Read Chapter 8: First Blood

The cold had teeth that morning.

Harlow stood at the edge of the camp, watching the hunting party string out across the white plain. Twelve men, Cole at the front, their breath hanging in small grey clouds that vanished almost before they formed. The sun was a pale smear behind the haze, giving no warmth, only enough light to see the cracks in the ice.

Cole turned back, his face a mask of hard purpose. “We’ll follow the pressure ridge east, where the leads opened yesterday. Seals come up through the young ice there.”

Harlow nodded. He wanted to go himself. Every instinct screamed at him to take the rifle and walk at the head of that line, to feel the wind on his face and do something useful instead of standing at the camp edge like a mother hen. But command meant staying. Command meant trusting others to do the work he could not do himself.

“Bring back meat, Mr. Cole,” he said.

Cole’s mouth twitched. “I bring back meat. You keep the tent warm.”

The men laughed, a thin, nervous sound that died quickly. They knew what waited out there.

Harlow watched them go. The hunting party dwindled, black specks against the endless white, until the pressure ridge swallowed them and he was alone with the wind.

---

The camp settled into its waiting rhythm. Men mended clothing, repaired sledges, stared at the horizon as if it owed them something. Pence brought Harlow a cup of weak tea, hands shaking so badly the liquid sloshed over the rim.

“Steady, Mr. Pence.”

“Sorry, sir. Cold gets into the bones.”

Harlow took the cup. “Who is it? The man you owe.”

Pence’s eyes flickered to the supply tent where Cummings sat confined. Then away. “No one you need worry about, sir. I’ll settle it soon.”

“Gambling debts don’t settle themselves, Mr. Pence.”

“No, sir. They don’t.” Pence retreated before Harlow could press him further.

The hours crawled. Men came and went from the tents, their faces grey with cold and boredom. Somewhere behind him, Harlow could hear the low murmur of conversation, the occasional sharp laugh that meant nothing. The ice groaned beneath them, a sound like a great beast turning in its sleep.

Harlow tried not to think about Liam, alone in the cutter, a mile away across the floe. He tried not to think about Mercer’s compass, sitting in his coat pocket, pointing west toward a destination only a madman had charted. He tried not to think about the torn log page, the proof that they had all been brought here on purpose.

He thought about all of it anyway.

The shot came at midday.

A single crack, sharp and clean, carrying across the ice like a whip. Harlow was on his feet before the echo died, his heart hammering. A second shot. Then silence.

Men poured from the tents, faces turned toward the east.

Then the screaming started.

---

Harlow ran.

The pressure ridge was further than it looked, the ice deceptive in its flatness. His boots slipped on frozen hummocks, his breath tearing from his lungs in ragged gasps. Behind him, he heard the pounding of other feet, men following without orders because orders were pointless now.

He crested the ridge and saw them.

The hunting party was spread across a frozen lead, dark water shining through a split in the ice like a wound. Two men were down on their bellies, reaching toward the edge. Another stood frozen, rifle hanging from his hand. And in the water, a black shape thrashed against the current.

Harlow could see his face. Young. One of the stokers, a boy named Jenkins who had spent the whole voyage below decks and finally traded the hell of the engine room for the hell of the ice.

“Grab the rope!” someone shouted. “Throw him the rope!”

But there was no rope. They had left the camp in haste, carrying only rifles and knives and the foolish certainty that nothing would go wrong.

Cole was already at the water’s edge, lying flat, reaching out. His fingers caught Jenkins’s coat, slipped, caught again. The boy’s hands clawed at the ice, the cold already stealing the strength from his limbs.

“Hold on!” Cole roared. “Goddamn you, hold on!”

Harlow ran. He threw himself down beside Cole, his arm stretching, his fingers brushing Jenkins’s wrist. The boy’s eyes met his. They were huge, white-ringed, full of a terror that Harlow would carry with him for the rest of his life.

“Sir,” Jenkins whispered. His lips were already blue.

“Pull him up!” Harlow shouted. “All of you, pull!”

The men grabbed his legs, Cole’s legs. They heaved. The ice groaned. And with a sound like a gunshot, the edge crumbled beneath them.

Jenkins slipped backward.

For a moment, his hands seemed to find purchase on nothing. His fingers scrabbled at the ice, leaving bloody furrows. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. The current took him, dragging him under the sheet of black water, and he was gone.

The silence that followed was absolute.

---

Harlow lay at the edge of the lead, his arm still stretched over nothing. The water had already begun to freeze over, a thin skin of ice creeping across the surface where a man had been breathing moments before. He could feel the cold seeping through his coat, through his skin, into the marrow of his bones.

He had been too slow. He had sent them out without a rope. He had stood at the camp edge like a mother hen while a boy died a hundred yards from safety.

Cole rose to his feet, his face grey. He did not look at Harlow. He did not look at anyone. He simply walked away from the water’s edge, his boots crunching on the ice, and did not stop until he reached the far side of the lead.

The men stood in silence. No one spoke. No one moved.

Harlow got to his feet. His knees threatened to buckle. He forced them straight.

“We go back,” he said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, flat and hollow. “We go back to camp.”

They went.

---

The camp was quiet that night. Men ate their rations in silence, staring into the dark. No one spoke of Jenkins. No one spoke of the water, or the sound his body had made when it disappeared beneath the ice.

Harlow sat outside his tent, watching the sky. The aurora had begun to dance, green ribbons of light twisting across the blackness, beautiful and meaningless.

Bryant approached, his face drawn. “The men are restless, sir. Not mutinous. Not yet. But they’re asking questions.”

“What questions?”

“Whether Jenkins needed to die. Whether Cole’s party was sent out too soon. Whether—” Bryant hesitated.

“Whether I’m fit to lead them.”

Bryant said nothing.

Harlow looked at his hands. They were still trembling. In his pocket, Mercer’s compass seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, pulling him westward, always westward.

“Tell them Jenkins’s death is on my head,” Harlow said. “Because it is. I gave the order. I should have known the ice was rotten. I should have sent a rope. I should have—” His voice cracked. He forced it steady. “I should have been there.”

Bryant shook his head slowly. “The men don’t want blame, sir. They want certainty. They want to know that if they put their weight on this ice, it will hold.”

“And what do you want, Mr. Bryant?”

Bryant was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I want to know what Mercer’s dying ship has to do with us. And I want to know why the chart leads west, toward a place no sane man would go, when there’s still a chance to march east and find help.”

The wind picked up, whipping snow across the camp. The aurora danced on, indifferent.

Harlow reached into his pocket. His fingers closed around the compass. It was cold, colder than the air, as if it had been pulled from the very heart of the ice.

He pulled it out and looked at the needle.

It pointed west.

It had never pointed anywhere else.

“We leave in three days,” Harlow said. “The spring thaw will come early this year. I can feel it. We take the boats, and we sail west, through the passage on the chart.”

“And if the chart is wrong?”

Harlow looked at the compass. At the needle that refused to point north. At the truth he had been avoiding since the moment Mercer vanished.

“Then we die on the ice,” he said. “But at least we’ll die moving.”