint gray light of the Arctic afternoon bled through. “Every hour we wait, the ice shifts. The channel I found opens at peak tide and closes just as fast. If we miss tonight’s window, it may not open again for a week—and your hull won’t last a week, patched or not.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know what a dead ship sounds like.” Mercer’s voice dropped, losing its edge. “I’ve heard it before. You have too.”

The words landed harder than Harlow wanted to admit. He had heard it—the groan of timber giving up, the shriek of ice taking hold. He had heard it on his last voyage, the one he never spoke of, and he heard it now in the distant creak of the Discovery’s hull beyond the cave wall.

Behind him, a boot scraped against stone. Harlow glanced back to see the landing party gathered in a loose knot—Morris near the front, his ledger tucked under his arm, his face unreadable. Thomas stood beside him, jaw tight. Behind them, five others: the cooper, the youngest able seaman, two of the older hands, and the cook, who had somehow managed to bring his favorite pot even on a scouting mission.

Ten men in all. The rest had stayed aboard the ship.

“I’m not asking you to abandon them,” Mercer said, as if reading Harlow’s thoughts. “I’m asking you to save them. All of them. Join me, and we take the ship through together. The tide waits for no one, but it will wait for *us* —if we move now.”

“And if we don’t?”

Mercer’s eyes flicked to the whaleboat bobbing at the water’s edge—the only boat Harlow’s party had brought to shore. “Then you take your people back to that ship, and you pray the pumps hold long enough for you to find another way out. There is no other way out, Harlow. I’ve charted every square yard of this bay. That channel is the only exit that doesn’t require climbing a glacier wall.”

The cooper spat on the ground. “Begging your pardon, sir, but who says we trust the word of a man who faked his own death?”

Mercer’s men bristled. Hands drifted toward belts, toward knives. Harlow stepped forward, placing himself between the two groups.

“Enough.” He looked at Mercer. “You left us to die. You used us as a distraction while you went exploring. That’s not the act of a man who deserves blind trust.”

“No,” Mercer agreed. “It’s the act of a man who knew his wife would die before he ever made it home, and who had one chance to find a route that would let him live with himself afterward.” His voice cracked, just slightly, before he steadied it. “I didn’t know you’d find the cave. I didn’t know you’d make it this far. But you did. And now we’re standing on the same shore, with the same tide and the same choice.”

Harlow studied him. Mercer’s face was weathered, lined with more than years—grief, maybe, or guilt. But his eyes were clear, and his hands were steady. He wasn’t lying about the passage. Harlow had seen the charts himself, the careful annotations that only a man who had sailed the route could have drawn.

“What do the men think?” Harlow asked quietly.

Morris stepped forward, flipping open his ledger. “I spoke with the crew while you were in the cave. Most of them are willing to trust you, sir—but they trust their own eyes more.” He cleared his throat. “The hull is taking on water faster than the pumps can clear. The carpenter says the patch is holding for now, but he won’t promise it’ll hold through another push through pressure ice.”

Harlow felt the weight of the words settle on him like a shroud. “And?”

“And some of them figure a dead man’s chart is better than a slow one. No disrespect.” Morris closed the ledger with a soft snap. “They’re asking permission to take the second whaleboat out to Mercer’s depot crew, once the channel opens. They want to be there when he makes it through—assuming he does.”

“They want to leave the ship.”

“They want to live, sir. Some of them more than others.”

The cave went quiet. Harlow could hear the drip of meltwater somewhere above, the distant groan of the glacier, the breathing of eighteen men waiting for him to speak.

He looked at Mercer. “If I take the Discovery through that channel, do I get the supplies your depot crew is holding?”

“Enough to make it to open water. Not a ounce more.”

“And if I don’t?”

Mercer gave a small, sad smile. “Then I take my men through in the whaleboats. We reach open water, we signal the depot, and we sail out of this frozen hell without you.” He paused. “I’m not proud of it, Harlow. But I’m not going to die in this cave because I was too noble to walk away.”

The cooper made a noise of disgust. “You hear that? He’d leave us to rot.”

“He’d leave *you* to rot,” one of Mercer’s men shot back. “The rest of us are walking out of here tonight.”

“Enough!” Harlow’s voice cut through the rising argument like a blade. He turned to face both groups, his back to the water, his shadow long and dark in the lantern light. “Anyone who wants to go with Mercer can go. I won’t stop you. You signed on to my crew, but I won’t force a man to die in a ship he no longer believes in.”

A murmur ran through the men. Thomas stepped forward. “And you, sir? What will you do?”

Harlow looked at the cave mouth, at that thin gray line of sky beyond. Then he looked at the Discovery, invisible beyond the rock, but present—he could feel her, the way a man feels a sick child in another room.

“I’m her captain. I’ll go down with her, if it comes to that.” He turned back to the crew. “But I don’t intend for it to come to that. There’s another way out of this bay. There has to be. And I’ll find it before the ice finds us.”

Morris nodded slowly, then stepped to stand beside Harlow. “I’ll stay.”

Thomas followed. Then the cooper. Then the youngest seaman, who looked relieved to have made a choice at all. Four of the older hands shuffled across, their eyes on the ground but their feet firm.

Mercer’s men counted the remaining five—men who had been aboard the Discovery for over a year, men who had fought the ice and the cold and the fear, and who had finally reached the end of what they could endure.

Mercer extended his hand. “I wish it could have been different.”

Harlow took it. His grip was firm, his palm calloused. “So do I.”

“If you find another way out—and I’m not saying you will—the depot’s signal fires will burn for three more days. After that we’re gone.”

“I’ll bear it in mind.”

Mercer turned to his men. “Get the boats ready. We move for the channel at high tide.” He paused at the edge of the whaleboat, looking back over his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, Harlow—I hope you make it. I hope you find a way through. But if you don’t, I want you to know something.”

Harlow waited.

“It was never about the passage. It was about getting home before she dies.” Mercer’s voice barely carried across the water. “If I’d stayed with you, I’d have been too late. I couldn’t live with that.”

Harlow watched him go, watched the whaleboats slide into the dark water of the cave harbor, watched the men he had commanded for months disappear into the shadow of the glacier wall.

Morris stepped up beside him. “That was noble of you, sir. Giving them the choice.”

“Nobility’s got nothing to do with it.” Harlow turned from the water and began walking back toward the cave mouth, toward the ship. “A captain who has to force his crew to follow him isn’t a captain at all. Now let’s get back to the Discovery.”

They emerged from the cave into the gray Arctic light, the wind biting hard after the stillness within. The bay was still, the ice quiet, the ship a dark shape against the glacier wall.

But as they trudged across the shelf toward the whaleboat they’d left tied at the shore—the one Mercer hadn’t taken, the one still waiting for them—Harlow saw something that made him stop.

The hull of the Discovery sat low in the water. Lower than it had been an hour ago.

And from her stern, where the rudder met the ice, a thin black line of smoke curled upward into the freezing air.

Harlow broke into a run.