Read Chapter 5: Rations Run Low

The hiss of a dozen men breathing hard in a frozen tent was a sound Harlow had come to know too well. He stood at the mouth of the canvas, letting the pale light of a reluctant dawn wash over the clumped forms of the crew. They were not asleep, not this morning. They were curled in their furs, but their eyes followed him as he stepped between them, counting the piles of broken biscuit that lay beside each man—a ration that had shrunk again.

“Mr. Harlow.” The voice came from his left, low and trembling.

Harlow turned. Mr. Pence, the steward, was pressed against the tent’s ice-rimmed seam, wringing a rag between his fingers. His face was a pale, sunken mask of raw nerves. He was a thin man at the best of times, a creature bred for the pantry and the galley, and the weeks on the ice had carved him down to something fragile.

“Not now, Pence,” Harlow said, moving toward the flap. “Cole wants a word before we set out.”

“Please, sir. It cannot wait.”

Something in the steward’s voice cut through the morning’s chill. Harlow stopped and looked at the man properly. Pence’s fingers were shaking so badly the rag slipped through them and fell to the ice. He did not bend to pick it up.

“Come,” Harlow said, and led him out of the tent, past the smoldering fire pit where a few men were trying to coax heat from a puddle of seal blubber. They walked a few paces onto the frozen stretch between the tents and the ridge of pressure ice that had swallowed the Discovery’s hull. There, with no ears to catch his words, Harlow turned. “Speak.”

Pence swallowed hard. “It’s Biggs, sir. He says I owe him.”

“Owe him what?”

The steward’s eyes darted to the tents, then back. “Twelve pounds, sir. A gambling debt from the voyage out. I lost a hand of cards in the mess the night before we struck the ice.”

Harlow frowned. Gambling was forbidden aboard His Majesty’s ships, not that such rules ever stopped a crew with months of darkness ahead. But twelve pounds was a sum beyond a steward’s wage, a sum that could ruin a man.

“And Biggs wants payment now?”

“He says I’ve had long enough. He says the ice doesn’t care about my debts, and neither does he.” Pence’s voice cracked. “He said if I don’t settle by the time we reach the cache—if we reach it—he’ll see me buried in the floes myself.”

Harlow looked back at the tent line. Biggs was one of the larger men, a harpooner’s mate with shoulders like a bull and a temper to match. He had been standing close to Cole during the vote, nodding along with every word.

“Why come to me?” Harlow asked. “I’m not the one in command.”

“Because you’re the one who listens, sir.” Pence’s eyes glistened. “Cole, he’d tell me to fight my own battles. And I can’t fight Biggs. I’m a steward, not a man.”

Harlow studied the steward for a long moment. The man was genuinely afraid, white-knuckled and twitching like a caught bird. Whatever his faults, Pence had kept the crew fed and the tea hot through every miserable hour of this frozen purgatory. He was worth more than a rope’s weight of gambling debts.

“You’ll not march with the supply column today,” Harlow said. “I’ll have Yates keep you at the tents, working the blubber stove. You’ll be near me and Miller when Biggs is out of sight.”

Relief flooded Pence’s face, but it was short-lived. “And when he returns, sir? He won’t forget.”

Harlow lowered his voice to a near whisper. “Then you’ll find a way to pay him, or you’ll find a way to prove the debt is settled. But you will not be dead in a crevasse because of a hand of cards. Do you understand me?”

Pence nodded quickly, sniffing back what might have been tears.

“Go back to the tents. Pack the tins for the march—but you’re not to carry them. I’ll tell Miller to find you lighter work.”

The steward shuffled away, casting one last nervous glance at the tent line before disappearing inside. Harlow stood alone on the ice for a moment, turning the matter over in his mind. A gambling debt on the edge of the world. Men had killed for less, out here, where the law was as thin as the sky and every day was a contest for survival.

A heavy boot crunched on the ice behind him.

“Early to be making friends, Harlow.”

He turned. Cole stood at the edge of the tent, arms crossed over his barrel chest, a smile that did not reach his eyes. Behind him, Bryant was folding canvas, and Miller was checking the harnesses of the sled dogs.

“Just counseling a worried man,” Harlow said.

“Counseling? Or plotting?” Cole stepped closer. “I heard the steward’s voice. You’re not the man they come to, now. I am.”

Harlow met his gaze without flinching. “He came to me with a problem. I pointed him to a solution. That’s all.”

“See that it stays that way.” Cole’s eyes drifted to the west, where the chart’s promised route sliced through the pressure ridges. “We march at noon. I want you at the rear, with the dogs. Keep an eye on the sledges and the rations.”

Harlow felt the insult land like a slap. The rear. A position of assignment, not of trust—a man they’d watch, but not one they’d follow. It was precisely what he expected from Cole, and yet it stung.

“I’ll take the rear,” he said, and let Cole hear the steel beneath it. “But if the ice decides to break behind you, don’t expect me to shout an advance warning.”

Cole’s smile tightened. He turned sharply and barked an order to Bryant, and the camp stirred to movement. Men pulled on their furs, yawning and shivering, packing what little they had. Harlow watched them, these men who had trusted Mercer and now trusted Cole, and he felt the weight of everything he could not yet say.

They marched by noon, a miserable line of dark figures stretched across a plain of white that swallowed all sound. Harlow walked at the rear with the sledges, the dogs pulling heavy loads of tinned meat and tarred canvas. The wind was picking up, biting through the wool of his scarf and burning the exposed skin of his nose. He pulled the scarf higher and kept his eyes on the backs of the men ahead—on Cole’s broad shoulders leading them into the white unknown.

The compass in his pack pulsed like a second heartbeat. He had not shown it to anyone else, not even Bryant or Miller. It sat wrapped in his glove, its needle swaying gently toward the west, toward the “F” on the chart that Mercer had left—a destination that was not a heading but a name. And every step they took in its direction, Harlow felt the creeping certainty that they were not marching to safety, but to wherever Mercer wanted them to be.

They had marched not two hours before a shout went up from the front. Harlow stopped, hand on the butt of his pistol, and watched as a figure broke from the line and staggered back toward him. It was Dunn, the youngest of the crew, barely a man. His face was white, his breath ragged.

“Mr. Harlow,” he gasped, bending over, hands on his knees. “Sledges. The far sledger, with the tins—she’s cracked. The wood’s split and the ice has gotten in.”

Harlow’s stomach dropped. “Who’s on that sledge?”

Dunn’s eyes went wide and fearful. “Pence, sir. Mr. Pence was assigned to it. Biggs switched his load with him before we left.”

Harlow did not wait for more. He broke into a run along the line, boots skidding on the frozen crust, the wind screaming in his ears. Behind him, Dunn called out something about the rations beginning to spoil.

But Harlow was already gone, running through the ghostly light, racing the collapse of their only hope.