Read Chapter 33: The Chase

The whaleboat grated against the ice shelf before the shout even reached Harlow’s ears. He turned from the rudder casing, socket wrench still in his fist, and saw the dark shape of Mercer’s men scrambling across the frozen tongue of the bay, canvas sacks over their shoulders, rifles glinting in the low polar sun.

“They’re taking our stores!” Peterson’s voice cracked from the forecastle.

Harlow didn’t think. He dropped the wrench, grabbed the belaying pin from the rail, and leapt from the ship’s listing deck onto the ice. Behind him, boots hammered the gangplank as his loyalists followed—Dawson, Jenkins, the Scot Macready, a dozen more.

The bay was a chaos of blue shadow and hard white. Mercer’s party had split, three men dragging the boat toward the channel mouth while others covered their retreat. One of them raised a rifle. Harlow heard the crack and felt the hornet-whine of shot passing close enough to shear a strand of hair.

“Spread out!” he shouted. “Don’t bunch!”

He drove forward at an angle, cutting off the nearest man—Cummings’s old mate, Williams, a man he’d shared grog with in better times. Williams saw him coming and dropped his sack, pulling a knife.

“Don’t, Will.” Harlow skidded to a stop, chest heaving, breath clouding. “This isn’t your fight.”

“It’s the only fight that puts food in my belly.” Williams lunged.

Harlow sidestepped, caught the man’s wrist, and twisted. The knife spun away across the ice. A sharp crack of knuckles against jaw sent Williams sprawling. Harlow didn’t watch him fall. He was already running toward the boat.

Ahead, Mercer stood at the water’s edge, one hand on the whaleboat’s gunwale, the other holding a lantern that guttered in the cold wind. His furs hung open, revealing the same brass-buttoned coat he’d worn when they thought him dead. He saw Harlow coming and made no move to flee.

“James.” Mercer’s voice carried across the ice, almost warm. “You’ll forgive me for not waiting.”

“You sabotaged my ship.”

“I protected my passage.”

Harlow closed the distance. His men were trading shots with Mercer’s rearguard now, the crack of rifles echoing off the glacier wall. Macready went down clutching his shoulder, swearing in a stream of Gaelic.

“Liam is aboard,” Harlow said, low and hard. “Your son. And you walked away from him.”

Something flickered in Mercer’s eyes—not shame. Something older. Regret, perhaps, worn smooth by years. “The boy chose his side. I chose mine. You of all men should understand the arithmetic of survival.”

“I understand leaving a child to die for your pride.”

Mercer’s jaw tightened. “You mistake pride for purpose. You always did. That’s why Eleanor—” He stopped. Shook his head. “No matter. The tide turns in two hours. My channel opens, and I intend to be on the other side when it does.”

“You’ll never find open water with a broken rudder and no provisions.”

“I won’t need the Discovery.” Mercer gestured to the whaleboat, already stacked with canvas sacks. “I have what I need. The passage is tide-driven. A boat will suffice.”

Harlow saw it then, the full shape of Mercer’s plan. He’d never meant to take the Discovery through. The ship was a decoy, a weight to drag behind him until he’d stripped it bare. The cave, the channel, the hidden charts—all of it had been aimed at this moment. Escape with the stores and a light craft, leaving the crew to freeze in the ice.

“You’re leaving forty men to die.”

“I’m leaving forty men a choice.” Mercer stepped back, into the boat. His men pushed off, oars biting the black water. “You can stay and rot with your loyalties, James. Or you can find your own way out. But you’ll not come through my door.”

Harlow lunged for the boat, caught the gunwale. The freezing water lapped at his boots as he hauled himself forward. Mercer’s second, a man named O’Shea, swung an oar. Harlow’s shoulder absorbed the blow with a crack that sent white fire down his arm, but he didn’t let go.

“Give me the charts,” he ground out through clenched teeth. “You owe me that.”

“I owe you nothing.”

“I saved your life in Scoresby Sound. Pulled you from the lead when you went through the ice.”

Mercer’s face went still. The memory hung between them, old and sharp. “And I put your name on the masthead when no one else would sail with you after the Franklin disaster. We’re even.”

“We were even the day you faked your death and left me to command your corpse.” Harlow’s grip tightened. The boat was drifting, pulling him deeper, water now at his knees. “But Liam isn’t even. He’s a boy who watched his father rise from the dead and turn away.”

For a long moment, Mercer did not speak. The wind carried the distant crack of gunfire—his rearguard still holding their line. Then he reached inside his coat and drew out a folded oilskin packet, creased with years.

“The tide charts,” he said. “Marked with the safe leads. They’ll show a path south, if you’re clever enough to read them.”

He tossed the packet onto the ice. It skittered to a stop at Harlow’s feet.

“Don’t mistake this for affection,” Mercer said. “I want you alive to remember that you chose the wrong side.”

He gave a sharp nod, and the oars bit deeper. The whaleboat pulled away, cutting a dark wake through the channel mouth. Harlow stood in the freezing shallows, chart in hand, and watched the man who had once been his captain disappear into the labyrinth of ice.

A cry from the ship snapped him back. He turned. Smoke was rising again from the stern—thicker this time, black and oily. And over the crack of flames he heard a voice he didn’t recognize, shouting orders in a language that wasn’t English.

“Mr. Harlow!” Dawson staggered across the ice toward him, face smeared with soot, eyes wild. “They got aboard! Four of them, come up through the hold—they fired the sail locker. Jenkins is down, and they’ve got the armory!”

Harlow’s blood went cold. The saboteurs. The men who’d disabled the rudder before Mercer ever set foot on the Discovery. They were still aboard, and now they held the guns.

He looked at the chart in his hands, then at the burning ship where his crew was fighting for their lives in a war he hadn’t seen coming.

“Two fronts,” he muttered, and began to run.